Movies

The movies Rebel Without a Cause and Bonnie and Clyde offer two prime examples of the difference between Old Hollywood and New Hollywood.  Rebel Without a Cause was released in 1958 and, although it pushed the envelope for movies at that time, it still was very much a depiction of Old Hollywood.  Bonnie and Clyde released in 1967 was one of the first films of New Hollywood in that its style, acting and storyline moved it into a new generation of filmmaking.

In this paper I will analyze these two films and contrast their different styles and also show how Bonnie and Clyde set a new standard in the filmmaking industry.  I will also look at readings from class and draw from them in order to back up my discussion.

Rebel Without a Cause (Old Hollywood)
If I had one day when I didnt have to be all confused and I didnt have to feel that I was ashamed of everything.  If I felt that I belonged someplace.  You know.

This quote was from the protagonist Jim Stark who is a 17 year old whose parents just moved to Los Angeles.  His parents fight often in front of him and his mother is very domineering toward his father and Jim doesnt like this.  He feels his dad is not man enough to stand up for himself and he sees him as being week.  Even though his father loves him a lot and shows him affection, Jim wishes he was more of a man.  Throughout the movie he tries to tell him that he needs to just stand up for himself and set a good example for his son, but his father doesnt get it.  Hes just too used to being bullied around by his mother.  Jim even goes so far as to say that he never wants to end up like his father.

This was just one of the many films during the fifties that depicted the youth of America as being insubordinate and not having the same moral makeup as past generations.  This film also looks at parenting styles and how they affect the youth at that time.  The main character Jim continuously gets into trouble as a result of his confusion and detachment from his parents.

The style in which the film was made goes right along with what was being done in that era.  The acting, at times, was very over dramatic and the dialog was sparse and very clean.  The high school kids were rebellious and got into fights, but there is very little blood and the discourse was very civil.
Up until the fifties, the movie business had grown exponentially and was dominated by about eight different studios located in Los Angeles.  Small budget films were being made at the time but wouldnt make money simply because the Giants had all the talent and money to produce large-scale productions.  At that time it was also accepted that the larger the amount of money put into a film, the more it would make.  It was published to the public amounts that were invested into the films.

In the postwar period, the foreign market became an even more important source of income to Hollywood.  By the early 1960s foreign sales generated about half of the majors revenuesbut instead of bringing European stars to Hollywood, American production migrated abroad.

So part of New Hollywood was its presence abroad and actually filming and producing films in foreign nations.  However, not many were ready for the movie that, in essence, changed how filmmaking was done.

Bonnie and Clyde (New Hollywood)
This heres Miss Bonnie Parker.  Im Clyde Barrow.  We rob banks.
Directly influenced by the French New Wave style of cinematography, Bonnie and Clyde broke all of the rules associated with Old Hollywood.  The film portrayed sex and violence on a graphic level not really ever seen before.  And, although, the movie started out as sort of a comedy, it quickly turned dark as the violence began.  Many different societal taboos were broken regarding sex and violence.

This new style also included a more real form of filming in that it was more graphic and the filming itself was more choppy.  The comedic way that it depicted violence along with its quickly shifting tone toward the dark side of violence was something new at the time.  Since the production of Bonnie and Clyde many others followed suit in its overt display of sex and violence in the movies.  The impression created is one of restlessness, edginess and a palpable sense of sexual hunger and longing.

Clyde is a thief that meets up with Bonnie while hes trying to steal her mothers car.  She falls in love with him and they go on a bank-robbing spree together.  As they get better at what they do, the level of violence is escalated and the amount of gore depicted in the film rises.  Sexual overtones are constant and this entire concept of glorifying sex and violence on film was brand new at the time.

During the late fifties and sixties, times were tumultuous in America and Hollywood cinema reflected that.

Making connections between Hollywood movies and the times in which they appear is not as straightforward a business as it might often appear.  Sometimes, however, the case seems more clear-cut the times are such that they appear to impose themselves forcefully on our consciousness, unmistakably invading the terrain of popular entertainment such as Hollywood cinema.

Because of social events and tragedies that were taking place in that era such as the Kennedy assassinations, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, people were longing for films that helped express how they were feeling.

Conclusion
Both movies were epic pictures that were preserved in the United States Library of Congresss National Film Registry and even though their release dates were only twelve years apart, watching them makes you feel as if they were made in completely different eras  which, in fact, they were.

Rebel Without a Cause, arguably James Deans best film, sort of represents the innocence of America at that time.  You feel as if you are watching something that would be rated G today, or would be on the Disney Channel.

Bonnie and Clyde represented the direction that America was moving in.  People might not have been ready for it at the time, however, they went to the theaters in drones to see it.  It was the start of a brand new era in filmmaking and stands to be one of the founders, if not the founder, of New Hollywood today.

Chinese American MuseumLast February 27, 2010, I visited Chinese American Museum, located in the downtown of Los Angeles. It is the oldest and the last surviving original structure of Los Angeles Chinatown. Upon entering the green-colored wooden door, I walked through the lobby area. I witnessed the exhibit of the history on how Chinese immigrants started their life in Lose Angeles. The Chinese were the first Asian immigrants who entered the United States. Large-scale immigration began in the mid 1800s due to the California Gold Rush. Moreover, the other side of the room displayed old-fashioned Chinese pharmacy, Sun Wing WO Store. The store is a recreation of an actual store that was housed in Garnier Building in the 1890s.

The second floor showcased the Hollywood Chinese The Arthur Dong Collection. Its about a documentary on the Chinese-American featured films produced by Arthur, entitled Hollywood Chinese. The documentary emphasized the evolution on how Chinese-American imagined the cinema industry during the last century. At that time, most filmmakers and directors had to work under great pressure due to political and social condition. The collections range from 1916 to the present day which include posters, lobby cards, stills, scripts, press material, and to the other artifacts products. The films The Good Earth, The Vengeance of Fu Manchu, Charlie Chan in Honolulu, and Flower Drum Song highlighted the exhibit. These are some of the early films directed and written by Caucasians. The films are based on western peoples perspective on Chinese. Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu were the most recognized characters of western people literacy creation. During that period, American cinema industry were run by white people, even the Asian characters were portrayed by white actors. Often, looks were artificially changed with the use of make-up in order to approximate Asian facial characteristics. This implied that Fun Manchu was the stereotype Chinese evil character from western peoples views. In the middle of the gallery, there is a showcase. It contains a card board game known as Fu Manchu Hidden Hoard. Personally, I felt sad about it because it degraded its true purpose which is for childrens entertainment. They used it as an icon to show the competition in the real world. I believed that toy designers tried their best to avoid using icons such as angel and devil characters, or any designs that will influence children in engaging to racial stereotypes.

In the room where Hollywood Chinese documentaries were exhibited, posters are also hanged on the walls. These include Brokeback Mountain, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, and Memoirs of Geisha. Nowadays, Hollywood movies are using Asian, Chinese-American, or Chinese actors from China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Chinese directors are able to contribute to the Hollywood film industry. For instance, Director Ang Lee won the Oscar award for directing Brokeback Mountain (2005). In the Hollywood Chinese Documentary, Arthur Dong interviewed Ang Lee. In the interview, Ang Lee said, Hopefully in the future of film industry, people can see the director individually and not judge them by nationality.

During the tour, Arthur mentioned that western people think that all Chinese have Kung Fu skill. This is another stereotype influence by Kung Fu movies. Bruce Lee, Jet Li and Jackie Chan are three recognized Kung Fu actors. Being a Chinese, I really enjoy and appreciate Kung Fu movies. Why Because Kung Fu is art in a different and unique form which combines it with exercise. I believe it is a human achievement sport. Kung Fu movie productions are means of spreading and advertising Kung Fu art in digital media to the global arena.

My favorite part in the museum is the Sun Wing Wo General Store and Herb Shop. It reminds me the trip I had in Hong Kong 10 years ago. Even today, some stores in Hong Kong still have wooden cabinet and old-fashioned cashier machines. Sun Wing WO General Store was a multi-purpose space that showed how self-sufficient the Chinese were. They had to be independent due to racism and discrimination but at the same time they were responsive to the needs of their community. There were European, Japanese, and Mexican Americans who also came to purchase Chinese merchandise.

In the 20 century, Chinese had adopted the western culture. The western culture was also influenced by Chinese. The changes are continuous nowadays. In effect, Asian and Chinese actors and actresses have more opportunities to be international stars.

The Nouvelle Vague or the New Wave started in France and spread to Sweden. It soon caught up in India and then in Italy. The Argentinean and Spanish New Waves soon followed suit. What was the New Wave It was a movement, a revolution However, it was not a revolution of arms  it was a revolution of film. Completely unlike the mainstream films of the time, this movement was principally a new pattern of movie-making, a new way of telling stories, but simultaneously, it was also much more than that. It was a rise of a completely new culture, a path-breaking political statement and above all, it was a representation of the socio-cultural situation of the country at the time. It was the voice of the people, which needed to be heard.

In China, the film industry saw this Movement with the rise of the leftist films, the left-wing filmmakers works of art, which started with the May Fourth Movement in the 1919. During this time, the youth of the country was largely dissatisfied by the new rulers of the country and agitated at the encroachment of Chinese land by the Japanese. They revolted against both by way of protests and soon, this agitation of the youth turned into a cultural movement  a shift of power which saw the powerless proletariats and intellectuals wanting to become the leaders of the country. This revolution also started reflecting in the films of the country at the time of the 1920s and 1930s when the young left-wing filmmakers of the country wanted to emulate the Western ideals and reconstruct a free, empowered nation  China.

Women in Chinese Films Prior to the Movement
Before the advent of the May Fourth Movement, the womens roles in the Chinese films were largely cosmetic. The films were influenced by the western styles and stories as they were mostly produced by the foreign production houses who had built bases in and around Shanghai. With a Western story, a Chinese cast and overseas technicians, the Chinese film industry saw decent monetary success. The more traditional stories were made in the later stages of this period.

The True Progressive Chinese Cinema
However, the Chinese industry started its rise earnestly in the 1930s with the advent of the leftist or progressive films. These were the films where the stories diverged from the western-influenced stories and started focusing on the Chinese socio-cultural situations, Chinese people and Chinese enemies. The studios concentrated on making films which would convey a message to the people of the country  that a struggle was on, that the centre of power was shifting and that everyone needed to take a stand. In the making of these films came the ultimate empowerment of the female actors of China, they were given more substantial roles, many a times being made the protagonists of the film itself. Stories were crafted around women and strong women characters were portrayed by supremely talented actresses like Yin Minzhu, Zhang Zhiyu, Hu Die and Ruan Lingyu.

This period saw an undaunted flow of progressive films which were also commercial hits like Three Modern Women, Womens Outcry, The Sisters and many others. The one thing which was glaringly obvious, however, was that though the films portrayed the female characters overcoming various struggles and coming out as heroes, the Leftist Cinema Movement was entirely run by males. No woman was a part of the making of any Leftist film in any capacity. At this time, men chose to tell their stories through the female characters. The Chinese woman was used to represent the oppressed class, the Chinese proletariat fighting against the bourgeoisie society and coming out victorious.

Although women were given the most power-packed roles to play, ranging from the prostitute to the factory worker to the new age professional, their role in the making of a film was often restricted to the male ideologies. Men, even in this Golden Age of the Chinese Cinema, used women to represent the male fantasies of the New Age Woman, to show the constant struggle between a dissatisfied and eager to rise oppressed and as overpowering, overbearing oppressor. Shuqin Cui, the famous Chinese film historian pointed out that The early film production frames womens problems to signify the need for national awakening while using star images to attract audiences (and) how socialist cinema presents woman as either a victim of class oppression or a beneficiary of national liberation (2003). Women were not yet given the freedom to enact their roles, free of the male gaze.

