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. 34 Time and MemoryCamera movementThe camera as a hidden persona is reinforced by downplaying point-of-view shots, which would have engendered alternative viewing subjects.As the viewer is given the sole privilege of sharing the camera s perspec-tive (sometimes from under a bed and behind street corners), he/sheis interpellated into a voyeuristic position as the characters personaland intimate secrets are revealed.Within this denaturalized, voyeuristicvision, the reality of the past is subject to an aesthetic metamorphosis, somuch so that the collection of nostalgic objects and characters, like theplay-within-the-play of love and betrayal Chow and So try to re-enact,are de-realized into eye-pleasing artefacts.The film s deliberate croppingout of Chow s wife and So s husband from the frame is a brilliant moveto emphasize skewed emotional relations, as their formidable absentpresences remain in the consciousness of the main characters through-out the film.33 The close-ups and off-focus framing, ironically, conjuresup a nostalgic world whose reality rests upon our desire to see what isnot there.This play with presence/absence echoes the processes of hal-lucination and reverse hallucination Ackbar Abbas observes in HongKong s visual culture in the 1980s and 1990s, a problem of vision andvisibility that Wong s films repeatedly address.34 If the nostalgic, as pro-jected image, is a symptom of hallucination (seeing what is not there),then Wong s meta-textual/meta-fictional approach to the hallucinatedimage here initiates a reverse hallucination, by distracting, if not forbid-ding, us from seeing (completely) what is there.Reverse hallucination ismost vividly present in the oft-quoted scene where So Lai Chen walksup the spiral of stairs leading to Chow s hotel room.The scene is one ofthe most sophisticated examples of ellipsis and slow/stop-motion edit-ing in Wong s films to dramatize a character s complex psychologicalstates and inner conflicts.A series of jump cuts shows So walking upthe stairs from different angles, while the back-and-forth movement ofher feet is edited in a dance-beat sequence, dramatizing not only herhesitation but also the yearning and desire behind the hesitation.Thecamera then cuts to a brief high-angle shot of Chow waiting anxiouslyin his darkened room.After these forgoing shots have prepared us fortheir eventual meeting, the camera cuts to their parting, swiftly con-cluding the scene with a back-tracking shot of So walking down towardsthe retreating camera followed by a freeze-frame.This shot sequence,probably the signature of the whole film, is a prime example of howthe film disrupts narrative progression and frustrates our desire to seemore, to go behind the scene to find out what has really happened.35 Post-nostalgia 35In Mood, as in2046, camera movement turns space into sheer affect,a psychological rather than a physical entity.One good example is theuse of panning.On several occasions, panning is used as a transitionaldevice to create an emotional connection between Chow and So.Pan-ning is also used in a scene when the two are seen working intimately onChow s martial arts fiction.The camera pans across the room to showmultiple reflections of the characters in the mirror.Rendered withoutdiegetic sound or dialogue, the background music serves as an emo-tional marker and dictates the basic rhythm of the action on-screen.Ina different scene where Chow and So meet in a Hong Kong-style steakhouse, the camera shows the characters in profile, sitting face-to-face.Maintaining the same angle, the camera alternates between close-upson Chow and the dishes on the table.A short pan to So breaks themonotony of the one-sided view of Chow, but in the process the cam-era inadvertently sweeps past So and swiftly swings back to refocus onher, creating a slight blur as it moves back.A similar pattern of panningand close-up shots is used in an earlier meeting between the two in thesame setting.This playful use of the short pan certainly has an impro-visatory quality, as if the camera was participating in (eavesdropping?)the conversation like a third party, constantly trying to fix and adjustits focus as the dialogue unfolds.The persistent close-up shots, again,make it almost impossible to view the scene in its wholeness, replacingthe objective distance of the two-shot and the shot/reverse shot with avisual intimacy bordering on the erotic.The animated use of the cam-era is complemented by a different technique, that of the static, emptyshot that usually accompanies an emotionally charged scene.The fin-ishing shot can rest on a street corner deserted by the lovers, a lonelystreet lamp against a rough stone wall, old adverts melting on concretepillars, or the spiraling smoke of a cigarette dancing to the rhythm ofthe background music
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