002
step-printing: temporal stutters
Chungking Express;
opening sequence
Shot by a handheld camera, “only glimpses of the sky are visible and, even so, they are ‘denatured’ with the clouds moving at an abnormal speed … the camera then freeze-frames on a woman we do not and cannot recognise, because she is in disguise” (Tong, 2003).
; dir. Wong Kar-Wai; 1994Chungking Express opens with a multi-perspectival blur - a chase sequence with an incoherent mess of colours which dislocates the surrounding architecture; at friction with the classic cinematic establishing shot where rather than establishing location, Wong Kar-Wai attempts to capture time. This atmosphere of space/time displacement sets the narrative tone which is defined by the tension of action and inaction as characters - often isolated from each other while still occupying the same frame - long for romantic connection. Their images drift through this artificial bubbled present while space splinters as
“images of time” (Tong, 2003).
Janice Tong utilises Deleuze's conception of Time-Image in Cinema 2 to make a case for Wong Kar Wai’s “temporal exegesis” in the sense that his films unfold rather than run linearly, less driven by narrative structure (2003).
This effect of simultaneously speeding up and slowing emerges from Wong Kar-Wai’s poetic deployment of step-printing. This opening sequence is shot at double-speed, 48 fps, and played back at 24fps. Frames 1-12 run consecutively then frame 12 gets repeated for the next 12 frames to achieve a ‘pause’; frames 13-24 are discarded and frames 25-36 run consecutively and so on (Tong, 2003). Something gets lost in this process - we lose grip on our surroundings, space becomes ambiguous, things appear and disappear in a mesh. Intercut with these step-printed sequences are our only resting moments - stills of expiry dates, clocks and declarations of measurements in voice-over:
“At the high point of our intimacy,
we were just 0.01 cm from each other”
The use of past tense itself becomes an insertion of time. This tension of distancing is supported by the wash of non-diegetic score - the slow emergence of out-of-sync footsteps as our only diegetic hook. We are relocated in a fictional present through a more conventional orchestral piece which itself suggests a parody of
cinematic inevitability.
Straddling diegetic and nondiegetic, the music throughout the rest of the film also splinters our temporal location - the only recognisably contemporary track is ‘Dreams’ by The Cranberries but “even as you hear the opening your familiarity is immediately displaced by a Cantopop version remade and sung by Faye Wong” (Tong, 2003).
Significantly, step-printing is not the same as slow motion, despite its similarity in the experience of temporal manipulation. Where slow motion requires the filmmaker to shoot at a higher frame rate - you are ‘creating’ time - with step-printing you are lingering in a moment. The mechanics of image-making allows us to inhabit a space we cannot ordinarily see - a previously ‘blank’ screen between frames. By occupying this latent space we are afforded a kind of computationally enhanced vision through repetition of what is missing.