The New Woman  the New Woman question
In those times, the question of the New Woman was often raised  who is she What is she like What ideals and ideologies does she embody In a response to all these questions, the answer was quite simple  to the newly struggling Chinese proletariat, the New Woman was the embodiment of all their political ideologies and nationalist sentiments. External manifestations, Edwards argued, like hair, clothes and dresses were immaterial to the New Woman. She principally represented the modern Chinese woman, for whom national welfare was a primary concern. The new woman was conceived as politically aware, patriotic, independent, and educated (2000). The New Woman was a woman awakened, a woman who performed as many duties as a man with respect to revolutionizing the population of her country and fighting against oppression.

Here so far, the New Woman in films was a reality  the women in the leftist films were not only politically awakened and economically independent, they were also a part of the woman types  the worker, the prostitute or the professional. However, this is where the departure from the definition of a typical New Woman began.

The New Woman  Ruan Lingyu and Xin Nxing
The talented leftist director Cai Chusheng, in 1935, produced a remarkable woman-oriented progressive film with the lead actress of the time, Ruan Lingyu as the New Woman. This movie was based on the life of another woman, Al Xia, who was a writer and actress, who committed suicide because of the vicious attack of the media on her personal life (Harris, 1995).

A hard working music teacher and a part time composer and writer, Wei Ming (Ruan) is the typical New Age Woman  beautiful, young, financially independent and living without any male support. However, she soon finds out that this modernity is only superficial as she faces the real world where her publisher only wants to publish her book if her photo appears on the cover page and the trustee (Mr. Wang) of the school she works in, makes indecent passes at her while being married to her friend from school (Mrs. Wang). She is friends with a young man (Yu Haichou) who helps her where he can, but firmly rejects all her advances and flirtations, and a woman, Li Aying, who is a factory worker who also teaches the women of her factory songs of patriotism and courage.

Soon after, we see that Wei Mings daughter, the product of a failed marriage who is living with her aunt, falls ill and has to return to her mothers home. Her troubles get worse when she turns down Mr. Wang and he vengefully gets her fired from her teaching job. Wei has no money for her daughters treatment and she finally resorts to selling her body in return for some desperate money. However, even this does not seem to work for her when her first client is Dr. Wang who she escapes from, a second time. With no way to save her daughter, she silently watches her die. This trauma adds to her already precarious hold on a sane and healthy mind and she decides to end her life. Her friends, Mrs. Wang and Yu, succeed in getting her to the hospital in the nick of time and when she comes to consciousness, she screams out to the camera that she wants to live. Soon after, as the film ends, we see a newspaper clipping of her obituary.

This is the pathbreaking film, New Woman, in a nutshell.

The New Woman Incident
Although today this film holds the place of a classic in the world cinema map, the time it was released it had to face severe criticism from the reporters and journalists at the unflattering image of the media shown in the film. They also forced major reedits of the film and a public apology from the production house, Lianhua Company. They wrote many unflattering articles about Ruan Lingyu who was going through a painful public divorce at the time and the vengeful mud-slinging and image-bashing engaged in by the media contributed to the talented actresss suicide a few days after the release of the film, on International Womens Day, 8th March, 1935.

This incident, dubbed as the New Woman incident, became a most controversial subject in the days to come as the people realized the responsibilities of the media and journalism and at the same time as the power of their own public opinion (Harris, 1995). Debate also ensued over the symbolic significance of the New Woman and what she really stood for. The uncanny resemblance between real life (Al Xia) and the occurrences in the film and then again its repetition in real life (Ruan) set many a pens writing about the accountability of the Press while at the same time the women begun to be categorized as traditional women and New Women.

New Woman  a Film Study
In New Woman, Ruans character is an amalgamation of modernist values and traditional, socially bound mentality. She is a character who is constantly striving to make an independent living but cannot manage to do so because of the many confines of the society. Although sometimes this seems to be the case, many a times it comes across as her own reluctance to completely tear down the restrictions of the society and move out on her own in this world and make a living, away from the men in it. She seems to be a strange convergence point of all the contradictory values of a New Woman and a Traditional Woman. In fact, the movie New Woman, in itself, embodies many a contradictions in its many layered folds.

Ruan is an educated, new age, independent woman, yet she depends on her friend Yu to get her work. She also seems to flirt with him to draw his attention. She seems to lack the basic ingredient of a New Woman  confidence in her abilities and a will to make it on ones own in this world. She is economically independent, yet she in unable to gain in confidence. She seems to require a male presence to make her feel secure. Contrast this to the factory worker and her friend, Aying, who is a completely independent woman who seems to fight her own battles as well as gives courage to everyone else to do the same. Ruan falls ruefully short on the independent count.

On another count, Wei Ming is a moderately well doing woman who works her way through life. She is supposedly an opposite to her flashy friend Mrs. Wang who is the typical personification of the wily female  she has tantrums and she has her ways of getting men to do her bidding. Mrs. Wang is fond of jewellery, as in seen in many a scenes when her diamond rings and jewellery ubiquitously sparkle directly into the camera. Wei Ming, on the other hand, should be shown as completely disinterested in superficial looks and trappings, as being a New Woman, but she too seems to be just as vulnerable to the superficial, when one notices the details like the various photographs of her in her home, the way she gazes at herself in the mirror from time to time, etc. When the publisher has to print the manuscript initially, he is disinterested but when he sees her picture and realizes that she is a beautiful, young woman, he promptly agrees. She is commodified to an extent  the camera enjoys her show of beauty. The film seems to constantly switch between a subjective and objective view of the New Woman.

Similarly, when one sees the scene where Wei is travelling in Mr. Wangs car, accompanying him to the cabaret ball, she looks out the window while silently sulking about her situation. Here, in a mise-en-scene she sees her introduction to the antagonist on the car window, again juxtaposing her helplessness in the present to the cause of it in the past. The window becomes her mirror of the past where she ruefully realizes that there is no getting away from the commodifying of her as a woman. At the same time, the audience is asked to sympathise with her when she regretfully shakes her head to the image and thereby seems to appeal to the audience for sympathy and understanding. This again, seems to be telling the audience that she is just another woman struggling for independence, not the heroic figure which the audience might be expecting her to be.

This is juxtaposed to the background of huts and slums, again contradicting the grandiose which is within her reach if she agrees to become a commodity of the bourgeoisie and the poverty which lies in her way if she refuses. It seems that she has to make this choice and this continues in the next scene when she watches the dance in the hall, sitting next to Mr. Wang, and suddenly sees herself in the place of the dancers  essentially imagining herself as a means of entertainment to the affluent  a fate which a New Woman would never accept and is completely against.

However, in opposition to this again, we see that when Wang proposes marriage to her, despite of his much-married status, she angrily tells him off,  saying that she is not looking to become anybodys slave. This is very much in line with the widely accepted ideology of the left-wing, where the intellectual youth fights against the oppression of the rulers. Similarly, when she identifies herself with the dancer is shackles, the director also somehow tries to show us that though she may think that she wont give in to the bourgeoisie pressures, she is, in all essence, powerless to stop the same.

The camera also frequently seems to take on the male gaze every once in a while, adoring the actress, her beauty, having the camera do a series of shots of her which seem to show her as a beautiful woman, a woman lusted after by her employer and adored by the publisher. It seems that while the director wants the audience to identify with her and her cause and everything she represents, he also wants them to see her as a commodity, a woman who is available because she has no male protector, no money and many mouths to feed.

Contrast this with the two other women in the film  both representing individual characteristics of their own. One is a sniggering and condescending bourgeoisie who is constantly looking down at Weis possessions and accomplishments. She employs her feminine wiles to get her husband to gift her what she desires and has everything and would want for nothing. Aying on the other hand is the complete opposite to Wang. She works hard on a daily basis, fights for causes that she believes in and has few worldly possessions. She helps out her fellow colleagues and has a purpose in life which she ardently supports.

In contrast to these two, Weis character seems to be woefully confused, and towards the end, woefully weak as she succumbs to the various pressures of the outside world even as she fervently screams and appeals to the audience to let her live.

The New Woman  separating the Myth from the Reality
Dreams are fine but money is essential said Xun Lu while talking to a group of women. In practical life, he is correct. But the argument does not end there. He asks that if the traditional New Woman character of Nora from the Norwegian literature had not in fact left her home, would she have been happier, as her husbands puppet Or was she happy after she walked out on a financially secure life (1923). Perhaps, the answer for this seems to lie in New Woman as we realize that if we correlate Wei to Nora, then either Wei was an inadequate woman as compared to her Norwegian counterpart or Nora must have had a terrible life after she walked out.

Yet, as we see the other characters in the film, those of Wang and especially Aying, we realize that Weis character was just trapped into her own mire of limitations and weaknesses. While Aying manages to strike out on her own and follow through on the ideals of nationalism and patriotism, Wei never quite manages to sort her own life out and keeps struggling to attain what she does not seem to know she desires. Wang, on the other hand, is happy as the traditional woman and has grown into being spoilt.

Ming wrote in his essay, Seeing New Woman, The New Woman is a call to arms for humanity and society. It offers a model for the spirit of the new women (1936). Aying fits the bill perfectly. So, in essence of the typical definition of the New Woman, Aying is the only woman in the film who fits the bill. She is confident, she is patriotic and most of all, she is the one who is constantly striving towards to welfare of her country.

The Real New Woman
The Chinese audience of the leftist movies have always seen comedy and tragedy in strange ways. When its time for sacrifice, if the martyr is bold and daring, they applaud the tragedy if the victim is timid and distraught, they see it as comedy. However, what they see in New Woman is the martyrdom of who they think embodies the ideals of the struggling proletariat  the masses  until she gives up and takes her own life. Yet, instead of signifying a death of the struggle, the film ends with the songs of Aying and her coworkers filling the auditorium, signifying one thing for sure  that with the true New Woman, the fight lives on.

The primary concern of my paper will be the changing way in which the female protagonist is represented within films produced by the Disney studio and the messages this imbues to their audience of extremely receptive children. Following a close textual analysis of a number of films produced by Disney my thesis will thus be that whilst changes are evident in the Disney female in terms of her demeanor and characterization, with the overwhelming passivity and naivety displayed by Snow White and Cinderella being clearly challenged within films which were produced during the 1990s and onwards, such as Belle in Beauty and the Beast, Ariel in The Little Mermaid and Mulan in Mulan, nonetheless one common theme which is seen in all Disney features regardless of the time frame it was produced in is that the females primary purpose and fulfillment can only come through marriage. Even in the most recent export from the Disney company, The Princess and the Frog, this message is still reinforced.

A number of academics have noted the great power that the Disney company has to act as a moral compass for the young audience who consumer their texts for. For example, Time Magazine states, Measured by his social impact, Walt Disney is one of the most influential men alive The hand that rocks the cradle is Walt Disneys- and who can say what effect it is having on the world (qtd. in Giroux 5). Thus, the strong power of Disney to shape the viewers of their films both in terms of ideas about right and wrong and the role a female is expected to play in adulthood is an extremely potent issue which has been examined in great deal within academic literature. As a result, looking closely at the messages the company is communicating to children, particularly females, about the world in which they live in and the roles they are expected to fulfill throughout their lives is an extremely important practice given the amount of people this company engages with and the extremely influential age at which these messages are being presented to children across the world. In addition, the way in which the messages are communicated, through characters the audience look up to and wish to emulate, set to music and presented in an aesthetically pleasing manner all further invites the child to adopt the morals they see on screen as their own so an examination of how appropriate and aligned these messages are with the reality of growing up in todays society is extremely important.

However, it is also important not to forget the social context in which these films were produced. Looking back from a twenty first century perspective of the ideas which were prevalent during the 1930s it is easy to dismiss them as inappropriate, however during the era which Snow White was made, 1937, the role of the female in society and what was expected of her was extremely different to today and this is evident in the characterization of Snow White. It is extremely evident that Snow Whites worth is dictated by what she can offer in terms of hard work and domesticity in the household environment. For example, the dwarves only permit her to stay with them after she promises to cook, clean and keep house for them, thus representing her bargaining tools and her most valuable assets to be her domestic ability as opposed to her intelligence or her mind. Whilst this notion may seem alien looking at it retrospectively from a twenty-first century perspective, during the 1930s it was far more representative of reality.

