Chungking Express

A film about time and coincidence.

In this sense, a continuation of themes already established in Wong Kar-wai's second feature-length film, the sweltering melodrama Days of Being Wild (1990), and a springboard to the deeper meditations on memory and place that occur in the masterworks Ashes of Time (1994), Happy Together (1997), In the Mood for Love (2000) and 2046 (2004). These are films that slip between layers of memory and actuality; between how it is and how it could have been, either as a projection of the character's wants or needs, or through the accidental nature of existence; the significance of chance encounters, misheard declarations of love, or unlikely coincidences that occur when characters stumble across one another at a particular point in time.

In Wong's films, the situation that is established as a facilitator for these wider considerations is simple, if not wholly mundane. Two characters meet: either they live across the hall, or they work in the same part of town, or they share the same thoughts and feelings that compel them towards inevitable junctures and conclusions. These are characters on a collision course: fated, marked; existing on the fringes of a society, not because they're incapable of living any other way, but because the requirements of a lifestyle - the job or the social situation - dictates it. The loneliness, the desperation, the tedium of places all inspire a particular attitude that leads these characters into these situations in the first place; these locations that we return to again and again, always in some new manifestation of the same old routine, regardless of time, place or generation.

The small take-away restaurants, bodegas and bars give good cover for those meetings between inarticulate strangers with nothing much to say but a need to share a moment (or two) with someone other than themselves. Let the music drown it out before the soul starts screaming; take a walk through the lonely backstreets where characters can saunter, alone with their dreams and their shadow as chaperone.

Chungking Express directed by Wong Kar-wai, 1994:

In Chungking Express (1994), the two characters - inner-city cops battered and bruised by an aching loneliness - wander a labyrinth of these backstreets, alleyways and market places, converging in bars or convenience stores, but never really speaking; just taking the opportunity to soak in the spectacle of a life that eludes them, before it's back to the lonesome apartment buildings or the late night city streets. Both characters spend the duration of each segment sifting through old memories; living like revenants in a world that can't recognise their emptiness. Their paths cross on two separate occasions, but never intersect. Instead, their two stories are presented separately, one after the other, with each story offering echoes and variations of a theme that ripples throughout, uniting them through grief.

At the end of the film, after both threads of the narrative have reached their inevitable conclusions, the essential themes, of time, coincidence and displacement, come full circle, with the allusion to California - replayed by a character sitting in a bar called "the California", and with the song California Dreamin' on the soundtrack - highlighting the central idea of two entities existing at the same time in different places, connected, but at the same time, apart.

Black Ice

The title seems appropriate. The experience of the film suggesting the slow slippery slide of an unseen hazard as it catches the light of a clear December morning, just seconds before our feet slip out from under us, or the car drifts into the break. This light, burning bright beneath the surface of the screen, throws shapes into our periphery. Shapes that might exist as mere markings on the celluloid - like a living collage of daubed paint, dead leaves or spilled ink - but which, on closer reflection, can be interpreted by the viewer on an emotional or psychological level. Not so much as a Rorschach Test as an attempt to find meaning in the abstract. Like the refracted glare of the sunlight flaring off the camera lens on a holiday snapshot, or the dappled spots of rain on a windowpane that turns the world outside into a shimmering mosaic, this, as an effect, is something powerful enough to transform the mundane into the extraordinary.

Like in Mothlight (1963), or The Garden of Earthly Delights (1981), the presentation of the film, when looked at, straight-on, as a moving canvas, creates an interpretation that is further established in the mind by the connotations of the title. Here, it's that slow forward-journey through the void that makes Black Ice (1994), as a motion-picture, more immersive, more captivating, than any 3D blockbuster. The illusion of depth, of movement, created, not by multi-million dollar "FX", but by an optical illusion. Something that is formed within the mind; the act of viewing transforming it into whatever we want it to be, but at the same time, exactly what the filmmaker intended.

