Desire/Expectations: The Films of Edward Yang a series at Film at Lincoln Center, New York City, December 22, 2023–January 9, 2024
Chronicles of Changing Times: The Cinema of Edward Yang a series at the Harvard Film Archive, Cambridge, Massachusetts, March 29–May 22, 2024
A One and a Two: Edward Yang Retrospective an exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, July 22–October 22, 2023. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Wang Jun-jieh, Sing Song-yong, and Chen Yeng-ing. Taipei: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 421 pp., NT$1800
In 1977 the Taiwanese director Edward Yang (Yang Dechang) was nearing thirty and working as a computer designer in Seattle. As a young man he’d dreamed of making films, but to please his parents he studied electrical engineering in Taiwan and then became one of the thousands of young, upwardly mobile Taiwanese to study in the US, completing a master’s degree at the University of Florida in 1972. A semester of film school in Southern California the following year left him disheartened, and soon he dropped out and took a position at the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory, where he would remain for the better part of a decade. “On my thirtieth birthday,” he recalled in one interview, “I suddenly said to myself, ‘Damn, I’m getting old!’ I realized that I had to change my life.”
On a drive through downtown Seattle, Yang stumbled upon a screening of (1972), Werner Herzog’s epic about Spanish conquistadores searching for El Dorado in the Peruvian jungle. “I went in and that turned me around,” Yang said. Herzog’s film—shot entirely on location and with a minuscule budget—became a touchstone of the New German Cinema, a loose grouping of young filmmakers whose aesthetically ambitious and socially conscious works upended the West German film industry. In 1981 Yang moved back to Taiwan, where he helped initiate another cinematic new wave—what came to be known as the Taiwan New Cinema. Many directors associated with the movement went on to find success abroad, including Yang’s closest contemporary and occasional collaborator, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and younger figures like Ang Lee and Tsai Ming-liang. The films they made varied widely, but they shared a visual vocabulary of extended takes, longdistance shots, and largely stable cameras; a patient attention to everyday life; and a
