The idea of time in Wong Kar-wai’s films

Wong Kar- wai is one of the most influential and innovative filmmakers in Hong Kong. His work has generated universal admiration for the way in which it explores the limits of cinematic representation and the need to go beyond received categories of understanding. He is not an easy director to interact with; he disdains facile connections and ready-made stereotypes.

He is a director who demands intense patience and concentration for his films to yield their full plenitude of meaning. It is indeed Wong’s desire that we respond to his films as a distinctly and progressively evolving interconnected body of work. Wong Kar-wai is unafraid to break cinematic rules; that is because he takes rules with the utmost seriousness. He is a difficult director because his style occupies an ambiguous space that challenges easy comprehension. The disjunctions between narratives and images, signifiers and signifieds that mark his films contribute to this perceived difficulty. In his films, he set himself formidable tasks, and in boldly meeting them has acquitted himself admirably as a creative filmmaker.

Reason

Another reason why Wong Kar-wai's films appear to be difficult is his self-referential aesthetic and his not too uncommon practice of making the creation of the given film itself the object of commentary. The density and variability of visual registers and the shifting meanings within them can prove to be demanding to the average movie-goer. His films have a way of pointing to other films by him, thereby forcing each of his films to be a reflection and extension of the others. For example in his martial arts film Ashes of Time, which as with many of his other works, puts into play the memory of ruins and ruins of memory, re-focuses on the panorama of futility that interests him deeply; this is a vital aspect of the complex dignity that he seeks to bestow on his cinematic art.

As a filmmaker, Wong Kar-wai is not interested in creatively mapping life as it is or ought to be; his focus is on mapping life as it brushes against his senses and inquiring mind. His deep engagement with time – the focus of this column – is central to his cinematic creed. In my discussion of this topic, I wish to pay particular attention to his film Ashes of Time.

Before I discuss Wong Kar-wai’s idea of time as manifested in his cinema, I would like to make some preliminary observations on time in cinema in general. It need hardly be said that time has always been an important concept in filmmaking. Films deal with stories, and stories are actions of people presented through time. Hence time becomes important. Filmmakers tell a story through moving images and this movement is a consequence of time. Once gain time assumes a great importance. From the very beginning as filmmakers were experimenting with style and technique time loomed large as an undeniable force. For example when in 1908 D.W. Griffith in his short film ‘After Many Years’ decided to make use of the technique of flashback, many studio executives warned him of the confusion it might create in the mind of the viewers. However, he realized that in the increasingly urban environment given to fragmentations and dislocations this was a useful way of telling a story.

Experiment

Filmmakers have experimented in diverse ways with time as exemplified in such works as Matrix and Rashomon. In films like Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour and Christopher Nolan’s Momento we see bold experimentations with time. This tendency is discernible both in art films and popular films. Works such as Back to the Future – The Terminator – Time Bandits – Time After Time – Nick of Time – Groundhog Day are illustrative of this. Similarly Asian filmmakers have sought to explore the limits of time in interesting ways as exemplified in films such as Rouge (Hong Kong) and Halpos (Philippines.)

Wong Kar-wai made his first film, As Tears Go By, in 1988. A film that is somewhat reminiscent of martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, it explores the possibilities of the genre of gangster films. What he was seeking to do was to de-glamorize the genre and expose the waste and violence that is endemic to the kind of life led by gangsters.

His second film Days of Being Wild was made in 1991. It succeeded in gaining wide critical attention. Yuddy, a young man who is addicted to violence is at the center of the film; he has affairs with two women, and later abandons both of them and goes off to the Philippines in search of his birth mother. Yuddy is a wealthy, carefree egoist who is uninterested and unable to enter into deep human relations, thereby dramatizing the powers of alienation, solitude, uncertainty. His trademark stylistic features such as episodic narration, discontinuities, fragmentation, discrepant spatial and temporal registers, and the frequent use of voice-over and so on are abundantly present.

In 1994 Wong Kar -wai made is third film, Ashes of Time’, which is ostensibly a martial arts film but in point of fact a counter-martial arts film. In the same year he made his fourth film Chungking Express which succeeded both commercially and critically. It is, unlike his other films, a light-hearted comedy that deals with two loosely connected stories abandoned by their respective girl friends. The action of the film takes place in the famous Chunking Mansion which has come to symbolize the crass consumerism, the decadence, the hubris of the throw-away culture associated with consumer capitalism. In 1995 Wong made Fallen Angels which was originally intended to be a sequel to Chungking Express, but in point of fact is not so. However, there are discernible similarities and affinities of interest between the two films in terms of style, representational techniques and visual rhetoric. Fallen Angels reconfigures the lives and activities of a number of characters inhabiting the underworld of Hong Kong.

