To Let Us Both Get To Our Business [No. 2]
by Matt Paley
[a Letter to Robert Kelly:]
The film that taught me to cultivate silence — or, at least, made me aware of the flesh of the film itself — was Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love. Perhaps Wong Kar Wai doesn’t compare to Vigo or Epstein — his films certainly fall into the category of “sentimental loves stories in celluloid” — but I remember realizing, for the first time, that In the Mood for Love loses nothing from a subtitle-less viewing. I saw, in that, the hope of a fuller, richer, fleshier cinema.
Should cinema attempt to do all of its work visually? The question presupposes something essential to cinema about the moving image–that every art can be reduced to a single heart; painting to color, poetry to words (or, perhaps, their absence), drawing to the line, etc–and that the heart of cinema is not the dream of a complete representation of the world (as Bazin might argue).
Or, on the other hand, is cinema is in the unique position to utilize all of these languages? Should the film-maker, then, search every subject / idea / emotion /