The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, October 19-25
The Terrorizers (1986)
Directed by Edward Yang
Terrorizers is often labeled the angriest entry in Yang’s filmography. Malaise and malice occasionally poke through in his other films, however refractedly. In Terrorizers, they’re conveyed with uncompromising force.
The film follows four characters—ranging from the mildly repugnant to the sociopathic criminal—whose lives fatefully intertwine. But even as each character’s life links with that of another, each remains hopelessly isolated, marooned amidst the urban anomie of Yang’s biting vision of 1980s Taipei.
The 80s and 90s marked an era of liberalization for Taiwan, a period which witnessed the dissolution of the country’s military dictatorship and its opening up to the world. This moment was especially crucial for Yang, whose films are so deeply informed by his encounter with American and Western culture (Terrorizers is a sort of riff on Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up). But the light-speed jump from totalitarian control to the toothy promise of capitalist free-for-all does not occur without turbulence. Yang’s film is one of the most indelible monuments in cinema to the overlooked casualties of this kind of transition, one made by many countries in the last decades of the 20th century. Michael Blum (New digital restoration October 21-27 at BAM; showtimes daily)