In addition, the context of criticism thrown at the Disney company must similarly be accessed to account for their changing views towards femininity. Disney has often been subject to damning criticism of the way in which they represent morals for children to pick up on. Many critics have slammed the company for being irresponsible in the way they represent females such as Janet Wasko (2001) who puts forward her opinion that all of the female protagonists live in male dominated worlds, describing them as predictable (116) and she goes on to criticize Disney for the lack of innovation they have displayed when they came to adapt existing narratives in that the animated form gave them a great deal of flexibility and license to make the narrative their own, however they instead chose to create characters whom, in Waskos opinion, are all homogenous. The volume of criticism thrown at Disney both in academia as well as more popular sources, with popular television programs such as Ally McBeal and Sex and the City both pointing out that the attitude that Disney films promote is out of touch with modern reality, also accounts for their changing representations of femininity. It is highly possible that after they felt the pressure from parents and academics who deemed their messages as inappropriate and irresponsible their reaction was to create the more empowered females of Pohcahontas and Mulan in order to appease their audience and the people who pay for merchandise, DVDs and tickets to their theme park.

Evidence for the idea that the modern Disney heroines are more empowered than those who were produced before them comes from a comparison of the characterization of Snow White with that of Areil within The Little Mermaid. The clear and obvious differences which exist between the characterization and traits shown by these characters thus displays the way in which a clear change in the assets valued by the Disney company in a female has taken place. Whilst Snow Whites demeanor can be described as submissive, naive, passive, innocent and domestic, none of these traits seem to fit for Ariel. Rather, her characterization seems far more independent and determined, as pointed out by Ross (2004 58). Her desire to live in the human world is brave as her father and the society she is a part of under the sea do not approve. However, she displays drive and emotion when she goes against what her father intends for her and allows her curiosity to lead her up to the surface, where she is even willing to sacrifice her voice in order to fulfill her desires.

In addition, as pointed out by Vashti (2009) a desire for knowledge and inquisitiveness is displayed by Ariel which appears to be a trend within the later Disney films as similarly Alices, Jasmines and Pohcahontass curiosity about things they are not familiar with motivate their actions. Thus, the traits these characters display, that is a defiance of authority as all of these characters perform actions which higher authorities do not permit them to do, Areil engaging with the human world, Jasmine wanting to see life outside of the palace and Pohcahontas wanting to know about the world of the white people, are therefore rewarded through their attainment of love which comes as a result of their stubbornness, defiance and disobedience. Such a trait is not evident within the earlier Disney heroines such as Cinderella, Aurora and Snow White where conversely obedience is rewarded. For example, Snow White is instructed by the huntsman to run into the woods and never return after he is unable to kill her, which she obediently does, and Cinderella shows a distinct lack of resistance to the instructions of her sisters who tell her to wash their clothes and clean their house despite them showing her a lack of respect which, from a twenty first century perspective, we are given the impression you should stand up to. Thus, the message given by the Disney company in relation to defiance and curiosity is that such a trait is desirable for life in the twentieth century which marks a distinct change of direction for the company as obedience was displayed by their earlier heroines.

These traits as shown by Areil thus are antithetical to those displayed by Snow White and a clear change in the Disney world view is evident to bring the Disney female into the twentieth century and to display a more responsible and appropriate message for children. It is also however worth noting that whilst the characterization of the females has encompassed a more empowered and less oppressed attitude, the issue which this paper is primarily concerned with, that is that fulfillment for a female only comes through romantic love, is nonetheless still represented within films made during a more modern time frame when indeed such notions are out dated and not at all reflective of reality. This seems to represent a rather inconsistent and contradictory message from the company as it seems as if on the one hand Disney is keen to appease critics and parents by providing role models who have more drive and assertiveness than their predecessors, however on the other characters still appear to subscribe to out of date notions about females and marriage where nonetheless they are still living in male dominated worlds.

In the case of Ariel it is questionable whether her motives are the result of a natural curiosity and inquisitive nature about the human world, or rather her motivation for leaving the under the sea world in favor of the human world is out of desperation for the love of Eric and this is what causes her to be willing to sacrifice so much to join the human world. However, given the sheer amount she sacrifices in order to be with Eric, and the final conclusion of the film as she sails off into the sunset with Eric in her wedding gown, it appears as if the ending is only happy as a result of her being with Eric, as opposed to her being a human alone. Thus, despite Ariels more positive attitude than that of Snow White and Cinderella, she none the less is only able to be truly happy as a result of finding love and being with Eric, which appears to contradict the empowered messages Disney are attempting to promote to their viewers.

Similarly, the conclusions of Pohcahontas, Alladin, Beauty and the Beast, and Mulan are all centered on the finding of true love. Whilst these females may well have other motivations throughout the film, such as protecting their family from war, death, or protecting their familys legacy, nonetheless the overriding message is that happiness is only able to be fully achieved when you are in the arms of a male. Therefore, the conclusions of these films thus provide supporting evidence for the thesis that despite the more empowered and less passive characterization of these females none the less they are living in worlds where true happiness can only be achieved through romantic love. As this is not an appropriate message to be giving to children, as it is perfectly possible in todays society to be happy without having a husband on partner, Disney is therefore projecting an inappropriate and possibly even damaging message to children through their films.

However, a counter argument for Disneys irresponsible messages towards femininity comes from the issue of adapting. All of the narratives which Disney has produced have come originally from other authors, whether they are novels such as Alices Adventure in Wonderland by Lewis Carrol or fairy tales such as Snow White and Cinderella which first took a fixed form within French society. According to Jack Zipes (1995) by their taking a fixed form the stories lost their flexibility and ability to be applied to specific situations and as a result a process of censorship took place to make the stories suitable for a mass, young audience (25). Therefore the notions of femininity which are evident in the animated features of the Disney company were evident in the narratives before Disney even produced the texts leading to the conclusion that it is not Disney who is responsible for projecting such notions onto children as the original authors of the text similarly reflected the same morals and values about femininity.

One thing which up until now has been an assumption in my paper is the notion that goodness is linked with beauty. As pointed out by Craven (2002) in relation to Beauty and the Beast, Belle is intended to be the character for whom the audience identifies with (133). She is therefore coded as good and her behavior worthy of emulation through the manner in which she is physically presented and it is because of this assumption that Disney is able to portray messages about those personality traits which are useful to adopt, as by imbuing their heroines with these traits it is likely that the audience will similarly pick up on them and adopt them themselves. The notions of good and evil being twinned with light and dark stretch as far back as Snow White however the idea that good looks is intrinsically linked with good deeds is something which is almost relentlessly suggested by all Disney features. As Belle is presented as an attractive female, she has a slender figure, large eyes, small nose, long hair and a small waist, she, along with all other Disney heroines who fit this description, therefore subscribes to universal ideas of physical beauty. By creating a link between physical beauty and being of good character Disney is highlighting the importance of good looks in being liked and placing a high value on this trait.

Similarly as with the idea that happiness is only achieved through romantic love, this message again seems out of touch with reality. Of course everyone realizes that people who dont fit this blue print for attractiveness may well be good, and similarly those who do fit this blue print may not necessarily be good. The message that the behavior of anyone who is attractive is therefore worth emulating as it is permanently good therefore again is an irresponsible message for Disney to be teaching their young viewers, and this is by no means the case in the world they will soon grow up in. The irony here is that the prevailing message of Beauty and the Beast is that it is what is on the inside which counts and that despite his grotesque appearance Beast is in fact a good character, unlike Gaston who despite his handsome looks underneath has an unpleasant disposition. Again evidence of a contradiction from Disney can be seen here as Belle is coded as good as a result of her attractive appearance so for her, as well as the remainder of the Disney heroines, her attractiveness highlights her as being a good character as opposed to her disposition alone.

In conclusion, throughout this paper evidence has been provided for the notion that the Disney heroine has undergone a transformation since the first Disney feature, Snow White, to today. Such changes have made the female character more empowered and thus equipped young viewers with traits which are more appropriate for coping with the demands made of them in current society. I have argued that such changes have occurred as a result of pressure from people who have criticized the past Disney heroines and a desire to please those who generate profit for Disney, the parents of their young audience. However, whilst the traits they display now more accurately reflect an appropriate manner in which to live your life today, none the less flaws in this logic still exist which create an inconsistent and contradictory message for viewers. The way in which true happiness is represented as only being achieved through romantic love and the assumption that good looks equates to a good character thus creates confused messages for the viewer and reflects messages which are not helpful for children to adopt. As a result the conclusion of my paper is therefore that whilst improvements have been made to Disney heroines to more closely match her with a useful and helpful set of virtues, negative messages still exist even in the more recent Disney features which thus create a set of principles which parents should closely monitor to ensure that their children arent adopting harmful or inappropriate ideas about femininity.

In his article, Iron Man Suited Up for Fun, Chuck Koplinski reviews the film Iron Man, directed by Jon Favreau.  This film is based upon the Marvel Comic series of the same name.

Based on the review, it seems clear that Koplinski came to the film already a fan of the original comic strip.  Based on this, it is doubtful that he would have needed to take any notes during his viewing.  Koplinski begins his review with concerns that the pre-release promotions might give away the whole film.  Given the volume of material shown in advance of the film as well as Koplinskis familiarity with the subject matter, it is unlikely that he needed a pen and paper to keep up.

The audience Koplinski speaks to in his review may well be the comic geeks he refers to in his introductory paragraph- but he also speaks to readers not familiar with the original story.  He addresses both when referring to elements of the film that will please fanboys and newbies to the Tony Stark universe alike.  Again, Koplinski speaks from the perspective of the established fan (already familiar with the Tony Stark universe) - but also includes the uninitiated by giving a basic synopsis of the story and characters.  

Koplinski organizes his review loosely in chronological order, while interspersing background information and critical commentary within this format.  As mentioned already, the review begins before the film even begins- with a discussion of the prerelease hype.  He goes on to describe the main characters and storyline and then describes the relative skill with which the screenwriters and director brought the story to film.  Koplinski concludes with an assessment of the relative success of the special effects and also of the acting performances.

In the review, Koplinski compares Iron Man to the Spider- Man series.  The reader understands that Iron Man is primarily intended as a summer time action film- though more grown up than the teenage geared Spider- Man.  Koplinski also briefly mentions Hulk and Fantastic Four- other comics that were made into films- but references them more for their character familiarity to audiences than for any film style comparison.

Concluding the review, Koplinski viewed the main strengths of Iron Man to be the performance given by lead actor Robert Downey, Jr., the faithfulness shown to the original comic, and to the nuanced sense of humor brought out by the director.  The main weaknesses seemed to be a predictable subplot of the film, along with some confusing action sequences.  Not having seen the film, I cannot say to whether I completely agree with Koplinskis review- but he seems to understand the balance necessary in bringing good original material to life in a new context.

Directed Summary
Little Miss Sunsine is a 2006 comedy-drama-adventure film about a seven-year old girl named Olive Hoover who desired to join and bring home the crown from the beauty pageant Little Miss Sunshine. Bringing her dysfunctional family and driving their almost broken down Volkswagen T2 Microbus, they went on an 800-mile road trip from their home in Albquerque to California where the pageant was held. In the course of their travel, they came across several setbacks that made them arrive four minutes late and was almost refused by the organizers to join the pageant. In the talent portion, Olive innocently performed a burlesque dance number taught by her grandfather and unaware of the dismayed reaction of the audience. Angered by her outrageous performance, the organizers ordered her parents to remove her from the stage, but instead of taking Olive down, her family joined in her dance.  Olives family was next seen at the hotels security office where they were banned from participating in Little Miss Sunshine forever. The movie ends with Olives family riding their van home, happy and fulfilled.

