The Emotional Cinema of Wong Kar-Wai Viktoriia Protsenko
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The Emotional Cinema of Wong Kar-wai Viktoriia Protsenko TESI DOCTORAL UPF / 2018 Director de la tesi: Ivan Pintor Iranzo Departament de Comunicació Abstract This thesis seeks to explain the affective appeal of Wong Kar-wai’s oeuvre in terms of emotional marketing. Although his working method and storytelling principles are most atypical of Hong Kong film industry, the director has actively exploited local strategies of genre, stardom, and hybridization throughout his career. Contrary to his well-crafted image of improvisational artist, recurrent stylistic tropes and narrative strategies in Wong’s films evidence a conscientious organization. I argue that Wong Kar-wai deliberately caters to the tastes of a transcultural, multilingual and cinema-savvy spectatorship, and that his films encourage affective investment and repeated viewings. Keywords Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong cinema, Emotion, Cognitive Theory, Film Analysis Resumen La presente tesis busca explicar el atractivo emocional de la obra de Wong Kar-wai. Aunque su forma de trabajar y estrategia de narración son muy atípicas en la industria cinematográfica de Hong Kong, el director ha recurrido con frecuencia a las convenciones del género, star system e hibridismo del cine hongkonés. Los elementos estilísticos y estrategias narrativas de sus películas contradicen la imagen del artista improvisador, difundida por el propio Wong, y en cambio afirman una minuciosa organización del relato. Sostengo que Wong Kar-wai busca satisfacer los gustos de un público cosmopolita, multilingüe e ilustrado, fomenta un compromiso emocional y hace que los espectadores quieran volver a ver sus películas. Palabras clave Wong Kar-wai, cine hongkonés, emoción, teoría cognitiva, análisis fílmico Table of Contents CHAPTER I. THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK...1 1.1. Introduction.…………………………………………………………………...….1 1.2. Literary Overview………………………………………………………...………11 1.3. Scope of Study……………………………………………………………...…… 12 1.4. Research Questions / Hypothesis ………………………………..…..…......…….15 1.5. Theoretical Framework………………………………………………………...…16 1.5.1. Cognitive Theory…………………………………………………………...…17 1.5.2. Reception Theory……………………………………………………………...22 1.6. The cinema of Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong film industry and global arthouse..…24 1.7.1. Wong Kar-wai’s literary influences and storytelling strategies…………….…..32 1.7.2. Foregrounding………………………………………………………………..…41 1.7.3. Characterization……………………………………………………………..….44 1.7.4. Setting……………………………………………………………………..……47 1.7.5. Cinematography…………………………………………………………..…….62 1.7.6. Editing……………………………………………………………………..……69 1.7.7. Intertextuality……………………………………………………………..…….80 1.8. Methodology……………………………………………………………………...89 CHAPTER II. RESULTS………………………….....……………………………...90 2.1. On Repeat: The Poetics of Eternal Recurrence in Vertigo, Last Year at Marienbad and 2046……………………………………………………………………………….96 2.2. Beyond Postcolonial Nostalgia: Wong Kar-wai’s Melodramas In the Mood for Love and 2046………………………………………………...............................................120 2.3. From Arthouse to Amazon: The Evolution of Wong Kar- wai………………………………………………………………………………..140 CONCLUSIONS……………………..……….…….…………………………….....164 BIBLIOGRAPHY.……………………………..…………………….………….......166 CHAPTER I. THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK 1.1. Introduction When I set off to pursue a PhD degree in Communication, my idea was to examine one of the topics that most fascinated me as a cinephile – the emotional interaction between the film text and the viewer. It is hard to deny that the medium’s greatest appeal lies in its ability to elicit emotional responses, however, the role of emotion in film is a highly problematic topic in the academic field. Questions such as why audiences cry or laugh, take sides with particular characters, and enjoy repeated viewings remain largely unexplored by scholars, yet they are ripe for research. Despite the fact that I did not have an academic background in film studies, Professor Ivan Pintor Iranzo was kind enough to accept my proposal and provide me with guidance every step of the way. The literature he recommended (Slavoj Zizek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (2007), Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (1982), Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: the Movement-Image (1986) and Cinema 2: the Time-Image (1989), among others) prompted me to study film directors from a broad generic, chronological and geographical range: from post-WWII European auteurs (Resnais, Hitchcock, Antonioni) to independent American filmmakers (Kubrick, Scorsese, Lynch) to Asian arthouse icons (Akira Kurosawa, Wong Kar-wai). Alas, such a task quickly