In 1997, Wong Kar-wai made Happy Together, a narrative taking place in Argentina. This won for Wong the director’s prize at Cannes. The film is sub-titled a story of reunion and explores the aftermath of a relationship between two gay men. It also has suggestive pointers to the impending handover of Hong Kong to china. Loosely based on a relatively unknown novel by Manuel Puig, the film seeks to probe into a theme that Wong has found to be intriguing – the tensions and anxieties and ambivalences that characterize human intimacy. Being happy together is the theme and desired goal of the film, but it also demonstrates the impossibility of this goal.

Three years later he made In a Mood for Love, perhaps his most delicate film in terms of love and eroticism. The sensuous immediacy of its images is indeed memorable. It is in many ways a nostalgic film looking back to the 1960s. The nostalgia for the 1960s pervades the film inflecting its narrative discourse as well as visual registers and tone. In this film too the determinate role played by organizing and dominant symbols is evident; in the Days of Being Wild, Ashes of Time, Happy Together and In a Mood for Love the telephone booth, bird cage, waterfall, and carefully photographed walls respectively act as the guiding symbol. In 2004 he made a film titled ‘2046’, which has as its theme the power of lost memories. In 2007 he directed his first English language film titled My Blueberry Nights.

The idea of time is central to many of Wong’s films. We know the deep implications of time that manifest themselves in the work of a filmmaker like Alain Resnais. Similarly, in Wong Kar-wai’s films the importance of time is undeniable. According to the British film critic Tony Rayns Wong Kar- wai is ‘a poet of time.’ In his judgment, no other film director since Alain Resnais has been so sensitive to the impact of time on memory, sensation and emotion. As he observed, ‘few other directors have ever imbibed their movies with such a metaphysical sense of time at work; dilating, stretching, lurching, dragging, speeding by.’ A film like Ashes of Time with all its philosophical interests can best be understood in terms of the power of time. The deconstructive thinker Jacques Derrida sees a connection between time and fire. According to him, cinder is ‘that which preserves in order no longer to preserve.’ This statement emblematizes in interesting ways the predicament facing the characters in the Ashes of Time. As the story unfolds, it becomes evident that they are straining to preserve time in order not to preserve it.

In Wong Kar- wai’s films, one observes a complex treatment of time that serves to underscore his distinct vision of space, time and selfhood; they are interconnected in convoluted ways. Time is ordinarily conceptualized as a continuous flow through which people and events move; the dominant trope for time is the river. Expressions such as the river of time, flow of time, time has slipped away bear testimony to this fact. The river is the standard paradigm for time. However, it is evident that Wong Kar-wai sees things differently. He sees time as a frozen river, which of course underlines its spatiality. Events do not float in time, as in normal films, giving rise to categorizations of past, present and future. In his films, events are presented as entities in space that are connected to each other spatially. Hence, the work of Wong

does not encourage us to conceive of time as a continuous, uninterrupted flow.

The idea that time is continuous flow, some would argue, is only a linguistic trope that we come to embrace in our daily life as a way of delineating time. To imagine events as items flowing in a river while we are calmly observing them from the bank is a misperception and mis-characterization. These critics contend that we need to go beyond this paradigm. Through his cinematic works, Wong Kar-wai seems to be urging us that that we need to conceptualize time in alternate ways. It is as a way of underlining this mode of thinking that he has chosen to focus on the spatiality of events and the ways in which events are spatially connected. The disjunctions, dislocations, discrepancies, discontinuities in the filmic narrative discourse of Wong that I alluded to earlier can be productively interpreted in terms of this alternate reading of time. What this ‘static’ view of time underscores is not the powerlessness of time or the insignificance of time but its power and significance seen from a different vantage point and in relation to a different frame of intelligibility.

For example, in the film Ashes of Time, we are aware of the long periods of waiting and inactivity of its main characters. Some in the audience who are used to action-based martial arts films find this disconcerting. These long periods of waiting and inactivity are reconfigured, given visualities, through spatial images. If we wish to go deeper into the philosophical implications of his move, we can do no better than invoke Kant’s name. It is evident that Wong is keen to dismantle the easy binary that Kant posited between space as dimension of the phenomenon of external sense and time as the internal form of perception related to inward states.

Philosophers have always been interested in time and consequently it is hardly surprising that a significant body of writing has emerged around this topic. In terms of our immediate concerns – the films of Wong Kar-wai and how hey represent and explore time – two European philosophers could prove to be suggestive. They are Emanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. It is indeed true that they are not the names that spring immediately to mind when we discuss the topic of philosophy of time. Nonetheless, in terms of the interests and investments of Wong Kar-wai they are highly relevant. For example Levinas sees the moment, an instant of time, as carrying within it the idea of its exclusion from other moments. In other words, he wishes to establish the point that moments are separate and monadic.

