'Crouching Tiger' director to speak on Taiwanese cinema
Renowned film director Ang Lee, whose recent movie "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" won four Academy Awards, and Chen Kuo-fu, whose Hollywood film "Double Vision" was released in 2002, will be among the film professionals and scholars who will discuss Taiwanese cinema as part of a film festival and conference taking place on campus Oct. 30-Nov. 2.
The event, titled "Double Vision: Taiwan's New Cinema, Here and There," will explore the local and transnational contexts of the country's modern filmmaking, the relation of the "New Cinema" to the social and cultural transformations that accompany the process of globalization for Taiwan's 27 million inhabitants and innumerable emigrants who form movie audiences, and the future of Taiwanese films, among other topics.
All film screenings and conference events will take place at the Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall St., and are free and open to the public.
A highlight of the film festival/conference will be "An Evening With Ang Lee" and "An Evening with Chen Kuo-fu," featuring discussions with the filmmakers and a screening of their recent films. Kuo-fu will discuss his work on Friday, Oct. 31, between the showing of "Double Vision" and his 1998 work "The Personals." The event will begin at 7 p.m.
Lee will speak about his filmmaking between the screening of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and another film of Lee's choice (to be announced) on Saturday, Nov. 1, beginning at 6:30 p.m. He will be interviewed by film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader about the history of Taiwanese cinema and his personal itinerary as a filmmaker. Lee's other films include "The Ice Storm," "Ride With the Devil," "Sense and Sensibility," "The Wedding Banquet," "Eat Drink Man Woman" and this year's release "Hulk."
Other films being shown as part of the festival are Hou Hsiao-hsien's "City of Sadness" and "A Time to Live and a Time to Die"; Hsu Hsiao-Ming's "Heartbreak Island"; Yee Chih-Yen's "Blue Gate Crossing"; and Edward Yang's "Yiyi."
The keynote address for the conference will be given by cultural theorist Fredric Jameson '56 M.A., '59 Ph.D. of Duke University, who will speak on the topic "Is a National Cinema Possible? The Case of Taiwan."
Other conference participants hail from throughout the United States and from Hong Kong and Taiwan. They include Peggy Chiao of Arc Light Films and the Taiwan Film Center at the Taipei National University of Arts, and screenwriter/producer James Schamus, who has scripted a number of Ang Lee's movies.
This event is the fourth annual conference and film festival presented by the Film Studies Program in conjunction with the Whitney Humanities Center. Earlier programs featured the cinemas of Ireland, Japan and the Balkans. Support for the event was also provided by the Council for East Asian Studies at the Yale Center for International and Area Studies and the Taiwan Economic and Cultural Organization of New York.
A detailed schedule for "Double Vision" can be found online at www.yale.edu/filmstudiesprogram/taiwan_home.htm.
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