L'enjeu de ce mémoire consiste à tenter de saisir, à travers l'oeuvre cinématographique de Wong Kar-wai, quelques indications sur la nature de notre rapport à la nuit dans le monde contemporain alors que celui-ci semble déterminé à faire disparaître la noirceur. Les activités diurnes de nos sociétés post-industrielles empiètent en effet de plus en plus sur la nuit: les commerces et les services demeurent ouverts de plus en plus tard, voire toute la nuit, les communications, surtout depuis l'arrivée d'Internet, sillonnent le globe 24 heures sur 24, faisant fi des fuseaux horaires. Laissant à d'autres le soin de mesurer les retombées sociologiques de ce phénomène, nous nous sommes proposé d'en questionner les effets sur notre rapport à la nuit tel qu'on peut le percevoir à travers le cinéma. Pour ce faire, l'oeuvre du cinéaste chinois Wong Kar-wai nous est apparu riche de possibilités. Non seulement le nocturne y est-il prépondérant, mais cette filmographie se situe résolument dans la contemporanéité autant par son propos que par son traitement. Nous avons regroupé les problématiques étudiées sous trois grands chapitres: il s'agit du traitement de la nuit comme expression d'une crise sociale, du traitement de l'espace et de ce qu'il révèle des rapports à l'intériorité et à l'intimité et enfin du traitement du temps et de ses implications sur l'approche narrative et en rapport à la modernité. Ces trois points d'accès à l'oeuvre de Wong Kar-wai permettront d'y vérifier la présence d'un être nocturne identifié lors d'un colloque consacré à la nuit au Centre de Cerisy en 2004. On progressera dans l'analyse en nous référant régulièrement à l'expressionnisme allemand et le film noir américain qui représentent deux pôles de référence incontournables pour le traitement de la nuit dans l'histoire du cinéma. Nos références théoriques sont principalement Les structures anthropologiques de l'imaginaire, de Gilbert Durand et L'origine de l 'oeuvre d'art, de Martin Heidegger. L'analyse nous amènera à constater, chez Wong Kar-wai, un glissement du Régime diurne au Régime nocturne de l'imaginaire et nous permettra de vérifier la pertinence de notre intuition initiale sur le caractère essentiel de la nuit dans notre relation au monde. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Cinéma, Film, Nuit, Nocturne, Wang Kar-wai.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 58-62).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 71-75).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 58-62) Also available in print.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 71-75). Also available in print.

Wong Kar-wai is a premier avant-garde auteur of Hong Kong cinema. In the existing research, postmodernism is considered as a predominant approach to shed light on Wong’s aesthetics, poetics and politics. Being the iconoclastic ‘poet of time,’ Wong Kar-wai is extolled as a leading figure for his postmodernist style of visually unique and emotional resonant film works. Recurring motifs, such as alienation and rejection, time and memory, pursuit and loss, are regarded as representations of cultural and political anxieties of Hong Kong people in the context of 1980s and 1990s. Wong’s characteristic exoticism and cosmopolitism in his films also distinguishes him from other Chinese-language directors. However, when we expand the scope of the postmodern terrain, we find modernism and its attendant aesthetics are just as relevant and important as postmodernism to the understanding of Wong’s oeuvre. This thesis evokes a comparative perspective of modernism proposed by Eugene Lunn as an aesthetic approach, with an illustrative analysis by using David Bordwell’s and Kristin Thompson’s work on non-Hollywood cinema. This approach emphasizes four major directions of the social and cultural aspects influenced by modernism in art. Using this approach requires researchers to find cinematic representations of modernism in terms of aesthetic self-consciousness, juxtaposition of time, ambiguity and dehumanization within the film. This research takes Wong Kar-wai’sAshes of Time Redux (2008) as a case study to explore the alternative interpretations beyond postmodernism. The investigation of Wong’s uses of modernist approach involves the analysis of his experiments of conventional film techniques and strategic employment of the mise-en-scene, camera angles, lenses, lighting, and music, which constitute his pictorial world. My assertion is that Wong’s juxtaposition of time and space createsan elusive and ambiguous fictional world in response to his reflection on the dehumanization of an integral individual subject in the modernized world.

