Use of Time and Wong Kar-wai

Abstract

Wong Kar-wai’s films are analyzed and assessed according to their use of narrative film and how much of Time is appropriated and valorized in order to show its importance to Hong Kong as site of transnational capital exchange. This, in turn, is comparatively read against the background of Philippine cinema’s increasing use of social realism in films that implicate the country’s status as a neocolonial state and the people’s continuing struggle for greater opportunities. This essay argues that the use of editing and camera techniques and their implicative notion of time, speed, and progress are heavily anchored on the vicissitudes of a filmmaker’s economic and political “time.”