multitemporality and the speed(s) of thought in johnnie to's action films

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JCC 7 (3) pp. 277–295 Intellect Limited 2013

Journal of Chinese Cinemas Volume 7 Number 3

© 2013 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jcc.7.3.277_1

Keywords

Johnnie Tomultitemporalitythinkingthe body/brain/culture

networkfilm musicfilm sound

Charles KronengoldStanford University

Multitemporality and the

speed(s) of thought in

Johnnie To’s action films

absTraCT

Johnnie To’s post-1997 action films often contain sequences that present many simultaneous temporal processes. To’s group-oriented narrative strategies typically place an ensemble of people in the frame; even when they don’t speak we experi-ence each of them seeing, hearing, touching, moving, and engaging in other sorts of body/brain activity. These sequences also include processes and forces that are other-than-human: wind, weather, machines, etc. Sound and music contribute to this complexity. What can we make of this multitemporal flow? Focusing on audiovisual practices this article considers three related effects of this multitemporality: (1) new possibilities for depicting the heterogeneity and the layered character of thinking (from higher-level decision-making down to autonomic processes); (2) an intense concreteness in the representation of thinking, especially nonverbal thinking, and (3) a thickening of the connections that bind cinematic renderings of what William Connolly calls the ‘body/brain/culture network’. Thinking becomes necessarily rela-tional, externalized and ultimately collective.

Across a three-minute span of Johnnie To Kei-Fung’s Man Jeuk/Sparrow (2008), a rain-soaked pickpocketing duel builds to an extreme close-up of a bloody razor blade. Two gangs are competing in a highly structured battle over

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a passport; by mutual agreement its owner’s fate hangs in the balance. Kei (Simon Yam) breaks a quiet lull by slipping under a double-umbrella blockade two rival gang members have set for him. Splashing rain returns to the sound-track, underscoring Kei’s sudden movement. Smiling, Kei emerges into the night-time light and reopens his umbrella, producing a too-reverberant click. He regains his equilibrium as the music shifts to a beat-driven, percussion-heavy arrangement. The rival boss-man Fu, who now holds the passport, walks towards Kei, aware that Kei’s three comrades are shadowing him. In a gesture the film has accustomed us to, each of the pickpockets in turn produces a razor blade hidden under the tongue. The parties meet in the busy crosswalk. Old Fu gets shoulder-bumped six times, which spins him around; the rain’s audiovisual intensity swells and falls. Someone traverses the fore-ground, filling the frame with black. Cut to the key razor slice: blade meets leather as the music, Foley sound and film speed decelerate in tandem. We see Kei’s hand waiting for the passport to fall from Fu’s coat; soon it does. The parties separate. For the first time in two and a half minutes, the film drops out of slow motion. Annoyance dawns on Fu’s face – the passport is gone – then surprise: he realizes his razor has bloodied someone, violating the pick-pocket’s code. We see a close-up of the blade; the blood starts losing its colour as the raindrops dilute it. Fu turns to reveal the razor, which he holds out half-apologetically. Each of Kei’s companions quickly pats himself down; they look at one another and then at Kei, who withdraws his now blood-smeared hand from inside his coat. In the only bit of dialogue this eight-minute battle contains, Fu acknowledges his skills have grown rusty. He tosses away the tiny blade, which we (somehow) hear hit the sidewalk.