Subject of the Paragraph
Achieving the American Dream.

Controlling Idea
Dayton and Fariss (2006) film depicted through the Hoover family, a side effect of selfishness and self-indulgence from fully concentrating on that American dream.

Corroborating Details
In Little Miss Sunshine, Olives father, Richard Hoover, is an aspiring motivational  speaker and life coach that has a dream of having his own motivational business. With his type A personality, his attitude toward his family was unpleasant and he perceives them as mediocre from the wrong decisions they made in their life. However, with the loss of an important contract to start his motivational business thus diminishing his dream, he was able to experience first hand what it was like to be disappointed and realized how inconsiderately he treated the other members of his family. Richard Hoover is a good example of an achiever of that American dream who focused so much on fulfilling it that he lost sight of what really mattered his family.

Careful Description of the Details
In Jonathan and Fariss film (2006), the Hoover family portrayed the concept of  achieving the American dream, of getting that prosperity and satisfaction in life. Members of the family formed plans of their own to acquire those desires but only to find out in the course of their travel and problems they came across that those desires were unattainable. But by joining Olive in her performance amidst being ordered by the organizers to finish her scandalous dance, they realized that there are more to than just fulfilling their dreams.

Connection to the Thesis
Dayton and Faris (2006) depicted dreams that are ruined by present conditions or circumstances but with those diminished desires, one realizes or learns what are the things that really matter. Sometimes people tend to overlook and lose sight of what is  essential and through disappointments and failures, a person recognizes what is truly important.

Article 1
Bits and Pieces of Love Stories from a Writers Mind A Wondrous Journey,
2 January 2006 , Author gradyharp from United States
Reference Choi, Sean., Fa yeung nin wa, imdb 6 Mar. 2002. HYPERLINK httpwww.imdb.comtitlett0118694httpwww.imdb.comtitlett0118694 (3 May, 2010).

Kar Wai Wong is more than a film director (though he is one of the finest directors working today) he is a visual, poetic, creative and daring artist capable of more cinematic miracles in one isolated film than most directors achieve in a lifetime. 2046 is a visually stunning, intellectually challenging, emotionally charged view of love and lust in todays kinetically dysfunctional society.

There is no one way to interpret this non-linear film and therein lies much of its rewards. The main character Chow (Tony Leung) is a writer and a libertine who has pushed his vacuous life around with his hormones and though he has had many affairs he has failed to find the illusory love. He has lived in Singapore and Hong Kong, makes his living writing columns of newspapers while his novels formulate in his mind. One of his novels is called 2046, the title based on the room number in a hotel where he witnessed a bizarre incident involving a gorgeous woman, and resulted in his moving into the adjoining room 2047 where is meets the hotel managers daughter in love with a Filipino Japanese man her father loathes. He desires this unattainable woman and fuses her with a fictional android in his novel which now uses 2046 as a year or time or place where people go to find memories. He continues to encounter women for whom he desires more than surface relationships (there is a stunning lady gambler cameo who represents everything he lusts and longs for, etc) but he is never able to find his tenuous ideal his memory is his only source of consolation.

The actors in every role include many of the finest actors available Li Gong, Ziyi Zhang, Carina Lau, Maggie Cheung, Takuya Kimura, Chen Chang, and of course Tony Leung. But it is Kar Wai Wong, the writer, director, choreographer, colorist, visionary that makes this excursion into the interstices of the mindimagination so overwhelmingly satisfying. Whether the viewer elects to view the story as a continuation of the directors previous films, or as reality vs memory, fiction vs imagination, sci-fi excursion, or simply a plethora of vignettes about the challenges of finding love in a world geared toward instant gratification, this is a magnificent achievement. In many ways the sound track could be turned off (though the beautiful musical score by Peer Raben and Shigeru Umebayashi with a lot of help from Maria Callas would be missed), and the inventive cinematography and visual image manipulations by Christopher Doyle, Pung-Leung Kwan and Yiu-Fai Lai such as the constant dividing of the screen into triptychs and diptychs would remain some of the most beautiful photographic images on film.

This is not an easy film to follow and it is most assuredly one that will grow in importance with repeated viewings. The comparison with Alain Resnais Last Year at Marienbad suggests its potency. But free the mind and enter into the world of 2046 for one of the most satisfying cinematic achievements of the recent past.

Article 2
Reference Lee, Ken., 2046 (2004), imdb 20 Oct,.2004.  HYPERLINK httpwww.imdb.comtitlett0212712 httpwww.imdb.comtitlett0212712 (3 May, 2010).

Filming was shifted from Beijing to Macau after Chinese authorities demanded to see the completed script. The director never uses scripts.

The number of the hotel room where Chow stays is 2046, which is the directors next feature length film.

Maggie Cheung wears a different cheong-san dress in each scene. There were 46 in all, though not all made it to the final cut.

Kar Wai Wong was shooting the finale, and editing the film a little over a week before its debut at Cannes.

Chosen by Les Cahiers du cinma (France) as one of the 10 best pictures of 2000 (05).
Director Kar Wai Wong found the English title for In the Mood for Love while listening to a song from a Brian Ferry CD with a similar title, Im in the Mood for Love. It is a cover of a 1930s song with the same title, Kar Wai Wong used the title and the song in an early Hong Kong trailer of the film, and it was also used in the USA trailer of the film.

During filming, Kar Wai Wong improvised often with the actors, crafting the story and mood of the film as he went along. Originally, In the Mood for Love was a much more obvious romance film, with the actors throwing witty dialog at each other and engaging in several scenes of love-making. Eventually, the actors and director decided to tone the mood down to the more subtle version that was released in theaters.

Article 3 Wong Kar-wais In the Mood for Love Like a Ritual in Transfigured Time, by Stephen Teo
Reference Teo, Stephen., Wong Kar-wais In the Mood for Love Like a Ritual in Transfigured Time, Archive.sensesofcinema Mar, 2001.  HYPERLINK httparchive.sensesofcinema.comcontents0113mood.html httparchive.sensesofcinema.comcontents0113mood.html (3 May, 2010).

Stephen Teo is the author of Hong Kong Cinema The Extra Dimensions (London BFI, 1997). He is currently engaged in his research project for a Ph.D degree at RMIT University (Melbourne).

In Dream Time
It is by no means coincidental that the two most celebrated Chinese-language films of the last two or three months - Ang Lees Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and Wong Kar-wais In the Mood for Love (2000) - hark back to old genres and times past. Some grand design of time has brought the films about. Both directors and their films recollect childhood memories of pleasures induced from going to the cinema. Both men are roughly of the same generation (Lee was born in 1954 Wong in 1958), and have come of age as directors at about the same time this, above everything else, appears to have informed their choices of genre. In the case of Ang Lee, the directors own memories of watching martial arts pictures spawned boyhood fantasies of a China that probably never existed. (1) Watching the pictures of the wuxia (sword and chivalry) genre throughout his formative childhood days evoked a dreaming time for Ang Lee - his film being in his own words, a kind of dream of China. (2) Both Ang Lee and Wong Kar-wai, each in their own ways and working in radically different genres, have tried to duplicate this kind of dream time in their respective movies.

Wongs In the Mood for Love is a romance melodrama, which tells the story of a married man (played by Tony Leung) and a married woman (played by Maggie Cheung), living in rented rooms of neighbouring apartments, who fall in love with each other while grappling with the infidelities of their respective spouses whom they discover are involved with each other. The two protagonists are thrown together into an uncertain affair which they appear not to consummate, perhaps out of social propriety or ethical concerns. As Maggie Cheungs character says We will never be like them (referring to the off-screen but apparently torrid affair of their respective spouses). The affair between Cheung and Leung assumes an air of mystique touched by intuitions of fate and lost opportunity is it a Platonic relationship based on mutual consolation and sadness arising out of the betrayal of their spouses Is it love Is it desire Did they sleep together Such ambiguity stems from the postmodern lining of the picture (its look as processed by Wongs usual collaborators, the cinematographer Chris Doyle and art director William Chang), which is more in line with Wong Kar-wais reputation as a cool, hip artist of contemporary cinema.

However, there is a conservative core to the narrative that is quite unambiguous, clearly evident in the behaviour of the central protagonists, both of whom act on the principle of moral restraint. In this regard, the film reminds me of the 1948 masterpiece Spring in a Small City, directed by Fei Mu, the plotline of which is slightly mirrored in Wongs film. (3) In Spring, a wife meets her former lover and flirts with the possibility of leaving her sick husband. In the end, she falls back on the principle of moral restraint. The director Fei Mu was reputed to have ordered his players to act on the dictum Begin with emotion, end with restraint As a result, the film ends on a note of moral triumphalism colored by a sense of sadness and regret, reinforcing the inner nobility of the characters - a theme which Wong regurgitates with the same sense of brevity and cast of subtlety. The soulful nobility of the characters in both films is a touching reminder of the didactic tradition in Chinese melodrama, where the drama serves to inspire one to moral behaviour - and when the actors are as beautiful as Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung, the note of restraint is all the more poignant and all the more ennobling (the attractiveness of the characters preying on our own natural inclinations or baser instincts building up a kind of suspense but finally leading to an anticlimax that is as close to a philosophical statement as Wong Kar-wai has ever got his audience to).

Whether or not one sees In the Mood for Love as a film about sexual desire or alternatively, about moral restraint, there isnt that much more to the plot. It lives up to its English title as a veritable mood piece, and is essentially made up of rather passive and variable substances the characters and their interchange of feelings that are nothing more than fleeting moments of time. Added to all this is Wongs dense-looking mise en scne that combines the acting, art direction, cinematography, the colours, the wardrobe, the music, into an aesthetic if also impressionistic blend of chamber drama and miniature soap opera. Wongs key elements - what older critics might call atmosphere and characterizations - are thus grounded in abstraction rather than plot, and its hard to think of a recent movie that offers just such abstract ingredients that are by themselves sufficient reasons to see the picture. But it is precisely this quality of aesthetic abstraction that makes up an ideal dreamtime of Hong Kong, which is Wongs ode to the territory.

The Melodrama of Mood
The English title itself, of course, strikes the key to the picture, suggestive of foreplay or a kind of mind-massage. What Wong Kar-wai does for an hour and a half is to butter up his audience for two or three levels of mood play a mood for love, to begin with but even more substantially, a mood for nostalgia, and a mood for melodrama. In Wongs rendition of the melodrama, we have a romance picture that works mainly as a two-hander chamber play, illustrated by contemplative snippets of popular music that also help to recreate the ambience of Hong Kong in the 1960s. The elements of nostalgia and melodrama that play on our feelings are Wongs way of paying tribute to a period and to a genre. The Chinese melodrama (known in Chinese as wenyi pian) is traditionally more akin to soap opera - a form that assumes classic expression in the 60s with the rise of Mandarin pictures from both Hong Kong and Taiwan (particularly adaptations from the literary works of the author Qiong Yao, often starring Brigitte Lin).