proved to be unfeasible, and I spent the first year of doctoral studies narrowing the scope of my thesis, which was made all the more difficult by the fact that my extensive reading list kept feeding me new, exciting ideas. Even though I was originally supportive of the psychoanalytic approach, I gradually began to question associational reasoning that compared the pleasures of film viewing to dreaming (Baudry) and voyeurism (Metz). Film analysis is not an exact science – there is always a danger that, instead of rigorously testing the data to either validate or refute the initial hypothesis, one imposes interpretations that best suit his or her theory. What is more, such diverse concepts as Lacanian psychoanalysis, Saussurean linguistics and Althusserian Marxism tend to overlook social and economic practicalities of film production and reception. As an aspiring filmmaker who also comes from a culture heavily influenced by formalism, I am more interested in how films are made to produce specific effects in the audience, not least of which is an emotional response. Contrary to the psychoanalytic-semiotic-marxist paradigm which deems filmic emotion unconscious or impulsive, the cognitive theory emphasizes rational motivation behind the powerful impact of cinema: each spectator evaluates the formal components, narrative information and other indicators present in the text, and the affective reaction emerges from the totality of connections he or she perceives. After reading the works of David Bordwell, Noël Carroll and Greg Smith, I have found that cognitivists were well-equipped to answer the question: how can films engage individuals across national, cultural, class and gender boundaries? Among the books that influenced me the most in the early stages of research were Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory (1988), Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (1989) and Film Structure and the Emotion System (2003). In Mystifying Movies, Noël Carroll rejects murky analogies of ‘dream screen’, the mirror stage and fetishism, while arguing that the film apparatus was designed rationally and can be explained from the cognitive perspective. ‘I do not believe that a film theorist can stipulate that movies engage people’s psyches on an unconscious level any more than I believe that an astrologist can be allowed to stipulate that our fates are controlled by the stars,’ he would write in response to detractors (Carroll 1992: 207). Carroll explains the powerful effect of Hollywood International1 in terms of narrative and spatio-temporal organization that seeks to engage universal cognitive and perceptual faculties. In Making Meaning, David Bordwell provides both a concise history of film criticism and an alternative method of analysis. He classifies the tools critics use for interpreting films and dissects four types of meaning: referential (the understanding of diegesis and fabula based on prior knowledge of genre conventions and the real world), explicit (moral of the story which can be confirmed by textual cues), implicit (themes that can be supported by textual or extra-textual evidence) and symptomatic (a layer of meaning that operates beneath and, possibly, beyond the intended message, which may reflect the psychological stance of the filmmaker or ideological, economic and political conditions of production and consumption). According to Bordwell, in analysing any film, the critic inevitably constructs a mental ‘model’ which highlights some hand-picked aspects while ignoring others. This way, interpretation does not produce scientific knowledge, and has fewer virtues than flaws: ‘[…] contemporary interpretation-centered criticism tends to be 1 By ‘Hollywood International’ Carroll means not only American, but also European and Asian films in the ‘classical style’, made either for the big screen or television. conservative and coarse-grained. It tends to play down film form and style. […] It is largely uncontentious and unreflective about its theories and practices’ (Bordwell, 1989: 261). Bordwell offers a substitute – historical poetics, which he conceives as ‘the study of how, in determinate circumstances, films are put together, serve specific functions, and achieve specific effects’ (ibid, 266-267). Such criticism would proceed from empirical factors (norms and traditions established in the industry, such as genre conventions and the compositional processes of form and style) to practices of film reception (schemata and heuristics implemented by the spectators to make meaning, and effects generated by films), and would have recourse to perceptual and cognitive research in the fields of anthropology, linguistics, and psychology. ‘Empirical without being empiricist, emphasizing explanations rather than explications, poetics can enrich criticism by putting cinema’s social, psychological,