Customer Reviews

The Cinema of Ang Lee: The Other Side of the Screen (Directors' Cuts)

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This is must reading for film buffs.

This book is no less than a terrific synopsis of Ang Lee's life and filmmaking motivations plus a thorough review of the common themes that surprisingly link Lee's amazingly diverse films.

Whitney Crothers Dilley's much-anticipated book provides the first in-depth look at one of the most heralded creative film directors still active today. A true auteur, Ang Lee has taken on the challenge of almost all the classic film genres and done them all marvelously.


From his early Taiwanese-themed social comedies through his Chinese/American and American and even British mainstream films to The Hulk (his only commercial failure) to the colossal last two released films, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Brokeback Mountain, no film director has ever generated an oeuvre of such range.


With a new Ang Lee film in yet a new genre coming out later this year (this time a film noir set in 1940's Shanghai), The cinema of Ang Lee ... the other side of the screen is the perfect read for all the relevant background on this astonishing director before seeing it.

This scholarly treatise of director Ang Lee by Whitney Crothers Dilley is a thoroughly engaging, in-depth study of this iconic and enigmatic filmmaker. Logically organised and richly researched, The Cinema of Ang Lee shows great insight on the many influences which impacted Mr. Lee's directorial vision: born in Taiwan, to parents who escaped Mainland China following the 1949 Civil War, his cultural identity further diluted when he came to the U.S. at age 23 in his yearning to break free of parental control to pursue his artistic and cinematic dreams.

Ms. Crothers Dilley astutely shows us that Ang Lee's directorial range cannot be confined to a single culture or genre, and while films such as Eat Drink Man Woman, Sense and Sensibility, The Ice Storm, and Hulk appear to be thematically disparate, common threads course throughout his filmography. Globalisation / cultural identity, family ritual, intergenerational conflict, dialogue-free visual metaphors, cultural codes of behavior, and above all the inherent diaspora brought to bear stemming from his personal history bring a unique perspective to each of his films.

Serious students of film as well as casual fans of Ang Lee's body of work will love this book. Take the time to go on a wonderful journey as each film is dissected in order to find, in Ang Lee's words, "'The Juice', the thing that moves people, the thing that is untranslatable by words".

This book is an extraordinarily thorough and well-written account of Ang Lee's career. Anybody interested in the director's work would be fascinated to read it. I highly recommend it.