Hong Kong Cinema Tears Time and Love The Films of Wong Kar Wai Paper Please read two readings and watch one movie to complete the assignment. I’ve attached

Hong Kong Cinema Tears Time and Love The Films of Wong Kar Wai Paper Please read two readings and watch one movie to complete the assignment. I’ve attached two readings. You don’t need to watch the movie, just answer question a and b

Following is the requirement of the assignment. Don’t need to cite. I’ve attached a sample A paper provided by the prof.

1. Weekly responses to reading and viewing homework, 25%.Every week you must write a minimum of 350 words summarizing the reading and viewing homework. Please demonstrate that you have done the reading carefully by answering the following questions:

a.Please summarize the thesis of each of the required readings, in your own words. Don’t just repeat what the article says; describe what it is trying to say.

b.If you had to compose an exam question based on this week’s readings and viewing material (but also linking to other materials we read and view this quarter), what would the question be?(The question can consist of multiple sentences.) University of Illinois Press
Chapter Title: Tears, Time, and Love: The Films of Wong Kar-wai
Book Title: Wong Kar-wai
Book Author(s): Peter Brunette
Published by: University of Illinois Press. (2005)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/j.ctt5vk0ff.5
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Tears, Time, and Love:
The Films of Wong Kar-wai
As Tears Go By
In 1988, when Wong Kar-wai directed his first film, As Tears Go By,
he had already been working in the Hong Kong film industry for a
number of years, principally as a scriptwriter. The project was initially
given to Wong as a star vehicle for Andy Lau, a popular singer at the
time (Carbon 36), initiating a pattern that has continued throughout the
director’s career. In an interview with the French journal Positif, whose
critics were early supporters of Wong’s films, the director explained that
As Tears Go By was originally intended to be the second film in a trilogy: “The first part hasn’t (yet) been filmed. The third is Final Victory,
directed by Patrick Tam [and written by Wong], when the gangster is in
his thirties and realizes that he hasn’t been successful. In As Tears Go
By, the second part, he’s in his twenties. In the first part, which would
have been called ‘Hero for a Day,’ he would be an adolescent” (Ciment,
“Entretien” 40). Given the fact that the gangster hero dies at the end of
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Figure 1. As Tears Go By: Fly (left, Jacky Cheung)
recklessly challenges a ruthless gang boss.
As Tears Go By, however, the narrative logic of Wong’s proposed trilogy
is not entirely clear.
In this putative middle film, Ah Wah (Andy Lau) is a young gangster who is torn between emotional commitments to his irresponsible
friend, Fly (Jacky Cheung), and his cousin, Ah Ngor (Maggie Cheung),
with whom he falls in love when she comes for a visit. After numerous
confrontations with assorted bad guys that explosively punctuate the
sparse narrative, Wah leaves the thug life to pursue the healthier and
more fulfilling relationship that Ngor offers him. Inevitably, Fly pulls
him back to Mongkok, an unsavory part of Kowloon, into the dangerously macho world of honor and betrayal that he is trying to escape.
Fly is intent upon making a name for himself within triad circles by
assassinating an informer held by the police, while Wah is just as intent
on protecting his “little brother.” At the end of the film, both tragically
meet their deaths.
Wong told another French critic that he had remarkable freedom
in the making of As Tears Go By: “At the time, because of the success
of John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow (1986), gangster films were doing
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very well and, as a new director, I wanted to do one too, but different
from what I had seen in Hong Kong. I wanted to do a film about young
gangsters. And since I knew the producer very well, he gave me lots of
freedom” (Reynaud, “Entretien” 37).
This focus on young gangsters has led many critics to exaggerate the
connection between Wong’s first film and the American director Martin Scorsese’s feature debut, Mean Streets (1973). Wong discussed this
apparent linkage with Michel Ciment: “I think the Italians have lots of
things in common with the Chinese: their values, their sense of friendship, their Mafia, their pasta, their mother. When I saw Mean Streets
for the first time, it was a shock because I had the impression that the
story could just as easily have taken place in Hong Kong.” However,
Wong went on to say, he actually only borrowed the Robert DeNiro
character from Scorsese’s film, since the other characters came from
his own experience (Ciment, “Entretien” 41).