The terminology wenyi is an abbreviation of wenxue (literature) and yishu (art), thus conferring on the melodrama genre the distinctions of being a literary and civilized form (as distinct from the wuxia genre, which is a martial and chivalric tradition). Wong seizes on the literary or civilized antecedence of the genre to water down the soap opera tendencies that were characteristic of 60s melodramas. (4) Wongs interest in the genre is not so much narrative as associative. For instance, he equates the melodrama with the 60s, a period that for the director, yields manifold allusions to memory, time, and place. I was born in Shanghai and moved to Hong Kong the year I was five (i.e. around 1963). .For me it was a very memorable time. In those days, the housing problems were such that youd have two or three families living under the same roof, and theyd have to share the kitchen and toilets, even their privacy. I wanted to make a film about those days and I wanted to go back to that period ., Wong says. (5)

The melodrama genre itself becomes an apt metaphor for the 60s, with many films of the period dealing with just such housing problems and families living under the same roof as Wong speaks of. The invocation of wenyi pian carries a sense of period and place. The Chinese title, Huayang Nianhua (translated in the subtitles as Full Bloom but more accurately meaning those wonderful varied years), is more suggestive of period nostalgia and the Shanghai association, pointing to an iridescent, kaleidoscopic age of bygone elegance and diversity (and it is actually the title of a Chinese pop song from the 40s which we hear played on the radio, sung by the late singer-actress Zhou Xuan who popularized the song in a 1947 Hong Kong Mandarin movie). In Wongs hands, the genre itself and the period of the 60s is a stage of transfigured time that isnt fixed diachronically. His 60s happens to coalesce around other synchronic recollections of the memorabilia of earlier periods (such as the 40s or the 50s), through the evocations of popular culture as a whole that largely recalls the glories of Shanghai in music (citing the songs of Zhou Xuan, for example), in fashion (the cheongsam), novels (the martial arts serials that Tony Leung writes with input from Maggie, that recall the methods of the old school writers of martial arts fiction in 30s and 40s Shanghai), and the cinema (the unstated allusion to Spring in a Small City).

In watching the film unfold, the audience itself is partaking in a ritual in transfigured time (to borrow the title of a 1946 Maya Deren film (6)), and each member of the audience, depending on their ages, could in theory go as far back in time as they wish to the moment that holds the most formative nostalgic significance for them. Of course, Wongs skill in recreating Hong Kong of the 60s seems so assured and so transfixed to those of us born in the post-war baby-boom years who grew up in the 60s that it is more than enough to recall nothing but the 60s (with the rise in our consciousness at the time of Western culture and accoutrements, plus the efforts to blend East and West, as evoked by the references to Nat King Coles Spanish tunes, Japan, electric cookers, the handbag, Tony Leungs Vaselined hair, eating steaks garnished by mustard, and eating noodles and congee in takeaway flasks).

So successful is Wongs recreation of the past that we tend to forget that he has only shown us the bare outlines of Hong Kong in 1962 (the year when the narrative begins). Wong has created an illusion so perfect that it seems hardly possible that the director has got away with really just the mere hints of a locality to evoke time and place (the film was shot in Bangkok rather than in Hong Kong with the feeling perhaps that the former could better convey the idea of transposed time, and not so much to capture authentic details of the seedy alley ways and sidestreets, through which the protagonists pass or meet each other, that have supposedly vanished from modern Hong Kong). In other words, Wong Kar-wai has successfully transfixed his audience in a dreamtime without the necessary big-budget frills so that it actually seems a bit too dissociative to think of In the Mood for Love as a dreamtime movie. It doesnt, for example, indulge in the kind of overt symbolism such as one may associate with Dalis famous painting The Persistence of Memory where we see time pieces melting in a desert-like landscape, symbolizing time lost. I mention Dalis painting because in Wongs films, we do see persistent shots of clocks in what has now become the characteristic style of Wong Kar-wai (being so persistent, they actually invoke a surreal sense of time melting away, as in the Dali painting) those scenes in In the Mood for Love where the camera dollies down from a giant Siemens clock hanging overhead in Maggie Cheungs workplace to catch Maggie in a pensive moment. In Wongs deliberative manner, this is exactly the moment that would conjure up the 60s in his body of work, with the same motif and the same actress (indeed, essentially the same character) from Wongs key work in the early phase of his career Days of Being Wild (1990), also set in the 60s.

A Literary Vision
Such visual motifs are the obvious affirmations of Wongs style, denoting his preoccupations with time and space. However, in keeping with his theme of moral restraint, Wong himself appears to show a much more restrained hand in delineating his visual style, which seems less semaphoric and more attuned to the purposes of a narrative, however slight that narrative may appear to be. The film may function basically as a mood piece, with much to wonder at in terms of visual splendours, but there is no visual motif that goes astray. In the Mood for Love is a virtual cheongsam show, for example, and who among the Chinese of the baby-boom generation could fail to be moved by the allusive and sensual properties of the body-hugging cheongsam (or qipao in Mandarin) The array of cheongsams worn by Maggie Cheung is Wongs cinematic way of indicating the passage of time, but Wong also milks it for its erogenous impact on the mind and soul. Maggie Cheung clad in the cheongsam is surely every Chinese persons idea of the eternal Chinese woman in the modern age, evoking memories of elegant Chinese mothers in the 50s and 60s (when the gown was still in fashion) as well as memories of the Chinese intellectual female still bonded to tradition (recalling the image of the writer Eileen Chang, or Zhou Yuwen, the character played by actress Wei Wei in Spring in a Small City).

Much more significant, in my opinion, than all these visual configurations is Wong Kar-wais predilections for covering his ground with literary references. It is often forgotten that Wong is a highly literary director, and part of the magic that he wields in movies like Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express (1994) and Ashes of Time (1994) is the consummate way with which he induces his audience to auscultate to his narratives. The monologues and voiceovers of those films are some of the most literary pieces to be heard in Hong Kong cinema. Of late, Wong has taken to inserting passages from books as inter-titles studding the course of the film, somewhat in the manner of silent movies, or in the manner of epigraphs in essays - a practice seen in Ashes of Time (where he quotes passages from the book by noted martial arts writer Jin Yong that was the source of his screenplay), and now in In the Mood for Love where he quotes lines from a 1972 novella, Intersection, by Liu Yichang, a Shanghainese expatriate writer living in Hong Kong. Gone is the voiceover narrative or the multiple monologues that he ascribes to each of his characters (finding classic expression in Days of Being Wild). The story of Intersection, the Chinese title of which is Duidao, tells of the way in which two characters lives - strangers to each other - appear to intersect in ways apparently determined by the nature of the city, and the structure of the novella provides a direct form of inspiration for Wongs use of the intersecting motif in In the Mood for Love.

The influence of Liu Yichangs story cannot be underestimated - so taken by the story has Wong been that he has actually put out an ancillary product in the wake of the films release in Hong Kong last year a book of photographs and stills from the film illustrating an abridged English translation of Liu Yichangs story. Its a curious kind of book, seemingly without any theme or focus, which actually contains a hidden title Tte-bche A Wong Kar-wai Project. Wong explains the significance of the title in a foreword

The first work by Liu Yichang I read was Duidao. The title is a Chinese translation of tte-bche, which describes stamps that are printed top to bottom facing each other. Duidao centres round the intersection of two parallel stories - of an old man and a young girl. One is about memories, the other anticipation. To me tte-bche is more than a term for stamps or intersection of stories. It can be the intersection of light and colour, silence and tears. Tte-bche can also be the intersection of time a novel published in 1972, a movie released in 2000, both intersecting to become a story of the 60s. (7)

Tte-bche - the intersecting motif that makes up Wongs narrative style in other films, notably Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express, Ashes of Time, and Fallen Angels (1995), which are narratives of parallel stories, finally finds its mature expression in In the Mood for Love where the motif assumes a diacritical mode. The poetic nature of Wongs images and his style stems from this literary conceit, and the serial-like connotations of Chinese literature where the chapters intersect with one another (the zhang hui form) to build up the suspense of what happens next. Wongs literary sensibility makes him unique among modern-day directors who would probably not have conceived of an ending whose spirit is basically literary in nature, embedded in storytelling and myth. This ending, taking place among the ruins of Angkor Wat (subconsciously calling to mind the ruins of Spring in a Small City which similarly endow a sense of melancholic nobility to the chief protagonist), is one of Wong Kar-wais more conclusive and heart-stopping moments, filled with secrets that must never be revealed in a kind of compact between the director and the viewer, and finally infused with a sense of regret and Zen-like magnanimity.

Article 5 The Cinema of  Wong Kar-wai - A Writing Game, compiled by Fiona A. Villella
Reference Villella, Fiona A., The Cinema of Wong Kar-wai - A Writing Game, rchive.sensesofcinema 2001.  HYPERLINK httparchive.sensesofcinema.comcontents0113wong-symposium.html httparchive.sensesofcinema.comcontents0113wong-symposium.html (3 May, 2010).

Collaborating with stock company (Chris Doyle, William Chang, Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung) and shooting haphazardly, in constant improvisational mode, Wong Kar-wai has brought to our cinema screens over the last ten years images of modern living, urban alienation, and forlorn love in a dazzlingly intimate, fluid, poetic and fragmented formal register.

A call was recently put out for impressionistic contributions on any aspect of Wongs career a single film, a particular character, a moment, a stylistic aspect, the way his work gets critically discussed, his key collaborators, his shooting style and so on. Each entry was required to centre upon, or use as a starting point, a one-word title. The final statements collected below range from the personal to the political, the deeply heartfelt to the bluntly critical.

WONG KAR-WAI filmography
As Tears Go By (1989), Days of Being Wild (1990), Ashes of Time (1994), Chungking Express (1994), Fallen Angels (1995), Happy Together (1997), In the Mood for Love (2000)

Backside
Wong Kar-wais In the Mood for Love is a radiant homage to the neglected posterior. I dont mean to detract in any way from Maggie Cheungs overall highly nuanced and restrained performance when I say that she is almost deliberately, it seems, defined by the coy welcome offered by her lustrous buttocks in glorious retreat. The physicality of her acting and the phenomenal space she occupies on the screen is, for me, what makes this one of the great mime performances in film, equal to that of Marlene Dietrich in The Devil Is a Woman (Joseph von Sternberg, 1935).

As Cheung sashays into the distance, one high-heeled foot sartorially censoring the other, she takes on the aspect of a dominatrix moulded in showers of light. Like Renoirs paintings of servant girls, her skin and garments attract the light as her director sheaths her in tight, high-necked dresses that deny the body, yet hint at the promise beneath. Placing her squarely in the battlefield of love, the director must then camouflage his star for combat. At his bidding she imitates wallpaper, curtains, jungles, tropical beaches, the promise of blue skies. At times her lower body blends so effectively with the background that she becomes a supernatural presence - nothing but a floating, disproportionately large, head out of a Chinese ghost story.

But inevitably, the eye is drawn down the length of her spine again to her backside, offering an enticement that can only be yearned for but never fully satisfied. The beauty of her performance is that, restricted by convention, and unable to openly express her desire, Cheung resorts to the subliminal use of body language. She freezes her face but liberates her tail, which speaks more eloquently of her inner yearnings and turmoil than does her dialogue. Watching this startling display, one is reminded of the way Garbo used her hands and body in her pre-sound days.

Maggie Cheung is a mime of extraordinary subtlety as she proffers her protuberant flesh to the nostalgic ardour of Tony Leung. Her bottom is a beauty of regal proportions, communicating her character to the spellbound audience. To her bewildered lover, she must seem a priestess of fecundity or an immodest Venus in retreat.
by Dmetri Kakmi                

Blue
Blue is the color of the rain soaked streets on a languorous summer night as the paths of Su Lizhen (Maggie Cheung) and Tide (Andy Lau) cross in Days of Being Wild. But there is no spark in their passing encounter. Like the accursed ghosts of Greek tragedies wandering the earth without purpose or direction, they walk aimlessly to pass the lonely hours, to fill the void of unnerving silence. They speak dispassionately, as the saturating weight of sadness that ladens the atmosphere seems to exhaust even their deepest thoughts, and all that is left is the polite exchange.

