Edward Yang

Abstract

Edward Yang (楊德昌) (b. 6 November 1947 – d. 29 June 2007), a key figure in the Taiwanese New Wave in the 1980s, was born in Shanghai, China, in 1947. He emigrated to Taiwan in 1949 with his family after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China on the mainland. During his childhood, Yang was exposed to films by Federico Fellini and Robert Bresson. After his undergraduate study in electrical engineering in Taiwan, he pursued his postgraduate study on the same subject at the University of Florida. He worked for a few years at the Center for Informatics Research at the same university. He studied briefly at the University of Southern California film school and applied to Harvard’s architecture school. He did not complete any of these programs and ended up working on microcomputers and defense software in Seattle. Yang watched Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) in a cinema in Seattle. He had an epiphany and decided that he should become a film director. Yang would go on to produce some of the most influential films in world cinema: Taipei Story (青梅竹馬) (1985) The Terrorizers (恐怖分子) (1986), A Bridger Summer Day (牯嶺街少年殺人事件) (1991), A Confucian Confusion (獨立時代) (1994), Mahjong (麻將) (1996) and Yi Yi (一一) (2000). It was for the last film that Yang won Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival. Yang died of colon cancer in Beverly Hills at the age of fifty-nine. Yang worked with several notable artists in his relatively short career, including the actress Sylvia Cheng, the cinematographer Christopher Doyle, the film director Hou Hsiao-hsien, the playwright and theater director Stan Lai, the singer Tsai Chin, and the screenwriter Wu Nien-jen.