Experimental film

• Narrative structure

  • Narrative diptych - spliced plot - split structure
  • Narrative parallels compare characters/situation
• Narrative themes

  • Time - how time shapes the vicissitudes of romance
  • Alienation - in Hong Kong
• Film Form

  • Stretch printing - undercranking + step printing
  • Contrasting speeds of reality - slow motion + fast motion
  • Colour saturation
  • Internal voiceovers + pop songs
• Aesthetics

  • Energetic glossy visuals - 'MTV aesthetics'
  • 'Aesthetic of disturbance' (Garry Bettinson)
• Mainland China

  • Communism
  • One-party: Communist Party of China
  • Mandarin
  • Renminbi/Yuan
  • Internet regulation - 'Great firewall'
• Hong Kong

  • Capitalism
  • Multi-party: Limited Democracy
  • Cantonese
  • Hong Kong Dollar
  • No internet regulation - unfiltered
• Andrew Sarris (1968)

  • Technique
  • Personal Style
  • Interior meaning
  • Creates auteur theory
• Social context - population density

  • Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated places in the world
  • Population: 7.2M
  • Area: 424 sq miles
  • Density: 66, 200 per sq mile
• Social context - melting pot

  • Hong Kong's population is diverse, made up of immigrants (mainly from China), ex-patriots (from the UK), transnational businessmen and 'workers' and travellers from all around the world
  • These diasporic communities result in the population of Hong Kong being transient, with multiple cultures and national identities sharing and communicating in the same 'always open' crowded spaces.
• Social context - melting pot PT2

  • Residential buildings (e.g. Chungking Mansions) become cultural melting pots, housing up to 120 different nationalities each year. It is estimated that 100,000 people enter or exit the building every day.
  • Hong Kong never sleeps - it is a city driven by commerce and capitalist freedoms with no limits on the number of working hours.
• Cultural context - First New Wave

  • Driven by a group of approx. 30 young directors
  • Most graduated from film schools in the US or UK and returned to Hong Kong in the mid-1970s
  • Went to work for Hong Kong TV stations, undergoing 2-3 years of training and accumulating practical experience
  • Without prior arrangement, they left TV and joined the film industry, preparing to take risks and use film as a serious artform
• Cultural context - First New Wave (2)

  • Addressed issues faced by contemporary Hong Kong society
  • Highly localised representations of Hong Kong culture - Cantonese - shot on location - about the present, not the past
  • Less tied to Mainland traditions - turned away from martial arts and more towards gangster, sword & sorcery fantasy and contemporary drama - Western culture
  • A willingness to experiment with genre, narrative and stylistic techniques (e.g. cinematography, editing and SFX)
• Cultural context - Second New Wave

  • Hong Kong cinema went through a creative and commercial slump in the early 1990s due to a variety of different factors:

  1. Repetitive cycle of poorly produced formula films
  2. Cinema tickets fell
  3. Artists left Hong Kong due to the hand-over to China
• Cultural context - Second New Wave

  • This left a chasm in terms of new blood coming through to make innovative films
  • The 'Second Wave' of Hong Kong New Wave emerged. Wong Kar-Wai was the pivotal force in transcoding film form and opening up Hong Kong cinema to the critical acclaim afforded to much of European Art Cinema and 'independent' cinema in general.
• Cultural context - Second New Wave - Aesthetics

  • The 'Second Wave' is often seen as a continuation of the firs - many of the directors worked as assistants to the First Wave directors
  • Wong Kar-Wai was mentored by Patrick Tam - Wong wrote the screenplay for Tam's Final Victory (1987) and Tam supervised the editing on Wong's Days of Being Wild (1991)
• Christopher Doyle - DOP - cinematographer

  • Key partnership with Wong working on numerous projects including Dyas of Being Wild, Ashes of Tine, Chunking Express, Fallen Angels and many more after
  • Key in the use of the 6.9mm lens specific to Fallen Angels
  • Key in the use of the handheld camera for scenes of violence
  • Key in the decision to use B&W motif for every time something went wrong with the leads used after the footage got spoilt for one scene - become part of the style.
  • Central in the use of Neon Lighting
• William Chang - Editor, production designer

