I love the sixties.

I love Shanghai and postmodern Hong Kong culture.

I love the colour red.

I love bitter-sweet movies with melancholic tones.

Add all this together, and Wong Kar-Wai’s film, ‘In The Mood For Love’ was the perfect way to spend a Tuesday afternoon.

Su and Chow, both married, begin an unforgettable bond as each of their spouses are suspected of having extramarital affairs.

The camera work throughout the film is extraordinary as there is constant movement from beginning to end. Composed like a romantic Waltz, the camera is hardly ever completely still, showing mesmerising motion and hypnotic rhythm between the two characters and the world around them. Even their conversation, though basic and friendly, go back-and-forth like two partners would in a dance.

I was able to naturally find many symbolism in the film from set, to colour, to camera angles. Many of the pans and tilts the camera does are purposely done to emphasise the shape of the woman’s body. Each time Chow lights a cigarette, the camera focuses solely on the smoke and the way it flirtatiously swirls around the air. This gave me the impression that the wavy smoke, playfully dancing in the air in slow motion represented the curvy lines of Su’s body moving in slow motion. Did this mean every time Chow smoked, he was thinking of Su?

There are many bright and eccentric colours in the film. There is never a dull frame. One of the main colours shown throughout is red. Red can have many connotations; love, lust, passion, temptation, tension, wrong-doing, sin. The blossoming colours and floral prints can also be interpreted as the “blossoming” of Su and Chow’s new relationship.

In most of the opening scenes, frames are never clearly shown – always with walls, doors or shadows covering either a quarter or even half of the frames. The theme of shadow and darkness plays consistently throughout the movie, acting as a metaphor for what the two main characters are doing would be deemed undesirable to society, so they have to come and go in darkness and in shadows. A sense of entrapment can also be analysed. Trapped within a pointless marriage and trapped within the morals in which restrict them from being together.

Slow motion is a manipulation of time, and this technique, together with the repetition of romantic violin music, made it seem like most of the film was in a single, unbroken take. Everything is emphasised when it is slowed down. The main idea that was highlighted was the sense of time, longing, and waiting. Waiting for their partners to come home. Waiting for each other. Waiting for the other person to make a move. It is once again like a dance. A dance around their spouses. A dance around the people near them. And a dance around each other.

Week 2’s class allowed me to learn about ‘Plato’s Cave’. An allegory presented by Greek philosopher, Plato, in his work of ‘The Republic’, in which a group of people are chained inside a cave, forced to face a blank wall for their entire lives. These people are made to watch shadows projected on the wall of things passing in front of a fire behind them, and with this, they begin to appoint names to each shadow. This is then described to readers as a false sense of reality that many people believe in, yet the shadows are just mere representations of what is real.

We were then asked to go out and take fifty frames of anything we liked and with whatever theme we had in mind. The first idea that popped into my head were to take photos of buildings and architecture, because of my love for these things. I knew I wanted to showcase all the amazing buildings, designs and mostly, all the Victorian style architecture that Melbourne had to offer, yet most of the time go unnoticed by the busy, daily traveller.

I decided to go take my photos in the afternoon when the weather was overcast; the best time to take photographs because the sun isn’t glaring and ruining the image. I needed good lighting and not too much sun because I did not want anything creating a distraction from my main photographic aims: to focus on the design, the lines and the architecture.

What I decided to capture and what I decided to leave out of the frame can be brought back to the idea from ‘Plato’s Cave’, where the “maker” has the power in what the viewer gets to see or not see.

 I tried not to capture buildings that would be categorised as “popular” or “tourist attractions” like Flinders Street Station or Federation Square. I was going for the more… “unconventional” looks of Melbourne.

I also aimed to use the rule of thirds in many of the frames, making certain lines of buildings align and straight to make the photos easier to look at.

A trip to the National Gallery of Victoria during our week 1 class of my new studio, ‘On The Frame’ allowed us to look at different artwork (mainly focusing on paintings) and find how different elements create different meaning in each piece.

The five elements that I chose to focus on was that of colour, character, lighting, movement and mise-en-scene. Many of the paintings that caught my attention and made me want to write about were that of people (whether it be self-portraits, portraits or candid ones).

The first piece of painting that drew my attention within the first couple of minutes entering the gallery was Andy Warhol’s large and vibrant ‘Self-Portrait No.9’ from 1986. The main element that came to mind whilst looking at this painting was ‘colour‘. The flamboyant splashes of pink, yellow, blue and orange all screamed to the audience Warhol’s eccentric style and personality, showing that he successfully conveyed his identity in this self-portrait. These ideas also bring in the element of ‘character‘. The highly-eccentric colours would represent a lively and energetic mood at first look, but analysing the image further, Warhol’s death-like stare gave us the contrary, and an eerie feel haunted the artwork. Not to mention this was created months before his death! Was this some sort of foreseeable future for Warhol?

The second artwork was the mysterious painting done by David Hockney in 1963, titled ‘The Second Marriage’. This piece stood out the most to me because although marriage is supposed to be correlated with joy, excitement and new opportunities, the first reaction you get from Hockney’s painting is a sense of dread, gloom and boredom. The element of ‘character‘ is shown through the faces of the bride and groom. The colours on their faces are grey, pale and deathlike, conveying a dull and ghostlike mood with their emotionless expressions. The colourful mise-en-scene (couch, curtains, carpet, etc) contrasts heavily with the characters in the painting. This can be seen symbolically; the bride and groom trying to trick the outside world with bright and happy “props” and “features” in their house, hiding the reality of their unhappy marriage. Another factor that emphasises this idea of it being “all for show” is how the painting is framed. The box-like cut of the painting looks like a television set; giving a sense of entrapment and being forced to do what they are doing (forced marriage?). There is a constant feel of uncomfortableness between both characters and in the entire painting itself.

The third piece was by Weaver Hawkins titled ‘Jitterbugs’, made at the end of World War II in 1945. It shows two girls and two soldiers dancing, emphasising on the element of ‘movement‘. This style of surrealist painting can be used to convey how crazy and messy war is; how there was no real meaning and point for so much death, violence and trauma. The denotations of the painting itself expresses a sense of joy and exitement; celebrating the end of war, with bright colours such as red, green, light blue and purple. The different lines and cuts within the picture make the audience feel the type of hazy, fast-paced atmosphere the dancers would be feeling.

(We should definitely do this every week)