Blue is a sense of regret - of a chance encounter and missed opportunity that forms a closed, perpetual cycle of incompletion, loss, and want. It traces the shape of an imperfect circle - a hollow vessel, an oblate soul. It is a fragmented glimpse of infinite possibility from the omniscient windows of an unoccupied telephone booth a failed attempt at connection, stifled by inaction. Like a spiritual bremsstrahlung, their souls have passed through the influence of a greater life force, and have now lost their energy. Now weak and unnecessary, there is only the shell of existence, the fading memory. It is a truncated portrait of a drifter - a tale of hopelessness and despair - of the figurative blues. It is an inertia that will not yield against the potential of true love, but instead, contaminates like a virus, and each hopeless, unrequited lover inevitably succumbs to a lethargy of the will. It is an ache of passivity that hovers innocuously through the impersonal city, and only the restless who venture into the empty evening streets find themselves incurably infected, inducted into some reluctant, nocturnal fraternity, eternally condemned to perform this somnambulistic, melancholic waltz of the wounded heart.
by Acquarello                

Creation
Is it really possible for a commercial filmmaker to create his work in the same way as a novelist or a playwright In the Mood For Love may be the most luxuriant film because it seems that Wong Kar-wai had the luxury himself to endlessly recreate the work until a final version appeared.

He seems to have been able to film and refilm, think and rethink, and use a multitude of apparently interchangeable collaborators (most notably cinematographers), before he has pronounced the film, for the moment, at an end. Part of his process of elaboration has also been to remove and eliminate, most notably the physical love scene.

When it was finished he continued to elaborate by issuing the films visuals in a book, Duidao (a novella by Hong Kong writer Liu Yichang), which tells a different story. It exists like one of those little fish that live in the big fishs mouth. The In the Mood For Love website goes beyond the usual puffery and stills. Here, we can find, under the Kitchen link for instance, details of Maggies meals when dining alone, Maggies summer and winter meals for her home and her snacks and fruits home according to the seasons.

I wonder, do Wong Kar-wais films ever cease being created Chungking Express started life as a Chinese art-house noir and went on to become both a Tarantino video (that surely has negative implications) and the inspiration for a Tarantino movie. After Tarantino, it has dribbled into the consciousness of a thousand actual and would be filmmakers some not a million miles away.

Then (in rebellion) Wong Kar-wai turns everything upside down again and makes the coolest, most enigmatic love story in which so little actually happens that the audience spends its time wondering whether what they are seeing or have seen actually took place at all either on screen or off.
by Geoff Gardner                

Dali-esque Time
What do you do when you meet the spouse of the person your spouse is having an affair with Complicated Should the two pained souls succumb to their carnal desires and have an affair themselves We would clearly forgive them this infidelity. Or should they retard this dilemma and have it slowly grow into an emerging tacit love, and replay the painful love forever and ever They would gain our utmost admiration. But should we even be privy to what lies in their hearts Secrets, melancholia, and the passing chance at love not seized become the central emotions in Wong Kar-wais In the Mood For Love. Like an orchestral conductor, Wong Kar-wai plays these emotions by manipulating what Andrei Tarkovsky referred to as the time-pressure inherent in every shot. So that the rhythm of each succeeding image becomes bathed in a glorious hue of temporal indeterminacy. The images in In the Mood for Love do not narrate, they linger, describe, and emote. The time of the images does not slow down, it melts down from the burning passion of the two would-be-lovers, as they tease each other with hushed glances and sexually charged quotidian encounters. These chance moments of physical proximity on staircases and hallways become what if memory-images suspended in time and space and protracted to a level of pure character subjectivity, a consciousness of Time heightened by banal moments that attain monumentality through the temporal melt down of the filmic image.
by Donato

Desire
Wongs leads, from Faye in Chungking Express to Mr Chow in In The Mood For Love display a repressed desire. In several ways, Wongs films are all about submerged passion and hidden desires. Ironically, they are also fused with a saturated emotion that resonates in every scene. It is in the characters repression of desire that emotion can be felt most. It is about what is not said or acted upon on screen, that which the audience is aware of but not shown. There is a three dimensional depth that exists behind every character and every door. Loneliness, isolation and yearning consume protagonists Mrs Chan and Mr Chow in In The Mood For Love. Their characters status as outsider is constantly reiterated as they often choose to eat alone, and avoid human contact and interrogation.

Mrs Chan enjoys going to movies and both protagonists share a love for martial arts fiction, another form of escapism. Shots of narrow hallways, people slamming doors, and narrow staircases highlight the claustrophobia of apartment living. However, they also accentuate the alienation and distance that prevails regardless of physical proximity. In Chungking Express, a sense of detachment is generated by the mere fact that not all the characters are given names - the lady in the blonde wig and policemen whose most identifiable feature is their police number. There is a detachment of emotion, a sense of the characters being simply another set of elements amongst the visual array of urbanity. In The Mood For Loves main protagonists are often seen talking to other characters off screen, highlighting the separateness between individuals. Consequently, when characters share on-screen space, it is almost claustrophobic because of the heavy presence of repressed longings and unspoken desires. Intersecting paths and missed moments are the only key to the characters true intent. Dictating the arbitrary nature of romance, Wong creates a visual pastiche of eccentric visual rhymes and coincidences. Ultimately, the desires and yearnings of his characters ensure an ambiguity that denies closure. The relationship between Mrs Chan and Mr Chow retains ambiguity, continuing a thematic tradition that runs throughout Wongs previous films Chungking Express, Fallen Angels and Happy Together.
by Elizabeth Wright                

Emotion
To write anything about Wong Kar-wai is like trying to focus clearly on an object seen through a mighty waterfall. To so much as think of his name is to unleash a mental cascade of the richest, most vibrantly emotional audiovisual material of the past twenty years. Wong penetrates the emotional centres of his lonely characters fantasies and feelings, that place in most people least likely ever to connect with the outside world, and sets up his camera there. From this vantage point he sends them spinning out past each other, at perpetual cross-purposes, never connecting, at best colliding for a few ecstatically freeze-framed seconds.

They say no man is an island, but in Wongs work everyone is a self-contained universe, governed by its own laws of desire and following its own eccentric path in search of that ever elusive state Happy Together. Rather than bewail this hopeless state of affairs from a distance, Wong chooses to celebrate the intensity of these great arcs of emotion through a visceral intimacy only he can achieve. Somehow this makes his films all the more heartbreaking. At their spontaneous best they show us film narrative melting away, leaving us with a cinema of pure feeling.
by Maximilian Le Cain                

Look
For In the Mood for Love especially, Wong Kar-wai has declared one of the decisive influences to be Jacques Demys Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) where impossible love plays itself out between the banality of everyday material concerns (life in a gas station) and a luxuriousness of look. As with Demys film, In the Mood for Love is a film with a lush visuality, one in which decor (all those flower patterns on curtains, wallpaper, and dresses) takes off from story and even takes it over (insofar as whatever the free will of characters in the narrative, they will serve most as pieces in the overall visual design). Time slows down repetition of situations robs actions of their uniqueness a languorousness enters into the image through slow, lingering pauses, looks, and the meandering ephemerality of steam and smoke that waft lazily through the scenes. By these means, the film impels the spectator to look, to see the film immediately and predominantly as a formal experience. And yet like Demys film (where what really makes love impossible is the fact that Nino Castelnuovo has to go away to fight the Algerian war), In the Mood for Love reiterates that beyond form, there is the inescapable presence of the historical and the social. There is intense nostalgia in the film - for example, Nat King Cole on the soundtrack - but it is a nostalgia set against the impositions and transitions of modernity. From the initial premise that a tight housing market brings strangers into proximity to the references at the end of the film to inter-nation migrations and to the Cambodian war, In the Mood for Love reminds us that post-modernity is not only a style but a way of living concrete issues of our contemporaneity.
by Dana Polan                

Love - Things Wong Kar-wai Taught Me About Love
Requited love is an impossibility.

You will fall in love only once. Obstacles will prevail. The rest of your life is spent recovering.
Eroticising their possessions will be the pinnacle of your sexual fulfilment.
Anything that distracts you from the pain of your loss is good. Some people are more successful in this regard than others.

Hook up with someone. Live with them. Sleep with them. Tag along. Dont be fooled. You are only a transitory distraction. Ask for commitment. Declare your love. Watch the set up evaporate.
The most potent way to exist is to occupy someone elses imagination.
Desire is kept eternally alive by the impossibility of contact.
Modern communication enabling technologies will only heighten your sense of desolation by making you more keenly aware of the fact that no one is trying to call.
by Alice Dallow                

Possibility
The city is an engine of possibility. There are chance encounters lurking in every intersection. No amount of effort on the part of the city dweller can avoid the possibility of possibility. Just being in the city and of the city is enough. Wong Kar-wais cinema is the cinema of the city as a machine for possibility. His characters may be loveable or unloveable, plausible or implausible, but they are all expressions of the space of the city itself. The city, which is the real object of love in all Wong Kar-wai films. It is not always love that his characters find. It is not the lover they find or the kind of love they seek. What they find are the possibilities opened up by the city. Characters meet, or rather, collide on this screen of the city. They mingle their affects, create a zone between their bodies in which something happens. Something that is neither the one nor the others, but a third creation. His characters are always making something, with someone, other than what they expected. But making something, affirming their powers, enhancing their attributes. That is how it is, in the city, if you are of the city. The city of possibility. The city as possibility. The city of cinema. The cinema of Wong Kar-wai. The love affair of Wong Kar-wai.
by McKenzie Wark                

Repetition
An echo of pain through time, David Thomas (1)
When Tony Leung looks into the mirror in In The Mood for Love, it is ten years after Days Of Being Wild you can see that hes aged. Whether hes matured, I dont know (Im not complicated, he insists). He doesnt need the youthful gesture of combing his hair any longer, but hes still smoking those filterless cigarettes, over and over, thinking about Maggie Cheung, presumably, as he sits behind the glass office door. In another office, is a big clock that echoes the clock from Days Of Being Wild. The woman under it is no longer the young, tender being that seemed to sit at the office box of the stadium forever.

She doesnt dress casually anymore instead shes wearing those uncomfortable, classy gowns as if to cover up her fragility. Shes Maggie Cheung and shes as beautiful as ever, but on occasion she cant suppress the pain of disappointment any longer. Shes aged, whether shes matured, I dont know. Theyre both going through an endless series of repetitions, always the same, always slightly different, still trapped in a past that obsesses its chronicler, Wong Kar-wai, to such a degree that he has turned the somber, damp green hues of the older film into a hothouse of colors. Theyre both In The Mood For Love and the unidentified quotation at the end seems to be about the filmmaker rather than any of the two. It talks about seeing memories through glass and hoping the glass will break. In one of their rituals, as much about their absent partners as about themselves, Maggie Cheung runs out of frames, as if she could produce the vibrations to shatter the glass. In the repetition her inner turmoil bursts into tears, while Leungs voiceover says that its not real. The feelings on the screen are never real and theyre produced by the repetition of real acts, in different contexts, trapped forever in the material of the film, looking the same, looking different everytime, coalescing past, present and future into a projection. In The Mood For Love may be a projection Wong had in mind when he shot Days Of Being Wild or a repetition of a longing, a mood, a vibrant dream state, condemned to make its eternal loop in the protagonists of Wongs films. Like them, hes aged. Whether hes matured I dont know. But I think he has and I pray that Im right, everyday.
by Christoph Huber            

Space
A clich of Hollywood romances, parodied innumerable times is the scene in which two lovers run towards each other on a white beach or across a sunlit meadow, arms outstretched embracingly. Their physical trajectory across the relative vastness dividing them represents their emotional coming together, the space they traverse a special place beyond the daily to-and-fro.

In the West these images portray love to viewers in terms of immediately comprehensible realities. But what happens if you inhabit a space where there are no meadows or beaches, where the light is artificial, and you live so close to your neighbour as to be little more than a changing shape on his or her retina. Then you need to create distance, desire needs space to breathe, to detach itself from the frenzy of familiar stimuli, in order to develop into romance. Here, space is calculated in centimetres, not metres, and romance grows not in leaps and bounds but tiny increments, through the smallest of gestures, and the pauses between gestures.

