Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 08/10/17

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Thursday, August 10, 2017

A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang, 1991)

Lisa Yang and Chen Chang in A Brighter Summer Day

Xiao Si'r: Chen Chang
Ming: Lisa Yang
Father: Kuo-Chu Chang
Mother: Elaine Jin
Eldest Sister: Chuan Wang
Older Brother (Lao Er): Han Chang
Middle Sister: Hsiu-Chiung Chiang
Youngest Sister: Stephanie Lai
Cat: Chi-tsan Wang
Honey: Hung-Ming Lin

Director: Edward Yang
Screenplay: Hung Hung, Mingtang Lai, Alex Yang, Edward Yang
Cinematography: Hui Kung Chang, Longyu Zhang
Production design: Wei-Yen Yu
Film editing: Po-Wen Chen

Any four-hour film is going to be immersive, but for me, A Brighter Summer Day was a bit like being taught to swim by being thrown into the deep end of the pool. There are so many characters and the political, social, and cultural milieu of Taiwan in 1960 is so foreign to me, that it took at least the first hour to get my bearings. I think it's no accident that Tolstoy's War and Peace, another vastly immersive experience, is referred to twice, the first time surprisingly by the fugitive gang leader known as Honey, who was attracted to its portrait of conflict and especially by Pierre's fixation on assassinating Napoleon. A Brighter Summer Day is perhaps the closest that a film can get to the complexity of a great novel -- which doesn't necessarily make it a great film, although I think it gets pretty close to that, too. It will take another viewing, which means another four-hour block of time, for me to make that decision -- and even for me to have something concise and coherent to say about it.

Watched on Turner Classic Movies and on Filmstruck Criterion Channel (after my recording of the TCM showing fell short)