At a press-conference in Taipei last week, Ang Lee (李安) appeared the most self-effacing and generous-natured of celebrities, but also one of the most intelligent. He guessed he was "not a macho kind of guy," he said, but was instead interested in outsiders, those who suffered from the conflicts of others, and especially women. He was also devoted to diversity, he said, to making each new movie as unlike the one that went before it as possible.
These themes and more are explored in a superb new book, The Cinema of Ang Lee. The author, Whitney Crothers Dilley, teaches English at Taipei's Shih Hsin University, and her account appears in the Directors' Cuts series from London's Wallflower Press. Taiwan is very fortunate to have someone of this quality teaching here.
This new book's essential characteristics are clarity, perceptiveness, sympathy and thoroughness. This is no coterie text for cineasts or crabbed work for academics. Instead, it's eminently clear-headed and lucid, covering all his films in detail, but also containing a perceptive and even profound overview of the inner nature of Lee's achievement.
In the author's view, Lee is on the edge of becoming - indeed, may already have become - one of the great film directors. But, as with Bergman or Fellini (directors she only refers to in passing as influences cited by Lee himself), his achievements have been on his own terms. He doesn't make movies on the orders of media moguls, but instead follows his own insights, so that each new creation is, in a sense, unexpected. Such people are best seen as major world artists who, as if by chance, have wandered into the world of film.
The diversity of Lee's oeuvre has been much remarked on. He has darted from East to West and back again, and then from one Western genre to another (after Lust, Caution (色,戒), his Asian movies are also coming to appear enormously varied). He not only makes films following his inner compulsions - he also makes them out of a sheer delight in the challenges and technical difficulties they pose. (Shakespeare's plays were also astonishingly varied in subject matter and unpredictable in style).
Lee's films are full of risk, the author claims, courting failure (and once, in the case of Hulk, discovering it). They are also free of stereotypes, filled instead with a desire to make appear normal the kinds of people who are usually considered outsiders. This she puts down to Lee's ambiguous position as an immigrant from Taiwan living and working in the US - half celebrity, but also half outsider.
One of the book's arguments is that Lee brings specifically Chinese qualities even to his American movies. The characteristics it pinpoints are a rejection of the standard Hollywood "happy ending," and a related sadness that life in reality is not what you dream it could have been. This melancholic nostalgia, the author points out, is very characteristic of traditional lyric poetry in Chinese, but it also pervades Lee's films all the way from Pushing Hands (推手) to Lust, Caution.
She also points to the power of silence in Lee's films. The focus on the plight of the individual that this silence leads to is exactly what Lee wants to achieve. As the British poet Wilfred Owen wrote about his World War I subjects, the poetry is in the pity. And so it is with Lee.
In an interesting aside on The Wedding Banquet (喜宴), Dilley remarks that the script originally had a leading character working at developing products specifically for left-handed people. This idea was later cut, but it provides an incomparable insight into where Lee's sympathies lie. The left-handed are still, in a lingering prejudice, routinely forced to use their right hands in much of Taiwan, and indeed in much of Asia. A sympathy with, and concern for, the metaphorically left-handed in many spheres of life could be said to characterize all the films of Lee.
There is a mass of incidental detail included - how President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) visited Lee at his parental home near Tainan, how the original author of Brokeback Mountain, Annie Proulx, initially doubted if Lee was the right director for it, how The Wedding Banquet was shot in six weeks for US$750,000 but made US$32 million, proportionately surpassing even Jurassic Park, and of how Lee appears himself in that movie, speaking the single but crucial line about the over-the-top wedding-day antics, "You're witnessing the result of 5,000 years of sexual repression."
Lee has said of himself "I don't have a hobby. I don't have a life," and "I would like to live inside the film and observe the world from the other side of the screen" (providing this book with its subtitle). But there's something more to this than meets the eye. It's the attitude, usually unspoken, of many of the very greatest artists. Their creations are everything, and there's no time - certainly no imaginative time - for anything much else. Shakespeare seems to have done little and traveled nowhere, while Mozart was so involved with music that his daily life reads like a sad, then a tragic, joke.
It's a big claim to make for Taiwan's most famous son, and it's not made in this book. But the point is that Lee is of that same, rare personality type, ambitious only for his work, and endlessly inhabiting a world alongside his characters - he lives, not in glamorous Hollywood, but in an unassuming New York suburb. And it's an understanding of the deep nature of her subject that makes Dilley's groundbreaking and comprehensive book such a rewarding read, and such a very fine achievement.
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), and the country’s other political groups dare not offend religious groups, says Chen Lih-ming (陳立民), founder of the Taiwan Anti-Religion Alliance (台灣反宗教者聯盟). “It’s the same in other democracies, of course, but because political struggles in Taiwan are extraordinarily fierce, you’ll see candidates visiting several temples each day ahead of elections. That adds impetus to religion here,” says the retired college lecturer. In Japan’s most recent election, the Liberal Democratic Party lost many votes because of its ties to the Unification Church (“the Moonies”). Chen contrasts the progress made by anti-religion movements in
Taiwan doesn’t have a lot of railways, but its network has plenty of history. The government-owned entity that last year became the Taiwan Railway Corp (TRC) has been operating trains since 1891. During the 1895-1945 period of Japanese rule, the colonial government made huge investments in rail infrastructure. The northern port city of Keelung was connected to Kaohsiung in the south. New lines appeared in Pingtung, Yilan and the Hualien-Taitung region. Railway enthusiasts exploring Taiwan will find plenty to amuse themselves. Taipei will soon gain its second rail-themed museum. Elsewhere there’s a number of endearing branch lines and rolling-stock collections, some
Last week the State Department made several small changes to its Web information on Taiwan. First, it removed a statement saying that the US “does not support Taiwan independence.” The current statement now reads: “We oppose any unilateral changes to the status quo from either side. We expect cross-strait differences to be resolved by peaceful means, free from coercion, in a manner acceptable to the people on both sides of the Strait.” In 2022 the administration of Joe Biden also removed that verbiage, but after a month of pressure from the People’s Republic of China (PRC), reinstated it. The American
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislative caucus convener Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) and some in the deep blue camp seem determined to ensure many of the recall campaigns against their lawmakers succeed. Widely known as the “King of Hualien,” Fu also appears to have become the king of the KMT. In theory, Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) outranks him, but Han is supposed to be even-handed in negotiations between party caucuses — the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) says he is not — and Fu has been outright ignoring Han. Party Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) isn’t taking the lead on anything while Fu
RSS