Chungking Express Communications & Media Essay Paper

Drop Box - respond to a study question or come up with your own topic on any of his films

Padlet - Assignment - Post a clip or screen shot and discuss from any of Wong Kar-wai’s films

1. How does Wong’s film “defamiliarize” the viewer?
2. How much doe the film reveal to us about Buenos Aires?
3. Respond to the documentary Buenos Aires Zero Degree - The making of Wong Kar Wai's Happy Together (1999 Pung-Leung Kwan) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFeFGBvpdd4
4. Wong was quoted in an interview that he was worried that the film was “not gay enough” but at the same time he also stated “This film is not merely about two men, but about human relations, human communication and the means of maintaining it.
It’s two men but it could have been any other couple.” discuss
5. Does this film confront what Ackbar Abbas has called “the problematics of disappearance” for Hong Kong and the 1997 takeover?
6. How is transient global space represented in the film?
7. How does the film represent local/global urban spaces?
8. How is queer space represented?
9. How is intimacy represented between the three main characters, Ho Po-wing, Lai Yiu-fai and Chang?
10. Where is intimacy achieved in Wong’s films — in the domestic space or the public spaces?
11. Connect this quote to the film - “Every day m brush past so many other people. People we may never meet or people who may become close friends.” Cop 223, Chungking Express
12. How do Wong’s characters reveal a frustrated pursuit of intimacy?
13. Comment on Lai’s statement when he runs into Ho cruising in the men’s toilets “I thought I was different from Po-wing. Turns out lonely people are all the same.”
14. For critic Larry Gross, the characters in Wong’s films seem suspended in an ‘unfulfilled yet compelling dream, as if the movie opens out into a new reality just outside the frame of the screen.”
15. How do Happy Together and other Wong films refuse to relegate intimacy to the private form of the couple or privatized domestic space?
16. How do his films suggest that the potential for intimacy exists outside in the public world?
17. Discuss how the apartments are places of transience or loss of privacy in Chungking Express and Fallen Angels.
18. Critic Ackbar Abbas suggests for almost all of Wong’s films treat the theme of “proximity without reciprocity” How we can be physically close to someone but have not intimacy? Are his films about how individual characters fail to achieve real intimacy or is it more complicated?
19. Do his films suggest that globalism generates the potential for new kinds of feeling and new kinds of intimacy?
20. What does the character Chang provide to Lai?
21. What are the cinematic techniques in the film that affect the spectator’s interpretation of time and movement?
22. As you watch the film, consider how your understanding and expectations of the characters evolves in this film
23. How are our expectations of the events fulfilled or denied
24. How does the depiction of the location (Hong Kong) part of — or an extension of — the characters in this film?