TAIWAN CINEMA | Dark Night directed by Fred Tan Hong-Cheung
Sunday, February 28th, 2010
| Date | Time | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Sunday, February 28, 2010 | 2:00PM - 4:00PM | External Event, Town Hall, Innis College at the University of Toronto, 2 Sussex Avenue (south of Bloor at St. George) |
Description
INTRODUCTION
Mr. Colin Geddes (Toronto International Film Festival and Ultra 8 Pictures)
Dark Night (1986) | Director Fred Tan Hong-Cheung | 115 min.
Based on noted feminist writer Li Ang’s novel, Dark Night weaves a dramatic and occasionally surreal depiction of an unravelling marriage. Li Lin is happily married to Wong Shing-tak, a successful businessman, but when handsome reporter Yip Yuen enters her life, innocent friendship spirals into a passionate affair that leaves Lin pregnant and then abandoned by Yip. Shamed in the eyes of her husband, Lin spirals into a depression. In the film’s most bizarre episode, Li Lin’s anxieties give way to nightmarish abortion fantasies involving sword-swinging Taoist priests and fetus-carrying watermelons.
Like others who would become prominent Taiwanese filmmakers like Ang Lee and Edward Yang, Fred Tan did not come to his directing debut with Dark Night along a straight path. He moved to the United States in 1975 and to work as a Hollywood editor and film critic for “The China Times.” Four years later, back in Taiwan he worked as Assistant Director for King Hu on Raining in the Mountain (1979) and Legend of the Mountain (1979). Following his directorial debut with Dark Night, he adapted and directed Eileen Chang’s Rouge of the North (1988). Both films drew attention for their thematic preoccupation with adultery, sexual repression and the role of women in modern Taiwanese society. He then directed the ghost story Split of the Spirit in 1989, a film which rehearsed the supernatural and grotesque imagery in portions of Tan’s debut feature. That year, Tan travelled to Beijing to join in the student uprising in Tiananmen Square. Soon his return to Taiwan, he contracted acute hepatitis and died. Tan was 35.
The film was produced by the prolific Lo Wei (director of Bruce Lee’s Fists of Fury) and edited by Edward Yang collaborator Chen Bo-Wen (A Bright Summer Day, Yi-Yi).
– Peter Kuplowsky
DARK NIGHT is distributed by University of Toronto Media Commons
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