Roland Barthes, a French literary theorist, suggests that a city is an object that requires multiple reading (92). A similar city setting can generate different feelings for numerous people. Wong Kar-Wai’s The Fallen Angles (1995) and Tsai Ming-liang’s Vive L’Amour (1994) was shot in Hong Kong and Taipei respectively and turn their attention to the loneliness among citizens, but the films generate opposite city texture owing to the use of different cinematic techniques. Wong shows Hong Kong in a passionate and romance way while Tsai emphasizes the coldness around Taipei, his movies are more natural and literal with black humor filled in occasionally.
Wong and Tsai’s difference in city representation could be due to Auteurism. Auteurism is a term arose in French during 1940s by the cinematic theorists André Bazin and Alexandre Astruc purposing a film should bear
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As Wong and Tsai take different creative visions on the city, so their movies also being shot in a dissimilar way. Wong is more links to the French Cinephilia. He is passionate to filmmaking but he never attends formal film school, so his movies follow the Hong Kong New Wave and remove from the classical narration (Yau 31). I would consider his films’ structure in a manner like the French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960s movies. Both like to experiment with the formal possibilities of a film’s medium, so a gangster genre likes The Fallen Angles interestingly focuses on a hard-to-related theme about human relation. The Fallen Angles also seems to pay homage to the film noir. According to Shin and Gallagher, film noir is to use a dark tone to tell thing (125). The film is set in the dark so a