A Brighter Summer Day

My favorite film of all time is Yi Yi, directed by the late Edward Yang. Yang's other work is more than a little hard to come by; it's with great pleasure that I link to this post about an earlier (and even longer) Yang film A Brighter Summer Day. Thanks to Martin Scorsese and the folks at Cannes I might have a chance to see a critical work from a director I'm still getting to know. (Moving Image Source)

We only discover at the end that the film is a bolero, rising silently to a chilling moment of climactic violence, but its affect is decidedly unmelodramatic. The film’s length is a vital factor, and requires one to paradigm-shift into a distinct film-watching mode. Genuine length—utilized as time undergone, as film-watching in a perpetual state of re-self-definition, as personal investment, as movie-life in the grip of duration, exhaustion, and accretion—is a tool largely misused and misunderstood by Americans, who demand that any random five-minute chunk of a film be as exciting and distractive as the film is as a whole.