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tags: Film Wong Kar Wai Nostalgia
Wong’s films are part of a wider symptomatic cultural phenomenon in Hong Kong cinema. In his nostalgic films, time is often spatialized. With his constant interest in mobile space, such as hotels and trains, he creates an alternative perspective to question the grand narrative of history. In his reconstruction of the past, there is never any cultural purity or origin to revisit. Rather, the past is presented with itinerant characters, mobile space, and cultural ambivalence, enabling multiple narratives of history
Huffer says nostalgia is at it’s core conservative. It is seen as “necessarily static and unchanging in its attempt to retrieve a lost utopian space”
Svetlana Boym says nostalgia can be restorative or reflective. It is meant to construct an imagined community and reconnect the past with the present.
Despite the emphasis on time, space still plays a crucial role in today’s nostalgia. The fear or lament over the lost place contributes to nostalgia, and the creation of a fantasized past often involves spatial elements. Restorative nostalgia is crystallized by institutionalized spaces, such as museums and urban memorials, in which temporality is encased and clearly classified in archives, display cases, and curio cabinets
Preservation of a time in film: Wong Kar-wai has talked about how he consciously preserved the past with his films: “the lifestyle of Hong Kong in certain periods, maybe the sixties or seventies or eighties… I’m trying to preserve it”
Why the 60s? He’s reconstructing the HK of his childhood. But further “Expressing the anxiety over the disappearance of the city’s uniqueness after its merging into mainland China, his films respond to the de-historicized and globalized Hong Kong by constructing a reflective nostalgia.” The City Authentic
In Wong’s construction of the 1960s, his hometown Shanghai is a haunting shadow
Trains and Hotels are a recurrent object in Wong Kar-wai’s oeuvre.
In 2046, 2046 is not only a room number, but also the name of a mysterious place to where people can only take a specific train. Via the depiction of this futuristic train, the blurring of the past, present, and future is again spatialized. 2047 is a novel written by Chow about the place 2046 in which “nothing ever changes”.