Wong Kar-wai & his Films Essay

Wong Kar-wai is considered to be one of the most innovative and up-to-date director ever to come out of Hong Kong. As a representative of the Hong Kong New Wave, he is well-known for the films focused on substantial themes, including politics, human psyche, social conditions, concerns with “…love, identity and angst, recurring motifs in many of his works” (Song 1). Wong has a very unusual approach to creating films, starting work without a script and relying on intuition and improvisation more than on previously prepared ideas. The actors also receive little information about their characters, so that they can develop their characters in the process of filming. To grasp human naturalness and spontaneity, Wong does not allow actors to rehearse and use acting stamps, encouraging them to improvise and help each other. Wong also does not use storyboards and does not fix the camera in a certain position, preferring to experiments in the process of shooting.

Wong is known for his poetic film language, which focuses on the expressiveness and atmosphere of films. The structure of Wong’s films is usually fragmentary and chaotic, and leaves only a slight hint of the narrative, which often consists of several intertwined plot lines. Wong’s visual style is often described as beautiful and unique. The main elements of Wong’s visual style are clear, saturated colors, inventive camera work, “fragmentation of narrative structure, voiceover monologue, hand-held camera, discontinuity editing and ambiguous shots” (Song 2). The most frequent technique that Wong uses in his films is to impose the same frames at different speeds on each other, which creates the effect of “vague colors” – when bright colors are blurred into bands of light. Also, Wong often uses: rapid shooting, fast-paced editing , offset frame composition, fuzzy and shaded close-ups, cross-cutting, intraframe focusing,  jump cuts, shooting in the dark or in the rain and elliptical montage, which consists in reproducing a sequential action without showing its specific stages.

The use of fast-paced editing and inventive camera work greatly influences the stories Wong tells. This is evident in his films composed of hidden desires and unspoken emotions that people secrete deep inside of themselves. These stories include urban loneliness, heartaches and desires that accompany main heroes in the story. The experience of creating scenario designs allows Wong Kar-wai, when working on films, to do without the script itself, to be guided only by the emotional sense of design. His shooting turns into a solid improvisation, and the plot is sometimes born only at the editing table. Therefore, Kar-wai’s narrative structure splits into dozens of minor events, the director prefers to focus on moods, on playing with emotional states. For instance, created with the help of fast-paced editing in three weeks between the shooting of another film, “Chungking Express” became a starting point for the expansion of Kar-wai’s cinema to the West. The film itself represents Wong’s unique style: dancing camera, clip editing and the parallel pattern of fragmentary storylines where “the alternative narrative makes use of changing the temporal order” (Song 25) — all this became not only the director’s calling card, but also the cinema of the new century anticipated by a few years ahead.

Thus, taking the above-mentioned information into consideration, it is possible to draw a conclusion that Wong Kar-wai is a significant figure in modern cinema and is named one of the best directors of his generation. His use of fast-paced editing and inventive camera work greatly influences the stories he tells. In this case, it is possible to trace hidden desires and unspoken emotions, urban loneliness and heartaches inherent in the human’s inner world.

Works cited

Song, Jingjing. Modernist aesthetics in the films of Wong Kar-wai. Dissertation, Hong Kong Baptist University, 2014. Web. 8 Nov. 2018.

The terms offer and acceptance. (2016, May 17). Retrieved from

[Accessed: March 28, 2024]

"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016.

[Accessed: March 28, 2024]

freeessays.club (2016) The terms offer and acceptance [Online].
Available at:

[Accessed: March 28, 2024]

"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016

[Accessed: March 28, 2024]

"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016

[Accessed: March 28, 2024]

"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016

[Accessed: March 28, 2024]

"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016

[Accessed: March 28, 2024]
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