ROMANCE, INSULARITY AND REPRESENTATION Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love and Hong Kong Cinema (original) (raw)
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Beyond Postcolonial Nostalgia: Wong Kar-wai’s Melodramas In the Mood for Love and 2046
Wenyi pian, a Chinese equivalent of melodrama, has been experiencing a revival in Hong Kong cinema at the turn of the twentieth century. As a genre that appeals to the emotions, it is best suited for delivering personal stories set against the backdrop of a changing society. Particularly interesting to the scholars of wenyi is the oeuvre of Wong Kar-wai. His biggest success to date, In the Mood for Love (Fa yeung nin wa, 2000), and its sequel, 2046 (idem, 2004), revisit the classics of the Second Golden Age of Chinese cinema and imbue the traditional wenyi with socio-political sensibilities of Hong Kong in the transitional period. This essay explores how these two films appropriate melodramatic tropes – such as subjective narration, non-linear chronology, extensive use of music and props – in order to portray nostalgia. Article published in L'Atlante, volume 25, January 2018.
Melancholia in Hong Kong: Remembering Wong Kar-wai’s 'In the Mood for Love'
Publiknama, 2020
Remembering Wong Kar-wai’s in the Mood for Love on its 20th anniversary. [Archived version of the url on WayBackMachine (archive.org): https://web.archive.org/web/20201115063249/https://publiknama.com/2020/11/14/melancholia-in-hong-kong-remembering-wong-kar-wais-in-the-mood-for-love/\]
Restraining the Mood for Love: A Semiotic Analysis of Wong Kar Wai’s in the Mood for Love
Capture : Jurnal Seni Media Rekam, 2020
This article attempts to explore the visual signs in Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love in the context of how they support and emphasize the topic of restraint through the film’s cinematography and misè-en-scèene. As the theoretical foundation, Peirce’s classification of signs into symbol, icon, and index is chosen in addition to Barthes’ five systems of meanings that are applied to cinema. The visual signs in focus are not limited to objects within the film, but also the characters’ actions as well as the cinematography. The findings show that certain signs are effectively displayed to signify and amplify the idea of restraint. Not only that, some signs evolve into different signs through intentional repetition to further emphasize the aforementioned idea and the arbitrary nature of the signs, and at the same time open the possibilities of different interpretations of the signs within the film.
Hong Kong University Press, 2015
The foregoing analysis of Wong's work has demonstrated his artistic ingenuity and accomplishment. In the following section, I examine Wong's most recent feature-length lm, The Grandmaster (2013), from the perspective of the parameters and contexts that have structured this book so far: musical and visual style, story and narration, and popular genre. The Grandmaster has become Wong's biggest commercial success to date, igniting claims that Wong has entirely abandoned his "local" sensibility and the complex storytelling style for which he is renowned. Detractors argue that The Grandmaster testi es to Wong's turn (or regression) to popular genre and an international mode of address. Indeed, several critical reviews describe this lm as an atypical or anomalous entry in Wong's authorial oeuvre. Yet The Grandmaster embodies and extends many of the stylistic, narrative, and thematic features identi ed in the preceding chapters, no matter the lm's "anomalous" global popularity and impressive box of ce success (it grossed $45,270,000 in the PRC market alone). The Grandmaster's aesthetic strategies attest to Wong's continued endurance as an innovative and artistically relevant lmmaker in world cinema. As Bordwell (1981, 1988, 2005) has shown, a director's importance and fecundity can be further highlighted by examining the uses his or her work gives rise to. In what ways has Wong's cinema been appropriated? This study has placed particular stress on the viewing effects engendered by Wong's lms; but what of the lms' wider artistic and social effects, effects that Wong might not have intended or foreseen? In this concluding chapter, I go on to sketch Wong's in uence on contemporary world cinema. In summarizing the book's main concerns, I also discuss how one particular lm-Happy Together-has been appropriated by queer scholarship and thus has yielded broad social effects. I take this opportunity to hypothesize some of the ways that a poetics of cinema can illuminate the kinds of culturalist inquiries pursued by queer theorists. Finally, I brie y sketch potential pathways for Wong's future productions.
Speaking of his film Huayang nianhua (In the Mood for Love, 2000), Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai acknowledges that "what interested me was the way people behave and relate to each other in the circumstances shown in this story, the way they keep secrets and share secrets." 1 Thus less concerned with the representation of an affair than with how secrets are kept and shared in relationships, in Wong's film, 1960s Hong Kong is represented as a repressive society under the informal but nevertheless censorious surveillance of the colony's close-knit Shanghainese community and its culture of gossip. As John Orr points out by suggesting Wong Kar-wai's debt to Hitchcock, a Hitchcockian "politics of surveillance" similar to Notorious (1946) operates through spatial confinement within In the Mood for Love. 2 That is, Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung's every movement inside the cramped apartment is subject to the gaze of the landlady as well as other residents. Yet Orr's emphasis on the gaze and the prying eyes of neighbors misses the fact that spatial confinement also sharpens the sensitivity of the ear. The characters' every move and word is monitored by the prying ears of their colleagues and neighbors. Such all-seeing and all-hearing surveillance comes not so much from an authoritarian government spying on its subjects, as from a moralistic community trapped in confined spaces like the tenement apartment, shipping office, newspaper office, and of course room 2046. My methodology informed by film musicology, sound studies, and an academic sensitivity to sound can enrich and complicate conventional understandings of cinematic surveillance as frequently visual. In this chapter, I apply an auditory approach-still a relatively understudied aspect of cinema studies-to Wong Kar-wai, an extensively studied auteur. I argue that In the Mood for Love shows sonic secrets buried, circulated, and listened to as musical counter-surveillance, which stakes out a sonic territory of privacy and intimacy while escaping the invasive Shanghainese eyes and ears in 1960s Hong Kong. I will focus on the secret messages hidden in Mr. Chan's potentially poisonous musical gift "Huayang de Nianhua" for his wife Su Li-zhen (played by Maggie Cheung). The Mandarin pop song is extracted from He Zhaozhang's postwar Hong Kong Mandarin film Chang xiangsi (An All-Consuming Love, 1947), where those who stay in
Wong Kar Wai ’ S Treatment of Love in Happy Together , Chungking Express and in the Mood for Love
2013
Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love treats love as an ephemeral vapour, a missed chance and opportunity, a fleeting emotion which never acted upon becomes a ephemeral memory buried by time. Wong Kar Wai’s Chungking Express is a film about urban alienation and broken relationships, and love as a rare connection that takes place amidst this gloom of social isolation in an urban context. The movie starts with the meditation that we are all strangers to each other in the city, but this may change, people who were once strangers can eventually know each other, and anything may happen from there, including hits and misses in relationships. In Wong Kar Wai’s Happy Together, love is not treated as a form of fulfilment but a means to misery, pathology and indeed dysfunction. Yiu Fai and Po Wing are constantly seeking to re-invent their relationship in order to keep their passions alive, and do so by taking the brave step of migrating to Argentina, where they hope to ‘start over’, a recurrent...