Yi Yi · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

An eight-year-old hands a grown man a photograph of the back of his own head. He isn't being cute. You can't see it yourself, Yang-Yang explains, so I'm getting it for you; people only ever get half. The adults laugh and let it go. The boy keeps at it, one head at a time, and by the end his small project turns out to be the most exact account anyone has given of what Edward Yang does with a camera.

Yi Yi runs three hours and resolves almost nothing. A wedding at one end, a funeral at the other, the Jian family in between. Early on the grandmother falls into a coma, and the household is urged to sit with her and talk, in case she can hear. One by one they take the chair. One by one they find out how little they have to say for themselves.

That bedside is where Deleuze stops being decoration and starts being useful.

For most of film history an image worked like this: a character sees a situation and does something about it. Perception runs into action, action changes the situation, the cut serves the deed. Deleuze called that the movement-image, and it is the engine of nearly every film you have loved without thinking about it. Then, he argued, something jammed. Films began stranding people in situations no action could touch. What was left was looking, listening, waiting. He called these pure optical and sound situations, and the person caught inside one a voyant: a seer rather than a doer.

A coma is about as pure as an optical and sound situation gets. There is nothing to do. Yang doesn't even grant the family the dignity of a struggle. He gives them a chair and an obligation to speak. What comes out isn't dialogue, because dialogue needs someone to answer. It's testimony, what Deleuze called a speech-act: a voice that has become an act in itself because nothing will reply. And the question the scene puts to the room is put to you as well, not rhetorically. Five minutes, an unconscious listener, your own life. What would you say?

Now the film's great formal stroke. Midway, the father is in Tokyo and meets the woman he loved and lost; back in Taipei, his daughter stumbles into the first romance of her life. Yang designs the two generations to run in parallel and lets them bleed together until the rhyme stops being a rhyme. Deleuze's term for this is peaks of present: not a flashback, not a memory, but several presents coexisting and refusing to line up into a sequence. A flashback would have said the father is remembering. Yang says something harder. The first love isn't over. It is happening now, in him and in her at once, and neither version cancels the other. This is where the lens earns its keep. Read the Tokyo strand as a midlife-crisis subplot and the film shrinks to soap. Read it as a second present running alongside the first and you have the whole argument of Yi Yi in one cut: a life doesn't happen once, in order.

Yang's other instrument is glass. He composes through windows constantly, so a face carries the traffic sliding across it and an office interior floats over the city outside. Deleuze called an image like that a crystal: an actual thing and its virtual double swapping places so fast you can't say which you're watching. In Yang's Taipei the double is always the city. A man sits at a restaurant window and the street runs across his cheek. He can't see it. We can. That is Yang-Yang's photograph again, done optically instead of as a joke, and it explains why the film feels intimate and very far away at the same time. Not two moods alternating. One arrangement of glass.

None of this came from nowhere. The wedding-to-funeral scaffold is built out of Tokyo Story, which had already worked out how to let a domestic occasion turn quietly into a death and how to leave the heaviest beats offscreen. Running several dramas at once inside a single deep frame, the household read as a cross-section of a society, is The Rules of the Game. Bazin praised exactly that in Renoir: keep the actions alive in depth and the choice of what to watch passes to the viewer instead of an editor making it in advance. Yang takes the bargain seriously enough to hold you at a distance for three hours and trust you to look. The plate glass and the layered reflections are Playtime's optical grammar, borrowed and warmed; the cool geometry of corporate architecture is L'Eclisse. The braid of strands that rhyme and glance off each other without converging is Short Cuts. The deepest debt is to himself. A Brighter Summer Day taught him to nest people inside doorways and windows so the city does the framing.

The non-convergence is the point, and it's worth naming what it did to narrative. Deleuze described modern cinema as built from dispersive situations and weak links: many characters, loosely tied, causality slackened. A lesser film would collide the strands in the third act to prove they belonged together. Yang leaves them parallel. No reveal, no lesson. The unit isn't the plot beat but the held moment, three hours of what Deleuze called dead time, the everyday given the time it actually takes, which is why the film passes like an afternoon rather than a duty.

Yang's specific invention is this: he got an entire lifespan inside one household with no flashbacks and no narrator, using simultaneity and glass and nothing else. The boy, the teenager, the father and the dying grandmother aren't stages of a life shown in order. They are four presents held in the frame of one family. The Chinese title, one one, is the method stated plainly. Simple things, taken one at a time, until they add up to everything.

He never finished another feature. A long-gestating animation project, then cancer, then his death in 2007, so the usual story of who he influenced doesn't get to be told properly. What he left instead is the boy's assignment, handed to us rather than to a successor. Watch it again and watch the windows. Count the people in the shot, including the ones standing on the glass. There is almost always one more than the scene admits, and it's usually the one nobody in the room can see.