WEEK 2 - ChungKing Express

WEEK 2

Term meanings:

French New Wave:

A Cinema movement of the 1950's and 60's founded by young critics of caheirs du cinema magazine. Ecponents included Claude Chabrol (Le Beau Serge, 1959), Francois Truffaut (The 400 Blows, 1959), Jean-Luc Godard (Breathless, 1960), Eric Rohmer (My Night At Maud's, 1969) and Jaques Rivette (Paris Belongs To Us, 1960). They rejected the bourgeois 'cinema du papa' that had dominated French cinema since the second world war and made Low-Budget films that deliberatly broke with narrative and stylistic convention through the use of improvised dialogue, Location shooting, long tracking shots, and jump cuts, and a spontaneous, informal manner. The French New Wave, or 'nouvelle vague', influenced many key hollywood directors, notably Arthur Penn, Robert Altman and Quentin Tarantino.

Film Noir:

A highly influencial style of crime or detective film popular in the 1940's and 50's, and revived frequently since. The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, USA, 1941) is generally considered to be the first, and Touch Of Evil (Orson Welles, USA, 1958) the last of the 'classic' period. Stylistic features include minimal, high-contrast lighting, 'hard-boiled' dialogue, dramatic orchestral music, sadistic violence, and a down beat plot with an un-happy ending.

Leitmotif:

In music, a repeated phrase or theme used to suggest an idea or character in a story.

Intertextuality:

Where a Media Text contains references to another media text or texts, with the expectation that the audience will be able to recognise its significance. for example, when you can here that the chipmunks ar watching Spongebob Squarpants in the first Alvin and the Chipmunks film.

Euteur Theory:

The term Auteur came from Andre Bazin when he wrote about  it in a French magazine called 'Cahiers Du Cinema' it sggests that the director is the main creative force behind a film and that they have their own repeted use of unique methods which distinguish a group of films from any other.

Book: Complete A-Z media & film studies handbook
Author: Richard Harvey

I think this film could be remade as a Hollywood film, BUT! the alterations which would be made to it would take away the films unique intention and change it entirley because the focus would be based so much on the actors that the beggining sequence would be less effective, and the camera probably would be less shakey and more steady in comparision to the version we have seen, so to say it strait to the point...the film makers in hollywood would base the films whole construction on perfection that they would take away the shakey camera at the beginning which adds the effect to the film in the first place. The 4 main roles would probably be played by:

1: Zac Efron

2: Robert Pattinson

3: Selena Gomez

4: Taylor Swift

I chose these particular actors because of 3 main reasons:

1: they're all well known, good looking actors.

2: they have a big fan base.

3: they're on the 20 best romance actors/singers list as a romance actor

http://www.imdb.com/list/TgSOr2kHR-0/

(evidence)

 Most things in Chungking Express which are media/music related are from America because America is a huge country and controls most of what we hear and see, which makes American entertainment more popular and consumed worldwide. For example, Faye (the girl who works in the take away) repetedly plays "country song" California Dreamin' extremly loud whilst working her job.

(This clip shows how Faye is Childish) 

We learn that faye is complicated and that she likes to be playfull, and mess around rather than take her job seriously, for example, when she was messing about in Cop 633's appartment instead of getting on with her job that her boss had asked her to do, and she lied saying it was raining to get out of doing her job. 

(clip of how she acts towards customers)

The way Faye is repressented is childish and complicated, childish because of the way she acts and runs around playing with everything, entering peoples homes without permission and not thinking about her job, complicated because she comes across as though she likes Cop 633, but it comes across that it's in an obsessive way and that she's strange for expressing it the way she does.

California Dreamin' is used in chungking express repetedly to show the personality of Faye (leitmotif) it is used because Faye wants to go to California one day and she mentions this to Cop 633 at one point in the movie.