Put a camera in your pencil case

摘要

My earliest recollection of experiencing architecture without knowing it was from a film I watched as a teenager called Chungking Express, the seminal work by hallowed filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai. Set in Hong Kong, it concerns two unrelated love stories told in a fragmented and disjointed style, favouring the details of everyday lives over a conventionally structured narrative. In Chungking Express I saw the normal life taking place in the exuberant built environment peculiar to Hong Kong: the cramped convenience store, compact domestic spaces, the filthy interiors of the infamous Chungking mansion. The film showed the spaces in which most locals grew up, but we often took for granted. Wong's early works are inseparable from Christopher Doyle's cinematography. Doyle used a hand-held camera to shoot many of the scenes, while borrowing the in situ neon and fluorescent lights to create the dreamy mood at night. The film was not about love, it was about the loneliness we all experienced living in cities; it was a cinematic experience of everyday life, and the banal building elements pertaining to it such as the windows and the doors were romanticised through Doyle's lens.