BEFORE THE FIRST FRAME

YI YI

Edward Yang, 2000

We spend our lives seeing only half of what is there.

START HERE

Yi Yi follows the Jian family across roughly a year of ordinary life in Taipei: a wedding, a birth, illness, work, first love, disappointment, and the small negotiations that hold a family together.

Edward Yang does not organize these experiences around a conventional dramatic engine. Instead, he watches how separate lives overlap without ever becoming fully knowable to one another. Parents and children occupy the same rooms while living within radically different worlds. People repeat one another's mistakes without realizing it. Moments that seem trivial gradually acquire enormous emotional weight.

The film runs nearly three hours, but its scale is intimate rather than epic. Its subject is something close to the total texture of living: what we notice, what we miss, what we inherit, and how difficult it is to understand even the people closest to us.

YOU MIGHT LOVE THIS FILM IF...

• You like films that accumulate meaning gradually rather than announce it.

• You respond to filmmakers such as Ozu, Kore-eda, or Hou Hsiao-hsien.

• You enjoy ensemble stories in which no single character possesses the whole truth.

• You appreciate long takes, careful framing, and compositions that reward attention.

• You are interested in the gap between what people say, what they feel, and what they are capable of expressing.

• You like films where ordinary life becomes the philosophical subject.

THE JOURNEY IN

Do not wait for Yi Yi to reveal what it is "about." Watch how meaning accumulates through repetition, juxtaposition, and perspective.

Yang frequently keeps his distance. Rather than directing us toward the important thing through close-ups or emphatic editing, he allows several kinds of information to coexist within the frame. Windows, mirrors, doorways, reflections, background activity, and offscreen space become part of the film's thinking.

That distance is not emotional coldness. It is almost the opposite. Yang refuses to reduce his characters to whatever they happen to be feeling at one moment.

The film asks for patience because its form resembles its subject: a life cannot be understood from a single angle.

WHAT TO LOOK FOR

• Windows and reflections. Yang repeatedly photographs people through glass or layers reflections over them. Notice how often a character seems to occupy more than one visual space at once.

• Front and back. Yang Yang, the family's young son, becomes fascinated by the fact that people cannot see the backs of their own heads. Keep that deceptively simple idea in mind.

• Generations repeating one another. Children, teenagers, parents, and grandparents appear to inhabit different worlds. Watch for moments when their experiences begin to rhyme.

• Public versus private space. Offices, restaurants, apartments, hotels, classrooms, streets, and hospitals produce different versions of the same people.

• Distance. Notice how frequently Yang resists the close-up. Ask what becomes possible when the filmmaker refuses to tell us exactly where to look.

• Parallel lives. Events involving different characters are often placed beside one another rather than explicitly connected. Meaning frequently exists in the cut between them.

• Technology and modernity. Computers, telecommunications, business culture, photography, and the changing city quietly surround an ancient problem: how can one person actually know another?

• Sound beyond the frame. Conversations and events are sometimes heard without being shown directly. The world consistently exceeds what the camera can contain.

WHERE THIS FILM COMES FROM

Taiwan and the New Taiwanese Cinema

Beginning in the early 1980s, filmmakers including Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien helped transform Taiwanese cinema. Their films moved away from conventional commercial storytelling toward location shooting, long takes, social observation, historical memory, and the rapidly changing realities of Taiwanese life.

Yang became particularly interested in urban modernity. Taipei in his films is not simply a setting. Offices, apartment towers, traffic, schools, restaurants, multinational business, and new technologies alter the ways people understand themselves and one another.

By Yi Yi, Yang had spent nearly two decades examining the contradictions of modern Taiwanese life. Here those concerns become inseparable from the family.

Edward Yang

Yang was born in Shanghai in 1947 and grew up in Taiwan. He studied engineering and computer science and worked in the United States before returning to Taiwan and becoming a filmmaker.

That background matters. His films often have an almost architectural intelligence. People exist inside systems: families, corporations, schools, cities, economic structures, technologies. Yet Yang's precision never eliminates uncertainty. The more carefully he maps these systems, the more mysterious individual consciousness becomes.

His major films include Taipei Story (1985), The Terrorizers (1986), A Brighter Summer Day (1991), A Confucian Confusion (1994), and Mahjong (1996).

Yi Yi would be his final feature film. Yang died in 2007 at the age of 59.

DECODE THE JARGON

Taiwanese New Wave
A major movement beginning in the 1980s that brought a new realism and formal experimentation to Taiwanese cinema. Its filmmakers frequently examined history, modernization, family, and Taiwanese identity.

Long Take
A shot allowed to continue without frequent editing. Yang uses duration to let relationships develop inside the frame rather than constructing them primarily through cutting.

Deep Space Composition
Staging visual information across foreground, middle ground, and background. In Yi Yi, seemingly secondary details can become as important as the apparent center of a scene.

Ellipsis
The deliberate omission of events that conventional storytelling might show directly. Yang often allows us to encounter consequences rather than the supposedly dramatic event itself.

Ensemble Narrative
A story distributed across several characters rather than dominated by a single protagonist. Each perspective reveals something the others cannot see.

INNOVATION & IMPACT

• Yi Yi premiered at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival, where Edward Yang won Best Director.

• The film became one of the major international breakthroughs for Taiwanese cinema and helped consolidate Yang's reputation as one of the essential filmmakers of his generation.

• Its reputation has grown substantially since its release. In the 2022 Sight and Sound critics' poll, Yi Yi ranked #21 among the greatest films of all time.

• The film demonstrates that extraordinary formal complexity does not require an extraordinary plot. A wedding, a business meeting, a school problem, a conversation between spouses, or a child taking photographs can carry the structural weight normally assigned to major dramatic events.

• Its influence can be felt in contemporary filmmakers interested in families, urban alienation, duration, and the ethical possibilities of observational filmmaking. Its closest affinities also reach backward toward Ozu, particularly his attention to generations, domestic space, and the quiet transformations hidden inside ordinary life.

ONE IDEA TO CARRY INTO THE FILM

Early in Yi Yi, a simple problem emerges:

We cannot see the whole of our own lives.

We cannot see ourselves from behind. We cannot completely know what another person experiences when we leave the room. We do not know what our parents were like before we existed, or what our children understand that we have forgotten. Even our memories provide only one angle.

Cinema seems uniquely capable of solving this problem. A camera can show us what we cannot see ourselves.

But Yang complicates that promise.

Pay attention to how often Yi Yi gives you more information while simultaneously reminding you that something remains outside the frame.

DISCUSSION SPARKS

Keep these questions in the background rather than trying to answer them while watching:

• Who, if anyone, is the protagonist of Yi Yi?

• Why does Yang so often keep the camera physically distant from his characters?

• What can the children perceive that the adults cannot?

• What can the adults understand that the children cannot?

• Where do you notice experiences repeating across generations?

• When does the film deliberately deny you the view or information you expect?

• Does Yang's observational distance make the characters feel more remote, or does it allow them greater complexity?

• What does photography allow Yang Yang to do that ordinary perception cannot?

• Why might a film about everyday family life require nearly three hours?

• By the end, consider whether Yi Yi has shown you an unusually complete picture of a family, or demonstrated why such completeness is impossible.

The Close Up

Looking Deeper for Context, Insight, and Legacy 

Available next time