Black Ice by Stan Brakhage, 1994:

When I was a child, I'd play this game where I'd press the palms of my hands hard into my eye sockets and hold them there for several minutes. After a short while, the impression of the force would form against the retina and create the illusion of movement. A trip into the unknown, like Avatar (2009), but less expensive. At first the experience was like a slow descent into the depths of a jungle canopy. The tops of trees, enormous - green, blue and purple - covering the forest floor (which seemed endless), would blur and blend all around me. I'd dare myself to keep my hands pressed as hard against the eye for as long as I was able; to stay on this path, this trek, down into the abyss that my imagination was creating, to see what else I might discover. Eventually the whole thing would merge into a collage of colours, all melting and dissolving into a series of amorphous great blobs, like the shapes in a lava lamp, or a B-movie assimilation of the 'stargate' sequence from the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

I was sure that this activity was damaging my eyes but it was worth it to experience all that the mind could conjure. Like interpreting abstract art, it was something that I could claim as my own. It wasn't defined or restricted by what others suggested, but open to my imagination. The same is true of Brakhage's films, which are there to be looked at, intently, closely or from a distance, at the changing shapes that create images, ideas, emotions, stories and room for contemplation. Watching a film like Black Ice in the dark of this room on a small laptop, the light of the screen like a beacon, is a profound experience, though I can only begin to imagine how extraordinary it would be to see it as intended, as a theatrical projection. The entire cinema becoming the portal for some fantastic journey, like Jules Verne, sans contraption.

On The Unrequited Love

In her absence - or in the absence of her - Joseph clings to the only corporal sign of life; the television set. Its light, blue, like Klein, or as reminder of the troubled skies and crashing waves that Godard intercuts in an effort to create visual commentary on the subject at hand - emotions suggested as ever through figurative associations - illuminates the darkness of the room; burning bright enough to cast the shadow of this man in mourning, creating the presence of two when only one is seen. The illusion of light creating life, as Joseph, in his solitude, cradles the early-morning static of this 'box', bereft of images and thus without reason, just as he is without reason without Carmen there to cling to.

As much as the image might imply a kind of vague generational critique, with Godard as the eternal curmudgeon; the mad old uncle casting a narrowed eye toward the youth and their relationship with the TeeVee, enamoured by its spectacle - like James Stewart in Rear Window (1954), the eye becoming a telephoto lens, each channel offering a window into a possible world, to be watched, from a distance, and without feeling - there's still something almost brazenly romantic about its presentation. The character, warmed by a cold blue frost of static noise that runs like sparks through the stubble, finds something in this embrace that is absent from his subsequent interaction with the titular character.

There, moments of love and tenderness are found between moments of great cruelty. A kiss very quickly betrayed by a vicious word or a cold clinch of despair or desperation. Here the embrace of this object, inanimate and without soul, is characteristic of Godard's ability to suggest layers of commentary through an image that at once seems rather straightforward - a symbol that when taken literally could seem like a farce, consistent with the broad slapstick of much of the director's middle-period approach - but when viewed as a representation, or as an almost abstract expression, is full of emotion and meaning, open to interpretation. It's that poet's sorrow for the complexities of the human condition at its most simple or profound.

Prénom Carmen directed by Jean-Luc Godard, 1983:

However, the significance of the scene speaks to more than just Joseph's yearning for this beautiful nuisance. Instead, it's a kind of creative shorthand for the one-way love affair that exists between the audience and the work. The television - at this point still referred to, both dismissively and endearingly, as the 'small screen' - is, in some little way, a substitute for the cinema. With such a comparison in place, it makes perfect sense that in this moment of great loneliness Joseph would cling to this substitute as a surrogate for Carmen. In love with the image, its void represented by light, blue, like the words to the song that plays on the soundtrack - "everything is turning blue now" - or like his own heart in anguish - "there'll be someone else to hold you" - but unable to receive the same kind of love in return.

Of course the television is, like cinema, a dead object, brought to life by an audience willing enough to engage it's ideas or emotions through a genuine act of faith. What we get out of it depends on what we put in. A projection - personal and subjective - of our own experiences, wants, needs and desires onto these scenes, characters, words and images; the screen before us becoming a mirror, reflecting the great fantasy, not of how things are, but of how we want things to be. The greater the reflection, the greater our appreciation of the work. If cinema really is this magic mirror onto which we project our own individual dreams and desires, then television is the box we bury them in. Such is life. As much as we like to gesture and pontificate, citing the greatness of a work as we see it, or declaring from the rooftops in a voice as certain as the day that what we've just witnessed is a work of true beauty, it is an experience that exists only for us; like the greatest of all loves.

