Intro to Film – Intermittent Mechanism

The Expiration of Time and Love: Analyzing Speed of Motion in Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express

April 23, 2020October 10, 2026intermechanismcontributor

by Meagan, Emily, Dylan, Joalda, and Haina
University of Chicago CMST 10100, Intro to Film
Spring 2020

California Dreamin’-The Mama’s and the Papa’s (to supplement your reading)

The Chase

The context in which Wong Kar-Wai actually made Chungking Express is interesting to note as it relates to the techniques he uses to alter speed of motion in the film. According to Quentin Tarantino, Wong Kar-Wai was actually working on a different/epic movie, he had been editing for multiple years but had felt stalled in the process. Just as a writer needs to take breaks at times to look at their work with an objective lense, he felt he needed to step away for a bit, and decided to use the time to put out a quickly produced / quick hitting film, which would become Chungking Express. The context in which he made the film – moving from editing a film that was long, slower paced in time, to producing a film that was quick paced in time, and then returning back to the slower paced one – is in various ways actually reflected in his treatment of time in Chungking Express. As the remainder of this post will discuss in different ways, Wong Kar-Wai manipulates time through film techniques that alter the speed of motion. This manipulation of time is not meaningless however, the ways in which he does so is to reflect how time moves differently for different characters/situations, connecting us closer to their stories– instilling empathy in many respects. While Hong Kong films, at least at the time, were known for their fast paced approach, Wong Kar-Wai created a film in Chungking Express that is both fast and slow. And perhaps, his approach and reason to this was in-part to reflect how he perceives time as moving at different speeds within his own career.

Step-printing uses an optical printer to repeat frames, so that in the end, the scene kind of looks like a flip-book. The process, more simply, is basically the duplication of a film frame, creating an interesting type of motion that is hard to define without visuals, but easy to recognize when you see it. In the opening scene of Chungking Express, when Cop 223 is running after a suspect, he is in focus, but the background isn’t, which makes his background look like a blurry string of neon lights behind/around him. The visual effect places him clearly in the scene, but also removes him from it, as the background is blurry and almost seems as though he is not entirely in the same place as the background. The scene is not in slow-motion or fast-motion, but a kind of different motion that is slow and fast at the same time. The step-printing effect aids in both the film’s illusion of time and feeling of isolation. The constant stream of neon lights, the hussle and bussle of the market (never failing to unveil the seedy undergrounds of the city), and the crowd of people is a common sight in Hong Kong food markets, yet Cop 223 is facing two struggles. One, his affinity towards true love has backfired. His love has ended their relationship and the second part of the movie shows Cop 223’s fight to stop the expiration of love and time. In a dream-like performance, Cop 223 wonders the city hoping his ex-girlfriend will chalk their break up to a practical joke. When he realizes this is an impossible scenario, he searches through the city to find his next meaningful love, or at least to feel close to someone again: “ This was the closest we ever got. Just 0.01 of a centimeter between us.”

The Letter

In part two of the Chungking Express, Wong Kar-wai’s signature step-printing is back: fueled by the combination of slow motion, time-lapse, and motion blur in a single frame. Cop 663 is also faced with the betrayal of love, in this case from an airline stewardess. It is worth pointing out that part two of the film follows much slower, romantic sequencing in comparison to the first. Yet, the concentration of time that elapses when Faye presents the hand-written note to Cop 663 from his ex-girlfriend is just as listless as the feelings of romantic loss. Instead of seeing a physical change to Cop 663 in this time of mourning, the audience can reflect on how the cinematographers feel about both Faye and Cop 663. In this lapse, we can imagine Cop 663 reminiscing on the life he had with the airline stewardess for the last 5 years. Yet, we can also imagine Faye’s longing for the cop, along with the realization her newfound crush is still emotionally invested in his previous relationship. As twenty-two seconds of step-printing plays, only Faye and Cop 663 remain still, while the rest of the world turns. Although the specificities of the letter are never revealed to the audience, the moment of Cop 663’s acknowledgement of the letter allows for two scenarios: He won’t read it, thus the heartbreak will never be materialized OR he reads it and spirals into emotional pain. The movement between the characters, allowed by step-printing, creates noise in an otherwise silent scene. Time is both the killer of his relationship, while Faye sees time as the nourishment for her budding romance. The subtleties that underlie change is the ultimate heart of the film, and these scenes of step-printing appear to be a mockery of the situations we cannot control.

