*I wake up and I am talking to you, turning words and thoughts in the hollow drum of my heart, trying to decide a good way to say them to you, including this.
*
Thinking of "Yi Yi" and "Sexy Beast," about what you said about so desperately wanting a close-up insert shot: what a close-up means. Among many things it is both summation and dismissal; or, put another way, a resolution, necessarily wanting, of the anxiety of distance and mastery. Thinking of how often your fellow students need to distinguish the parts of films that are "dreams" -- as if there is any difference between dream and film; I think they use "dream" or "social commentary," markers of that ilk, in order to defuse the necessary anxiety of the opacity of lucid being. Ugh. --- I mean, they use taxonomy the same way I say a close-up is used: summation, dismissal. I guess a close-up is a kind of naming.
*
What "Yi Yi"'s meditative distances afford is an approach to that unnameable enormity, to the pulsation of life and its histories both dreamed and unuttered: an approach that, by respecting the distances between characters and audience, leaves inviolate our secret sharing. (Most cinema wilfully and gleefully invade its characters to assert its narrative mastery, its cyclopean version of space, time, perception.) Is it meaningful that Edward Yang considers himself a Confucian and computer, that one of his films is called "A Confucian Confusion"? Probably not, but it's not meaningful in a very interesting way.
*
Most of "Yi Yi"'s wonderful moments are its privates ones: NJ in his office in the dark, softly singing "Baby It's You" to himself; an unseen Yang-Yang photographing fairy-like "mosquitoes"; Ting-Ting and her boyfriend glimpsed on Taiwan's streets, at faraway intersections, amongst a world of traffic. Instead of alienating me, somehow, the vast world is made complicit and material in this intimacy, this sharing.
*
I wonder about intimacy and distance, dream and definition. I wonder about you.
*
French cinema is irredeemably wounded by its self-consciousness. As a consequence of either the dragging weight of auteurist theory -- the Name of the dead Father -- or the four hundred years of rationalism since Descartes divorced God, ergo sum. Carlos Fuentes remarks that French surrealism remained curiously focussed on the clarity of its definitions, issuances of manifestos and policies, members in good standing and those excommunicated, while true Surrealist art was solely the practice of outlanders uncontaminated by Gallic superogatoregoism: Fuentes names Ernst, Dali, Bu�uel.
*
Dream in "Sexy Beast": hm, different film-stock, obligatorily punctuated and backended by shots our wracked dreamer Gall tossing in bed, images of a ferocious rabbit-man riding a donkey intent on murder or even more nasty nastiness. Oh, scary. The dream's loony return at film's end is less coda than final pelvic thrust to squeeze the last bit of frisson from an impressively frenetic humping: it's the signal to clean up. The dream is shocking, hilarious, quick, dismissable: it informs little and contributes nothing to the world; a stylistic hiccough, a doodle, a concession to a required artistic morbidity.
*
Dream in "Yi Yi": indistinct, opaque; a dream, if it is a dream, of a tacit acceptance, reconciliation; a goodbye. "Sexy Beast"'s dream, and "dreams" in general, are stylistic marginal doodles. The fantasy sequence in "Yi Yi" -- if it is a fantasy -- seems to emerge less from stylised look-at-me's or individual character wish/fulfilment than from a communal desire -- that is, the characters' and the audience's desire -- for an adequate response to the enormous opening and disappearances of death. [I'm not describing what I mean very well. It happens too in "Ponnette," in "Les Jeux Interdits" and "Ugetsu Monogari": a tragedy and abandonment so enormous that the film must depart from life to provide an answer, for there is no answer in life.
Usually, like in "Yi Yi," this happens narratologically as nonsupernatural ghosts. Whence this anxiety? It is a shortcut
for mourning.]
'
