Filming Critical Female Perspectives: Edward Yang’s The Terrorizers

Abstract

From his first film—a twenty-minute short, “Expectations” (1982)—to his last—a three-hour masterpiece, Yi Yi (2000)—Edward Yang, one of the leading figures of the Taiwan New Cinema movement, devoted his career to portraying the impact of neoliberal capitalism on the lives of the citizens of Taipei. Interestingly, Yang’s films often employ female perspectives to criticize Taiwan’s education system and transnational corporations for perpetuating neoliberal capitalism’s ideology of self-fulfillment and upward mobility. This paper draws upon feminist film theory to investigate the ways in which Yang’s third feature, The Terrorizers (1986), utilizes various innovative cinematic languages to engender a multitude of women’s perspectives to expose male voyeurism and ultimately criticize the impact of neoliberal capitalism in Taipei.