“Movement, change and flux are the only constants in the city.”
A delightfully poignant movie revolving around urban alienation of its citizens living in Hong Kong, it is easy for its audience to get absorbed in the flurry of images created by Christopher Doyle’s shaky handheld cameras, William Chang’s fast-paced editing, and Wong Kar Wai’s signature ‘smudge-motion’ techniques in the film Chungking Express. These cinematographic images created from such, as if to vertiginously disorient its audiences, also serves to reflect the state of flux in the city of Hong Kong – of a sense of impermanence, rootlessness and of travelling as never-ending – an image of Hong Kong and its citizens that Wong would be presenting to the audiences throughout this …show more content…
Following the blonde lady through the streets, we are shown a collection of shaky images captured by handheld cameras where the subjects of the shot are somewhat discernible, but the surroundings and location of the shots almost undistinguishable, as if the surroundings of the subject were purposefully smudged to create the unclear images. Four consecutive shots of a pre-dawn steel-blue sky followed, framed by industrial buildings of the city. In contrast to the non-movement of the buildings and the city, clouds are shifting across the sky at an abnormal speed as if the earth is rotating fast and will not, for once, slow down for the people. Here we get a strange sense of how time is actually moving faster than people are living it. Perhaps the main intention of creating these images in this opening sequence is not to establish the actual physical space and characters of the film, but instead to give audiences a taste of how fast-moving time feels in Hong Kong, and thereby creating a sense that people and location in the city is being displaced by time – or even more so that time itself is to be displaced in the film Chungking
A delightfully poignant movie revolving around urban alienation of its citizens living in Hong Kong, it is easy for its audience to get absorbed in the flurry of images created by Christopher Doyle’s shaky handheld cameras, William Chang’s fast-paced editing, and Wong Kar Wai’s signature ‘smudge-motion’ techniques in the film Chungking Express. These cinematographic images created from such, as if to vertiginously disorient its audiences, also serves to reflect the state of flux in the city of Hong Kong – of a sense of impermanence, rootlessness and of travelling as never-ending – an image of Hong Kong and its citizens that Wong would be presenting to the audiences throughout this …show more content…
Following the blonde lady through the streets, we are shown a collection of shaky images captured by handheld cameras where the subjects of the shot are somewhat discernible, but the surroundings and location of the shots almost undistinguishable, as if the surroundings of the subject were purposefully smudged to create the unclear images. Four consecutive shots of a pre-dawn steel-blue sky followed, framed by industrial buildings of the city. In contrast to the non-movement of the buildings and the city, clouds are shifting across the sky at an abnormal speed as if the earth is rotating fast and will not, for once, slow down for the people. Here we get a strange sense of how time is actually moving faster than people are living it. Perhaps the main intention of creating these images in this opening sequence is not to establish the actual physical space and characters of the film, but instead to give audiences a taste of how fast-moving time feels in Hong Kong, and thereby creating a sense that people and location in the city is being displaced by time – or even more so that time itself is to be displaced in the film Chungking