Joseph, like the audience, thinks he is in love; but Carmen is not a human being capable of receiving such love, let alone giving it in return. She is a character, created for a drama, and appropriated here for the purposes of creative commentary. She is, like the image, an empty space. Again, like the audience when gazing in wonder at the figures on screen, Joseph is in love with what he wants Carmen to be, how he interprets her through his own personal and subjective experiences. He cannot possible love her for what she is, which is an object, less tangible and less real than the television that he caresses in her absence. His attempt, in this scene, to find fulfilment through the embrace of this non-image illustrates the void that exists between the audience and the work as a figurative or poetic expression of the unrequited love.

Intervals

A film nervous with the anticipation of something?

Though the something never arrives, at least not the something one might expect from the grating, almost metronome-like soundtrack, or the framing of shots, which imply The Third Man (1949) via shades of early Godard, or some similar tale of espionage suggested by these street level observations and the European locale. The amplification of the 'dubbed' sounds, at least initially, seem to play against a natural expectation for a certain kind of drama, or 'pay-off', in the dramatic sense. The ticking sound, like a ticking clock, counting the minutes, or a time bomb, like with Hitchcock, from Sabotage (1936) to Saboteur (1942). However, the dramatic reveal that we're anticipating turns out to be something else, unrelated, but no less remarkable! An explosion, not in the sense of a terrorist attack, but as an actual emotional revelation felt within the experimentation of the form.

The creative associations that are forced upon the work by this juxtaposition of sound and image create a sense of drama that would otherwise be nonexistent, and this, effectively, is the point.

Like Greenaway's later film, The Draughtsman's Contract (1982), this is a film about the relationship between the viewer and the work itself. While the later film would employ a dramatic device made famous by Antonioni in his masterpiece Blow-Up (1966) - in which an artist creates a work that reveals, on closer inspection, the clues to a terrible crime - the approach to this particular film is less narrative, more subjective. Here the audience adopts the role of the Draughtsman, or the unnamed photographer of Antonioni's film. However, unlike the two characters there, we (the individual spectator) haven't created this work, but are being invited by the filmmaker to look at it, to study these shots, these recurring moments in time, with the same restlessness, the same obsessive curiosity. At first it all seems fairly mundane; geriatrics and hesitant children shuffling through near-vacant streets. Without the soundtrack in place, these images would seem uneventful, perhaps even routine.

Intervals directed by Peter Greenaway, 1968-1973:

In the act of closely examining these shots, the audience begins to project their own ideas and interpretations onto them, drawing consciously or unconsciously on a familiarity with the machinations of a genre (or the general conventional presentation of cinema) to invent their own scenarios, to justify Greenaway's experiment in an attempt to anchor it to some kind of recognisable context or theme. This, as an experiment, is directly related to the specific way that we, as audiences, experience films; an experiment in the art of looking and seeing, but also in allowing the film (and the filmmaker) to manipulate the way we receive information through the combination of sound and image.

In the majority of films this is hidden; part of the great magic act that filmmakers use to dazzle their audience, creating moments of comedy and drama, terror and suspense from a seemingly simple cutting between scenes, characters and situations. With Intervals, Greenaway wants to expose the lie, expose the tricks that these storytellers use to manipulate the emotions of an audience. Here these cyclical street-scenes (presented as the 'Intervals' of the title) that repeat several times, each time with subtle variations on the soundtrack, are intended to push the viewer into analysing their own subjective interpretation of the images, and what these images might suggest.

While the earlier experiments with sound create an atmosphere of tension or suspense - something slightly ominous or threatening, again, like a ticking clock, counting down the seconds to some actual devastation - the wave of orchestration that breaks and pulls the images back from the brink of catastrophe (and back towards something more conventionally cinematic, in the Hollywood sense), creates a feeling in the viewer of our senses or perceptions being altered, subtly or not so subtly, by the experimentation with the form. Here we have the same images, the same streets and people appearing again and again, and yet our interpretation of these events is transformed, significantly, by the specific choice of soundtrack. This, in a very Greenaway stroke, is the essence of cinema at its most creative and unashamedly deceptive.