According to him time and sociality are indissolubly linked. As he remarked, ‘the dialectic of time is the very dialectic of the relationship with the other. That is, a dialogue which in turn has to be studied in terms other than those of the dialectic of the dialectic of the solitary subject.’ Although Levinas is expounding his idea within a religious and philosophical framework, it could be usefully applied to a film like Wong’s Ashes of Time to illuminate some of its more seemingly obscure aspects. What this suggests is that however solitary, withdrawn and self-absorbed a character may be, as indeed some in this film are, the full force of time on them is registered through the remembered interactions with others. To put it differently, the sociality of time is a condition of its experience. Just as memory is not personal but social as Halbwachs famously observed, so time too is embedded in social reality as Levinas astutely remarked, ‘time is not the achievement of an isolated and lone subject, but that it is only relationship of the subject with the other.’

This broad approach to time and memory in Wong Kar-wai’s films can gain in greater resonance when we locate it within exegetical frameworks fashioned by such thinkers as Levinas and Halbwachs. Such a move might appear as if it is unwarranted or externally imposed; but my experience is that widening the contexts of understanding of Wong’s films can yield valuable results. Moreover, his work invites such strategies of interpretation.

Wong Kar-wai’s distinct understandings of time are vividly inscribed in his style, visual rhetoric and strategies of representation. He pays close attention, as any gifted film director should, to the construction of images. His images become sites of critical thinking provoking the viewer to reflection and self-reflection.let us, for example, consider the large and revolving bird cage which is the presiding image of the film Ashes of Time. The protagonist of the film, Ouyang, sits in front of the cage and its shadow plays across the face of Ouyang and the faces of other characters. What this memorable image suggests to us is that the main characters are helplessly trapped in time. This can be cited as an example of what the French philosopher and film theorist Gilles Deleuze refers to as the time-image; the time-image as Deleuze introduces it is trans-narrative in its impact. He draws a distinction between movement image and time image. The movement image tends to follow the characters in action; it facilitates the narrative flow while the time image, by contrast, tends to instigate reflection on the very labor of representation itself.

It seems to me that Wong Kar-wai has deployed the time-image with great success to communicate his cinematic visions. Let us consider a film like Ashes of Time. When Ouyang is sitting before the revolving bird cage, which as I stated earlier, stands as a symbol of time and its entrapping force, the image has a way of encouraging us to ponder the dilemmas faced by the characters in the film. It bears a significance that transcends the imperatives of the immediate narrative. The image does more than opening a pathway to the consciousness of Ouyang. It assumes the significance of a space of reflection that provokes us to examine the meaning of the film. Here we have an instance of the work of the time-image as it facilitates a larger re-imagining of the significance of the film. Another example of the power of the time-image in Ashes of Time is the long shot of a lonely horse rider moving across the screen at a distance. This image is repeated many times in the film thereby urging us to reflect on the loneliness of itinerant swordsmen as well as the hardships faced by those depicted in the film.

As I asserted earlier, Alain Resnais is a filmmaker who has given great though to the easy time is central to cinematic experience. Gilles Deleuze once said that, ‘in cinema, Resnais says, something ought to happen around the image, behind the image, and even inside the image.’ This is indeed what occurs in time-images and they shed light on the complex work of time in interesting ways. Time-images promote reflections on time and representation. Wong Kar-wai’s images manifest both surplus and deficit. He once observed that you can signify change by not showing change.

It can be said that Wong Kar-wai is a filmmaker who is deeply preoccupied with time. one perceives this deep engagement with time in almost all his films. It is scarcely possible to think of any other Chinese filmmaker who has been so obsessed with clocks and calendars. Films such as Days of Being Wild and Ashes of Time serve to enforce this point. For example, Days of Being Wild opens with a question posed by the protagonist to one of the principal female charters as to what time it is. She tells him the exact time. And he responds to her by saying, ‘it’s one minute before three on April 16th 1994, you’re with me. Because of you I will remember this minute .From now on we’ve been friends for one minute’. After that we hear on the voice-over a vice of a woman observing that, ‘whether he remembers me because of that one minute, I’ll never know….but I’ve always remembered him. Afterwards he came every dat. We are friends for one minute, then two minutes, soon we meet at least an hour a day.’

