Happy Birthday, Edward Yang! Born today in 1947 as Te-Chang Yang, this Taiwanese screenwriter and director was one of the leading filmmakers of the Taiwanese New Wave and Taiwanese Cinema.
This was along with fellow auteurs, being Taiwanese film director, screenwriter, producer and actor Hou Hsiao-hsien ('The Time to Live and the Time to Die', 'A City of Sadness', 'The Puppetmaster') and Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang ('What Time Is It There?').
Growing up in Taipei, Taiwan, Yang was very interested in Japanese manga/comic books, which led to the writing of his own screenplays.
After studying engineering in Taiwan, he enrolled in the Electrical Engineering program at The University of Florida, receiving his Master's degree in 1974 while doing work with The Center for Informatics Research.
However, Yang did not pursue a PhD and instead attended USC Film School briefly, but dropped out after feeling disenchanted by the program's commerce-and-business focus and his own misgivings of pursuing a film career.
Upon working in Seattle with microcomputers and defense software, an encounter with a piece by Werner Herzog gave him inspiration to observe classics in world cinema and reignited his interest in film.
He eventually wrote the script and served as a production aide on the Hong Kong television movie in the early 1980s.
Although he returned to Taiwan to direct a number of television shows, his break came in 1982 with the direction and writing of the film short during the seminal Taiwanese New Wave collaboration.
While Hsiao-Hsien's films dealt primarily with history or Taiwan's countryside, Yang created films analyzing and revealing the many themes of city and urban life.
Yang's first major piece was a modernist narrative reflecting on couples and family. He afterwards followed up with an urban film.
It was a reflection on urban-Taiwan through a couple. For his 1985 Taiwanese drama film 'Taipei Story', Yang had cast Hsiao-hsien in the lead role.
In the early 1990s, Yang co-wrote, co-produced, and directed the first film of which he is best known.
This was the epic 1991 Taiwanese teen crime/drama film 'Gǔlǐng jiē shàonián shārén shìjiàn' ('A Brighter Summer Day'). Literally, the title means 'Youngster Homicide Incident at Guling Street'.
The film was inspired in part by Yang's memories of the sensational coverage of a teenager tried for killing his girlfriend
Set in the late 1950s and early 1960, it centers on young teenager Xiao Si’r (Chen Chang, in his first role), a boy from a middle-class home who veers into involvement with gangs and juvenile delinquency.
A film of both sprawling scope and tender intimacy, this novelistic, patiently observed epic centers on the gradual, inexorable fall of Xiao Si'r from innocence to juvenile delinquency, and is set against a simmering backdrop of restless youth, rock and roll, and political turmoil.
With a runtime of nearly four hours and a cast including more than one hundred amateur actors, 'A Brighter Summer Day' was an unusually large project.
The English title is derived from the lyrics of Elvis Presley's "Are You Lonesome Tonight?".
The epic feature is also a sprawling examination of teenage gangs, societal clashes, the influence of American pop-culture and youth. This was how Yang's first authentic masterpiece was crafted.
The following year, 'A Brighter Summer Day' was selected as the Taiwanese entry for the Best Foreign Language Film. However, it was not nominated. This occurred at the 64th Academy Awards in late March 1992.
Today, the singular masterpiece that is 'A Brighter Summer Day' by Yang is among the most praised and sought-after titles in all contemporary film as not just regarding the Taiwanese New Wave.
During the late 1990s, Yang followed up with two satirical films that looked at the struggle between the modern and the traditional, the relationship between business and art, and how capitalistic greed may corrupt, influence, or effect art.
However, it was at the start of the next decade that Yang would write and direct the second and final film of which he is best known.
This was the 2000 Taiwanese drama/romance film' Yi Yi' (lit. "one one",meaning "one after another").
When written in vertical alignment, the two strokes resemble the character for "two": (二). The film is also known as 'A One and a Two'.
Set in present-day Taipei, the film follows the lives of the middle-class Jian family over the course of a year. It begins with a wedding and ends with a funeral.
'Yi Yi' is told from the alternating perspectives of the three main family members: middle-aged engineer father N.J. (Nien-Jen Wu), teenage daughter Ting-Ting (Kelly Lee) and young son Yang-Yang (Jonathan Chang).
N.J., disgruntled with his current job, attempts to court the favor of a prominent video game company while Ting-Ting and Yang-Yang contend with the various trials of youth, all while caring for N.J.'s mother-in-law, of whom lays in a coma.
With a runtime of three hours, 'Yi Yi' premiered at the 53rd Cannes Film Festival in May of that same year.
It was here where Yang won a Best Directors Award. The film is now generally regarded as one of the major films of the 21st century.
Yang was the first Taiwanese and second Chinese filmmaker to win Best Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival. This was after Hong Kong film director Wong Kar-wai ('Chungking Express', 'Happy Together', 'In the Mood for Love').
Whether chronicling N.J.’s tentative flirtations with an old flame or precocious young son Yang-Yang’s attempts at capturing reality with his beloved camera, Yang deftly imbues every gorgeous frame with a compassionate clarity within his masterwork.
Warm, sprawling, and dazzling, this intimate epic is one of the undisputed masterworks of the new century.
It was Yang's filmmaking style of which looks at the uncertain future of modernizing Taiwan in an enlightening manner. His vision within the world of 'Yi Yi' is one of the most original operating in world cinema today.
That same year, 'Yi Yi' was named best film of the year by the National Society of Film Critics.
In his March 2001 review, Roger Ebert concluded by saying: “There was a time when a film from Taiwan would have seemed foreign and unfamiliar--when Taiwan had a completely different culture from ours.
The characters in "Yi Yi" live in a world that would be much the same in Toronto, London, Bombay, Sydney; in their economic class, in their jobs, culture is established by corporations, real estate, fast food and the media, not by tradition.
NJ and Yang-Yang eat at McDonald's, and other characters meet in a Taipei restaurant named New York Bagels.
Maybe the movie is not simply about knowing half of the truth, but about knowing the wrong half of the truth.”
Yang's second wife, Taiwanese actress and composer Kai-Li Peng, appeared in 'Yi Yi' and was credited as Cellist. Peng had also composed the film's score.
Two months later, Yang was Member of jury at the 54th Cannes Film Festival in May 2001.
Yang had been in the vanguard of the Taiwanese New Wave, a 1980s movement that brought international attention to the island state with films that probed political, economic, and social issues in Taiwan’s rapidly changing environment.
At the time of his death, Yang was working with Jackie Chan on the 2007 Taiwanese animated kung fu film 'The Wind'.
Of the many unrealized projects Yang developed in the wake of 'Yi Y', the one that came the closest to fruition was an ambitious animated martial arts film inspired by Yang’s lifelong love of graphic novels and his friendship with Chan.
Though production on 'The Wind' was halted by Yang’s death, this brief assembly of completed scenes offers a tantalizing glimpse of what might have been—and might, someday, still be.
Later that same year, Peng announced her husband's death and said that the cause was complications of colon cancer.
Yang had passed in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, California on June 29, 2007. He was 59.
The trademarks in most of Yang's film include dealing with urban Taiwan.
He also constantly reflects on the relationship between business and art in his films, and how business effects, corrupts, or alters art.
Although largely unknown in the West, Yang had emerged over the course of two decades as one of international cinema's most distinctive voices.
Yang had been active from 1982–2000.
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