Filmmaker Edward Yang’s Taipei Stories Shimmer at BAMPFA

When I first started watching A Brighter Summer Day, the Taiwanese filmmaker Edward Yang’s bittersweet chronicle of teenage street gangs in 1960 Taipei, I was more than a little dubious. The film has a four-hour (!) runtime, after all, and my past experiences with Taiwan New Wave cinema — with its long, languid takes and relative lack of dialogue — had been middling at best.

I needn’t have worried. From its opening moments, the film transfixed me with its slow-simmering portrayal of rebellious, misunderstood and (sometimes) delinquent youths who roam the streets of Taipei during a particularly uneasy time in Taiwan’s history. Occasionally, the kids are brawling with concrete bricks and baseball bats. In other scenes, though, they’re eating shaved ice on a hot summer day. Crooning American rock ‘n’ roll ballads with the voice of an angel. Falling in love for the first time.

The film is screening on March 23 at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, which is a few weeks into a months-long series, Edward Yang’s Taipei Stories, during which they’ll show all seven films that the legendary director made before he died in 2007. Taken together, the series makes a compelling case for what many film buffs, including BAMPFA Associate Film Curator Kate MacKay, have concluded: that Yang was “one of the all-time greats of cinema.”

MacKay says she first fell in love with Yang’s films when she was working as a projectionist for a retrospective of his work at Toronto’s Cinematheque Ontario in 2008. Over the course of her time at BAMPFA, the theater has screened a handful of Yang’s films as one-offs or as part of a broader series. But the wheels were set in motion for a full retrospective a couple of years ago, when the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute announced that it was digitally restoring several of his features, including some that had never seen a proper U.S. release.

It’s true that Yang’s shots are long and immaculately composed, and that his characters are often filmed at an artful distance. MacKay describes his cinematic universe as “so beautiful and smart and poignant,” from a visual standpoint. At the same time, MacKay says, Yang’s work is emotionally astute and has a wonderful narrative complexity. “He’s a humanist filmmaker.”

The films are also hard to pigeonhole. On top of everything else, A Brighter Summer Day (which BAMPFA will screen on March 23 and May 11) is a crime epic, at its heart, with a violent climax inspired by a real-life murder case that happened when Yang was growing up in Taiwan. Released in 1991, the film has an “elegiac quality” that MacKay especially admires.

On the other hand, A Confucian Confusion (1994) and Mahjong (1996) — screening on March 27 and April 6, respectively — are biting, satirical comedies that poke fun at the materialism of the post-economic-boom Taiwan of the 1990s.

Unlike previous generations of Taiwanese filmmakers, Yang was best known for his interest in the concerns and interior lives of everyday middle-class people. For example, That Day, on the Beach (screening May 3), Yang’s 1983 debut feature, tells the story of a chance meeting between two successful career women who reflect back on decisions they made, or didn’t make, that might have taken their lives down a different path.

Finally, there’s Yi Yi (screening April 20 and May 5), Yang’s 2000 masterpiece, which is easily the filmmaker’s most famous and most widely acclaimed work — a movie that starts with a wedding and ends with a wake, and is framed around conversations that members of a multigenerational family have with the grandmother, who has fallen into a coma. It’s the film that prompted the New York Times to call Yang “a poet of middle-class life.”

There’s a dedicated audience in the Bay Area for what MacKay describes as “Asian auteur cinema,” and so it has been no surprise that the three movies that have screened so far — including Yang’s 1985 classic, Taipei Story, for which the retrospective is named — all sold out. Several of the screenings also feature introductions by UC Berkeley professors.

BAMPFA’s Edward Yang series ends on May 11. Tickets should be purchased in advance, as each screening is likely to sell out. The theater is located at 2155 Center St. in Berkeley.