According to the director, the source of the specific details of As
Tears Go By lies in his spending night after night in bars with a gangster
friend. “We knew someone who didn’t know a word of English but who
had a British girlfriend who worked in a bar: she kept leaving him and
then coming right back. They were a strange couple who didn’t communicate at all. That also inspired the character in the film. So I spent
three or four years of my youth drinking, fighting, and driving fast cars”
(Ciment, “Entretien” 41).
The central critical debate around As Tears Go By—in retrospect,
of course, since the film was barely noticed by western critics when it
first appeared in 1988—concerns its relation to the dominant tradition
of Hong Kong genre films. Is it primarily another example of a generic
gangster film, in the tradition made famous by John Woo and others?
Or is it an altogether new beast, an art film from Hong Kong that bears
the unmistakable imprint of an auteur interested in moving beyond
genre?1
Each side has its partisans. In the genre camp, David Bordwell
has argued, rather implausibly, that it is the generic origins of Wong’s
films that “have international appeal in a period when directors are
encouraged to make crossovers. However idiosyncratic Wong’s films
are, they take popular norms as points of departure” (Planet 270). Generically speaking, it’s clear that some elements of Wong’s first film are
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outright borrowings from previous Hong Kong movies. For example, as
Bordwell points out, the café killing, “with bodies writhing against taut
plastic curtains,” seems to hark back to Ringo Lam’s City on Fire (270).
Nevertheless, it’s a stretch to claim that Wong’s links to genre are the
primary attraction for his growing international audience, an audience
that seems to especially appreciate his later films for their art-film qualities. Those art-film lovers who have come to deeply admire his work are
not necessarily fans of more traditional Hong Kong films.
If we are intent on inscribing Wong’s films within a generic rubric, it
is important to remember that they share generic links with other films,
from other countries, that were made long before John Woo or Tsui
Hark came on the scene. As the Austrian critic Andreas Ungerböck has
pointed out, As Tears Go By is indeed part of a genre—“gangster melodrama”—that goes back at least as far as Hollywood in the thirties (25).
Ungerböck correctly insists that “gangsters in love, as everyone knows
since Howard Hawks’ Scarface (1932), are careless and distracted. And
Ah Wah is tired, tired of the fighting and tired of hanging on. And in this
he doesn’t at all follow the larger-than-life heroes of John Woo” (25).
Chuck Stephens, an American critic, represents the antigeneric
camp. He has insisted that Wong’s “interest in formulas—other than
the one he’s in the process of inventing himself—is virtually nonexistent”
(15). Going further than Stephens, J. Carbon believes that even an early
film like As Tears Go By represents the complete repudiation of Woo’s
film noir heroes, who are based on the classic Chinese heroes trapped
by the rigors of a masculine code that pushes them to masochism. For
Carbon, the film “turns its back in an insolent manner on the tradition
of the local heroic cinema” (36).
Carbon overstates his case—Wong’s film is clearly enamored of its
romantic gangster hero, most of whose problems do, in fact, stem from a
masochistic masculine code—but he is right to claim that Woo and Wong
differ most obviously in what might be called the “femininized” nature
of the latter’s films. As Carbon rather dramatically puts it, “As Tears Go
By is a film that dares to be tender, a film of hidden tenderness made
by a hugely timid man, a poet who wants to make of women superb and
fragile beings, idealized incarnations of the traditional Chinese woman
(perhaps his sole concession to classicism). Where John Woo imposes
the idea of a yang cinema, Wong will always definitively be yin” (36).
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To some extent, this debate is entirely beside the point, because,
as the director explained to Anthony Kaufman, the division between
art and genre film is hardly clear: “In Hong Kong in the ‘60s, going to
cinema was a big thing. We have cinemas for Hollywood films, local
productions, European cinema, but there was no [label of] art film at
that time. Even Fellini was treated as a commercial film. So as a kid, I
spent a lot of time with my mother in the cinemas. And we didn’t know
which is an art film, which is a commercial film, we just liked to watch
the cinema.”
