Restraining the Mood for Love: A Semiotic Analysis of Wong Kar Wai’s in the Mood for Love (original) (raw)
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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.
Hong Kong University Press, 2015
Visual Style and the Aesthetic of Disturbance Many of Asian cinema's most renowned auteurs have m ounted stylistic programs optimizing a narrow range of techniques. Ozu Yasujiro mines the expressive possibilities of frontal staging, xed shot perspective, and low camera height. Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tsai Ming-liang, and Jia Zhangke test the inexhaustibility of extended takes and distanced framings. Zhang Che and John Woo explore the kinesthetic effects of camera-speed juxtapositions and rapid zoom shots. In Bordwell's terms, these lmmakers are "stubborn stylists," faithful to their stylistic signatures (2007). Unlike these counterparts, Wong Kar-wai holds fast to no stable stylistic repertoire. And yet Wong's lms-even those as stylistically dissimilar as Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love-seem uni ed by a consistent visual sensibility. In this chapter I argue that Wong is a director wedded not so much to a privileged set of visual techniques as to an elevated narrational principle, to which an array of stylistic techniques is subordinated. This governing principle-Wong's stylistic dominant, in neoformalist parlance-involves complicating (or roughening) the viewer's perception and comprehension without sacri cing overall dramatic clarity. Pledged to making the image "dif cult" yet intelligible, Wong revises, recombines, and repurposes standard schemas of visual style. This authorial strategy contributes to an overall aesthetic of perceptual and cognitive disturbance. By promoting a formal principle above favored devices, Wong outstrips aesthetic pigeonholing-hence he is no more a "long-take director" than he is a devotee of MTV-style editing. And yet, while Wong is in a sense properly characterized as a "polystylistic" lmmaker (Bordwell 2011: 176), he stays monogamous to a stylistic (and narrative) norm of roughened form and perceptual dif culty. In other words, Wong embraces stylistic pluralism, but his lms are uni ed by an enduring aesthetic principle. For Wong, the lm experience involves perceptual and cognitive challenge. Since the early 1990s, he has sought to set dramatically legible devices against tactics that disturb the
International Journal of Innovative Technology and Exploring Engineering, 2019
Motion pictures and the art of movie making started communicating with the audience and entertaining people decades before the first movie with dialogues came into existence. Pre-eminent directors and movie maestros reveled in the art of expressing emotions through their cinematic pieces without explicitly constructing them into dialogues. Wong Kar-wai, Chinese film director, is one such movie maker who gives his creations the wholeness and beauty of a painting. Through “In the Mood for Love”, “2046”, “Chungking express”, “Happy Together” etc. Wong Kar-wai, held art house audiences across the entire globe captive in his enigmatically beguiling form of art. His films are noted for its rhythmic unveiling of plot, photographic and semi-mask techniques and an intense personal flare. In the Mood for Love, often referred to as one of the greatest cinematic productions of the era, instantly earned the title of being a chef-d'oeuvre with its unconventional take on a rather conventional ...
