Thursday, February 10, 2011

yi yi (a one and a two) by edward yang

the trailer


what people thought

"My first impressions of Yi Yi were general ones, of visual beauty, narrative complexity, and quietude. Since I was familiar with Yang’s previous work, the complexity, and particularly the beauty, came as no surprise. Few modern filmmakers use the frame so precisely, with such a firm grasp of all its expressive properties—light and color but also scale, proportion, distance, containment, concealment. Among its many other qualities, Yang’s is a cinema of luminosity, his painterly eye dedicated to getting the exact tone of city life." (Kent Jones, at the Criterion site)

"The late Taiwanese director Edward Yang’s poignant wedding-day drama A One and a Two … understands better than any film I can think of the ideal relationship between the camera angle, the subject, the shot’s duration, the shot before, the shot after, and the emotion of the scene." (Nick Jones, at Sight and Sound)

"This is view of contemporary urban life as plausible and comprehensive as any cinema has to offer, its elements of soap opera and melodrama integrated as skillfully as its sense of the interconnectedness of things.” (Tony Rayns, also at Sight and Sound)


what I thought


what's next

Yi Yi's emphasis on family life and physical malady (specifically the difficulty of caring for a relative in a coma) has led my Film Club collaborator Tiffanny E. to choose The Safety of Objects (2001) for our next film. Stay tuned.

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