Edward Yang (Chinese: 楊德昌; pinyin: Yáng Déchāng; November 6, 1947[2] – June 29, 2007) was a Taiwanese and American filmmaker.
He rose to prominence as a pioneer in the Taiwanese New Wave of the 1980s, alongside fellow auteurs Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang.
[8] Yang always had a great interest in film ever since he was a child, but put away his aspirations in order to pursue a career in the high-tech industry.
[11] Yang returned to Taiwan in 1980, where his former USC friend Wei-Cheng Yu asked him to write the script for and serve as a production aide on his film, The Winter of 1905 (1981), in which he also had a small acting role.
His script brought him to the attention of Sylvia Chang, who hired him to write and direct an episode of the television miniseries she was producing, Eleven Women.
Yang's two-and-a-half hour episode, "Duckweed" (also known as "Floating Weeds"), concerned the story of a country girl who moves to Taipei with dreams of entering the entertainment industry, and was his first directorial effort.
While his contemporary Hou Hsiao-hsien focused more on the countryside, Yang was a poet of the city, analyzing the environment and relationships of urban Taiwan in nearly all his films.
Yang's first feature film, That Day, on the Beach (1983), was a fractured modernist narrative reflecting on couples and families that spliced timelines.
Yang's fourth film was A Brighter Summer Day (1991) (The Chinese title of "Gǔ lǐng jiē shàonián shārén shìjiàn" literally translating to: "The Murder Incident of the Boy on Guling Street"), a sprawling examination of youth-teen gangs, 1949 Taiwanese societal developments, and American pop culture starring a then 15-year-old Chang Chen.
[22] The three-hour piece started with a wedding, concluded with a funeral, and contemplated all areas of human life in between with profound humor, beauty and tragedy.
Scott of The New York Times, Susan Sontag writing for Artforum, Michael Atkinson of the Village Voice, Steven Rosen of the Denver Post, John Anderson, Jan Stuart and Gene Seymour writing for Newsday, and Stephen Garrett as well as Nicole Keeter of Time Out New York.
[26] In 1992, Yang also put on a production of a play he wrote entitled Likely Consequence, a video-taped performance of which can be viewed on The Criterion Collection Blu-ray/DVD of A Brighter Summer Day (1991), released in March 2016.
"[28] In the same year, Yang also hoped to make a film in Seattle and a World War II story set in Taiwan.
[7] Yang died on June 29, 2007, at his home in Beverly Hills, as a result of complications from a seven-year struggle with colon cancer.
[29] Yang's visual style comprehended deliberate pacing, long takes, fixed camera, few closeups, empty spaces, and cityscapes.
[4][31] Yang also collaborated with many of his fellow Taiwanese film-makers in his films: for instance, in Yi Yi he cast as the lead well-known auteur, novelist, and screenwriter Wu Nien-jen, director of the award-winning A Borrowed Life, which Martin Scorsese has cited as one of his favorite works and one of the most influential films of the '90s.