Edmond Wong, a film critic and professor in the Graduate School of Filmmaking at Taipei National University of the Arts, recalled his conversations with the late filmmaker, who died of colon cancer at his home in Beverly Hills on June 29, 2007 at the age of 59. "Many of the directors I have met are not trained filmmakers, but they became successful because of the depth and sensitivity with which they depicted human beings," Wong said Aug. 6. Yang used film as a means to express his concerns about society and call attention to the flaws of economic development, Wong explained.
Yang was born in 1947 in Shanghai and moved to Taipei two years later with his family during the Chinese Civil War. As a child, Yang showed great interest in drawing comics. "He liked the work of Japanese cartoonist Tezuka Osamu very much, and he would draw comic books," Wong said, adding that Yang's potential could already be seen at a young age. The ability to tell a story through pictures would help him as a filmmaker.
Yang graduated with a degree in electrical engineering from National Chiao Tung University in 1967. Yang went abroad to get a master's degree in computer science at the University of Florida.
Due to his interest in movies, Yang studied at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. He mostly took classes in basic film production, not film theory, according to Wong.
At the film school, he was greatly impressed by the New German Cinema, the movement of an emerging group of directors to produce films covering serious historical and social issues. Wong said that Yang especially liked directors such as Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
Wong explained that these German directors focused on different subjects and had unique styles. Yang was influenced by them and later went into the industry using shooting techniques he had learned from their films. For instance, Wenders preferred to portray a free lifestyle of roaming and drifting. In Herzog's works, the audience could learn his philosophy of life, which was highly pessimistic. Fassbinder liked to touch on issues of race and social class in history. Yang later left USC and returned to the high-tech industry.
While working in computer design in Seattle, Yang watched the Herzog film "Aguirre, the Wrath of God," which would re-inspire him to become a director. His low-budget style of filmmaking made Yang believe he could make movies too, Wong said.
The epiphany could not have come at a better time, as Yang had almost given up on becoming a filmmaker. In Wong's book "The Films of Edward Yang," there was a quote from the director: "I was pained and sad on my 30th birthday because I could not spend time watching movies or playing around any more. Entering the film industry was too difficult for me, even though I had some friends in this field. But Herzog showed me that making films was not that hard. He relied on money earned from working as a blacksmith to make his first film."
In 1982, the Central Motion Picture Corp. allocated a part of its budget to small-scale projects and encouraged several young directors to make a film together. The company wanted to nurture new kinds of films. Fortunately, Yang was one of the four directors chosen to shoot an episode for the anthology film "In Our Time," which became a representative work of the New Taiwan Cinema.
Yang's segment, "Expectation," was different from the traditional war movies with strong moral lessons or love stories popular at the time. Instead, it told the story of a girl reaching puberty, which served as a metaphor for a maturing population. Wong mentioned a scene from the movie where the teenage girl, Fen, got her first period and did not know what to do because her mother was not around. The camera captured Fen looking facedown at the ground, before moving to a group of trees waving in the breeze.
"Different from other directors, Yang moved the camera slowly to record the sudden incident and showed a gentle care for the protagonist," Wong said. Yang did not make the girl scream or run out to ask for help. He used the light breeze caressing the trees to express the emotion of the girl, Wong explained.
Due to his realistic style of shooting, Yang was labeled as the leader of the New Taiwan Cinema, which broke away from mainstream films to focus on immediate and real-life issues. Yang's episode from "In Our Time," was an example. Wong said the film was about more than a girl's maturity; it reflected the progression of an era. Another hallmark of the new cinema was that there were more details in those films, serving as a record of society. In this sense, new cinema films played a similar role to documentaries.
Wong discovered in his research that many directors were not brave enough to touch upon such sensitive issues as elderly soldiers, feminists and political dissidents. Yang was an exception. In his film "That Day, on the Beach," two women held inferior positions in their marriages, and he portrayed the social problems endured during the Japanese colonial era. "He showed the living conditions of different groups accurately," Wong commented.
Yang grew up in a military community and was familiar with that life. This experience found its way into his film "A Brighter Summer Day," which showed the children of soldiers living in a crowded, dilapidated military district. In the film, Siao Sih, a teenage boy who has a crush on his friend's girlfriend, Siao Ming, eventually murders her.
"The murder was not committed by the boy; the environment killed these children. Kids who sang English songs were considered good for nothing, and the youth were discouraged from having liberal ideas," Wong said, pointing out how Yang attacked the stifling social norms and hardship that burdened military dependents.
"It was like a record of his childhood, because that was the environment he had lived in," Wong said. "However, it is not easy to make films about yourself because the filmmaker usually needs to take himself out of the story and present it objectively." Hou Hsiao-hsien, another prominent Taiwanese filmmaker, also said that he had to keep a distance in order to examine himself properly, according to Wong.
As directors and people, Yang and Hou were a study in contrasts. Wong recalled that Yang was serious and wise, while Hou tended to be frank and outgoing. Yang's films focused on life in the cities, while Hou made films about people in the countryside.
Yang paid particular attention to the strain on relationships during Taiwan's economic boom in the 1980s in "Taipei Story," where a man from the old western area of Taipei falls in love with a woman from the modern eastern part of the city. The neighborhoods of the two characters highlight the gap that keeps them apart.
Even though Yang and Hou made different kinds of films, they had the same enthusiasm for making movies. Their friendship would lead to involvement in each other's projects. Hou played the lead role in "Taipei Story" and helped raise funds for several of Yang's productions.
Hou's assistance gave audiences the chance to enjoy Yang's art, which observed a changing society. Yang explored different aspects of life and invited viewers to acknowledge minority groups, contributing to the development of the New Taiwan Cinema. On his 30th birthday, Yang could never have known how much he would accomplish.
Write to Sandra Shih at sandrashih@mail.gio.gov.tw