Hong Kong University Press, 2015
I have examined the signi cance of style in Wong's cinema, but what of story? What convinces critics of the negligibility, even the absence, of plot in Wong's lms? Consider this representative but hardly exhaustive sample: Chungking Express is "minimally plotted" (Taubin 2008), displaying a "breezy disregard for plot structure" (Cameron 2007); My Blueberry Nights constructs a narrative "so vaporous it barely exists" (Brooke 2008: 74); Happy Together is "almost plotless" (Elley 1997: 50); Days of Being Wild "uneventful" (Brunette 2005: 21); and As Tears Go By narratively "sparse" (2). In this context, identifying storytelling as a central enterprise in Wong's cinema seems wrongheaded. Yet perhaps some critics miscalculate Wong's engagement with norms of story and narration, however popular or rare ed these norms might be. Part of the problem stems from conceptual imprecision. Just as some critics rely upon a spurious antithesis between story and style, so they presuppose an opposition between story and character. Thus, for instance, "all of Wong's lms. .. [are] more interested in the nature of human relationships than in narrative momentum" (Davis 2005: 26), while Days of Being Wild is a case whereby "character prevails over story" (Teo 2005: 35). Such claims may seem intuitively correct, but they lack the exactness of more conceptually negrained distinctions. For the purposes of this chapter, I adopt the narratological concepts of fabula (the story in its linear abstract form), syuzhet (the plotting of the story events in a particular way), and narration (the ongoing maintenance of story information). As differential tools of analysis, these distinctions enable a more speci c examination of the apparently diffuse, attenuated, or nonexistent narratives in Wong's oeuvre. This chapter regards story patterning as fundamental in shaping audience interest, stimulating cognitive effort, and counterpointing sensuous absorption. The complexity of Wong's lms owes as much to story materials (e.g., opaque and contradictory characters), plot structure (e.g., deforming the story in ways that make narrative chronology ambiguous), and narration (e.g., implying
ROMANCE, INSULARITY AND REPRESENTATION Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love and Hong Kong Cinema
2007
Wong Kar-wai’s film In the Mood for Love (2000) is set in Hong Kong in the early 1960s and explores the predicament and reactions of a female character (So Lai-chen) who experiences a personal crisis at a time of political turmoil. Like that other great film about passion and solipsism, Nagisa Oshima’s Ai no corrida (1976), In the Mood for Love poses as a mere love story only to open up, in a brilliantly off-handed fashion, a scenario of political devastation against which romance becomes all but impossible. For all its casual tone, the backdrop of the 1966 riots is a shivering revelation of the social and political conditions that have made possible the protagonists’ solipsistic absorption in their feelings as well as the fragility of Hong Kong’s status as a geographical and political island. This article discusses these elements of the film in the context of contemporary Hong Kong society and cinema.
The ambivalent identity of Wong Kar-wai's cinema
2009
Ayant realise neuf longs-metrages entre 1988 et 2007, aussi que plusieurs campagnes publicitaires, video-clips, courts-metrages et projets collectifs, Wong Kar-wai est un des realisateurs contemporains les plus importants actuellement. Issu de l'industrie cinematographique fortement commerciale de Hong Kong, Wong est parvenu a attirer l'attention du circuit international des festivals de cinema avec son style visuel unique et son recit fragmente. Considere par plusieurs critiques comme le poete de la recherche d’identite de Hong Kong apres 1997, Wong Kar-wai defie toutes les tentatives de categorisation. L’etude qui se poursuivit ici a donc pour objet essentiel de fournir une analyse attentive et complete de son oeuvre, tout en se concentrant sur les traits stylistiques qui donnent a ses films une unite. Ces caracteristiques correspondent a une certaine facon de raconter des histoires, de composer des personnages et des recits, de manipuler le temps et d'utiliser des res...
The Time-Image and the Unknown in Wong Kar-wai's Film Art
The Fascination with Unknown Time, 2017
This chapter explores the representation of time in the films of Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai. Wong’s films display a strong fascination with temporality, its construction, deconstruction, fragmentation, reconstruction, projection, and retrospection. Memory, nostalgia, and amnesia are recurrent motifs in Wong’s films. His film art embodies the principles of the “time-image” in modern cinema, which is a cinema of fragmentation, self-reflexivity, paradox, double and multiple temporalities, non-linear narrative, and inconclusive endings. Using Gilles Deleuze’s concepts of “movement-image” and “time-image,” the chapter looks at various configurations of time in Wong Kai-wai’s films. It focuses especially on Wong’s informal trilogy: Days of Being Wild (1990), In the Mood for Love (2000), and 2046 (2004), in which Wong uses exemplary time-images to explore problems of time and memory in the changing geopolitical and psychosocial landscapes of Hong Kong, attempting to open up a space for its past to negotiate with its unknown future.