The California Restaurant

During one of the last scenes of part two of Chungking Express, we see Cop 663 in the California restaurant. After learning Faye’s secret, he decides to ask her out on a date and brings her to this restaurant that represents her dreams and aspirations. But time goes on, and Faye does not seem to be showing up. Wong Kar-wai’s use of step-printing is used to effectively communicate to viewers how Cop 663 is feeling. In this moment, it seems like he is separated from the world around him. As people go by him in the background, Cop 663 is slowly moving within the foreground. This can represent how time and the world around him is continuing even as he wallows in his sadness, waiting for his date to finally come and rescue him from it. The dialogue in these scenes also plays into his loneliness. He describes Faye’s lateness as a flight delay, and later says that the flight was cancelled, signaling that Faye would not be showing up. These descriptions tie into the fact that Cop 663 has yet to let go of his past where he is in love with a flight attendant, and can only seem to describe time and events through terms that can help remind him of the past. Even the music in the background, some sort of slow jazz, captures the slowness and dullness of the moment. The step-printing effect and the other crucial aspects of the film together create this somber tone that seems to continue to encompass Cop 663’s lonely life.

The Cup of Coffee

Faye offers Cop 663 her note after he tells the snack bar about his breakup; in a little over one minute, Wong uses the step-printing process twice to show the perspectives of both Faye and the heartbroken cop. For him, time slows down around him as he drinks his coffee; absorbed in his own residual feelings for his ex-girlfriend. He steps out of this trance as he leaves Faye and her letter behind, who returns to work diligently cleaning the counter at a normal pace. The scene then cuts to focus on a cup of coffee that Faye has brewed after her hours, and step-printing is used again to show her sipping the cup of coffee and grimacing at the flavor. Though there are no more people walking in and out of the frame, the intentional disjointedness of the step-printing process tells us that time is still passing outside, but moves slowly for Faye inside the shop as she tries to sort out her unrequited feelings. Unlike utilizing actual slow motion, step-printing allows for the manipulation of specific frames such that one can be drawn out for a different number of repetitions. Since it is also manually copied, viewers can tell when the placement or angle of the scene shifts slightly, such as in stop-motion films. Here, the shakiness of the transitions add to the cinematic effect in the ways the viewers can interpret and empathize with Faye’s feelings. Perhaps she is annoyed with herself for trying something she doesn’t like; perhaps she wishes to experience the same kind of feelings the cop is experiencing through solidarity; or perhaps she doesn’t understand what it is about coffee that he just enjoys so much. Most likely, she is feeling some combination of all of the above, and her disappointment at her predicament is clear. Placed directly after the other, the viewer experiences the emotional arrays of both characters who are isolated in their own worlds. As hard as Faye tries to empathize or place herself next to Cop 663, she struggles to step out of or make sense of her own emotions.

A Look Into Parasite‘s Decor

April 15, 2020October 10, 2026intermechanismcontributor

making_of_parasite_-_publicity_-_splash_-2019

by Zach, Meagan, Dylan, Gabriela, and Alan
University of Chicago CMST 10100, Intro to Film
Spring 2020