Consider the number and variety of overlapping temporal processes this scene presents. They operate at different scales, engaging seeing, hearing, touching, balance and other sorts of body/brain activity; they include many processes and forces that are other-than-human. Thinking, feeling, and all the work of the senses are irreducibly temporal. When placed in an audiovisual flow that includes other-than-human processes, the temporality of thinking/feeling can emerge in sharper relief.1 The art of pickpocketing relies on a precise micro-choreography of well-timed body-bumps and quicker- than-the-eye hand movements, as this scene insists. It also requires the pick-pocket’s continuous scanning across his field of vision, and various forms of memory, along with higher cognitive functions – revealed in Kei’s improvised escape from the umbrella blockade. Much of this too can become audiovis-ually available on-screen. In keeping with To’s group-oriented narrative strat-egies, this sequence projects rhythmic structures based on one guy doing an action, then another guy, then another, then another. And every character is shown at least once in close-up with a changing expression that can read as purposefulness or thoughtfulness. Longer individual strands of directed thought and motion become visible too, in a balletic ebb and flow, as the ten pickpockets move through the frame; slow motion, rack focus and wide-screen compositions with multiple moving figures underscore the temporality of their thinking and movement. When Fu produces his bloodied razor, its meanings ricochet between the interested parties; thanks to the differentiated Foley sounds of palms hitting torsos, we hear as well as see these meanings circulate through time and space. At several points we experience the inti-macy of what To calls the ‘split seconds of waiting … before … action erupts’ (To 1999). On the other hand, sometimes we can’t even tell characters from extras: our sense of recognition comes and goes, shaped by the darkness, the

1. I use the term ‘thinking/feeling’ here to encompass both modes of body/brain activity; this deliberately broad category seeks to emphasize what thinking and feeling share over how they’ve traditionally been opposed.


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2. In the introduction to a volume on Chinese film, Olivia Khoo and Sean Metzger present the useful notion of ‘contrapuntal modernities’ to describe the uneven and overlapping processes of modernization in China and beyond. In concert with technological developments this counterpoint emerges cinematically as ‘competing temporalities erupting through and into one another, often with violent effects’ (Khoo and Metzger 2009: 18–19).

3. See also Connolly (2002: 95–99). Connolly calls for a layered conception of thinking in which cognitive and less-than-cognitive layers can interact to modify one another; in this he draws on Deleuze’s argument that Welles and Resnais ‘link depth-of-field shots to dissonance between sound and visual image to foment an experience of time that agitates thought’ (2002: 99).

rain and the big umbrellas. Shots of isolated objects and body parts, too, can emphasize the temporality of a gesture or process over the person behind it. In the background are slower structural rhythms. We witness the characters following their plans for this battle, and we grasp its long-term implications; we’ve experienced the film’s slow build to this climactic scene.

The rain itself, waxing and waning as an object of aural and visual atten-tion, presents many different temporalities. Sheets of rain sometimes swell to earn their sonic correlative; sometimes their rhythmicity remains purely visual. At times the rain is reduced to a brisk, steady drip. Sometimes we get the ‘subjective’ rain sound from underneath a character’s umbrella; momentarily we hear what seems like an aggregation of the sound under all the characters’ umbrellas. The rain sounds occasionally pull back, allowing a tiny audiovisual process to gain the foreground, as when Fu tosses away his razor. All the while, as Foley and ambient sound ebb and flow in a more-than-diegetic manner, non-diegetic music commands the soundstage. It too is notably dynamic. Its textures shift many times over the course of this sequence; it points towards various musical styles, and (like most film music) it embodies multiple rhythmic strata at any given moment. Rain, music, narrative, place and characters’ thinking each work to shape the scene’s progress – now occu-pying the foreground, now serving as glue, now providing punctuation. Many of these heterogeneous processes happen simultaneously. Some subtend or interrupt and replace others. In short, these elements interact to form new temporal structures. What can we make of this multitemporal flow?

Recent scholarship has invested in cinema’s capacity to embody multi-ple temporalities. Bliss Cua Lim connects Bergsonian ideas of ‘radical temporal multiplicity’ and irreducibly temporalized perception with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s politics of co-present ‘heterotemporalities’ (2009: 83, 14–16).2 Discussing movie musicals and other sites of the ‘musical moment’, Amy Herzog starts from the premise that the ‘musical spectacle’ presents an ‘image of time that … exists in fluid layers of simultaneous present-past-future’ (2010: 174). Jean Ma notes that Wong Kar-wai’s style emerges partly through ‘the layering of multiple temporalities and subjective-objective perspectives in the counterpoint of image and sound’ (2010: 123). Lim and Herzog draw on a Bergsonian strain of Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 2, which (in a key passage) locates multiple ‘sheets of past’ in Welles’s depth-of-field shot (1989: 105–16, especially 107–08, 114). This passage has also attracted the attention of William Connolly, who shows how a depth-of-field shot in Citizen Kane confirms Bergson’s multilayered conception of memory and perception (2002: 37–41 and 205 n. 19).3 These scholarly projects take temporal multiplicity as a condition – and raison d’etre – of complex cinematic discourses.

