양더창(楊德昌): 거장의 영면과 비평의 유혹

Abstract

Edward Yang, the great master in the Taiwan Cinema, has passed away in 29th June, 2007. This paper has been written to analyze his works, at that time when the critique mechanism is operating as the momentum that he has died. However, it premises that we need to awake the critique should not be favorable or ceremonial because of his death, it would be like some cases when he has been called in those famous Western film festivals. Edward Yang is an important director, has created the Taiwan new wave with his colleagues, Hsiao-hsien Hou and Ming-liang Tsai in 1980's. Taiwan cinema, before 1980's, has showed strong political or some traditional aesthetic trends. The new wave has been against that trends, and Edward Yang has selected new politics and aesthetics as the products against them. After Edward Yang mentioned the "Remapping Taipei" about his works by himself and Fredric Jameson published a paper about it, lots of critiques on him seem like being concentrated on that new rhetoric. It could be a tendency to read Taipei on his works as the national allegory of a metropolis in the third world. Some scholars in mainland, however, has been reading out some motifs on human relationship and communication from his cinemas. This paper is trying to understand them as struggling fields not a dichotomy between speciality and universality. On Eight films, from In Our Time to A One and A Two, we can see melancholy of modern human being, I'd like to call it “poetic melancholy”. It shows us struggling fields between modernity and post-modernity. Edward Yang, the first has chosen a strategy to label his works using two different expressions in Chinese and English; the second has used some specific space structures and mis-en-scenes in frame; and the last has structuralized narrative such as creating characters.