“Time, which changes people,
does not alter the image we have
retained of them.”
- Marcel Proust
Cinema grew out of the human desire
to capture the fleeting images of our lives in some kind of permanent
record. Image, time and memory were favourite
themes of the recently departed filmmaker Chris
Marker (1921-2012) and this short film by Edmund Yeo is an homage to Marker’s meditative, poetic documentary Sans Soleil (1983).
Like Sans Soleil, Fleeting Images
is narrated by a woman who conveys her interpretation of letters she has
received from a close male friend. The
letters are a poetic contemplation of the passage of time and the tenuous
strands of fate that connect people of varying circumstances, times, and places
together.
Instead of drawing on T.S. Eliot or Racine as Marker did in Sans
Soleil, Yeo turns to Proust for
inspiration. Memory is the central theme
of Proust’s great work À la recherche du
temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, 1913–1927). Sights, sounds, and smells
trigger involuntary memories from the past for the narrator and the novel was
groundbreaking in its exploration of how we perceive time.
Although Fleeting Images is only 10 minutes long, Yeo manages to capture the
essence of his Proustian theme using montages of contemporary images and
motifs. The letters are sent to the female
narrator (played by Nicole Tan but
narrated by Tsai Yi-Ling) by email,
and the life experiences of blind Indian children and elderly Tibetan refugees
are contrasted with imagery of the modern streets of Tokyo. These fleeting images haunt the letter writer
as he seeks to understand the world as it is seen by others. There is a sweet little montage of animation
by Julian Kok as the letter writer
wonders if the world of the blind children’s imagination could possibly be more
colourful than we imagine.
The disconnect that city dwellers
have with the natural world is represented in the film with great poignancy
when the letter writer despairs of being completely oblivious to the setting of
the sun while caught in the swelling sea of humanity flowing through the
streets of Shibuya. The setting sun
becomes a motif for the passage of time and it recalled for me the Buddhist notion
that impermanence and change are the undeniable truths of our existence. For the cynical viewer, Edmund Yeo’s Fleeting Images may dip a little bit too
far into sentimentality, but for such an early, experimental work by a young filmmaker I
think this may be forgiven.
Fleeting Images won the Grand Prix at the CAN CON Movie Festival in 2009 from an
international jury which included film critic Chris Fujiwara and director Naomi
Kawase.
Catherine Munroe Hotes 2012
This is the first in a series of
reviews of the short films of the award-winning Malaysian filmmaker Edmund Yeo (b. Singapore, 1984). A graduate of Murdoch University in
Australia, Yeo has been based in Tokyo since 2008 when he moved there to pursue
a Master’s degree at Waseda. His films
have received wide acclaim at international festivals including Cannes, Pusan,
and Rotterdam.
To learn more about Edmund Yeo visit his official website.
Edmund Yeo Filmography
Chicken Rice Mystery (2008)
Fleeting Images (2008)
Love Suicides (2009)
kingyo (2009)
The White Flower (2010)
Afternoon River, Evening Sky (2010)
NOW (2010)
Inhalation (2010)
Exhalation (2010)