I seek to complement these projects by attending to the sorts of multi-temporal play I have just described in Sparrow. How do cinematic discourses create the effect of multiple temporal strands unrolling all at once? What happens when they do? If, as the music theorist Jonathan Kramer says, ‘music can enable listeners to experience different senses of directionality, different temporal narratives, and/or different rates of motion, all simultaneously’ (1996: 22), it’s worth investigating how film music and what Kevin Donnelly (2009) calls ‘musical sound design’ can encourage such experiences. More strongly: Kramer’s description of music can extend to an audiovisuality that includes the image. As Michel Chion reminds us, ‘rhythm … is an element of film vocabulary that is neither…specifically auditory nor visual’ (1994: 136). Following Chion’s path into Dolby sound and digital cinema, we can ask what


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4. See especially Connolly (2002, Chapter 1). This phrase signals the ways that ‘cultural life mixes into the composition of body/brain processes. And vice-versa’ (2002: xiii).

sorts of temporal multiplicity might be particular to the heightened audio-visuality of recent film. Focusing on a few short scenes from To’s Dai si gin/Breaking News (2004) and from Tie saam gok/Triangle (2007, co-directed by To, Tsui Hark and Ringo Lam), I’ll discuss three related effects of this multitem-porality: (1) new possibilities for depicting the heterogeneity and the layered character of thinking (from higher-level decision making down to autonomic processes); (2) an intense concreteness in the representation of thinking, as it were literalizing William James’s assertion that ‘thoughts … are made of the same stuff as things are’ (1987: 1158, see also 1156–57, original emphasis) and (3) a thickening of the connections that bind cinematic renderings of the ‘body/brain/culture network’ (to borrow a phrase from Connolly).4

Throughout I’ll be pointing to ordinary multisensory experience in scenes that use heightened audiovisual techniques, often in the absence of dialogue. To’s action films constitute an archive of people behaving and thinking by means of the senses. I’ll emphasize the ways that multisensory experience in To’s films mostly happens in groups: it’s mostly revealed as it’s shared among the characters onscreen. The Sparrow example has already shown us that thinking becomes radically relational in To’s post-1997 films. This essential relationality has three entailments I will make much of. First, some sort of being-next-to is necessary to the presence of thought. Second, To’s widescreen compositions usually project multiple subjectivities, sometimes even a distributed or other-than-human subjectivity. And as such (entailment three) the assertion of a singular subject becomes surprisingly rare, brief and precarious. Placing dialogue to the side both changes the cinematic economy and foregrounds nonverbal thinking, knowledge and behaviours, including less-than-conscious bodily processes.

IsolaTIng ThInKIng

Three minor moments in To’s Breaking News show how the multitemporality of thought – and the very presence of a thinking subject – can be projected audiovisually. Each of these moments emphasizes specific cinematic param-eters I’ll be drawing attention to in what follows. The first example demon-strates the role of talking, and especially not-talking, in conveying thought. The second moment emphasizes the discursive logic of a favourite To shot: the widescreen long take with a moving camera. Music and sound perform crucial functions in the third of these examples. All three moments both isolate the thinkingness of a single character and register the ways this char-acter’s thinking happens in relation to others. I begin with isolated thinking figures because they present thinkingness in a clear manner: they benefit from a traditional focus on the individual in cinema (and in the discursive fields around cinema). But as I have already hinted these ‘solo’ performances of thinking carry less aesthetic and ethical weight than do To’s images of think-ing in groups. I’ll be moving towards consideration of the multitemporality that on-screen groups can create.