Comment faire un travail scientifique si le chercheur est déjà trop obsédé par son objet d’étude et si, d’ailleurs, ce dernier n’est pas seulement un objet réifié mais doté d’une certaine réalité de l’âme ? La distance délicate entre le subjectif et l’objectif est ainsi l’enjeu principal de cette thèse, une recherche dont le chercheur est un cinéphage devenu cinéphile, qui est hanté par sa passion pour son objet bien vivant qu’est le cinéma de Wong Kar Wai mais qui a envie de vivre symboliquement cette passion. Il s’agit donc de l’équation personnelle d’après C. G. Jung et de cette distance ironique selon Antoine de Baecque. Vis-à-vis d’une telle difficulté méthodologique qui est en fait une occasion très généreuse, une approche empirique et une attitude religieuse se proposent. D’où le chercheur-cinéphile se lance dans un itinéraire homérique, à la recherche de son mythe du cinéma total qui n’est rien d’autre que son archétype du cinéma dont le symbole vivant se veut exactement Wong Kar Wai. Cette recherche devient, au fur et à mesure, une découverte, vu que la nostalgie n’est pas ailleurs, mais chez soi. Dans une telle circumambulation sous la forme d’une mise en abîme, le rapprochement entre une histoire du cinéma et une Histoire du cinéma n’est qu’inéluctable. Re-contextualisés sont les souvenirs personnels du chercheur du cinéaste hongkongais et plusieurs protagonistes rencontrés dans sa cinéphilie (Bresson, King Hu, Langlois, Bazin, Tarkovski, la bande de Truffaut, Dumont, etc.) sur la route et envisageable est une filiation toujours en devenir entre ce qui arrive avant et ce qui vient après. Que ces pages soient une scène de la création-critique et que la fonction cinéphile se manifeste à travers elle. / How to conduct a scientific work if the researcher is himself already incurably obsessed by his study material? This question fits in quite well for the present case, since the PhD student is an inveterate lover of Wong Kar Wai’s cinema. In other words, the situation is that of a cinephage-turned-cinephile — extremely conditioned by a living work inescapably defined by an amorous aura — who is trying to find a way out, in a relatively rational way, that is to say, symbolically, to deal with this entanglement as mise en abyme. Two methodological as well as deontological perspectives are thus drawn on, “the personal equation” adapted by C. G. Jung and “the ironic distance” coined by Antoine de Baecque. Hopefully, the writing of this dissertation could be regarded as a circumambulation whose goal is nothing more than its very process which is a nostalgic yearning for the cinema archetype, or, in terms of André Bazin’s idea(l): the myth of total cinema.

In Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Gilles Deleuze distinguishes two regimes of audiovisual thought. In the regime of the movement-image, such thought is constituted by two processes. The first, differentiation/integration, expresses a whole that changes through the intermediary of the shifting relationships between the objects and people on screen. The second, specification, gives images a determinate function in a sensory-motor schema, through which perceptions are linked to actions in rational intervals of movement. With the regime of the time-image, as I understand it, thought instead comes to mean, as Deleuze puts it in Foucault, to experiment and problematize, and “knowledge, power, and the self are the triple root of a problematization of thought” (95). It is my argument in this thesis that Deleuze’s work on cinema is of great utility in carrying out filmic analyses that seek to detect and draw out the consequences of strategies of filmmaking that make knowledge, power, and self problematic. Furthermore, such a mode of analysis is particularly valuable in attending to new films that confront us with novel means of organising problematic audiovisual thought. My arguments are made through consideration of two films each from four directors: Wong Kar-wai, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Pedro Costa, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. While there are many important differences between the works of these filmmakers, their films nevertheless lend themselves to an approach that seeks to determine how thought becomes problematic in specific cases. Similarities and resonances are brought out between these films and those that Deleuze uses himself in making his arguments and shaping his concepts, but I also identify new problems that we encounter in the works of these filmmakers, which extend the range of meaning of some of those concepts. One such concept that is of particular importance in this thesis is “belief in the world”. There is always something in those films that pass into the regime of the time-image that is asystematic, which breaks up and multiplies thought, multiplies the thinkers we are made to inhabit. Our relation to the world of the film is therefore unstable and uncertain, and calls for belief, since films themselves in this regime produce new links between humans and the world, rather than firmly establishing a realistic state of things, a temporal and spatial matrix that accords with that which we experience in everyday existence. Such films thus make us receptive to a thought different from that interiorised thought through which, as Nietzsche writes, the apparatus of knowledge abstracts, simplifies, and takes possession of the world and others (Will, no. 503, 274).

Thesis (M. A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

This thesis evaluates cemeteries as an open space entity of urban land, which conveys high social and cultural values through its sacred and spiritual landscape. These sacred sites are closely integrated into community history and carry social meanings, in addition to their aesthetic and ecological values as an open green areas with its habitats, biological diversity and wildlife reserves. By this study the symbolic and emotional meaning of cemetery from the users&amp / #8217 / eyes is investigated and the relationship between users&amp / #8217 / preference and perceived elements among the users of KarSiyaka Cemetery is explored.