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The Missing Link

 
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PostPosted: Sat Oct 06, 2007 6:02 am    Post subject: The Missing Link

The Missing Link
By Brian Hu


In the first English-language book on celebrated director Ang Lee, Whitney Crothers Dilley provides a crash course on the filmmaker who rose to fame by transcending boundaries.


In his coverage of the Toronto Film Festival, Roger Ebert dared his readers to come up with the missing link amongst Ang Lee's films, which include pictures as disparate as the Victorian romance Sense and Sensibility, the wuxia film Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, the New England drama The Ice Storm, the comic book blockbuster The Hulk, and the "gay western" Brokeback Mountain. Readers didn't hesitate to step up to the challenge, posing such possibilities as: hidden passions, psychological and social repression, struggle with fears.

What's interesting about this exchange isn't whether the readers are right or not, but that Ang Lee is already an "auteur" in the minds of those readers, who have studied his films and begun to theorize what it means for a movie to be "Directed by Ang Lee."

It's fitting then that the time is right for Lee to be the subject of a new book, The Cinema of Ang Lee: The Other Side of the Screen, written by scholar Whitney Crothers Dilley and published by Wallflower Press as part of their impressive "Directors' Cuts" series. Dilley takes a standard approach to film authorship, going through each film title by title, and reading in them pieces of Lee's own biography.

The book comes in the wake of two other recent books that have featured chapters on Ang Lee. Michael Berry's Speaking in Images contains an interview with Lee that's very similar to Dilley's chronological, biographical approach, only it chooses to privilege the director's own voice, rather than the critic/scholar's.

The other is Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis's Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island, which includes a chapter on Ang Lee. Yeh/Davis's otherwise valuable book angered me when it made a special point to label Ang Lee a "Confucian director." Why is Lee called "Confucian"? Does Lee use this term to describe himself? Or are Yeh and Davis utilizing it simply because of Lee's ideologically/politically conservative family lineage? And calling Lee's introverted personality -- that is, his "efficiency, his friendship, and cooperation" -- "Confucian" risks depicting Chinese filmmakers as the "model minority" in an otherwise cutthroat Hollywood.

In other words, I objected to Yeh and Davis's generalizing of Lee, a Chinese/Taiwanese/American director who has radically expanded what is "Chinese," as the most emasculated, clichéd, and grossly essentialistic definition of "Chinese" available.

On the other hand, Dilley is more sensitive to the cultural openness in Lee's films; in fact, her sections on the English-language The Ice Storm, Ride with the Devil, Brokeback Mountain, and The Hulk go as far as to nearly eschew Lee's "Chineseness" altogether, having the sensitivity to call them what they are: American films. This is because, above all, Dilley reads the "primal moment" of Lee's career as not being his childhood in KMT Taiwan, but his decade living in the United States as an out-of-work aspiring director facing cultural, economic, and racial barriers in a merciless industry. For Dilley, these years are the root of Lee's interest in stories about outsiders who cling on to their passions despite the repressive pressures of society. She writes, "The extravagance of his success and failure comes from him being already inured to failure; he had nothing left to lose." It's a convincing approach to Ang Lee's films, for it acknowledges Lee's Chinese American identity, as well as his "Chinese" one. While in some ways this approach essentializes the Chinese American experience and perhaps overestimates his personal trauma, it at least allows for the possibility that biography is linked to artistic creation, an approach common in art history and musicology, but unpopular in post-structuralist film studies.



Dilley's distance from contemporary film studies is apparent in the tone of the book, as well as its structure and lack of depth. It doesn't take long before the reader realizes that this is in fact not a scholarly book, but a general critique of Lee's oeuvre that happens to have footnotes. There's nothing wrong with this; for the ordinary fan who may have seen his films once and would like to know more, Dilley's book provides an essential overview of the debates surrounding Ang Lee and his films. But for those seeking a sustained argument, this is not the place to look. What makes it even more frustrating is that Dilley is clearly trained as a scholar; she cites important theorists and introduces key concepts such as globalization. However, these observations are typically thrown in rather than integrated into a thesis. So the chapter on The Ice Storm will conclude with a statement about how Lee's skill working in English-language cinema proves he's a truly globalized filmmaker, even though that is hardly what she'd been writing about in the chapter. I also believe she overstates Lee's ties to the Taiwan New Cinema movement. Dilley shows how Ang Lee, like directors Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, and Tsai Ming-liang, employs non-professional actors and uses long takes. But intent and affect cannot be reduced to pure style; neither can affiliation in a cinematic movement.

That said, Dilley does display some analytic strength, particularly in her exploration of the use of language throughout Lee's films. The clash of languages is an important narrative element of Lee's immigrant stories, Pushing Hands and The Wedding Banquet. In The Ice Storm, Ride with the Devil, and Brokeback Mountain, language is rightfully seen as one of the films' key sources of audience pleasure, so her analysis of their words, phrasings, and deliveries is most welcome. In Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, language is the site of cultural translation, given the film's unique writing and subtitling process.



Dilley's book also collects great insights into the production and reception of Lee's cross-cultural films. The discussion of the Taiwanese reception to the overly-"Western" Eat Drink Man Woman provides a nice antecedent to what would happen years later with Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. And the section on Sense and Sensibility includes wonderful quotes and anecdotes by the film's British cast and crew about working with a "foreign" director. I only wish that in discussing reception and production, some consideration could have been given for not only Ang Lee the creative person, but for "Ang Lee" the brand and image. Dilley's approach is a traditional approach to the auteur, looking at biography and the director's body of work. But here is when the post-modern, Foucauldian approach to the auteur could have been useful. What does the name "Ang Lee" now mean in the American/Hollywood context? What does it mean in a Taiwanese context? Or in mainland China? Answering these questions would necessitate a very different approach to studying the auteur, and perhaps these questions can be posed in future studies.

Finally, Dilley's book was written before the release of Ang Lee's latest film, Lust, Caution. In many ways, Dilley's definition of an "Ang Lee film" carries into Lee's latest picture: repression and marginalization remain central themes, while the innovative use of dialogue and language continues to redefine the "Chinese" in Chinese cinema. But Lust, Caution draws attention to one important point on which, I believe, Dilley is quite wrong. Dilley argues that sexuality tends to be over-emphasized in discussions of Lee's films. For instance, the sexuality of Eat Drink Man Woman and Brokeback Mountain are largely the imagination of publicity and the media rather than the films themselves. Meanwhile, The Ice Storm is significantly less sexual than the novel it was based on. But the sexuality in Lust, Caution is no media creation, plus it's far more graphic than in the original short story. But to my mind, Lust, Caution is no anomaly. Lee's films have consistently contributed to the dialogue of sexuality in cinema, even when the sex isn't explicit. Think about The Wedding Banquet, The Ice Storm, and Brokeback Mountain, and the way they encouraged people to talk about sexuality. Lust, Caution has not been an exception. When it comes to sex, Ang Lee is, quite surely, no Confucian.

For more information on the book and Wallflower Press's "Directors' Cuts" series, click here.




Date Posted: 10/5/2007

http://www.asiaarts.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=79223
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