In the cramped world of In The Mood for Love, physical space - the foundation of personal space - is a much-valued element. That is why mirrors, which feature prominently throughout the film, are so prized. Where there is no space, they at least give an illusion of it. Wongs protagonists live in single rooms, work in congested offices and travel the corridors that connect the two, encountering each other on stairs and in alleyways so narrow that they must turn sideways to pass, acutely aware of each other, intimate strangers, deeply connected in their thoughts yet superficially separate. Wong makes many visual references to their dualistic condition by simultaneously juxtaposing and separating Mr Chan and Mrs Chow, as we see one or the other through a screen, in a mirror or bounded by rectilinear lines of walls and doorways of their shared space. When they finally find a place of their own it is a Western-style caf, where they sit in a cubicle divided by the bench table between them. The camera pans back and forth tracking their (gastronomic) dialogue, here as throughout, physical space structuring their relationship.

In Wongs film, confinement is both a sociological and psychological condition. In The Mood For Love is a study of love in small spaces, not a miniature world, however, but a prison. Love grows under the watchful eyes of the prison-keepers, and is communicated not with the largesse, even excess of the West, but in its inhabitants subtle code, one so muted and circumscribed as to fail them, whose love will finally remain enclosed forever in a tiny sub-let room.
by Bernard Hemingway            

Third-World
Wong Kar-wais Happy Together might be seen as a turning point in cinematic negotiations of where Hong Kong and Taiwan figure in the global popular imagination. Hong Kong and Taiwan (and also China and Singapore) are still often cinematically represented to Western audiences (especially by American filmmakers) as exotic locales, places where the foreign, the ancient, the mysterious and superstitious (martial arts, fengshui, triads, and so on), the black market, and ubiquitous chaotic street markets are shown to be coexisting with the modern, Westernized world of urban high-rises, international finance, Starbucks and McDonalds, international terrorism and intrigue, military technology, yachts, jets, and so on. (for example, see especially action and fantasy films, such as the continuing wildly popular James Bond series). This state of coexistence between the ancient and the modern emphasizes the sense that Asian places like Hong Kong and Taiwan, though thoroughly internationalized in many aspects, are however not cosmopolitan in the Western sense, but are still in some ways part of the developingThird world. However, the appearance of a movie like Happy Together signals a moment when Hong Kong film has now taken to imagining its own Third-World other representing Argentina as an underdevelopedexotic place for Chinese to visit, where Chinese fantasies and experiences can be explored in a non-Chinese subaltern space (Note Wongs main characters are temporary visitors from Hong Kong and Taiwan, clearly not illegal immigrants forced out of their home countries for economic or political reasons). Argentina, in Wongs film, is the end of the world, the place where his characters can go slumming - to escape their own families, society, and geography, to work, and to have exotic and erotic experiences in cheap, spacious, affordable surroundings. This has up until recently been the kind of thing that (North) Americans and (Western) Europeans can be seen doing in some films, but rarely are Chinese represented this way. As such, this film represents a new shared imaginary world where America, Europe, Hong Kong and Taiwan are now more alike than different, at least in terms of development and modernization.

For such a story as we see in this film can only take place if less wealthy and less developed countries are simply there, waiting to be narrative backdrops for the more important events of our own more modernized globe-hopping lives, culture, economy, and society. This takes place at the cinematographic level as well - Wong takes this space that is only a temporary on-location background, distorts it through various lighting and camera techniques, and cuts it up as he pleases during editing process.
by Nick Kaldis                

Nick Kaldis is Assistant Professor of German, Russian, and East Asian Languages at the State University of New York at Binghamton, where he teaches Chinese Language, Literature, and Film. He has published articles on Lu Xuns poetry, and on PRC and Taiwan cinema.

Time
In the Mood for Love, a mysterious, elliptical film, is a modern-day Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945), that is to say a middle-class tale of repression and restraint transformed into a fable of longing and stoicism by the directors command of potent images.

Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung are caught in loveless marriages. Through a series chance encounters, which could have been enacted against Abbas The Day Before You Came, they meet and over time come to rely on each other for the company and affection withheld them by their respective, absent partners. However, circumstances, entrenched behaviour, and perhaps even a touch of habitual monkish denial, prevent them from embracing the new joy that has quietly entered their lives. Rather than regular furtive collisions scheduled between noodles and a cup of coffee, they settle for languid looks, loaded conversations and small, touching, intimacies that sear the soul. Not since Peter Greenaways The Pillow Book (1995) has such delicate eroticism suffused the very fabric of a film. Its the kind of impossible romance one dreams into being in the dead of night. Cut adrift and restless, floating somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, life is transformed into a series of fleeting, impressionistic moments to be played with as one wishes.

Scenes are replayed and given a different accent, interpretation, and even totally new outcome. Ghostlike, one drifts in slow motion down corridors and up stairways, past curtains billowing with the sighs of love as Nat King Cole croons in Spanish. The world shimmers. The inner eye, transfixed by an irrecoverable and distant past, transforms a tawdry alley, a cramped apartment, a shabby basement eatery, into an exotic, loaded-with-meaning movie set against which the heart can be pierced by tumultuous love.

But movie set is perhaps not accurate. It may be more correct to say that this is a glossy high-fashion magazine spread dreamt up by Diana Vreeland, full of ennui and obsessive, hypnotic attention to detail. See the fabric drape and reveal the curve and flow of the body beneath. Be mesmerised by the stylised hand gestures that metamorphose a flesh and blood human being into a liquid mannequin of desire. Admire the adherence to ritualised space. If this suggests superficiality to some, I remind them of Oscar Wildes maxim that it is only the superficial that believe looks are not important.

In Wong Kar-wai, physical reality, if not altogether obsolete, is malleable clay. It can melt, change colour, or vanish to allow the players to stand against a universe of varying shades representative of their complete and utter surrender to the act of yearning. Time exists only in so far as when the loved one will call or depart. As for the flesh and blood human beings suffering for our delectation, they become gods and goddesses, able to transmute the base metal of their anguish into the embodiment of a lost time, of what might have been had fate been on their side.
by Dmetri Kakmi                

Dmetri Kakmi is an essayist and a critic. He works for Penguin Books Australia as an editor.

Wrongheaded
If I offend, it is better at a distance. Byron
The framework tends, I think, to inhibit rational analysis and encourages precisely the self-indulgent and self-serving attitude of film critics toward Wong Kar-wai to which I referred in my comment on In the Mood for Love. Im not terribly interested in films that may or may not conjure up a stream of vaguely linked nouns and adjectives. It will be discovered that nearly any work of a certain type will do that. (For example, remove Hong Kong, of course, and perhaps Pop and Voice-over, and see how many films fit the bill. Thousands.)

Whats really needed is a critique that begins to link the fondness for such films and filmmakers to the conditions of the booming entertainment industry and stock market of the late 1990s, i.e., an understanding that there are a good many people around with a good deal of time on their hands and without much social or historical knowledge, who are getting rich (or at least quite comfortable) by means they dont comprehend and who instinctively fear any concrete, probing, urgent look at social life. The Wong Kar-wai infatuation will, Im convinced, appear absurd in a few years time to large numbers of people. It should to more now.
by David Walsh

Article 5 Wong Kar-wai (Wang Jiawei)b. 1958, Shanghai, China.by Elizabeth Wright
Wright, Elizabeth., Wong Kar-wai, archive.sensesofcinema May. 2002.  HYPERLINK httparchive.sensesofcinema.comcontentsdirectors02wong.html httparchive.sensesofcinema.comcontentsdirectors02wong.html (3 May, 2010).

Elizabeth Wright recently completed her honours year in film studies at Monash University (Melbourne). Her thesis focused on the film aesthetic of Wong Kar-wai.

Wong Kar-wai is undeniably an auteur of striking and salient cinema, standing apart from much mainstream Hong Kong cinema. Wong belongs to the mid-1980s Second New Wave of Hong Kong filmmakers who continued to develop the innovative and fresh aesthetic initiated by the original New Wave. The Second Wave, which includes directors such as Eddie Fong, Stanley Kwan and Clara Law, is often seen as a continuation of the first as many of these directors worked as assistants to First Wave directors such as Tsui Hark, Ann Hui and Patrick Tam (with whom Wong worked and collaborated). The innovation of this group of filmmakers was linked to the social and political issues facing Hong Kong as well as an artistic impetus. The uncertainty with which Hong Kong citizens faced the 1984 Sino-British Agreement outlining the handover of Hong Kong to China forced Hong Kong residents and filmmakers alike to confront and examine their relationship with China. This issue was translated into film by the Second Wave of cinema but done so with introspection rather than outright cynicism that brought Hong Kong cinema to a new level of maturity. (2) Consequently, the themes connected to identity and Hong Kongs relation to China were broadened and modernised. The identity of Hong Kong is perpetually marked by its closeness to the motherland China and its Western link as a British colony. Yet in the face of its history, Hong Kong has duly created its own culturally specific identity, one that inevitably combines both elements of the West and Mainland China. The cinema of Hong Kong reflects this notion of a dual identity, combining to create a third, localised identity. Significant in this respect is Hong Kong cinemas New Wave movement, which rose to prominence in 1979.

Varying from his New Wave counterparts preoccupation with the 1997 handover, Patrick Tams contribution to the New Wave movement came via his interest in the influence of the West and Japan on Hong Kong. His exploration of a society rapidly consuming Western and Japanese popular culture led him to reveal the no mans land of Hong Kongs cultural, spiritual and geographical dislocation. Tams interest in themes of dislocation and alienation can be identified in the work of his protg Wong Kar-wai. Notably, Wong was the scriptwriter of Tams 1987 Final Victory and Tam supervised the editing on Wongs 1991 Days of Being Wild. (5) Both directors combined their preoccupation with themes of isolation and dislocation with a striking visual aesthetic. It is this exact visual and thematic amalgamation that signifies Wongs mode of filmmaking. He works outside of the usual representational approaches that underpin classical narrative cinema and transcends artistic boundaries. Moments, questions and answers are infinite for Wong as he attempts to charter the terrain of his lovelorn outsiders. Wongs status as a postmodern auteur sees him delve into moments that are linked to both history and the personal, whether directly or indirectly. Notions of identity and the ever-present fusion between East and West find context in the themes of love, loneliness and alienation that pervade his protagonists. Tension between the past and present is linked to memory, desire, time, space and environment. Hong Kong cinemas complex status as both a national and transnational cinema as well as its relation to mainland China are distinct issues in the quest to define Hong Kong cinema. Wongs art of filmmaking is crucial in discussing an innovative and inimitable cinema that is at once collective and exclusive. His focus on detail over totality consolidates his talent for creating a distinct mood and atmosphere, a visual pastiche of colours and emotions.

After obtaining a diploma in graphic design from the Hong Kong Polytechnic School in 1980, Wong become a television production assistant. Following work on several television drama series, he began working as a scriptwriter for television and then later for films. Wongs directorial debut As Tears Go By (1988) marked his unique visual style and was screened as part of the Critics Week at the 1989 Cannes International Film Festival. Wongs next film Days of Being Wild, which featured several of Hong Kongs beautiful and popular young stars, won five Hong Kong Film Awards, including Best Film and Best Director. His following effort, Ashes of Time (1994), varied greatly in genre, successfully subverting the conventions of the period martial-arts drama. During a break in the post-production of Ashes of Time, Wong made Chungking Express (1994), which later became a cult hit. Following this came Fallen Angels, which received considerable critical success when it was premiered at the 1995 Toronto Film Festival. In 1997, Happy Together premiered at the Cannes Film Festival where it garnered a Best Director Award for Wong. In 2000, Wongs In The Mood For Love was also awarded Cannes accolades, including Best Actor for Tony Leung Chiu-wai and the Technical Prize. Wong is currently completing his latest film entitled 2046, his first science fiction film to date.
 As with Wongs other films such as Chungking Express, Days of Being Wild, Happy Together and Fallen Angels, In the Mood for Love dictates the arbitrary nature of romance and the notion of the missed moment. In fact, the permeating concept of the moment is a crucial component of Wongs oeuvre. He consistently employs a signature parallelling and intersecting rhetoric in which his characters arbitrarily cross paths. Wongs protagonists are most often revealed to be a set of individuals existing within the visual array of urbanity. As in Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express and Fallen Angels, Hong Kong provides the ideal setting for this exposition of human contact within a buzzing cosmopolitan city that is both vibrant and brash. Wong successfully grants introspective gazes at his characters (usually in sets of twos), exploring their insecurities, personal motives and ultimately the random nature of relationships. With In the Mood for Love, the focus centres on the jilted figures of Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) and Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung Man-yuk). Their isolation and longing is transformed into a melange of intersecting paths and poignantly shared moments in which the possibility of a soulful connection is entertained. Again, Wongs arbitrary rhetoric finds expression in the poetic and brightly drenched tones of his unique filmic aesthetic, and his much-loved themes of loneliness, isolation, and longing rise to the surface. However, whilst In the Mood for Love incorporates all of his usual stylistic and thematic traits, it also ascends to a new level where the cultural significance of Wongs setting is explored in greater detail.

