Edward Yang, 59, Director Prominent in New …
The New York Times
Edward Yang, 59, Director Prominent in New Taiwan Cinema, Is Dead
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: July 2, 2007
Edward Yang, a leading figure in the New Taiwan cinema movement of the 1980s
who was best known for “Yi Yi,” about one family’s life together (and apart)
in Taipei, died Friday in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 59.
Mr. Yang’s wife, Kaili Peng, announced his death on Saturday and said the
cause was complications of colon cancer.
An American citizen, Mr. Yang was born in Shanghai in 1947, two years before
the leaders of China’s Nationalist government were exiled to Taiwan. His
family soon followed, and he was raised in Taipei, where he grew up watching
films by Federico Fellini and Robert Bresson. Although he dreamed of becoming
a filmmaker, he studied electrical engineering at the University of Florida
and worked in computer design in Seattle. He experienced an epiphany, however,
after seeing Werner Herzog’s “Aguirre, Wrath of God.” (“I went in,” he
later explained, “and that turned me around.”) He returned to Taiwan, where
he wrote the screenplay for the feature “The Winter of 1905” (1981) and
directed a short, “Desires,” for the 1982 anthology feature “In Our Time.”
This film, along with another anthology work, “The Sandwich Man,” announced
the arrival of two major world directors: Mr. Yang and his compatriot and
former collaborator, Hou Hsiao-hsien. Together, these new wavers pushed
Taiwanese cinema into its next era with work that explored the country’s
rapidly moving present as well as its history, by way of period pieces and
stories set in the here and now. The two also put Taiwanese cinema on the
international map, eventually becoming familiar presences at important forums
like Cannes, where Mr. Yang won best director in 2000 for “Yi Yi,” and the
New York Film Festival.
Pierre Rissient, a former consultant for the Cannes festival, explained that
in the early days Mr. Yang and Mr. Hou served as something of a team. Their
approach to cinema may not have been new, at least in an international
context, Mr. Rissient said. But in Taiwan and much of the rest of Asia, he
continued, it “was extremely fresh and extremely intimate and, at the same
time, had a distance.” This much-remarked-upon critical distance — evident
in Mr. Yang’s beautiful long shots and leisurely takes — allowed characters
and viewers the space and time to breathe and think. The influence of
European modernists like Michelangelo Antonioni on this work is undeniable,
as is its cultural specificity.
Mr. Yang directed seven features that in their visual style and preoccupations
— including the impact of modernization on the Taiwanese middle class —
argue for his status as an auteur. Among the notable titles were his feature
directing debut, “That Day, on the Beach” (1983), a female coming-of-age
story set against social and political transformations, and his
autobiographically informed “A Brighter Summer Day” (1991), set among teenage
gangs during the 1960s. At once deeply personal and epic in scale, with an
original running time of four hours and more than 100 speaking parts, “A
Brighter Summer Day” proved a crucial leap forward for Mr. Yang and firmly
sealed his reputation.
Still, even as his international renown grew, Mr. Yang remained largely unknown
in the United States, where interest in foreign-language film was on the wane.
It wasn’t until “Yi Yi,” his last completed feature, that American audiences
were finally introduced to a filmmaker widely hailed as one of the most
important in contemporary cinema. Released here under the jazz-influenced title
“A One and a Two,” the film received rapturous reviews. Writing in The New
York Times, A. O. Scott called it “lucid, unobtrusive and absorbing” and,
like many critics, placed it on his top-10 list of the year. It went on to win
numerous honors, including best picture — in any language — from the National
Society of Film Critics.
Mr. Yang is survived by his wife; a son, Sean; a sister, Li; and a brother,
Robert.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/02/arts/02yang.html
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