  • Key partnership with Wong working on numerous projects including Ashes of Time, Chunking Express, Fallen Angels and many more after.
  • Key in exploring the use of editing techniques such as step printing (slow motion), jump cuts - something he worked with Wong on in his other films too.
  • Key in the costume design and the mise-en-scene in terms of settings and how they are dressed.
• Experimental use cinematography

  • Relationship with Doyle / experimental approach is an auteur trait
  • Under-cranking the camera (lower FPS) is an auteur trait - blur
• Experimental use of editing

  • Relationship with Chang / experimental approach to editing is an auteur trait
  • Step printing to create slow motion is an auteur trait
• Experimental use of film form + context

  • The idea of time being limited and running out due to the Sino British Joint Declaration (1984) which returns Hong Kong to China in 2047
  • Hong Kong being a city that is constantly moving - a lonely city
• Narrative Diptych

  • A spliced plot - split structure of two separate stories which rarely intersect
  • Relates to Hong Kong in an identity crisis split between East and West (SAR 1997)
  • On of the most densely populated cities - impossible to make meaningful connections
• Internal monologue

  • Characters only able to connect with the spectator and not with each other
  • People in Hong Kong are constantly moving and unable to connect - a lonely city. People from so many different places, looking to make money - diasporic nature - Postmodern.
  • Wong's youth - moving from Shanghai (Mandarin) not speaking the language (Cantonese) - story of He Zhiwu
• Auteur narrative theme of Alientation

  • Explored via the 6.8mm lens; internal monologues; diptych narrative
  • Links to Wong's youth - moving from Shanghai and not being able to speak Cantonese
  • Diasporic nature of Hong Kong
• Post-modernism

  • Wong creates Fallen Angels as a self-referential film which includes many playful references back to his previous film, Chunking Express
  • For example, when Kaneshiro Takeshi parodies Faye Wong's body language behind the Midnight Express snack counter
• Influences

  • There is a sense that Fallen Angels is also indebted to the influence of French New Wave and, in particular, the work of Jean-Luc Godard in its overtly self-conscious spirit)
  • An example of this is when the police are looking for He Zhiwu who is hiding in the agent's toilet, but furiously smoking a cigarette
  • In Tony Rayns' Sight and Sound review, he draws parallels between the Hong Kong here and the Paris in Alphaville, in terms of the complex world created in each film
• Experimental narrative

  • Wong had quite a loose and minimalist attitude to plot, refusing to be pinned down by conventional chronology
  • The narrative is fragmented and elliptical. Events are presented in a mosaic fashion. Wong's uses of cross-cuts, freeze frames, and jump cuts make the film feel, in some ways, like a photo montage
• Experimental narrative pt 2

  • Wong's 'spliced plot' creates a 'network narrative' as the spectator has to follow several storylines - Bordwell
  • The split structure of two separate stories (diptych) rarely intersects apart from the characters arbitrarily crossing paths. Instead, Wong uses cyclical patterns of plotting to bring stories together through 'parallels' and 'motifs'
• Experimental narrative pt 3

  • Wong is interested in the nature of human relationships, not a classical cause-effect momentum. To Wong, character is the story
  • The protagonists are goal-oriented but their psychological complexity engenders paralysis
  • Gradual character change, rather than dramatic conflict, constitutes the basic narrative action
  • The progression of significant events within a traditional narrative (crimes, killings) can feel peripheral. Instead, Wong favours an internal narrative of subjective yearning for love
• Narrative structure

  • Larry Gross agues that when watching Wong's films, you initially feel 'you are watching a work of delicious visual mannerist indifferent to narrative structure
  • However, his films offer many rewards on subsequent viewings changing drastically and seeming 'richer, more intricately organised, more serious - and in passing a little more conventional
• Narrative structure

  • How does Fallen Angels arguably have a more conventional structure
  • Establishes the main relationships
  • Introduces new relationships
  • Characters break-up
  • The two narrative strands merge at the climax
• Wong's creative process - pre-production

  • Wong favours schematic story outlines over fully-fledged scripts
  • Tentative scenarios, character outlines and genre tropes provide a basic template from which to fashion a plot
  • Wong informs the stars of their respective roles and storylines
• Wong's creative process - production

  • Each day is dedicated to developing and filming two/three scenes. Action and dialogue is devised just fays or hours before
  • William Chang's scene construction accompanies the shooting
  • Narrative shape and structure is fine-tuned until notoriously late in the schedule