Position of the Houses: How it Reflects a Class Struggle

Kim House

The Kim house is below ground in a busy and cluttered area of poor families with people disrespecting their home (including a couple of drunk men peeing on the property). Their house itself has very poor lighting and really the only pieces of technology are outdated, insufficient for their daily lives, and are in very bad shape. Their house has a very unorthodox structure to it, yet it can also be said that the Kims are very good at using what they have in order to make it work, regardless of the clutter that it creates in their home (E.g. socks drying on a ceiling fan and trying to latch onto any wifi possible). They have supplies for work (pizza boxes) stacked everywhere and store clutter in every room. Even the toilet is in a strange place, sitting on top of a ledge. There appears to be no beds in the home. In the opening scenes of the film, we see the patriarch of the Kim family resting his eyes and lying in a fetal position atop a thin rug. This layout shows how they manage to scrape by using what they have in the most efficient way possible. The family has this massive window that they have to look up to see out of. This could be a metaphor for the family wanting to climb up the socioeconomic ladder and take on a world that they don’t feel is theirs. On the outside of the window, it looks almost as if it is barred. This again shows how they are locked away from the rest of the world, unable to succeed and advance up the socioeconomic ladder.

Park House

The Park house is everything that the Kim house isn’t. The Park house has a beautiful garden on its entrance and as the audience gets the initial shot of the property, it is obvious, even before it is mentioned, that the house itself is a work of art. The Park house is secluded on top of a massive hill, which saves it from being destroyed during the rain (the downfall of the Kim house because they are at the bottom where all the water heads). Instead of the clutter featured in the Kim house, their house is simple, clean, and modern. The house is both home-y and intimidating, but most importantly is an object of idealism. It is symbolic of success and excess, the antithesis of what is to come towards the end of the film. Unlike the Kim family who needs to make use of everything they have, the Park family has the space and luxury to keep their house clear of clutter. The family has many unneeded pieces of technology featured in their house including a television in the bathroom and a borderline iPad in the wall. Another big difference is that there is this massive window (as if it is a movie screen and the family is watching a movie out of it) that the family uses to look out into a beautiful array of trees and grass. A key difference here is that the family is looking out onto their property on equal ground, which could be a metaphor of that they are complacent on where they are in society on a socioeconomic level with the land that they own. Although the Park house and the Kim house are both isolated in a sense, the manner of isolation casts a very different light on their relation to society. The Kim house was pushed underground and seemed to trap the family, preventing them from reaching beyond their squalor. The Park house, on the other hand, uses beauty to isolate itself. They have created their own barrier to shield themselves from the unpleasantness of the lower classes in society.

a14ba6dccfe66fcd221e399032f5942673-parks-home-01-rendering.h467.w700

Stairs: A Motif for a Socioeconomic Climb

There is an emphasis on stairs in both the Kim and Park residences, a metaphorical device of climbing to wealth and significance. The set of stairs leading down to the Kim residence creates an effect of being subservient to the outside world, of being below even the drunken man who urinates on the street. The steps used to reach the toilet are filthy, yet it functions as the passageway to the tiny window (again, an entrance to the more ordered outside world). It forces the Kim family to constantly consider their place in society and to become parasitic beings. In the Park residence, stairs are a common motif of the home’s elaborate architecture. They even seem to function as a mode of communication between the Parks, Kims, and Moon-gwang and husband. Between the delicately placed champagne flutes and decorative fine china, something a lot less sophisticated is found deep in the basement. Even when the Kim’s son seizes in horror to the sight of Oh Geun-sae peering from the base of the stairs, the audience seems a glimpse of the calamity that will ensue when social classes intersect.

Intentions/Objectives: Decisions Made by the Production Design Team

It’s interesting to note that both houses were built from “scratch” by production designer Lee Ha Jun. For the Kim’s house, the set designers and production staff travelled to basement neighborhoods and used silicon modeling to replicate the environment, such as power lines and bricks. Jun says, “Nonetheless, we wanted to avoid having it [the houses] look like a set. We thought of the space as another actor. I told the art and set department that instead of trying to build Kitaek’s semi-basement neighborhood, we should just bring it over”. Jun also mentioned that once they started actually creating the Kim home, some of their dimensions – for doorways for example – were ‘off’, and so they had to makeshift props to retroactively fit the space. He mentioned that this ended up being a positive as many of these lower socioeconomic neighborhoods undergo the same process… that is, many years of iterative “fixes” to broken walls, doors, appliances, etc. He also mentioned that the small bathroom was modeled off his own experiences in college of having a moldy/overcrowded one.

