Research On The Narrative Ethics Of Edward Yang’s Film

Director Edward Yang was the delegate of Taiwanese New Wave movement. He was known as a "stylist" of film. It was firstly reflected in his film aesthetics, his lens language not only laid emphasis on reality, but also paid attention to express the human heart, and it was always calm and sharp but expressive; his narrative structures were heavy and complicated but had clear skeleton, and contained profound philosophy; based on the fusion of realism and modernism film aesthetics, he persisted in artistic innovation and self-transcendence. But Edward had never been "Art for Art", he treated the film as a way to get actively involved in society, so he deeply analyzed the ethical trouble and social alienation while the process of Taiwanese modernization, globalization and westernization, and he vividly portrayed the ethical life of Taiwanese modern people. Therefore, for him, the film was not only the weapon of attacking the social reality, but also the tool of diagnosing with the root of ethical disorder. By the question to the bound from the traditional ethics, the criticism to the utilitarianism tendency of modern individual freedom ethics, and the idea of the possibility of modern ideal ethics, he was worthy to be called as an intellectual "Narrative Thinker" However, the film theory area always insufficiently realize the value of Edward’s film, the research results of his film are also relatively few or limited interiorly. Based on the ethical narration characteristic of his film, this paper will use the new development of interior narrative theory - the research paradigm of narrative ethics which is combining ethics and narrative theory, to criticize Edward’s film, so as to explore the interactive way of narration and ethics in his movies, and focus on analyzing the formal skills of expressing the ethical subjects and strengthening the ethical effects, thus to mine the value of narrative ethics of his film.This paper contains six parts, including the introduction, four chapters, and the conclusion. The introduction mainly introduces the research situation of Edward’s film and the innovation of this paper, and so on. This part will focus on introducing the narrative ethics paradigm briefly and systematically, because understanding the theoretical connotation of narrative ethics is an important premise of this research, and decides the research trains.The first chapter mainly summarizes two aspects of ethical value in Edward’s film. Through this point, a detailed discussion on the ethical subjects of the stories will be carried out, and then this part will point out that his aesthetical creation in form always contains rich ethical meanings, which is the most important characteristic in his movies.The following three chapters are based on the angle of story-telling to analyze the narrative skills which complete the expression of ethical subjects, primarily, they will deeply discuss the mechanism including how the narrative forms manifest the ethical subjects, develop particular ethical meanings, and strengthen the ethical effects. According to the features of narrative forms in Edward’s film, this part will respectively unfold a detailed text analysis on time-plot structure, space-individual narration, and ironical narration, to explore the interaction between form and content, as well as the interaction between aesthetic and ethics.The last part will make a concise conclusion for this paper, and then comparing to Edward’s art spirit of film creation, the introspection on the situation of the interior film creation will be made continually. And the deficiencies of this research will also be pointed out at last.