In the Mood for Love
Jeremy Prentice
In the Mood for Love Paper
“The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn't said.”
-Peter F. Drucker
The quote by the author Drucker is a prime example of how non-verbal communication is most of the time more important than the actual answer itself. Body language is an essential element of everyday interaction amongst people. Based on simple hand gestures or a flicker of a smile, one can instantly change the syntax or structural meaning of a sentence. This change could turn a negative sentence into a positive outcome. Throughout the history of cinema body language is a tool that is applied to every movie. Movies by their very nature started of as any elaborate ploy on body language. The silent film era relies on nonverbal communication that is accompanied by visual elements and implanting a specific score in order to suspend disbelief that the audience is sitting an in a dark room watching various shades of light and color onto a screen. The movie In the Mood for Love directed by Kar Wai Wong is a prime example of how the characterization and plot of a movie doesn’t need to revolve around the construction of dialogue between the protagonist and other characters in the movie.
To start off I would like to say the cinematographer Christopher Doyle and Pin Bing Lee did a great job in presenting a somewhat stale plot line into a visual masterpiece. There are many examples, of how the cinematography of this movie enables the audience to visualize the budding of a love that happened out of pain, spite, and loneliness. I would like to analyze the cinematography of a scene in order to bring more clarity to how body language is more important. The first scene I would like to examine is in the first act of the movie. Keep in mind during this scene there is no dialogue just a musical score. The faces of the two adulteresses remain obscured throughout the scene. Fade from black no picture in your minds eye the wife Su Li-Zhen is in
In the Mood for Love Paper
“The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn't said.”
-Peter F. Drucker
The quote by the author Drucker is a prime example of how non-verbal communication is most of the time more important than the actual answer itself. Body language is an essential element of everyday interaction amongst people. Based on simple hand gestures or a flicker of a smile, one can instantly change the syntax or structural meaning of a sentence. This change could turn a negative sentence into a positive outcome. Throughout the history of cinema body language is a tool that is applied to every movie. Movies by their very nature started of as any elaborate ploy on body language. The silent film era relies on nonverbal communication that is accompanied by visual elements and implanting a specific score in order to suspend disbelief that the audience is sitting an in a dark room watching various shades of light and color onto a screen. The movie In the Mood for Love directed by Kar Wai Wong is a prime example of how the characterization and plot of a movie doesn’t need to revolve around the construction of dialogue between the protagonist and other characters in the movie.
To start off I would like to say the cinematographer Christopher Doyle and Pin Bing Lee did a great job in presenting a somewhat stale plot line into a visual masterpiece. There are many examples, of how the cinematography of this movie enables the audience to visualize the budding of a love that happened out of pain, spite, and loneliness. I would like to analyze the cinematography of a scene in order to bring more clarity to how body language is more important. The first scene I would like to examine is in the first act of the movie. Keep in mind during this scene there is no dialogue just a musical score. The faces of the two adulteresses remain obscured throughout the scene. Fade from black no picture in your minds eye the wife Su Li-Zhen is in