Nevertheless, critical writing requires distinctions, and it makes
sense to see Wong as still thoroughly involved in generic filmmaking
in As Tears Go By, yet clearly at the same time embarked on a countertrajectory that will come to fruition in succeeding films, when he begins
to leave genre definitively behind. Wong himself signaled a clear division between this first film and what was to follow in an interview with
Ungerböck recorded some years later: “I could have continued making
films like As Tears Go By for the rest of eternity but I wanted to do
something more personal after that. I wanted to break the structure of
the average Hong Kong film” (26).
Despite Carbon’s claim that As Tears Go By is resolutely antiheroic,
the film’s triad milieu is clearly glamorized throughout, as is Ah Wah,
its protagonist. Part of this fawning treatment is actually unrelated to
genre and stems from an unembarrassed affection for twentysomethings
in love that is not totally out of place in a self-conscious filmmaker
who was twenty-nine years old when the film was made. Here, at least,
Bordwell’s charge that Wong’s is “a deeply sentimental cinema” is true.
But we needn’t automatically agree that this is a wholly bad thing, nor
assent to this critic’s somewhat condescending conclusion: “Almost devoid of irony, Wong’s films, like classic rock and roll, take seriously all
the crushes, the posturing, and the stubborn capriciousness of young
angst. They rejoice in manic expenditures of energy. They celebrate the
momentary heartbreak of glimpsing a stranger who might be interesting
to love” (Planet 281).
Though it becomes more obvious as Wong’s career continues, Bordwell misses the fact that the “young angst” the director clearly revels
in can stand for the love, loss, and emotional pain anyone at any age
might experience. Is it not an unfair value judgment to denigrate “young
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angst” in the first place? I suspect that this emotion, and the delicious
frisson that it can activate, looks quite different to a young person than to
someone middle-aged, and neither response can be considered correct
or normative. Furthermore, in the context of the commercial cinema
that Bordwell privileges in his groundbreaking book on the Hong Kong
film industry, it is clear that, given the film’s origin as a vehicle for Andy
Lau, Wong would have had no choice, in this first film, but to focus on
glamorous young people even had he desired to do otherwise. In any
case, through this reasoning, Bordwell is ultimately able to recuperate
Wong’s cinema for his thesis that genre underlies all: “For all his sophistication, his unembarrassed efforts to capture powerful, pleasantly
adolescent feelings confirms his commitment to the popular Hong Kong
tradition” (Planet 281).
Interestingly, though he seems vaguely to disapprove, Bordwell provides a succinct and useful expression of the ways in which Wong differs
from his Hong Kong colleagues, if ever so tentatively, in As Tears Go By:
“Wong stands out from his peers by abandoning the kinetics of comedies
and action movies in favor of more liquid atmospherics. He dissolves
crisp emotions into vaporous moods” (281). It is precisely this feature
of Wong’s work—this productive clash of cultures and aesthetics, which
some critics have censured as “Europeanization”—that makes him such
a provocative filmmaker. It is, after all, the hybrid that fascinates.
The “liquid atmospherics” are what Wong’s cinema, at least formally
speaking, is all about. Ungerböck, an experienced observer of Asian
cinema, has claimed that the visual style displayed in As Tears Go By
was truly new and was copied all over Asia in television and film. This
popularity led quickly to Wong’s being acclaimed as a cult director (26).
Despite Ungerböck’s insistence on Wong’s novelty, though, the film’s
visual regime—bright primary colors and unnatural hues shot from bizarre camera angles and juxtaposed through jumpy editing—may be
partially a legacy of the quasi-experimental filmmaker Patrick Tam, with
whom Wong worked, especially on Final Victory (1987), his best film.
According to the critic Stephen Teo, the visual structure of all of Tam’s
films—which Teo doesn’t really approve of, because of what he sees
as their excessive formalism—is based on the coordination of primary
colors (156). Tam may thus be the principal source of this technique
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that was to be heavily used, in a more radicalized form, in As Tears Go
By and Wong’s subsequent films.