Similarly, in his highly popular and critically acclaimed film Chungking Express, a police officer in love reflects on the specific hour when he would make the transition from twenty four years old to twenty five, - that is precisely a month after his girl friend abandoned by him. he has a strange habit of buying cans of pineapples (his girlfriend loved them) with the expiry date specified on the table coinciding with his birthday. He has decided that if she does not call him that day, he will eat all the expired cans of pineapples and more. In Ashes of Time, too, as we noted earlier time runs through the narrative discourse like a leitmotif; .it influences both the narrative and performative dimensions of the film. The constant monologues of Ouyang which are diary-like, the ceaseless indexing of time, repetitions and duplications of events and sentiments, the cinematography that emphasizes the layers of frozen time in various events, the burden of dead time as it weighs down the characters bear testimony to Wong’s troubled fascination with time. Wong, through these devices, sponsors a creative ambiguity into his narratives. In his cinema the characters are so obsessed with the past and the future, it is as if the only thing that does not exist is the present.

In Ashes of Time, Wong Kar-wai initiates a dialectic between the vast and timeless sands in the desert, the ever rolling waters in the oceans, the perpetual clouds in the sky, and the deeply temporally and spatially dominated interactions among the characters in restricted settings underscoring the salience of the power of time. In his films time, memory and space are interconnected in complex ways. Wong is keen to point out that time is memory that operates within specific spaces. Indeed, in the work of Wong Kar-wai one observes a careful spatialization of time and temporalization of space.

The intersection of time and desire is another theme that figures prominently in Ashes of Time. Thinkers of the caliber of Jacques Lacan have pointed out that desire resists clear and unambiguous formulation and that it almost always exceeds our conceptual and representational grasp. In an interesting way, desire itself becomes the object of desire .It shares many features in common with time; it is open-ended and avoids closure. Through the filmic text of Ashes of Time one senses how time and desire are seamlessly intertwined. In almost all of Wong’s films that address issues of unfulfilled desire, unrequited love, there are no happy endings; desires never achieve satiation in fullness of time. Instead they continue to be unfulfilled, constantly feeding their unattainable goals and subjecting them to the slings and arrows of time. For Wong Kar-wai, desire like time is uncontainable and unreachable. It is apparent that many of the leading characters in his films experience this inconvenient and bitter truth .One can say that the pursuit of closure has to be understood as a will towards overcoming and obliterating difference and Wong does not want to have anything to do with it. It is Wong’s conviction that the inescapable fact about time and desire is that they relish their difference from themselves.

The use of time in cinema, it seems to me, can be explored at four different levels of investigative apprehension. The first is chronological time – time measured by clocks, watches and calendars. Here the focus of attention is on the representation of events in films that are structured according to linear time, the narrative presents no major problems by way of understanding; it flows smoothly offering few challenges to audiences. The second is psychological time. Here what we find is that the narrative is structured not in terms of chronological time, that is how events occurred over time, but in terms of the importance assigned to the events psychologically. Film directors who are deeply interested in the psychological complexities of their characters favor this approach. Flashbacks and flash forwards are commonly deployed by filmmakers who favor this approach. Outstanding directors such as Alain Resnais, Orson Welles and Ingmar Bergman have shown a great partiality to psychological time. Third, we have epistemological time. Here it becomes apparent that the orchestration of events is effected not in terms of the standard chronology or the importance attached to them psychologically and emotionally by the respective characters in the narrative but in relation to the way events follow a search to make sense of the confusions and chaos of the perceived world. Filmmakers such as Jean Luc Godard ad Michaelangelo Antonioni have displayed a great interest in epistemological time.

Wong Kar-wai , it seems tome, evinces a deep fascination with the nature and significance of epistemological time. In the narrative ordering of Ashes of Time with its complex recreation and re-imagining of events blends different time frames., following an epistemologically inflected vector of representation. The beginning of the film constitutes the end of the narrative. The narrative discourse of the film is shaped in conformity with a logic of time that is closely linked to an epistemological quest. If Wong Kar-wai is a film director deeply engaged with the ramifications of time, it is only the merest courtesy that we examine his preoccupation will all the intellectual resources available to us. T The fourth is cultural time. What cultural time references is the way that different cultures, though force of habit, the power of routine approach time differently. The way citizens in New York City and a remote village in India view time is different; cultural factors play a significant role in understanding time. This mode of time affords us a useful entry point into different cultures and their respective axioms and presuppositions and conventions. All these four types of time, I wish to argue, influence filmic narrative discourses in important ways.

The leading characters in Ashes of Time are victims of time. What we observe is their inability to master time or even understand it. It is evident that memory, through its process of selective remembering and selective forgetting, eliminates and preserves time. Consequently, we can say that time is a vital component of the selfhood of the main characters in Wong Kar-wai’s films. This fact is vividly reflected in the visual style that Wong Kar-wai has fashioned for his films.