Music and Modernity in A Brighter Summer Day
2003; Issue: 62 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2562-2528
Autores Tópico(s)Theater, Performance, and Music History
ResumoFredric Jameson, in his essay Remapping describes experience of modernity thus: The social totality can be sensed, as it were, from outside, like a skin at which Other somehow looks, but which we ourselves will never see. Or it can be tracked, like a crime, whose clues we accumulate, not knowing that we are ourselves parts and organs of this obscenely moving and stirring zoological monstrosity. But most often, in modern itself, its vague and nascent concept begins to awaken with knowledge function, very much like a book whose characters do not yet know they are being read. (1) Jameson describes aesthetic sensation of modernity as requiring existence of an omniscient presence, who, over miniature (2) connects disjointed, fragmented experiences of contemporary life, and provides sensations of connection, rhyme, and irony. This is province of artist, who alone is capable of converting random events of daily life into the material of storytelling, or Literature. (3) Edward Yang, in his 1991 film A Brighter Summer Day, endorses this view of nature of art. His film provides its viewers with a large-scale vision of Taipei circa 1960 that is consistently denied to its characters. We are given a series of visual and linguistic repetitions and filmic echoes that make connections, which are invisible to film's characters. A Brighter Summer Day's relationship to artistic urge similarly reflects Yang's positioning film, literature, and especially music, within world of film as revelatory of complexities of characters' lives. Yang uses these arts, most importantly music, as a means of rising over those roof-tops, and providing an understanding of daily life impossible to achieve in real world. Music becomes central point at which all characters' lives connect, and their relationship to music illuminates normally unseen framework of 1960s Taiwanese life. The traditional and modern are in constant tension throughout A Brighter Summer Day. Symbols of two modes emerge everywhere, and reveal a society on cusp of massive individual and institutional change. A Brighter Summer Day's placement in Yang's filmography, after his critically celebrated films Taipei Story and Terrorizer, both of which are set in present-day Taipei, is worthy of notice. A Brighter Summer Day is a step backward, a journey into past, and its relationship to earlier Yang films is one of explanatory prequel. A Brighter Summer Day documents social and cultural changes that create modernized, late-capitalist life of 1980s Taipei documented in earlier two films. Such a task allows Yang freedom to explore a society on brink of a great transformation, from a traditionally based way of life to a modernized, urban existence. While film exists in a number of versions, throughout this essay I will be referring to 185-minute cut (a 237-minute version is fullest, and most difficult to find). The other great transformation shown in A Brighter Summer Day is from cultural domination by a series of invaders, including Japanese and mainland Chinese, to a new culture primarily associated with United States. The film's cultural talismans illuminate this complex intertwining of old and new, Japanese, Chinese, and American influences. A Brighter Summer Day's characters treat their surroundings as archaeological, digging to find artifacts relevant to their contemporary existences. Their commingled presence in film creates a hybrid existence where traces of past military invaders mix with those of future cultural invaders. In a similar vein to Yang's later masterpiece Yi Yi, A Brighter Summer Day takes in a year in lives of a prototypical Taiwanese family, Zhangs. However, unlike Yi Yi, A Brighter Summer Day focuses less on family life and more on trials of one of Zhang family sons, Zhao Si'r. …
Referência(s)