"Revisiting" Ang Lee: A Study Of Ang Lee’s Films In A Perspective Of Perception

While Ang Lee is a director whose work is abundant and constantly explored,studies of him have focused more on cultural studies and interpretations of meaningful themes,his new films,supported by high-frequency technology,suggest that he also has strong artistic ambitions and practices.This paper revisits Ang Lee’s films and his unique aesthetic contributions through the new lens of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception,and attempts to step out of the comfort zone of mere textual analysis to focus on the perceptual characteristics of Ang Lee’s films.The first chapter compares and explains Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception and its inspiration to film studies,responding to the question of why Merleau-Ponty’s theory is used to study Ang Lee’s films.The second chapter analyses the unique montages of Ang Lee’s films from a perceptual perspective.The first part explores the evocative perceptual expression of daily life in Ang Lee’s films,and the second part discusses how Ang Lee creates perceptual fields through sound and picture montages and the overall configuration of space and time.The third section focuses on the perceptual experiments conducted by Ang Lee,analysing how his split-screen experiments brought about a split perception in the context of other films,and the changes that new technologies brought to the film in terms of psychological representation,perception of time and movement.The third chapter focuses on another major feature of Ang Lee’s films,the perceptual presentation of Microphysiogonomy.While the first part elaborates on the richness of faces in Ang Lee’s films from four aspects: faces,eyes and sight,hidden faces and star faces,the second part focuses on the deepening and updating of Microphysiogonomy in Ang Lee’s films enabled by new technologies,discovering the real reasons for Ang Lee’s enthusiasm for technology and the changes it has brought to the film proper.