Nostalgia City?Consumption City?Heterotopia

Kar-wai Wong is one of the most outstanding Hong Kong Chinese filmmaker among contemporary film circles, internationally renowned as an auteur for his visually unique work which mainly focusing on city landscape. Instead of simple background, city space plays such a decisive role in his work, which is complex, full of pleats. Living in post-modern society like Hong Kong, Kar-wai Wong captured the residents anxiety and emptiness with his sharp eyes, then translated into distinguished spaces: lonesome passageway, cramped cell, rainy day, night-streets with neon sign … In a word, urban problems are always the focuses in his masterpiece.The Urban spaces in Wong's work can be divided into three categories:" Nostalgia city", " Consumption city" and " Exotic city". For the first one is Chapter 1. " Nostalgia city", which mainly focus on As Tears Go by(1988), Days of Being Wild(1990), In the Mood for Love(2000),2046(2004) and The Grandmaster(2013). Start with mansion then radiated into public space together with entertainment space, the city landscape provides us a picture of Hong Kong culture, in which citizen's identical crisis and the ways to build self-identity has been fully explored. Chapter 2. " Consumption city" discussed Chungking Express(1994) and Fallen Angels(1995) mostly. In the space axis, the power of capital accumulation and deprivation permeates everywhere of the world. As a response, Wong's film captured the unique consumption spaces which scattered with typical individual/group:The consumption space and the consumer, the hybrid space and the stroller, the media space and the mediator, the daily space and the fetishist. Chapter 3. " Exotic city" mainly analysised Happy Together-(1997) as well as My Blueberry Nights(2007). In those films we can find that leading role always fail to serve hotel as home for mental substitution. The relation between home and hotel reflects the individual's normal surviving state in our modern society:Striving for life in "home" and "other space" crevice. Night view on the street, inconstant lights, glass windows, hotels and bars jointly mirrors protagonist's state of lingering in physical space in films. The stranger lost the spiritual sustenance in sleepless city. The character often fall into the abyss of loneliness and despair after temporary pleasure seeking. Short habitat and the normalization of the movement embodied in the various of public transportation spaces.By going through " Nostalgia city", " Consumption city" and " Exotic city", We can draw the conclusion that the time and space in Kar-wai Wong's film has dual characteristics----"the contradiction between real and unreal". He use a lot of Utopia and heterotopias imagery to make the character swayed precariously between real and unreal. For the space has both reality and illusory features, the time is both accurate and vague. Based on the real and illusion of time and space, the director not only limited the body but also liberated it. Therefore, Kar-wai Wong's work has unique connotations of aesthetic and cultural values. He depicted the social spiritual history and the Urban history of Hong Kong which was multi-level, multi-dimensional depth.