The Cage

The naked figure runs towards the gate. The surface of it fills the frame, becoming a barrier; an ornate wall - itself a relic to another time - which reduces the body of this man to something small and insignificant. We watch as his futile fists pound on the heavy exterior, both desperately and aggressive; trying without any great success to rend the gate open in a fruitless effort to break through to the other side. Excluding the music there is no sound, but we can imagine what is said: "let me out!" or possibly "let me in!"

From the images and the English translation of the title we can infer meaning. Time as a cage; a prison.

The Cage directed by Shûji Terayama, 1964:

The images are strange and enigmatic, but seem to suggest the various themes that explain what the film is potentially about. The above image can possibly be read as representation of birth. The figure - anxious, naked, desperate to escape this netherworld, to embrace life, or something like it - becomes like a child; his stature reduced to that of an infant in contrast to the overwhelming scale of the barred exterior, which looms before him in stoical reception.

Such a reading might seem too literal. The film certainly doesn't require such elucidation - the mood of the thing is enough to entrance us or provoke a response; the images suggesting stories or interpretations, but really just catching our eye with their disarming compositional approach - but it does make the experience of viewing more intriguing.

The images tell the story, or suggest one. An eye squints through the bars, like the eye of the viewer - the bars, as ever, a representation of the one-way relationship between the audience and the film - watching these images unfold. Some of the images conjure immediate associations, such as the old woman carrying the clock, carrying time, as a figurative gesture. Each of us are a prisoner of time, conscious of it. Perhaps not every second or every minute, but certainly the months, years and decades.

Other images seem vague or beyond easy interpretation. Two men exercise in unison, like prisoners in the yard. A hooded figure stands in the centre of a clock face, his silhouette - a body without a soul - becomes the hour hand, marking time.



These images add to the atmosphere of the film. That heavy sense of foreboding, which is only intensified by the tortured soundtrack; the thump of a drum, counting the seconds, or the howl of an anguished cry. Terayama's short is haunting, mesmerising, like much of the director's work (though some of his films are admittedly too contentious for my tastes), becoming, in effect, a series of bold gestures that suggest different meanings, different ideas, that play on the subjective gaze of the audience, like all art does.

Other viwers might disagree with these suggestions, but for me the film is a great figurative essay on time. A slow march towards the inevitable... like death or something else?

Voices

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Quelqu'un m'a dit

The voice of the man cannot travel between these two spaces; these inner worlds where lost souls attempt to express the feeling of longing through individual pursuits; plucked chords or the dance of light, illustrating the bittersweet embrace of a love that is unrequited. He's attracted to her, in the physical sense, but he cannot hear the sad words that she sings. His light burns brightly, but perhaps not bright enough. The inability to communicate is here in this single movement of the camera. It exaggerates the emotional distance between them by making explicit the physical closeness. Open your window and scream it, at the top at your lungs. I love you... but?

No. He breathes a sigh, lets out a silent declaration, but is content to chase the shadows. He carries a torch, but he can't hold a candle. She doesn't see him (won't ever see him); she's seduced by the muse. The siren, with her song, no longer calling the sailors to their deaths, but attracting, like moths to a flame, the hopeful and the hopeless. What was it Julie Harris said at the end of East of Eden; "it's awful not to be loved. It's the worst thing in the world" The man is plunged, back again, into the darkness, all hope gone; snuffed out, like the candle. Then someone told me...

This is the Caraxian fascination with obsessive love (dangerous love; a love that destroys) as a counter to Bruni's coyly poetic lyrics. Like Denis Lavant in Les amants du Pont-Neuf (1991), the man, Aurélien Recoing, shirtless, breathing fire, wants nothing more than to be in the presence of this woman - whose light burns bright enough to illuminate the darkness of his own existence - but he can never possess her. He cannot hold this light for fear of destroying it, corrupting it's beauty with his own cruelty; like Alex with Mireille in Boy Meets Girl (1984), or Pierre with Lucie in Pola X (1999). "Look away" says Nick; "look away... and never more think of me"

Quelqu'un m'a dit directed by Leos Carax, 2003: