I’ve just seen the future of cin­e­ma.” So declared the Amer­i­can film crit­ic Peter Brunette after stum­bling, “still dazed,” from a screen­ing at the 1995 Toron­to Inter­na­tion­al Film fes­ti­val. “Oh,” replied TIFF Ciné­math­èque pro­gram­mer (and respect­ed author­i­ty on Asian cin­e­ma) James Quandt. “You’re just com­ing from the Wong Kar-wai film?” Brunette includes this sto­ry in his mono­graph on Wong’s work, which was pub­lished in 2005. At that point, his pic­tures like Days of Being Wild, Chungk­ing Express, and In the Mood for Love had already torn through glob­al film cul­ture, inspir­ing cinephiles and film­mak­ers alike to believe that an intox­i­cat­ing range of cin­e­mat­ic pos­si­bil­i­ties still lay unex­plored.

What’s more, they seemed to do it all of a sud­den, hav­ing come out of nowhere. Of course, they came out of some­where: Hong Kong, to be pre­cise, a small but dense­ly pop­u­lat­ed and eco­nom­i­cal­ly mighty soon-to-be-for­mer-colony whose dis­tinc­tive cul­tur­al and indus­tri­al mix­ture pro­duced a kind of moder­ni­ty at once famil­iar and alien to behold­ers around the world.

Or at least it felt that way to those behold­ing it through Wong Kar-wai movies, which cre­at­ed their very own aes­thet­ic world with­in the con­text of Hong Kong. That “neon-drenched” world in which “lone­ly souls drift around, des­per­ate­ly try­ing to make a mean­ing­ful con­nec­tion, no mat­ter how fleet­ing,” is the sub­ject of the new BFI video essay at the top of the post.

As a part of Hong Kong’s “sec­ond new wave,” Wong found his cin­e­mat­ic voice by telling “high­ly atmos­pher­ic sto­ries of restrained pas­sion, using daz­zling visu­als, mem­o­rable songs, and uncon­ven­tion­al nar­ra­tives,” all the while “push­ing the bound­aries of Hong Kong genre cin­e­ma to cre­ate some­thing fresh and inven­tive.” The West got its first big dose of it in 1994 through Chungk­ing Express, whose world­wide release owed in part to the enthu­si­asm of Quentin Taran­ti­no. In the clip above Taran­ti­no does some enthus­ing about it and the rest of Wong’s oeu­vre up to that point, which “has all that same ener­gy that Hong Kong tends to bring to its cin­e­ma, but he’s also tak­ing a cue from the French New Wave” — and espe­cial­ly Jean-Luc Godard, who showed how to “take genre pieces and break the rules.”

None of Wong’s films has made as much of an impact as 2000’s In the Mood for Love, the tale of a man and woman brought togeth­er — though not all the way togeth­er — by the fact that their spous­es are cheat­ing on them with each oth­er. Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer, ana­lyzes the movie’s pow­er in the video essay “Frames with­in Frames.” Watch­ing it, he says, “you can’t help but feel that you’re in the hands of some­body in com­plete con­trol.” By restrict­ing his cin­e­mat­ic lan­guage, Wong “echoes the restric­tion of action that plagues Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan in 1960s Hong Kong.” The recent 20th-anniver­sary restora­tion of In the Mood for Love and those of Wong’s oth­er work are even now being screened around the globe. Hav­ing caught one such screen­ing just last night, I feel like I’ve seen the future of cin­e­ma again.