While in the film it is mentioned that the Park family’s house was built by a famous architect, that is of course not the actual case. Jun states that while they wanted to build a house with custom furniture that made you feel like it was not only a real one, but also belonged to a wealthy family, he more importantly clarified that his number one priority was to create the home keeping in mind spatial relationships and camera angles they’d need that would be conducive to the plot – such as characters watching each other – as well as “blocking” (which the third group may speak more about). Aside from that, to accomplish the realness effect (that of an affluent family’s home), Jun actually included real art works such as the image of a forest made by Korean artist Seung-mo Park (see below). Jun says that this artwork was intended to serve as a status symbol.

The Park families wealth is also demonstrated towards the beginning of the movie when the house is first being shown to Kevin. The mother of the Park family stops to show Kevin the family’s photos that have been hung on a wall of the house. The photos consist of some family portraits as well as wedding photos and impressive accomplishments that the father of the Park family has achieved. This pocket of photos displays the Park family’s wealth by showing that they are able to fund these photos and most likely have hired professional photographers to take them. The photos also show the career accomplishments of the father of the Park family that alludes to his major company that has become successful, as shown in the magazine cover that has been framed on the wall. In addition, in the photos the family is all matching wearing fancy clothes. This is especially prominent in the wedding photo, as the mother of the Park family is wearing a beautiful wedding gown with a long train. Wedding gowns to begin with are already very expensive, but the glamour of the mother’s wedding gown shows that it would not be something that many families would be able to afford.

Lesson Plan: Basic Terms of Cinema Studies + Their Relevance for Avant-Garde Cinema

February 10, 2017September 14, 2017Ian Bryce Jones

prezi_screenshot-key_terms_header_image

Ian here—

I suspect that every cinema studies teacher has their own favorite examples to use when teaching key vocabulary terms, and I would not be so presumptuous as to prescribe my own favorites! Nevertheless, though, it’s an important part of the job, so I wanted to share my own approach here.

Over the past couple of years, I have gotten used to teaching these terms in a very specific context. At the School of the Art Institute, I teach first-year seminar courses. They are courses designed so that all students have some basis in college-level writing as they go through their time at SAIC. Instructors are given enormous freedom to teach whatever they like. This makes it a great venue for testing out new and interesting course ideas, but the flip side of that is that your courses never have prerequisites, and there’s no telling the level of expertise students who enroll will actually have.

What I do, then, is devote one day early on in the semester to a quick-and-dirty Intro to Film in a single lecture. I take a lot of the examples and explanations I first started using when I taught Intro to Film at U Chicago in 2015, but I condense them down into something that can fit into an hour or so. It’s potent stuff.

You can access my go-to presentation here. I’ve set the privacy and sharing settings to their most open, so if you’re a Prezi user you should feel free to copy it if you like it, subbing in your own preferred definitions and clips as you feel necessary! I’m here to share, and not here to impose.

Continue reading →

Five Ways to Look Smart while Teaching PlayTime

December 22, 2016December 16, 2016Ian Bryce Jones

playtime_screenshot_00-43-04 — The travel posters are the obvious gag. But can you spot the fake cars?

Ian here—

So, this isn’t a proper lesson plan. It’s just a quick cheat sheet. When teaching PlayTime, I pair it with Kristin Thompson’s chapter “Play Time: Comedy n the Edge of Perception” in her book Breaking the Glass Armor. (I consider myself incredibly lucky that I can pair one of my favorite films with a piece of writing that I consider to be one of the more astute and persuasive pieces of academic film criticism ever written.) My lesson, therefore, largely revolves around the conclusions of Thompsons’ analysis: that “the comic and the non-comic become indistinguishable” in PlayTime, and that the way the film “forces us into new viewing procedures” holds the potential to “successfully transform our perception in general.”[i] To view PlayTime, in other words, is to encounter a new way of seeing the world, one that might persist beyond the theater.