Even the opening credit sequence of As Tears Go By bears out this
interest in juxtaposing extremes in color, as the credits are inscribed on
the far left of the screen in shouting reds (the text) and yellows (the neon
lights behind). The largest part of the screen, however, is occupied by a
severely angled bank of television sets that, plunging diagonally toward
the center, display the bright blue of the sky and clouds that pass by on
the multiple screens, in a fashion reminiscent of the work of the video
artist Nam June Paik. This intensely saturated visual field will be echoed
throughout the film by the omnipresent, garish colors of the various
neon signs associated with different night spots, especially the Future
club, on whose logo the colors and direction of the opening image have
been reversed. Beyond this, though, Wong relies throughout on a deep
blue image that signifies nighttime rather than the traditional black (or
however “black” has been conventionally suggested by sculpting with
various amounts of light); the effect is to signify time in quasi-conventional terms while also loading it expressively.
Curtis K. Tsui goes beyond an expressive reading of this binary opposition of colors to develop a specific and plausible interpretation that
ties it more closely to the narrative. He argues that the credit sequence
displays the film’s two opposing “‘spaces’ of radically different tone and
emotion,” different spaces that will come to be associated with Ngor
and Fly: “The blue skies and white clouds that appear on the TV screens
suggest one of idyllic calm, whereas the darkened streets imply one of
more somber proportions” (97). Even more intriguing is his suggestion
that the film’s Chinese title, Mongkok Carmen, which juxtaposes the
brutal reality of a rough section of Hong Kong with the promise of love
found in Bizet’s opera, participates in this binary as well. For Tsui, these
are the first signs of a specific political thematic—one that I will address
more fully later—that operates throughout the film and that transcends
character.
In another, somewhat overheated but provocative reading of this
same juxtaposition found in the opening credits, which deserves to be
quoted at length, the French critic Ackbar Abbas claims that it represents the clash between
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the slower, older world of material objects found in emporiums, and
the dematerialized, placeless and instantly commutable space of the
televisual. . . . It is not a question of rapid change and metamorphosis—a
commonplace theme—but rather of anamorphosis, of how the historical
grids by which we understand the image have themselves undergone
change without our noticing. . . . We never find synesthesias, but always
disjunction, dissemination, fugue. This results in a characteristic effect:
in Wong’s cinema, we are never certain about what we are seeing. The
image always subtly misses its mark. (44–45)
Abbas is right that this “missing” that occurs in visual representation is
an important thematic nexus in many of Wong’s films, but it appears at
most in only embryonic form in his debut film.
Once the film proper begins, the first thing we see is an overhead
shot of a sleeping figure, marked by strong lines of bright color, neatly
slicing the bed in two, which produces an almost chiaroscuro effect.
As in the credit sequence, we are being signaled that a large part of
this film’s drama will be visual in nature. And not only in the sense that
dramatic scenes will be visualized for us—the nature of the graphic
image itself, the organization of shape, color, and line, will be the site
of much of the film’s emotional “conflict,” conceived in the broadest
sense. Nor, the film suggests, will the classic Aristotelian unity of place
be respected, as we see a cutaway (or several)2 of Wah’s cousin Ngor,
who is about to visit him in Mongkok, on the boat. The shots or shot,
which seem produced directly from Wah’s consciousness, appear to be
overtly “composed” in a classically aesthetic manner. Here and elsewhere the director seems completely uninterested in any documentarylike, handheld Barthesian “effect of the real.” The contrast between
Wah’s everyday, violent world and the possibilities of release and redemption represented by his cousin Ngor, rhyming with the binary of
the opening credits, is figured visually from the opening images of the
film, even before the narrative has begun.
Because it is such a perfect “picture-postcard moment,” however,
replete with an artfully arranged sunset, it’s difficult to know exactly how
serious Wong is being here. In other words, is this film to be simply a
clichéd romantic story, fleshed out by pretty pictures? This alternative,
at least in any strict sense, seems doubtful. Or is it a clichéd romantic
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