Note: The Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion now offers a Wong Kar-wai box set that fea­tures sev­en blu-rays, includ­ing 4k dig­i­tal restora­tions of Chungk­ing Express, In the Mood for Love, Hap­py Togeth­er and more. Find it here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Best 100 Movies of the 21st Cen­tu­ry (So Far) Named by 177 Film Crit­ics

Jean-Luc Godard’s Breath­less: How World War II Changed Cin­e­ma & Helped Cre­ate the French New Wave

How the French New Wave Changed Cin­e­ma: A Video Intro­duc­tion to the Films of Godard, Truf­faut & Their Fel­low Rule-Break­ers

The Secret of the “Per­fect Mon­tage” at the Heart of Par­a­site, the Kore­an Film Now Sweep­ing World Cin­e­ma

Quentin Taran­ti­no Picks the 12 Best Films of All Time; Watch Two of His Favorites Free Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The dom­i­nant form of Hol­ly­wood and/or main­stream film­mak­ing has been real­ism, the sense that even in our wildest fan­ta­sy, sci-fi, and super­hero films there’s still an attempt to hide the cam­era, the crew, and the light­ing, and that what we’re see­ing just *is*, that noth­ing has been con­struct­ed for us. Despite the tricks that edit­ing and non-diegetic sound (music, etc.) play on us, we are still will­ing to believe that we are see­ing a thing that hap­pened.

There’s very few film­mak­ers that explic­it­ly resist this and still make pop­u­lar and suc­cess­ful Hol­ly­wood films, and Wes Ander­son is one of them. Hence the above video essay from Thomas Flight, who recent­ly vis­it­ed Anderson’s films to pull out the more eso­teric of his ref­er­ences.

Flight’s the­sis runs thus­ly. Ander­son chose to use real fur on the stop-motion pup­pets in the Fan­tas­tic Mr. Fox not despite the hair mov­ing from the ani­ma­tors’ hands’ manip­u­la­tion, but *because* of it. Show­ing the fin­ger­prints as it were of the cre­ators with­in the film itself is a con­stant styl­is­tic choice in his cin­e­ma, and one that is also reflect­ed in his use of flat, dio­ra­ma-like frames. This is what crit­ic Matt Zoller Seitz, who has writ­ten sev­er­al beau­ti­ful cof­fee table books on Wes Ander­son, calls Plani­met­ric Com­po­si­tion. But it’s also there in the titles, use of the­ater cur­tains, of the numer­ous sto­ry­book and com­ic book ref­er­ences that shape Anderson’s work.

This is not new of course, if you fol­low any writ­ing on Ander­son. It’s a key to under­stand­ing his aes­thet­ic. But Flight goes fur­ther to ask why. Why con­struct some­thing so arti­fi­cial and risk alien­at­ing audi­ences?

Flight comes to the point: it’s a risk worth tak­ing. It’s a moment in childhood—he com­pares it to a par­ent read­ing a bed­time sto­ry. A par­ent is present, often the focus of the child’s atten­tion (there might not even be a book) but at the same time so is the sto­ry. Words unfold in speech and also unfold in a child’s mind. Both exist in the same space, the arti­fi­cial and the real.

So many Ander­son films unfold like storybooks—we often see a hard­back book with the same title in the film itself, or in the case of The Grand Budapest Hotel, a series of sto­ries and books, all nes­tled inside each oth­er. Flight doesn’t make the com­par­i­son, but it is worth doing so: Anderson’s films are like epis­to­lary nov­els of the 19th cen­tu­ry, such as Franken­stein or Wuther­ing Heights, sto­ries with­in let­ters with­in sto­ries.

But here’s the inter­est­ing part: when Ander­son has a moment of height­ened emo­tion in his films, where char­ac­ters let down their guard and speak from the heart, the direc­tor will give us the clas­sic real­ist shot/reverse shot. It’s fleet­ing but it’s there.

And that works exact­ly because Ander­son holds off on reveal­ing it to us until that one moment. The sto­ry­teller knows it’s spe­cial and knows we’re going to find it spe­cial. At a time when the auteur the­o­ry is under attack from crit­ics on one side and the cap­i­tal­ist machine, it’s good to know there’s a direc­tor like Ander­son who doesn’t give us what we want, but gives us what we so sore­ly need.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wes Anderson’s Shorts Films & Com­mer­cials: A Playlist of 8 Short Ander­son­ian Works

A Com­plete Col­lec­tion of Wes Ander­son Video Essays

Wes Ander­son Releas­es the Offi­cial Trail­er for His New Film, The French Dis­patch: Watch It Online

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.