A title card at the beginning of In the Mood for Love reads It is a restless moment. Hong Kong 1962. This verse immediately triggers the mood of both the protagonists and the wider, social environment. At this time in 1962, 13 years after Mao and the Communist partys rise to power in Mainland China, Hong Kong remained a British Colony. However, during the 1960s there was considerable unrest as a result of the wider social and political situation that was existing in the world. The threat of the spread of Communism inspired the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States that was to centre heavily on Southeast Asia as a focal point for the competition between the global powers. In addition, the Vietnam War and Chinas support for the North Vietnamese Communist regime made the threat of Communism genuine. Naturally, Hong Kongs proximity to Southeast Asia made it a serious candidate for the Domino theory of a looming Red presence ready to advance upon any territory. Chinas hostile opposition of capitalism and imperialism also increased Hong Kong citizens fears that China would not wait for the end of Britains lease in 1997 to regain control of the territory. Many Hong Kong residents saw it in their best interests to leave Hong Kong and find homes elsewhere.

In both Days of Being Wild and In the Mood for Love, Wong recreates a 60s Hong Kong that is both nostalgic and contemporary, evoking both tradition and modernity. Significantly, the 60s era represents the childhood period of the directors of the Second Wave. Wong himself was five years old when he moved from Shanghai to Hong Kong. Thus, the recreation of this period is deeply nostalgic and sentimental in its theme of Hong Kong as home. Wongs portrait of 1960s Hong Kong is both retro and commodity conscious, with clear influences from the West and Japan. The restless moment and mood of uncertainty that defines both the protagonists and the era is significant within In the Mood for Love. Indeed, Wongs films may not be directly or overtly political, however there is often an indirect relation to the political via Wongs conveying of a particularly intense experience of the period as an experience of the negative an experience of some elusive and ambivalent cultural space that lies always just beyond our grasp.

The sense of history and nostalgia that pervades In the Mood for Love is a signature of Wongs style and reminiscent of filmmakers such as Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard and Krzysztof Kieslowski. With history and nostalgia, however, come change and the notion of before and after. The protagonists are caught in a constantly evolving space where time can stand still or be momentarily captured, but will eventually succumb to expiration. The inevitability of change brings with it a nostalgia and reminiscence that often evoke melancholy. Following Chow and Su Li-zhens return to their former home, a title card reads That era has passed. Nothing that belonged to it exists anymore. The characters whose identities are inexorably shaped by the past express Wongs nostalgia for an era passed. Su Li-zhens Shanghainese landlady cant bear to throw things away and Chow must physically unburden himself of the past by burying his memory in an ancient monument. Reminiscent of the female leads in Chungking Express and Fallen Angels, Su Li-zhen (unbeknownst to Chow) visits his apartment in Singapore and fetishes over his belongings, lying on the bed and taking a solitary drag from one of his cigarettes.

The notion of time is a pervading concept in all of Wongs films. His preoccupation with capturing time is constantly evident, his camera doting on specific moments and intent on finding difference in repetition. In both Chow and Su Li-zhens offices, there are clocks that oversee them. Particularly reminiscent of the clock in Days of Being Wild is the large Siemens clock that is prominent in Su Li-zhens office interior. Time and again the camera studies the stark black and white face of the clock as it attempts to capture the time that is constantly advancing. In the first part of Chungking Express, Cop 233 (Takeshi Kaneshiro) obsessively eats cans of pineapple with the expiry date of the 1st of May, convinced that everything has an expiry date, including love. In Fallen Angels, the hit man Wong (Leon Lai-ming) says I do not know who these people are and I do not care, soon they will be history and in Happy Together, Wong effectively captures the period of Hong Kongs return to China. Time and memory are inexorably linked, and these notions are in turn linked to both the personal and the historical. Wong depicts the transience of life and reveals that nothing is permanent in the worlds he creates. However, he also conceives characters that despite living in the present moment are maimed by their desperate attempt to find something stable. His characters lack of roots or painful personal history means they are forced to create their own history. Consequently, Wong acknowledges the significance and pervasiveness of history, especially for Hong Kong citizens who are constantly in transition. He also observes modernity and technology as discourses that must be worked with and not against. The result is often characters with fragmented identities whose inner struggle and quests for clarity in a dynamic social world ensure their validity.

In the Mood for Love continues Wongs tradition of capturing moments within a potentially isolating and disconnected environment and bears resemblance to his other 1960s homage Days of Being Wild, which is believed (through Wongs own statements on both films and popular perception) to be the first instalment to In the Mood for Love. Set in the 60s, Days of Being Wild presents young adults who are both lost and vulnerable. The films protagonist is an A Fei named Yuddy (Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing), A Fei being a euphemism for vaseline-haired and rock-loving delinquents and unsavoury teenagers with gangland connections.  The characters within this film are connected to other individuals, even if arbitrarily, yet unable to initiate lasting relationships. Their sense of desolation and perceived lack of identity pervades every aspect of their lives. Yuddy is both macho and vulnerable, sensitive and insensitive, representing the undefined soul of Hong Kong who seeks to find himself an identity he can respect. Days of Being Wild is a chamber film that evokes the utmost of personal emotions through unspoken words, desire, the notion of possibility and the melancholy of detachment. The films constant reference to time, via repeated shots of ticking clocks, alludes to the 1997 issue as well as the sheer intangibility and fleetingness of time. When Yuddy meets Maggie Cheungs character, he charismatically exclaims, lets be friends for one minute.  This same sentimentality and awareness of time permeates In the Mood for Love. Wong creates an internal world in which time is homogenous and ephemeral. His protagonists are caught in a quasi-dreamscape where time and memory cannot be secured.

Music is also a prominent and strategic element in all of Wongs films. Musical repetition is often employed to articulate that which is unsaid or that which cannot be expressed via words and dialogue. Moreover, Wongs destructuring and modernisation of genres involves re-interpreting codes, a process in which music is central.  The notion of re-interpretation is particularly evident in two of Wongs earlier films. David Martinez asserts that 40s and 50s music is used to re-create the 60s era in Days of Being Wild and a score by composer Frankie Chan and inspired by Ennio Morricones spaghetti western music is used for the martial arts epic Ashes of Time.  In Chungking Express music is used to evoke emotion and create atmosphere but also as an identification tool for the character of Faye (Faye Wong). The Mamas and Papas 1960s track California Dreamin plays continuously throughout the second half of the film, and becomes a trademark of Fayes presence within a scene. The song not only allows her to transcend her spatial and temporal boundaries and represents her state of mind but also emphasizes her as a subject who prefers music to words as a way of expression and communication.  Notably, the Cantonese translation of Western pop songs is a favourite cultural traverse of Wongs, as evident in the Cantonese version of The Cranberries Dreams in Chungking Express, Berlins Take My Breath Away in As Tears Go By and the re-orchestration of Massive Attacks Karma Koma in Fallen Angels. It is this willingness to borrow and reformulate influences and reference popular culture that contributes to Wongs status as a postmodern auteur and makes his films both local and transnational in execution. The rhythmic presence in the construction of shots and the pastiche of eccentric audio-visual rhymes and coincidences also allude to Wongs musical sensibility.

Wongs MTV aesthetic that finds an equilibrium between sound and image retains a sentimentality that does not succumb to an empty spectacle, or allow it to be subsumed by a postmodern ethos. Wong effectively highlights the fact that people (who make up part of the postmodern pastiche) are in close physical proximity, but can be so far apart, and indeed are so very far apart, at the same time. The literary nature of Wongs films is often ignored in favour of readings that focus on the visual splendour of his film aesthetic. Nevertheless, his penchant for voiceover monologues and written captions are also part of his signature compositions. The isolation of his characters often gives way to voiceover monologues in which his characters status as outsiders is constantly reiterated. The alienating space of the city is often the backdrop for inhabitants who struggle to mentally articulate their own sense of place and identity within the urban landscape. This translates to a visual pastiche of deeply drenched colours and stylised camera shots. Chungking Express adopts this rhetoric using MTV editing vocabulary and by constantly manipulating visuals. Wong finds creativity in the astute articulation of the pause and rewind modes, another postmodern emblem of the late 20th century.  He effectively employs the functions of fast-forward and pause into his aesthetic repertoire, illustrating the various modes of remote control technology. Chungking Express articulates this mode with the accelerated passing of clouds and Cop 633s (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) hastened running. The film also proposes a dual gaze through the visual juxtaposition of action versus immobility, as when a long take films the protagonists stationary whilst indistinguishable bodies hurriedly move past the camera, creating flashes of movement.
 
Spectators must suspend their beliefs in chronology, time and in many cases, their memories too, in order to fully experience the depth of Wongs evocative filmic creations. Wongs story is continual and the narrative as dependent on the context of the present as of the past. The geography, history and unique cultural identity of Hong Kong inhabitants have inevitably shaped the territorys cinema. Hong Kongs adaptability to change, cultural diversity and cosmopolitan lifestyle has led to a dynamic output of films that portray a distinct Hong Kong psyche. The films of Wong Kar-wai attest to this manner of filmmaking, articulating the nebulous space of Hong Kong and the in-betweeness and possible dislocation felt by Hong Kong citizens in the face of cultural and political diversity and advances in modernity. Through Wongs oeuvre, Hong Kong becomes a metaphor for the characters and their varied existence. It represents an urban pastiche in which individuals struggle to come to terms with a sense of detachment and loneliness despite the territorys high-density population. Wongs endless array of possible scenarios and the navigation of his protagonists internal and external journeys in turn constitute an unravelling and reconfiguring of spatio-temporal constrictions.

Hong Kongs identity cannot always be summated via its east and west sensibilities. Rather, in portraying Hong Kongs culturally diverse existence, Hong Kong cinema is effectively constructing and revealing its own identity. Wongs empirical aesthetic creates a cosmopolitan filmmaking practice that transcends cultural boundaries. His taste for popular culture, global influences and incorporation of several different music genres is explicit within his films. The origin of Wongs filmmaking may be Hong Kong but his films cannot be categorically contained or strictly confined to a culturally specific consumer. Ultimately, Wong Kar-wai is a filmmaking poet, concerned with issues as varied as memory, identity, time and space, urbanity, mood, isolation and absence. He is also dedicated to the location of Hong Kong as an urban landscape in which his thematic concerns find expression. Hong Kongs unique identity with its fusion of Chinese and Western culture and complex history provides a culturally diverse space in which technology and tradition co-exist in various forms. Wongs avant-garde filmic aesthetic is composed of elliptical storytelling through the use of deeply drenched tones, slow motion, jump cuts and fragmented images. Although the notion of auteur is not entirely customary in Hong Kong where films are often shot quickly and marketed via their accessibility as popular entertainment, Wongs status as auteur marks his position within Hong Kong cinemas industrial environment and signifies his complete creative freedom and control of every facet of his films production. In Wongs own words, his films represent explorations in which Wong Kar-wai, the director, managed to add something into the work.