Getting to Know the King of New Taiwan Cinema
A look back at the works of the Taiwanese filmmaker Edward Yang
"A Brighter Summer Day" follows teenagers in the 1950s and early 1960s.
Courtesy of Janus Films
Words by Dan Schindel
During the waning years of Taiwan’s White Terror, a stylistic revolution of lyrical realism emerged within the island’s film scene. One of the leading lights of this movement, commonly called New Taiwan Cinema, was filmmaker Edward Yang. Despite his longtime interest in movies, Yang spent many years avoiding them for a safer vocation in tech and engineering in the United States. After he returned to Taiwan in 1980, he entered the film industry almost by happenstance; a college friend’s invitation to write the script for his movie (1981’s The Winter of 1905) dominoed into a directing career that, over time, would become legendary.
Edward Yang (right) on the set of "A Brighter Summer Day."
Courtesy photo
Along with contemporaries like Hou Hsiao-hsien and Chang Yi, Yang cast a studious eye on the social conditions in Taiwan and the changes their society had undergone since World War II. These films were a marked departure from the melodramas that had long dominated Taiwan’s pop culture, formally rigorous and closely attuned to subtle emotions and character interactions. Yang’s works stand as some of the best of New Taiwan Cinema. But much of the appreciation for him outside Taiwan has tragically been posthumous, as his career was cut short by his untimely death from cancer in 2007.
For aficionados, recognition of Yang has been frustratingly fitful. While some of his movies, particularly A Brighter Summer Day (1991) and Yi Yi (2000), have been ensconced in the Criterion Collection and are thus easy to access, many have had no legitimate release in the United States—until now, at least. A concerted effort to restore Yang’s oeuvre has reached a crest with Film at Lincoln Center’s retrospective Desire/Expectations: The Films of Edward Yang, running through Jan. 9. Along with the established classics, this series has been the first opportunity for many to see the 2K or 4K restorations of titles like That Day, on the Beach (1983), A Confucian Confusion (1994), and Mahjong (1996). This hopefully presages the imminent streaming availability and home releases for these movies.
For those who can’t make it to New York, here are some of Yang’s films that you can stream right now.
Expectation (1982)
This short was Yang’s contribution to the anthology film In Our Time, which was the starting point for New Taiwan Cinema. Each of the four shorts takes place in a different decade, with the whole omnibus tracing the arc of Taiwan’s cultural changes over time. Expectation is set in the 1960s and follows a teenage girl whose crush on a college student lodger in her house is thwarted by her older sister becoming his lover. This was Yang’s first theatrical work after directing an episode of television, and already several of his hallmarks are evident—particularly how it opens on a long close-up of the protagonist’s face and its emphasis on rich quotidian details. The girl’s languid days, soundtracked by popular music like the Beatles on a tinny radio, speak to a new paradigm for youth brought about by the ’60s shift.
Taipei Story (1985)
"Taipei Story" tells the story of Taiwan’s future and past, illustrated via a relationship facing a crossroads.
Courtesy of Janus Films
The pull between Taiwan’s future and past is illustrated via a relationship facing a crossroads. Ah-lung (played by Yang’s fellow New Taiwan Cinema director Hou Hsiao-hsien) is caught up in nostalgia for his days as a baseball player and alienated by the rapid changes around him. Ah-chen (Tsai Chin, who married Yang after production) has adjusted to the office rat race, only to find herself adrift after getting laid off. They talk a lot about getting married and moving to the States, but make little progress on it. This is one of Yang’s more disquieting and uncertain works, and the beginning of an incredible string of features that would run through the rest of his life.
A Brighter Summer Day (1991)
Nearly four hours long and focused on a relatively small cast of characters, this movie uses its runtime to delve deep into a hyper-specific place and time. Here, Yang returns to the late ’50s/early ’60s, mainly following teenagers dealing with getting the short end of the proverbial economic stick after the war. Committed as much to juvenile gang warfare as they are to singing doo-wop, these kids’ everyday struggles of puberty are hopelessly tangled with the threat of violence—or, existentially worse, go-nowhere futures.
Yi Yi (2000)
"Yi Yi" follows a middle-class family in turn-of-the-21st-century Taipei after their matriarch falls into a coma after a stroke.
Courtesy of Janus Films
Yang’s final film is also widely considered his masterpiece. Novelistic in its intentions, it splits its narrative between the various members of a middle-class family in turn-of-the-21st-Century Taipei that’s thrown into turmoil when their matriarch falls into a coma after a stroke. Her daughter retreats to a Buddhist monastery, the daughter’s husband considers an affair with an old flame, their teenage daughter gets caught up in a love quadrangle, and their young son processes all the upheaval by playing hooky from school and taking photographs of strangers. This is another epic, running nearly three hours. While Yang, of course, had no intention of this being some kind of capping statement for his career, it certainly works as one, and feels like the culmination of his commanding attention toward day-to-day life, and all its little amusements and tragedies.
Published on January 3, 2024