Concepts (part 2)

ok - so the second thing I want to remember is something Wong Kar Wai said in an interview at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City sometime in 2007 - after My Blueberry Nights came out. I finally saw the movie about a week ago and ... it was perfectly awful, unfortunately. And Christopher Doyle wasn't the cinematographer on it either so the visuals weren't as stunning. So... you know, not everything is going to be a masterpiece.

Anyway, one of the special features on the DVD was this interview.

"SCHWARTZ (interviewer): One thing that runs throughout your
films is this idea of the fleeting nature of time, and it
seems to be tied in with the process of how you
work—always the sense that you can only live in
the present, but you can never really capture it.

WONG: No, no. Actually I’m not... I think what I’m
trying to say is about timing. I think this is very
Oriental thinking. There’s a Chinese poem about
how the blossom is the same but the face is
different. It’s always about timing. It’s like things
happen in the right time; or the wrong time, but the
right [people]. But I think this is a very universal
theme for dramas. Right? It is also a theme for
tragedies or comedies. Depends how you put it."

You know, reading this transcript is different than my memory of him saying this - it sounded like there was much more there. I must have been filling in with my own associations. But I enjoyed Wong's clarification in light of his movies - it clicks that he's constantly pointing out the vagaries of timing - its indifference, coincidence or intransigence.

Looking back I wonder about how things happened, how timing has worked or not to my advantage. Is it fate or chance? I don't know. Sometimes I think it's fate, most of the time I believe in chance.

The more important question for this entry though is... how can it be depicted?