Edinburgh Napier University

  This chapter conducts a case study on Ang Lee’s internationally acclaimed academy award winner Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and his Hollywood blockbuster Hulk, and investigates the ways that his transnational/global filmmaking intersects with Chinese cultural identities and influences. The chapter considers Ang Lee as an auteur director whose unique authorial signatures negotiate between two cultures, between East and West, and argues his cultural capital, namely “Chineseness”, has shaped both his Chinese-language films and English-language films. In particular, it offers a comparative study on the notion of the Confucian family, and the image of the father in the above two films, and investigates how Chinese traditional culture such as Confucianism influences the representation of the father–son relationship in Hulk, and the quasi father–daughter relationship in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (represented as a Master–Disciple relationship in this film). This further problematises the concept of national cinema and notions of “the national” as being defined within the boundaries of a nation-state. Ang Lee’s films take place in cross-cultural, transnational settings and deal with the themes of Chinese/Taiwanese diaspora, and cultural identity. The analysis of “Chineseness” in Ang Lee’s transnational/Hollywood cinema helps us interpret more productively the interface between global and local, national and transnational.