Where to begin with Edward Yang

There is perhaps no greater example of the emergence of a specifically 21st-century cinephilia than Edward Yang. A vanguard member of the Taiwan New Cinema movement – which included among its ranks Hou Hsiao-hsien, Wu Nien-jen and Ko I-chen – he made just seven feature films before his untimely death from cancer at the age of 59, and yet his impact looms large over world cinema, in spite of its long-term inaccessibility. 

Up until this past decade, just one of his films was readily available in pristine quality, and he only garnered international recognition in the final years of his career, but he has deservedly come to be seen as a towering, widely beloved figure whose signature films – conceivably the most universally praised works in Mandarin Chinese – have a purchase in the cinephile consciousness like few other filmmakers.

Yang took a circuitous route to cinema, initially starting out as an engineer in the United States, before an encounter with Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) inspired him to re-enter filmmaking. His sensibility was informed by multiple sources: European modernism, the quotidian relationships that surrounded him, even his lifelong interest in cartoons, which caused each of his film frames to possess a precision and immediacy of intent.

Yang’s films are defined by their tight-knit connection to Taipei – all set contemporarily, save for one enormous exception – capturing its development and capacity for urban malaise slamming up against traditional values and customs with a constant baseline of essential, subdued melancholy. The social and economic classes of his characters varied, but the balance that Yang struck between observation and understanding made his films dynamic, ever-shifting explorations of an emerging, tumultuous nation.

At first glance, it might seem strange to suggest a director’s final film as a point of entry. But A One and a Two… (2000) is no ordinary last testament, not least because Yang’s diagnosis came after he’d finished making it. A three-hour meditation on a Taipei family over the course of a year, it feels more like an archetypal middle-period film, one in which his directorial instincts embraced a certain accessibility while also finding ever deeper foundations of emotion. 

Though Yang had other projects in the works for the remaining seven years of his life, including an animated film starring Jackie Chan,  A One and a Two… stands alone as his one truly humanist film, dealing with each of the three central family members – NJ, the father played by major Taiwan New Cinema screenwriter Wu Nien-jen; the precocious daughter Ting-ting (Kelly Lee); and the mischievous and curious son Yang-yang (Jonathan Chang) – with a profound yet subtle command of all the connections of the modern world, both in the relationships and infatuations that slowly develop or resurface over the course of the film and in more existential reckonings with the mysteries of life and death. 

Each character, including such memorable figures as NJ’s fortune-obsessed brother-in-law and a wise Japanese game designer, carves out an ever-more complete portrait of a city at the turn of the millennium, culminating in a final scene whose plainness of expression yet ineffable yearning feels paradoxically fitting as its director’s premature valediction.

Yang’s other greatest work is his only period film: A Brighter Summer Day (1991). Few works earn the description ‘sprawling epic’ as vividly as this does: a four-hour magnum opus set immediately after the Republic of China’s relocation to the island of Taiwan, largely dealing with the conflict between two gangs of schoolboys. Featuring Chang Chen in his first role and his own father Chang Kuo-chu as a government worker under suspicion from the secret police, its ability to capture the roiling anguish of youth, the totemic force of objects, and a nation’s emerging consciousness – the original Chinese title is considerably more blunt, clinical in its revelation of the film’s final destination – is virtually without equal.

Despite the prominence of these two monumental works, the majority of Yang’s oeuvre is composed of ordinary-length feature films, no less incisive or impactful for their normal runtimes. His sense of form was set with his second film, Taipei Story (1985), which starred Hou Hsiao-hsien, the other greatest force in Taiwan New Cinema and whose own interests – chiefly period films, oftentimes outside of urban centers and forthrightly contemplative – were largely separate from Yang’s. Here, he ably plays the part of a driftless man in a collapsing relationship with a successful businesswoman played by Yang’s then-wife Tsai Chin. 

Yang’s next was The Terrorizers (1986), his most elliptical and clearly Antonioni-inspired. A ‘network film’ set in motion by a police raid and a photograph, it turns his penchant for occasional, abrupt violence into a structuring force, separate narratives all thrumming on the same, uneasy wavelength.

Yang’s international renown was first established by the two features between his two most beloved works, which also happen to be his wildest and most unabashedly modern. A Confucian Confusion (1994) is his only out-and-out comedy, a sometimes bitterly satirical take on the roundelay of relationships shaped and compromised by the then-booming Taiwanese economy. The performances are appropriately heightened, yet Yang wisely never loses track of the possibility for moments of pensive grace. 

Fittingly, his most loving film was preceded by his angriest: Mahjong (1996), an overtly cosmopolitan work involving various gangsters and a French woman played by Virginie Ledoyen. Yang’s controlled aesthetic erupts into wild colours and tonal shifts, fascinating in its integration of Western actors on his terms and placing some of his most despairing and tender scenes side by side.

Yang didn’t shy away from genre in his later films, but it can still be a bit bracing, even for his acolytes, to encounter his gorgeous debut feature That Day, on the Beach (1983). Despite its historical interest as both his and legendary cinematographer Christopher Doyle’s first film, it remains Yang’s most under-heralded work, in no small part because of its status as a three-hour melodrama. Moving unexpectedly from present and past as a woman played by the great Sylvia Chang reckons with her friendships and romances, the film is hazier in its affect, and though it rarely aims for the florid emotions traditionally associated with the genre, its openness of intent is an outlier in his filmography. However, just as with every single one of his films, its cumulative impact and clarity of insight are infinitely rewarding.

The Films of Edward Yang: Conversations with a Friend runs at BFI Southbank in February and March 2025.