Following a tense phone call between the hot-headed Police Inspector Cheung (Nick Cheung) and his superior, the young Commissioner Rebecca Fong (Kelly Chen), Breaking News cuts to a shot of Fong slamming down her phone on what becomes the downbeat of a musical cue. Fong appears by herself. She has a nice office with a view, but (we might note) she seems ‘isolated’ and enclosed. For three seconds after she hangs up, Fong is silently thinking: we may feel we’re alone with her and her thoughts. The



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5. Tristan Tzara wrote that ‘Thought is made in the mouth’ (1975: 389).

musical cue assists in creating this feeling. It features an open-ended melodic motive that has already been used to underscore the search for a piece of miss-ing information. This motive, and the long gaps between iterations, suggest an absence and a need to move forward. The film cuts back to Cheung and his men; the music continues. As soon as we return to Fong, she calls out to Ben, her subordinate, and gets up to move in the direction she has yelled towards (screen right). The camera pans right, almost a swish-pan, leaving her behind and beating her to the point she arrives at so it can pick up Ben, who has just entered the frame. Fong orders the schleppy Ben to pull Cheung off the case they’re working on. She speaks sharply, points her finger at him, and turns away without waiting for a response.

But suddenly Fong wheels around and calls him back, still sharply. They walk towards each other. She raises her hand, as if about to speak with emphasis, then stops and says never mind. She completes her hand gesture by waving Ben away. This non-exchange remains unexplained. What does it accomplish? It may not say much about Fong specifically, beyond telling us she’s like other people. Rather, it shows there’s more to thinking than what the talking includes, a fact that gains importance in many of To’s films. More broadly, this moment of hesitation reminds us that thinking cannot be circumscribed by language. Nor can thoughts be completely controlled by the body/brain at the helm. What does it do for the film if the audience knows that the character is thinking, but not at all what she’s thinking? Is Fong’s unvoiced thought related to this case or not? Is there even something there that could’ve been voiced? Or would this thought have had to be ‘made in the mouth?’5 Perhaps there wasn’t anything verbalizable at all. Breaking News renders these questions undecidable. But it gives us a key to the importance of not-quite-verbalized and borderline-unverbalizable thoughts in film. We grasp the presence of thought here precisely because we lack access to the contents of the thought. We know we’re confronted with a mind because we witness a change of mind. Thought comes to the fore when we sense a lack of fit between a character’s thinking and her (not) talking. As this example shows too, a character’s thinking gains concreteness through her friction with other people. And as my description of this moment seeks to register, thinking becomes more vivid when a film depicts or creates a rhythmic clash between the temporalities of thought and the temporalities of motion. Similarly, as the Sparrow sequence also reveals, thinking can start to matter when audiovisual techniques make a character’s perceptual work seem halting and difficult.

Talking and not-talking operate in tandem to provide a crucial multi-temporal resource in To’s post-1997 action films. Dialogue can be sparse for long stretches of these films, and not just in the action sequences (which are often quite talky). This approach reflects a shift in To’s cinematic economy: no longer does self-regarding male speech-making form the emotional core of To’s action films. Not only does this make the presence or absence of dialogue an essential formal and emotional determinant, from scene to scene, it draws attention to borderline phenomena like Fong’s unvoiced thought. People in To’s post-1997 films often seem about to say something – maybe – but it doesn’t get articulated. Nothing ever confirms that there really was a thought. But sometimes it looks as if these characters are reaching for the thought. The element of effort, the uncertainty, the fallibility this implies aids ‘character development’ in a way that’s peculiar to To’s post-1997 cinematic economy: it shows what people and thinking are like in general. Such moments can thus be placed in a constellation with the other kinds of effortful not-talking we see


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6. I’ll return to the specific question of vocality.

