WHY HIS NAME ISN'T KNOWN
Edward Yang made seven feature films between 1983 and 2000. He died in 2007 at sixty years old. The films he left behind are, in the consensus of serious film scholars, among the most formally significant works made in the second half of the twentieth century. The fact that his name is not widely known in the West is not evidence of his relative importance. It is evidence of a distribution and critical infrastructure that consistently failed to engage with Taiwanese cinema at the level it deserved.
The comparison that puts his standing in context: Wong Kar-wai, who worked in Hong Kong at the same time, received wide international distribution and critical attention. Yang worked in Taiwan, with less international infrastructure, and received a fraction of the attention for work that many serious critics consider formally superior. The distribution luck shapes the canon. The canon shapes what Western audiences know. Neither process tracks with actual quality.
WHO HE WAS
Born in Shanghai in 1947, raised in Taiwan after his family's displacement following the Communist victory in 1949. Trained as an electrical engineer at National Chiao Tung University, worked in the American tech industry, moved to the University of Southern California to study film in the 1970s, returned to Taiwan in the early 1980s as the Taiwanese New Wave was beginning. Made seven films. Never made a film he didn't believe in. Died of colon cancer in Los Angeles in 2007, at the moment his work was beginning to receive the international critical attention it had always deserved.
THE FORMAL CHARACTERISTICS
Yang's cinema is characterised by an extreme formal patience - wide shots, still camera, long takes, a refusal to use close-up as emotional instruction. In the Mood for Love is often cited for this quality; Yang was doing it a decade earlier with greater structural complexity. The camera in a Yang film does not tell you how to feel. It shows you a space - an apartment, a street, a school playground - and waits for you to understand what's happening inside it.
The films are about Taiwan specifically - the historical formation of the island, the mainlander communities displaced there after 1949, the specific social architecture of a city (Taipei) undergoing rapid modernisation in the 1960s through 1990s - but they are formally about something universal: the way time passes, the gap between who people intended to be and who they became, the specific texture of lives lived in a historical moment that is itself being lost.
THE FILMS
A Brighter Summer Day (1991): Four hours. Taiwan in the 1960s. The displaced mainlander community living in military compounds, their children forming gangs, a murder. Based on a true case that Yang's own family was adjacent to. The most formally ambitious film in the catalogue - structured like a novel, moving between dozens of characters across four hours, building toward a single moment that the film has been preparing since the first frame. Criterion released it in 2015. The restoration is the correct version to watch.
Yi Yi (2000): Three hours. A Taipei family across one year - the father facing a mid-life crisis, the daughter navigating adolescence, the young son photographing the backs of people's heads because we can only see what's in front of us. Yang's last film and his most formally complete. The boy's photograph conceit is the thesis statement of the entire filmography: we can only see what faces us, which means we can only know a fraction of the experience of the people we share our lives with. Three hours of formal precision in service of that argument.
The Terrorizer (1986): The formal breakthrough. Three loosely connected stories in contemporary Taipei - a photographer, a novelist, a runaway - whose lives intersect through coincidence and the specific modern anxiety of the city. Shot with a formal coldness that prefigures much of contemporary Asian cinema. The film that established Yang's international critical reputation.
Taipei Story (1985): Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien together - Hou appears as an actor, Yang directed. Two Taipei residents navigating a relationship across the changing city. Formally the clearest statement of what the Taiwanese New Wave was doing with modern urbanisation and the loss of older ways of living.
WHERE TO START
Yi Yi is the correct entry point for most adult viewers - it requires patience and will reward it more completely than any other Yang film. Three hours is a commitment; make it when you have an afternoon free and nothing competing for attention. A Brighter Summer Day is the film to follow with, once Yi Yi has demonstrated what Yang is doing. The Terrorizer for the formal development. Taipei Story for the historical context.
All are on MUBI UK. The Criterion physical editions - particularly Yi Yi and A Brighter Summer Day - are worth owning for the supplementary materials: the essays and interviews are among the best critical writing on Yang available in English.
The distribution luck shapes the canon.