On The Post-modernity Of Wong Kar-wai’s Films

This paper tried to do an integrity carding and research on Wong Kar-wai’s so farten and one third films. At first, this paper investigated the background of WongKar-wai’s films, then analysed the postmodern theme, postmodern narrative, technologyapplication and commercial of Wong Kar-wai’s films in the framework of postmoderntheory, trying to combine them over ontology research and cultural studies.Many kinds of culture coexist in Hong Kong due to its special status. AlthoughHong Kong films in the90s were depressed for many reasons, the producers of HongKong films created many high quality works inspite of various challenges. With the rapiddevelopment of modern western technology and economy in the twentieth century,post-modernism gradually evolved into a worldwide cultural trend and penetrated thepublic’s daily life, values and thinking mode. Although most of these works arenotcompletely pos-tmodernism films, some of them have many postmodern features andfactors. Wong’s films are the model of them. The French New Wave in50s to60s alsohad profound effect on Hong Kong films and Wong Kar-wai. Wong Kar-wai inheritedand developed some thoughts, methods and features of the French New Wave films.Wong’s films fully displayed the disappearance of the subject, and the postmoderncharacters’ living condition and emotion.“In the postmodern ‘exhausted’”, the subject is“fully fragmented and disintegrated”,“there is no oneself’s presence.” Wong’s filmsdeliberately ignored the characters’ names and social relationship. The characters are allmarginal, mobile, unstable and lonely, anxiety, paranoid. Wong Kar-wai highlighted themodern people’s living condition and psychological characteristics by using highlysymbolic figures can be replaced, let us see the modern people’s absurd, paranoid andautistic after losing selves. For “understanding, the truth, communication arenotpossible”, they isolate from each other, become good at refusing, wander lonely in the“postmodern game type life”“for the uncertain target”, waiting for the judgment ofdestiny. Modern people freeze their emotion under hard shells, leave out optional floating,not personal emotion. Although Wong Kar-wai dig out modern people’s real, delicatedemotion hidden in calm by using special circumstances and details, what the films showis still the loneliness from person to person. Modern people can only express their lonely feelings in their variable life.In his films, Wong Kar-wai showed his unique charming postmodern narrative styleby collaging solidify time symbols and fragmentary space structure. Wong’s films brokethe past structure model of time and space, collaged the time pieces according to theneeds of the films, used personal time instead of real and social time, to reveal modernpeople’s own time experience in daily life. In the films, Wong constructed the allegoricalpostmodern space by using cutted, restructured, broken and insecurity space, metaphordfor contemporary urbanite’s choking and desperate diaphragm.The language and monologue in Wong’s films are metaphorical, uncertainty andgameplay, shows the modern people’s life style and lonely individual state. At the sametime, Wong Kar-wai presented a scattered and fragmentary state by using the narrator’srepeated transformation.For “the logic of commercialization has affected people’s thinking”, Wong Kar-waimade his films suitable for the public’s taste with his technology rich in exploring spirit.Wong Kar-wai conveyed postmodern characters’ survival ande motional state, indicatedthe plot, built atmosphere and brought audience beautiful enjoyment by using lens unique.Wong’s films also payed attention to the ideographic function of color, used color toreflect the characters’ emotion and destiny. Wong Kar-wai used strong meaning music tofill the narrative blank and affect the audience’s emotion and thoughts.Commodity is the essence of Wong Kar-wai’s films. Wong Kar-wai has a clearunderstanding that film is the unity of art and commodity, he knows the features ofbest-selling products, used all star cast, parody of genre films and many popular elementsin his films to make them have a strong footing in a market.