Recently I watched Yi Yi by Edward Yang, and I thought that it was relevant to the camera exercises that we had been learning this week as one of the things that stuck out most to me in the film were the frame compositions and the lack of close ups.

The whole movie is filmed in a very simple, peaceful and unobtrusive manner. Edward Yang a lot of the time seems to set his camera down somewhere and let the scene play out. However, I don’t think this makes the film or the image boring at all. When watching a scene from the film, it felt as if Edward Yang had carefully framed the image beforehand, and worked the blocking of his actors to move and breathe within this very simple and quiet frame. To me, it came off as a very simple way to film. However, the whole movie is not just static shots. There are several instances where Edward Yang will move the camera, however, the movements themselves are very simple and do not draw attention to themselves. Most of the time they were very small pans or slow lateral tracking shots.

The overall very simple aesthetic of the movements and framing made the camera feel very omnipresent, almost like a third person narrator. It always kept its distance and acted a lot more as an observer than an intruding force. This was further extended as I realised that by the end of the film, to my memory, there were very few close ups throughout the three hour running time. I thought this was very peculiar and interesting as it is rare for a film to stray away from using close ups, but again I began to think about the camera as an observer, as something that tried to give the audience as large and even of a perspective of all the numerous characters in the film as possible.

I did like and connect to the style, but I wanted to know why it worked in this film, when for almost any other film this slow, simple and distancing visual style would make it feel very dry. That’s when I realised that the style and form of the film was in line with the content of the film. The film has a very broad and even, despite following the lives of an average family in Taipei, epic story, with numerous characters. With all these numerous characters I felt that Edward Yang made a large effort to have the audience connect of feel a sense of empathy for each and every one of them, and that’s why it was important to present them as honestly as possible, the good and the bad, to show all parts of them, and a very fitting way of doing this would be to show who they are, present them in a frame, and to just let them live and breathe in that space, along with other characters, other people that come into their lives.