"Lust" And "Caution"

Ang Lee was born in Taiwan in 1954, and he studied in the filmmaking Institute of New York University where he took his master's degree in 1984. As one of the most influential film director in the world, Ang Lee has received wide concern because of his distinctive cultural background and artistic temperament. As a kind of discourse system of intellectual, Ang Lee's movies have a strong speculativity. Using a distinctive psychological perspective, he investigates the humanity theme which breaks through the barriers of the Chinese and Western Culture in his movies. At the same time he explores his personal spirit, he also provide a big enlightenment for the aesthetic thought of the world films. Adopting the film theory and the theory of cultural study, the paper will have a interpretation of Ang Lee's movies in depth. This paper will make a further understanding of the aesthetic style of Ang Lee's movies by having a meticulous analysis on the text content and form from the macroscopic and microcosmic perspective, and also by tracing back to his cultural background.First of all, I draw out two major themes which hidden in his films by analyzing the texts of Ang Lee's movies: the theme of gender and the awkward and intimate family relationship. The theme of gender is a study of several gender images in the films, which including the image of father, the female image, and the homosexual image. These several kinds of gender images is presented to Ang Lee's movies dominantly or recessively, and they have their own continuation obviously. Ang Lee's movies selected them as the psychological perspectives cut-in to present his unique inner world. The awkward and intimate family relationship is the most important part of his personal mental space, and it is the starting point of his philosophical thinking on Human Nature.Secondly, according to the studies on shot language and scene control of Ang Lee's movies, and also by analyzing them in the metaphorical levels, we can find out that he seems to inherit the style of the Genre Film in Hollywood ostensibly, but in fact He has constructed his own ideographic systems by dispelling the traditional Aesthetic thought of films in a tender way. He has related his profound philosophical thinking to a artistic form which is quietly elegant, graceful and exquisite. It achieves the harmony and unity of the truth of human and the the aesthetic feeling of art.Finally, I hope to excavate the deep cultural background in Ang Lee's movies. Standing in the intersection of Chinese and Western Culture, he has a variety of complicated factors in his cultural background. Among them, the traditional Chinese aesthetic spirit and the philosophy of western existentialism are the particularly prominent. The thought and the linguistic strategies of Taoism is the important factors which arouse Ang Lee's esthetic passion while the aesthetic ideal of "Moderate Beauty" bringing along his composed and mild temperament. The philosophical view of Existentialism has a profound influence on Ang Lee's movies. We can see that his movies reveal a strong philosophical meaning of Existentialism. We also can see that the Existentialism has effected the on the implied meaning of the text deeply.The characteristics of expressive of Ang Lee's movies can be summarized as " lust" and " caution" in this paper. However, it is not the simple thinking model of dichotomy in literature and art studies, such as the contradiction between sense and sensibility. I think Ang Lee's movie is a complicated and unified aesthetic system. "lust" represents the enormous and complicated aesthetics system and polynary aesthetic study of Ang Lee's movies; and "caution "represents its unity of the rational pursuit.