How do you successfully persuade students that PlayTime requires specific viewing procedures from its audience, ones unlike those we use when viewing a more traditional narrative film? My tactic is pretty simple: I pull student attention to moments that reward close viewing. Thompson herself lists a bunch of these in her chapter. I like to point to additional, different ones, so that I can show students new, unexpected visual rewards—therefore making both me and Tati seem smarter than we otherwise would! Please feel free to steal these.

Continue reading →

Lesson Plan: Film Scores Addendum

November 30, 2016November 30, 2016Ian Bryce Jones

gravit_screenshot-01-for-second-post

Ian here—

This is just a quick addendum to my music-themed lesson on Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity (2013) from my Intro to Film course, which I posted earlier. This bit doesn’t have as much to do with synesthesia, which is why I separated it out, but it is something that I incorporated into the same lesson.

Continue reading →

Lesson Plan: Animation Week

November 10, 2016December 31, 2016Ian Bryce Jones

animation_week_mosiac

Ian here—

It is a shame to only teach one week on animation in an Intro to Film class, but I bowed to departmental tradition when I taught Intro to Film in spring 2015 and devoted only my final week of class to it. My screening for this week included Hummingbird Wars (Janie Geiser, 2014), Adventure Time S1E6, “The Jiggler” (Larry Leichliter, 2010), and The Lego Movie (Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, 2014).

This lesson preceded that screening, and pursued the following learning objectives: 1) I wanted students to understand that animators can work with individual frames of cinema, which can lead to the illusion of movement, but doesn’t have to. This would prep them for the flicker effects and broken motion of Geiser’s Hummingbird Wars. 2) I wanted to direct student attention to the salient aspects of Eisenstein’s theory of the “plasmatic” potential of animation, which finds expression in the Adventure Time episode. 3) I wanted students to be able to express some key aesthetic differences between hand-drawn and computer generated animation—specifically, that while hand-drawn animation excels at fulfilling Eisenstein’s “plasmatic” potential, CG animation excels at accurately simulating the physics of our everyday world.

Continue reading →

Lesson Plan: Film Scores and Synesthesia

September 22, 2016November 21, 2016Ian Bryce Jones

synesthesia_header_image

Ian here—

Spending one week on sound in an Introduction to Film course can be a daunting task. So much vocabulary, and so many new issues to discuss, with only a class or two to dwell on them. What to do?

I like to take this week to introduce the concept of synesthesia—the “bleeding” of one sense into another that results in sensations in one sensory modality being interpreted as impressions in another. It’s a phenomenon that has been studied from the era of classical Greek philosophy up through modern neuroscience, and it has provided inspiration to artists for nearly as long. For understandable reasons, it was something that was on a lot of filmmaker’s minds during the transition to sound cinema. Turning to this topic allows us to rope in stalwarts of classical film theory such as Eisenstein and Vertov, and to freely intermingle experiments in feature filmmaking with more radical experiments in the avant-garde.

In this particular lesson, I focus on music. If one’s spending two days on sound, this leaves another class for sound effects, if one so desires. Continue reading →

Lesson Plan: Bruce Conner’s A Movie

September 17, 2016March 8, 2018Ian Bryce Jones1 Comment

bruce_conner-a_movie_the_end

Ian here—

Bruce Conner’s A Movie is one of my favorite films to teach. I’ve taught it while covering theories of editing in an Introduction to Film course, I’ve taught it for a course on cinematic rhetoric, and I’ve taught it in courses on the history of American avant-garde cinema. I’ve been lucky enough to teach at a school that had a good-quality 16mm print of it in its collection, and since then I’ve made frequent use of a MPEG-4 rip of a VHS copy of that print (formats upon formats!). It’s less than ideal, but the poor image quality never seems to diminish students’ fascination with it.

Continue reading →