Art Cinema

Film scholar David Bordwell defines art cinema in its deviation from classic film structures. Where classical cinema is narrative-driven with active characters, art cinema’s sole focus is expression (Bordwell 95). The Double Life of Veronique (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1991) and Chungking Express (Wong Kar-wai, 1994) both eschew tight plots, direct characters, and resolute endings to highlight mood, reactions, and meaning in what Bordwell could call a “dissection of feeling” (Bordwell 96).

For these films, the highest goal is communicating, respectively, the feelings of not being in control of your life and of simultaneous desire and resistance to change. To fully engage with this expression, spectators must adjust to focusing on atmospheric immersion and forgo questioning and expecting rationality.

In The Double Life of Veronique, there is a persistent feeling of being watched. Oftentimes, this comes from the doubling of Weronika/Veronique through mise-en-scène — when they look in a mirror or through a window, their reflection gazes back. In Weronika’s room, a poster of herself watches over her. The poster fills the camera’ s frame as if it were its own character, returning Weronika’s smile.

The reflections and poster act as a stand-in for the women’s other halves. While they appear to be looking at themselves, the audience eerily knows that Weronika and Veronique may as well be looking at each other. They also sense this feeling of unwillingly sharing a life, echoing that they feel “not alone” and tied to someone else. This culminates in Weronika seeing Veronique in the flesh, with the latter belatedly returning her gaze through a picture.

In these reaction scenes, the camera focuses on their faces in lingering close-ups as both women are shocked at the manifestation of their feelings. The purpose of these moments is not to develop plot or even characters — it is to dissect the feeling of having an outside force subtly affect your life, always having an inkling of its presence and finally gaining confirmation without knowing how to move forward with it.

Chungking Express similarly dissects Faye’s need to travel through the use of music. She repeatedly plays the song “California Dreamin’” in what music and film scholar Giorgio Biancorosso characterizes as a “convoluted way of delivering her feelings” (Biancorosso 445).

Lyrically, the song betrays her dissatisfaction with her life and desire to change as it describes a protagonist who is sick of the cold and dreams of California. Its repetition demonstrates how pervasive the feeling is to Faye — it is constantly on her mind, even though she does not express this in words to the audience. She always plays “California Dreamin’” at top volume, to the point where it’s impossible to talk or even think over it.

Again, this highlights the suffocating nature of her desire that the audience gets inducted to through the music that is both diegetic and not. As the music becomes nondiegetic, the meaning is transferred to the film as a whole. Although Faye is the only character whose story is directly concerned with change as leaving, the theme of embracing change is felt by the other characters and thus, the audience.

In classic cinema, this attention to the exploration of a feeling would not be the crux of an entire film. Here, the spectator must consider motifs and notice interlocking threads created by film and storytelling techniques to grasp the full intention of an art film. They must examine how aspects like mise-en-scène and music affect them and how that ties into the larger meaning of the piece.

Ultimately, art films require their audience to accept a lack of the standard conventions in favor of different goals than narrative, such as mood.