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Posted 10/13/00 Acclaimed film director Ang Lee will be honored by the Dartmouth Film Society and presented with the Dartmouth Film Award in a tribute at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 21, in Spaulding Auditorium. Lee, who will be in residence at Dartmouth as a Montgomery Fellow from Oct. 19-23, will accept the award in person. His acceptance remarks will also constitute the public presentation traditionally given by a Montgomery Fellow. In addition to the award presentation, the evening will include a compilation of scenes from his films and a full screening of his latest feature, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, his first Chinese martial arts film. As part of his Montgomery Endowment residency, Lee also will meet with students in classes and in informal small-group settings. He is the fourth fellow in the Montgomery Endowment's ongoing "Making Movies, Making Music" series, which began in February with a visit from singer/musician Sheryl Crow. Of all Asian film directors, Ang Lee is probably the one who is best known to American audiences. Five of his seven feature films are in English, and three have been nominated for Academy Awards. Lee came to international attention with his second feature, The Wedding Banquet, one of the most profitable independent films ever made. Both The Wedding Banquet (1993) and the Chinese language film Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), filmed in Lee's native Taiwan, were Academy Award nominees in the best foreign film category. In 1995, Lee directed Sense and Sensibility, based on the Jane Austen novel and starring Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant and Kate Winslet. Included on more than 100 lists of the 10 best films of that year, Sense and Sensibility was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won the Oscar for best screenplay adaptation, by Emma Thompson. It also won best director and best picture awards from the Boston Film Critics and the National Board of Review and the best director award from the New York Film Critics. Lee's next film, The Ice Storm (1996), was his first feature on an entirely American topic. Based on the critically praised novel by Rick Moody, the film was set in 1973 suburban Connecticut and starred Kevin Kline, Sigourney Weaver and Jane Allen. The Ice Storm was selected for the 50th International Film Festival at Cannes, where it won the award for Best Screenplay Adaptation, and was screened as the opening night film in the 1997 New York Film Festival. Lee continued his focus on America in his next film, Ride with the Devil (1999), the story of Quantrill's Raid on Lawrence, Kan., one of the bloodiest atrocities of the Civil War. Adapted from Daniel Woodrell's novel, Woe to Live On, the film involved a huge cast and epic scenes of battle. With his newest feature, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Lee has ventured into yet another genre - the Chinese romantic martial arts epic. The film is adapted from a four-volume novel by Wang Du Lu set in the early 19th century during the last years of the venerable Qing Dynasty and stars Chow Yun Fat and Michelle Yeoh. Shot in mainland China, the film is Lee's first Chinese language film since Eat Drink Man Woman. The drama is punctuated by exquisitely choreographed fight scenes, devised by Yuen Wo Ping, famed for his work on The Matrix. Lee himself describes the film as "a kind of a dream of China, a China that probably never existed, except in my boyhood fantasies in Taiwan." He used the popular martial arts genre, he says, almost as a research tool "to explore the legacy of classical Chinese culture." The Dartmouth Film Award was established in 1979 to honor outstanding contributors to the world of film and filmmaking. The first recipient was Lillian Gish. Other recipients include Michael Powell, Johnny Depp, Robert Redford, Liv Ullman, Ken Burns, Stephen Frears, Glenn Close, Peter Greenaway and Meryl Streep. The Montgomery Endowment brings to Dartmouth outstanding figures not only from the academic world, but from non-academic spheres as well. It was established in 1977 by the late Chicago attorney Kenneth F. Montgomery '25 and his wife, Harle, to "provide for the advancement of the academic realm of the College . . . making possible new dimensions for, as well as extraordinary enrichments to, the educational experience" at Dartmouth. Tickets to the Dartmouth Film Society tribute to Ang Lee are general admission $8; Dartmouth students $5; DFS passholders $2. More information is available from the Hopkins Center Box Office at (603) 646-3991. |
