Happy Together (1997), dir. Wong Kar Wai
_______________________

I saw this movie about 13 years ago, and it changed the way I see.  It still does.

Escaping her disgust with herself, she walks out into the night to haunt a familiar tea room—to meet a familiar stranger. An encounter with the stranger, her lover, who asks her to stay here in Hiroshima is the beginning of a slow walk through the empty streets of the night city.

He’s going to kiss me. He’s going to kiss me and I’ll be lost.

She walks on, passing two strolling guitarists, lovers embracing in back seat of a parked car, another car slowing, almost stopping as it passes her, a lone lady in the night. The flickering of Japanese neon is cut with day-lit memories of the sober street signs marking the corner walls of her small French village. Her thoughts drift between both places she must eventually leave, between doomed love affairs. The filmmakers create these flashes of memory through cuts which link tracking shots that seem to keep the camera at the same up-turned angle, creating for the viewer the experience of walking the streets in two different places simultaneously, eyes turned slightly upward to read the signs.

I met you. (Hiroshima)
I remember you. (French village)
This city was tailor-made for love. (Hiroshima)

The walk through post-Nuclear-holocaust Hiroshima at night is full of memories of war-time France. A neon Eiffel Tower flashes on and off like a beacon atop a Japanese bar. One place often bleeds into another—this sort of time travel is possible at night on an aimless stroll, away from oneself.  Both places are bound by war. This walk is evidence of the inevitability and impossibility of love across cultures.

Morvern Callar, (2002) dir. Lynne Ramsay

Got it? Good. Now for a little thought exercise:

Below is an excerpt from a conversation between writer, Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient), and legendary film editor and sound designer, Walter Murch, from the book, The Conversations: Walter Murch and the art of editing film (2002).

As you read, think about all the ways that loving cities is so close to loving films, and why films can be great archives of the experience of living in cites.

Walter Murch: In film, there’s a dance between the words and images and the sounds. As rich as films appear, they are limited to two of the five senses–hearing and sight–and they are limited in time–the film lasts only as long as it takes to project it. It’s not like a book. If you don’t understand a paragraph in a book, you can read it again at your own pace. With a film, you have to consume it at one go, at a set speed.

But if a film can provoke an audience’s participation–if the film gives a certain amount of information but requires the audience to complete the ideas, then it engages each member of the audience as a creative participant in the work…

Even though it’s a mass medium, it’s those individual reactions that make each person feel the film is speaking to him or her. The fantastic thing about the process is that they actually see their own version on the screen. They would swear that they saw it, but in fact it wasn’t there…

How does this happen? It can only be because the film is ambiguous in the

right places and draws something out of you that comes from your own experience. And then you see it on screen and think: Only I know that, so the film must be made for me.

…

It’s a kind of mass intimacy. A paradoxical state, because you’re in a group and benefitting in some way from the group experience–yet if the film is any good, you also feel that it’s speaking directly to you. Even though it’s touching all these other people people as well. The ambiguity comes from the fact that it’s flowing through, like a river. You don’t have a chance to say–

MO: Wait a minute–

WM: As you do with a book.

I argue with Roberto on the slick-tiled patio
where houseplants as big as elms sway in a samba
breeze at four or five in the Managua morning
after too many Yerbabuenas and as many shots of
golden rum. And watch Pedro follow Diane up
her brown arm, over the shoulder of her cool dress,
the valleys of her neck to the place inside her
ear where he isn’t speaking revolution. And Alonzo
tosses in the rhetoric made of too much rum and
the burden of being an American in a country
he no longer belongs to.

What we are dealing with here are ideological
differences, political power, he says to
impress a woman who is gorgeously intelligent
and who reminds me of the soft talc desert
of my lover’s cheek. She doesn’t believe
anything but the language of damp earth
beneath a banana tree at noon, and will soon
disappear in the screen of rum, with a man
who keeps his political secrets to himself
in favor of love.

I argue with Roberto, and laugh across the
continent to Diane, who is on the other side
of the flat, round table whose surface ships
would fall off if they sailed to the other
side. We are Anishabe and Creek. We have wars
of our own. Knowing this we laugh and laugh,
until she disappears into the poinsettia forest
with Pedro, who is still arriving from Puerto Rico.

Palm trees flutter in smoldering tongues.
I can look through the houses, the wind, and hear
Jennifer’s quick laughter become a train
that has no name. Columbus doesn’t leave the
bow of the slippery ship, and Allen is standing at the rim
of Momotombo, looking into the blue, sad rain
of a boy’s eyes. They will come back tomorrow.

This is the land of revolution. You can do anything
you want, Roberto tries to persuade me. I fight my way
through the cloud of rum and laughter, through the lines
of Spanish and spirits of the recently dead whose elbows
rustle the palm leaves. It is almost dawn and we are still
a long way from morning, but never far enough
to get away.

I do what I want, and I take my revolution to bed with
me, alone. And awake in a story told by my ancestors
when they spoke a version of the very beginning,
of how so long ago we climbed the backbone of these
tortuous Americas. I listen to the splash of the Atlantic
and Pacific and see Columbus land once more,
over and over again.

This is not a foreign country, but the land of our dreams.

I listen to the gunfire we cannot hear, and begin
this journey with the light of knowing
the root of my own furious love.

by Joy Harjo, from In Mad Love and War.

New York, you’re perfect, oh please don’t change a thing!

you let the people see just who you want to be,
and every night you shine just like a superstar

Election night 2008 was an explosion of raw emotion in parts of New York City. Harlem was overflowing with affective experience. Listen to the sounds build into a joyful roar.