GODFREY CHESHIRE, CRITERION For two decades after its making, Edward Yang’s magisterial A Brighter Summer Day was more an alluring legend than a known presence for American cinephiles. Passed over by festivals, including Cannes and New York, after its completion in 1991, the four-hour film gradually began to circulate in specialized venues and among critics, with the result that it was named one of the most important films of the nineties in polls at the decade’s end. Yet it was only with its first, limited U.S. theatrical run in 2011, following a restoration by Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation, that it was widely hailed as a masterpiece of modern cinema as well as a defining work of the New Taiwan Cinema, which enjoyed a decade-long flowering beginning in the early eighties.
A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY
A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY
A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY
GODFREY CHESHIRE, CRITERION For two decades after its making, Edward Yang’s magisterial A Brighter Summer Day was more an alluring legend than a known presence for American cinephiles. Passed over by festivals, including Cannes and New York, after its completion in 1991, the four-hour film gradually began to circulate in specialized venues and among critics, with the result that it was named one of the most important films of the nineties in polls at the decade’s end. Yet it was only with its first, limited U.S. theatrical run in 2011, following a restoration by Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation, that it was widely hailed as a masterpiece of modern cinema as well as a defining work of the New Taiwan Cinema, which enjoyed a decade-long flowering beginning in the early eighties.