Remembering Edward Yang
Father of New Taiwanese Cinema dies at 59
by Godfrey Cheshire
July 2nd, 2007 3:50 PM
Filmmaker Edward Yang, who died last week of colon cancer at the age of 59,
exemplified both the protean creativity and the problematic dissemination of
Taiwanese cinema in recent decades. Beginning in the mid-1980s, all areas of
Chinese filmmaking enjoyed an unprecedented efflorescence. Yet while mainland
filmmakers such as Zhang Yimou and Hong Kong’s Wong Kar-wai found a ready
path into American art houses, Yang, like his great contemporary Hou Hsiao-
hsien, faced a host of business and cultural obstacles to U.S. commercial
distribution. The result was that one of modern cinema’s most fascinating
careers passed largely unseen by American cinephiles.
Surely the greatest casualty was the fourth of Yang’s seven features, A
Brighter Summer Day (1991), an electrifying four-hour epic of teenage rebellion
and social turbulence set in early-’60s Taipei. Its title taken from Elvis
Presley’s “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” and its story compounded from a lurid
period crime and Yang’s own youthful memories, the film fused a startling
degree of emotional frankness with a coolly expansive analysis of family and
political tensions. Though a masterful accomplishment from any number of
angles, it was passed over by the Cannes and New York film festivals, yet
emerged as one of the most critically esteemed films of the 1990s. It has never
been released in the U.S., either theatrically or on tape or DVD.
In all of his films, Yang examined the world through the cloudy prism of modern
Taipei. Born in 1947 in southeastern China, he was brought to Taiwan by parents
fleeing the Communist revolution. After receiving his secondary education in
Taipei, he studied electrical engineering at the University of Florida and
worked briefly as a researcher in Seattle before an art-house encounter with
Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God sent him back to Taiwan determined
to be a filmmaker.
It was an auspicious moment, with the first stirrings of the movement that
critics would eventually call the New Taiwanese Cinema. After a made-for-TV
short, Yang produced three features that quickly established his name on the
international festival circuit. Dubbed the “Urban Trilogy,” That Day on the
Beach (1983), Taipei Story (1985), and The Terrorizers (1986) drew comparisons
to Antonioni and Godard for their intricately austere and stylistically adroit
dissections of contemporary anomie.
After the disappointing reception of the five-years-in-the-making A Brighter
Summer Day, Yang shifted course. His next two films, A Confucian Confusion
(1994) and Mahjong (1996), tried to give a comic spin to the director’s
characteristic concern with the flux and disarray of life in Taipei. Though
they suggested to some critics that Yang’s gift was not for comedy, the films
led to the brilliant synthesis of Yi Yi (A One and a Two), his last film and
the first to gain a U.S. release.
Though surely not intended as a summing-up, Yi Yi managed to combine the
critical acuity of the Urban Trilogy and the affecting expansiveness of A
Brighter Summer Day with the philosophical whimsy of his previous two films.
A vision of family (and city) life as a mesh of precarious privacies, the
three-hour bittersweet comedy won Yang a Best Director nod at Cannes as well as
the Best Picture award from the National Society of Film Critics. It also
earned Yang something he’d long deserved: a hearing with American filmgoers.
http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0727,cheshire,77104,20.html
--
※ 發信站: 批踢踢實業坊(ptt.cc)
◆ From: 218.211.107.145