The view from Taiwan: looking back at the films of Edward Yang

A schoolboy unsheathes a samurai sword left in Taiwan by a repatriated Japanese general. He can’t speak a word of English but loves crooning Elvis and, despite his short stature, defends his friends from gangs in his postwar military village. In 1990s post-boom Taipei, a convenience store owner foolishly decides to franchise kindergartens and ends up owing millions to the mob. An estranged couple have their last conversation in a dark apartment, realising that emigration to the US and starting over is just an illusion. 

All the above are scenes and characters from the films of Edward Yang, a Taiwanese director of great breadth and intimacy who completed just eight-and-a-quarter works before dying of cancer in 2007. Taipei was his chosen subject, but in effect it was any globalising city. He walked the line between hope and desire, showing rare human connection — and the greed and defensiveness that thwart it.

Yang turned to filmmaking at 33, after a decade working in the US as a computer engineer. A screening of Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) reignited his interest in cinema. Meanwhile, waning martial law and loosening censorship in Taiwan encouraged him to return in 1981 to make films there. His first feature, That Day, On the Beach (1983), is a daughter’s tale about quietly resisting patriarchal family dynamics, told through inventive flashbacks. 

This weekend, the most comprehensive retrospective of Yang’s work to date opens at the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute (TFAI) and the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM). Yang has had numerous posthumous retrospectives internationally, but A One and a Two: Edward Yang Retrospective is the first to present his archives — scripts, essays, diaries — and screen his early and unfinished work, including theatrical productions and clips from The Wind (2007), an animated tale of kids in imperial China that was to be produced with Jackie Chan.

The exhibition is named after A One and A Two (Yi Yi), Yang’s last and best-known film, a profound and gentle portrait of a middle-class family that won Yang the award for Best Director at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival. In its large cast of extended family, first loves, classmates and business partners, each has their distinct personality. The film questions our deepest habits and values. What do we choose to hide even from those closest to us?

Born in Shanghai in 1947, Yang emigrated to Taipei with his family in 1949, along with 2mn civilians who followed the Kuomintang-led Republic of China to Taiwan after their defeat in the Chinese civil war. President Chiang Kai-shek aimed to erase Taiwan’s Japanese colonial history, declaring it the legitimate government of China while prioritising social and economic stability over personal freedoms.

In the 1980s, Yang’s films were difficult to see. ‘Those were very conservative times for art-house distributors in western countries’

“In my generation, the typical phenomenon was outward conformity and inner rage . . . The whole texture of life seemed unreal,” Yang said in a 2001 interview. Yet he was able to see films by Bresson, Fellini, Godard, Ozu and more. 

Curators Wang Jun-Jieh, director of TFAM, and film scholar Sing Song-Yong want to reveal new facets of Yang’s personality. “Kaili Peng [Yang’s widow] encouraged us to show his playfulness,” Sing says. “Yang was full of vitality, and she did not want the exhibition to be too tedious or solemn.”

New multichannel video installations cut from his films introduce his style and intersecting metaphors. Selected from more than 10,000 items, highlights include a meticulously shaded comic strip of besieged soldiers with smoking guns, drawn as a teenager; a cartoon character map for his film A Confucian Confusion (1994); and an alarm clock of a sleeping Astro Boy figurine gifted by the character’s creator Osamu Tezuka’s son to Yang’s own son, Sean, showing Yang’s life-long affinity for Japanese manga. All were kept by Peng, a concert pianist who composed the music for A One and A Two.

According to British critic Tony Rayns, Yang was accepted in “serious” film circles around 1986, after his second feature Taipei Story (1985) premiered at the London Film Festival, and Terrorisers (1986) won the Silver Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival.

Yet his films remained difficult to see. “Those were very conservative times for art-house distributors in western countries, but I recommended Edward’s film to various festivals and wrote about it wherever I could,” Rayns recalls. Today, Yang’s films can be found on streaming services.

Taipei Story tells of childhood sweethearts Ah Chin and Ah Lung (pop star Tsai Chin and fellow director Hou Hsiao-hsien, neither of whom had acted professionally before). We see imported cars and beverages, and endless construction. “How was Los Angeles?” an old coach asks Ah Lung, a fabric salesman holding on to his former stardom in little league baseball. “About the same as Taipei,” he replies.

Terrorisers was made on the heels of Taipei Story, and is a flinty, surreal picture that links the lives of a novelist, a doctor, a photographer and a police chief to ambiguous ends. It is often compared to Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966). Yang also dabbled in satire, with A Confucian Confusion (1994) and Mahjong (1996), about yuppies and grown-up rich kids, romance and racketeering in a globalised Taipei. These slyly refer to his own struggles in a profit-driven movie industry.

A Brighter Summer Day (1991), a four-hour epic often cited as Yang’s magnum opus, is set in an uncertain postwar Taiwan and was filmed at the prestigious all-boys’ high school he attended. The director immerses his viewers by means of wide-angle shots: a crowd of boys chase an unlucky rival gang member up the school steps at night; soft-spoken Si’r (Chang Chen) skips class in an open field with Ming (Lisa Yang), a gang leader’s girlfriend, as soldiers run war drills.

In one memorable scene, after Si’r is wrongly accused of cheating, his father, played by Chang’s actual father, tells him: “A person who’ll apologise for wrongs he didn’t commit is capable of all sorts of terrible things. The purpose of education is to search for truths to believe in. If you can’t be brave enough to believe them, then what’s the purpose of life?”

This is what Yang did best: give life structure, not to change it but to accept its hard truths, with grace. “Making films is not merely about retelling dreams, but to give life to dreams so that they resemble reality closely,” Yang wrote in 1991. “The power of film lies in how this fabricated reality can be so intimately related to each individual’s isolated living experience which is confined by a meagre lifespan.”

“Why watch films?” he scrawled elsewhere. “To keep us curious about the next moment.”

From July 22 to October 22, tfam.museum, tfai.org.tw