A Study Of Aesthetics In Kar Wai Wong’s Films

Kar Wai Wong,a rising star in Chinese films in recent years, has a limited number of 12 works with classically high quality, paving way for his dominant position in Hong Kong films and even around the world. His works aroused great influence internationally. Since his first film “As Tears Go By” in 1989 and another film “The Grand Master” in 2014, his works have been awarded by the Hong Kong Film Awards, Cannes Film Festival, etc. with a variety of significant awards like the best director, fully displaying the charm and competence of Chinese films.In Wong’s work, a Kar-Wai-Wong style of film aesthetics is established successfully based on unique visual images, post-modern expression, the mastering of urban people’s spirit and temperaments, and the description of exquisite emotions. The theme reflected by Wong’s films is about unique and encompassing rejection and being rejected, pursuit and loss, memory and Lethe, which are mutually contradicted but are magically set on each character. Stories by Kar Wai Wong are deprived from the real society and usually his stories could be built under the framework of nostalgia, love and gangs. However, he manages to stay away from the framework to express his ideas in a free way and present common emotion of humans. His works feature “author films” according to his theme, narrative style and personalized audio-visual language, which are worthy of our detailed research.This paper concerning film aesthetics of Wong’s films is divided into three chapters.Chapter One begins with Wong’s themes to analyze their features and the influence on his films by Hong Kong culture from a diachronic perspective.Chapter Two is about aesthetic style of his films and is divided into three sections. Section One analyzes characteristics of narrative time and space; Section Two analyzes split plots, character marginalization and features of massive monologues influenced by post-modern thoughts; Section Three analyzes influences of western “author films”. The manifestation of Wong’s features and the “author film” is concentration on lost young generation and mutual culture nature.Chapter Three studies art languages of Wong’s films from three perspectives: colors, music and figure shots. The central idea of a film is expresses to the audience via specific audio-visual language. The color and music are important audio-visual elements. Through colors, Wong builds a space to present the inner feelings of figures and subtle changes in interpersonal relations. The adoption of various music-image combinations and figure shots pose an influence on expression effects and reflect the director’s fundamental attitude towards the film.