Ang Lee: The Universal Language of Cinema (original) (raw)

Ang Lee has directed breathtaking films in 6 different languages across countries, genres, cultures and decades. Starting in Taiwan and then England, the United States's midwest, New England, China and India he has created a vast and diverse library of stories that have earned him international acclaim in almost every film festival. Ever the outsider in each of these cultures, Lee has managed to successfully make of the foreign language category a masterpiece assembly line, cranking out universally loved stories that rival any one nation's work. An auteur that speaks to the hearts of generations across languages in the one language they all understand, cinema. Lee was born in Taiwan, his family, like many others left china after the Chinese civil war ended with Mao's communists in power. He grew up in a heavily academic household, his father had always pressured him into academic excellence, expecting him to go on into a respectable career. Although after a discovery of his love for theater in Taiwan and in pursuit of a creative freedom, Lee set off to study in America, a theater student from a different country, speaking and performing in a second language, in The Cinema of Ang Lee: The Other Side of the Screen author Whitney Crothers Dilley explains how "[i]n 1974 Ang Lee went to the United States and, with financial support from his family, entered the University of Illinois [...] as a theatre major [...]. His English was heavily accented and far from fluent. Therefore, he faced inevitable difficulties with his drama performance courses" (1)