I appreciate Mike's citing of me as one of three admirers of Yang I
gather he respects, along with my friends Jonathan Rosenbaum and John
Belton. I don't think any of us engage in hype, nor are any of us
trend-followers, though Jonathan can be said to be something of a
trend-maker. John Belton is a tenured professor who is not known for
grasping over-ambitiousness at the expense of honesty; I mean, if one of
us likes a filmmaker, it's not likely a response to any hype but a
sincere reaction.

Mike is also right that understanding Yang should begin with the
magnificent "A Brighter Summer Day."

"A Brighter Summer Day" is a truly haunting and meditative film whose
images have a creepy and tenuous distance, almost as if we're seeing the
characters through a tunnel. "Yi Yi" is on the surface far more
sensuous, and its very sensuousness would I think not survive video at
all, because the presence of its colors and surfaces is more tenuous
than it seems to be. I hardly remember the story of "Yi Yi" at all (a
hazard of my peculiar approach to first viewings of subtitled films that
I don't have to write about), but what I do remember of it is things
such as the presence of highways in the backgrounds of buildings,
constructing the peculiarly disorienting spaces of its city. Human
existence is rendered both touching and tenuous by its mix of sensuality
and distancing.

I've never been as interested as most cinephiles seem to be in national
cinemas as categories. I suppose Jean Renoir, Jean-Isidore Isou, and
Robert Bresson do have something in common other than that they all made
films in French, but I have no idea what that might be. I'm not saying
that there are no characteristics of national cinemas, or that an
article purporting to show that Bresson or Godard might some Renoir-ian
roots might not be useful, but rather that directors, the whole output
of one director, studying that, has always proven more fruitful for me
than generalizing about nations.

Fred Camper