7. This is important in practical terms too, since To’s films contain little or no direct sound.

throughout To’s films: refusals to respond, temporary and pathological inabil-ity to speak, and nonverbal communication (silently, as through hand-signals, and in audible ways like screaming and crying). In an audiovisual economy that doesn’t privilege dialogue, these many sorts of not-speaking serve as reliable means to show characters thinking, reacting and communicating. They help establish a useful separation between communication, language and vocality.6 At a basic level too they provide audiovisual space for elements other than synchronized dialogue.7 Thus, as my group-oriented examples will make clear, these modes of not-speaking facilitate multitemporal play.

Even this brief scene, which a single character dominates, asserts the multi-temporality of ordinary human experience. Fong’s intense not-talking has a temporality that distinguishes it from the linguistic and extra-linguistic behav-iours that surround and overlap with it: interrogating a subordinate, hanging up a phone, looking off into space, making a decision, calling someone by name, getting up, walking, giving orders, pointing, turning around, starting a gesture and modifying it midstream, dealing with an unfolding crisis, not having a snack, working on a case, managing relations with colleagues, inhab-iting a role as Commissioner. The oddness of her sudden self-interruption, and the ‘empty’ moment it creates, can activate our time-consciousness – all the more because this self-interruption is odd only cinematically: as a real-life occurrence it would be perfectly ordinary. In effect Fong’s self-interruption adds a new temporal layer, as her thoughts outpace her body’s voluntary movements. Once this moment plops like a stone into this film’s audiovisual flow, it creates ripples that can be felt in other temporal streams. The music asserts itself more boldly. The rhythms of ‘normal’ talking destabilize. And in traditional character-development terms, this moment needs to be gradu-ally rinsed out of Fong’s psychological picture: it lies about her character by suggesting she’s unsure of herself, not up to the job. From here the film must work harder to convince us she’s cool and unruffled, which it does.

Often, however, a sense of multitemporality can emerge without a particular character triggering this sort of disruption. This is true of the scene that includes the call between Fong and Cheung. Here framing, camera movement, and motion within the frame help convey Cheung’s status as a thinking subject. In several long takes with little dialogue, right before Cheung receives the call from Fong, the camera both isolates Cheung’s think-ingness and places it in relation to objects, spaces and other people. It does so through widescreen compositions that shift rapidly across their eleven- to seventeen-second durations. Each of three such long takes changes a lot as the camera moves from a single to a two-shot to a group, from long- to medium-shot to close-up, from generous depiction of the background to an audiovisual emphasis on objects like the cell phone. Cheung remains at the conceptual and narrative centre of this sequence. But the constant movement and variation, always happening along several simultaneous strands, keeps the temporality and relationality of his body/brain activities in constant play. All his thoughts seem pressured by time and motion, just as his actions are pressured by what is happening around the edges of the frame.

At a certain level this scene is resolutely ordinary. Police work is put on hold so Cheung can get a snack; roasted yams become the goal of about a minute’s worth of screen time. By treating this scene as a mission, however, Breaking News intensifies Cheung’s potato-quest to the point that it becomes both tense and oddly funny. This itself marks a form of multitemporality. We can sense the conflicting drives: Cheung’s yam-desire against his men’s



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8. I discuss this sequence extensively in Kronengold (2013: 417-19).

confused attempts to follow him, his singlemindedness against their loyalty, his directed motion against their hovering bobs and weaves, the physical pressures of hunger against the exigencies of a chase for escaped killers. At the same time we can feel like it’s funny to be watching ‘pursuit of the yam’: were it not for the very intensity of the multitemporal flow, this puzzling pota-tocentricity might detach us from the film’s diegesis.8

This sequence begins with a shot of Cheung’s team’s cars pulling up to the curb and two shots of his partner getting out of the car and circling aimlessly in the middle of the street; in the last of these shots we pan to Cheung, seen through the windshield, apparently talking under his breath. The next three shots each last eleven seconds or more; they are notable partly for the range of things they include. The first of these shots shows Cheung busting out of the car in long-shot and walking with purpose towards what we soon see is a yam vendor; making eye contact with the vendor and gesturing towards the yams, hearing but not responding verbally to the vendor’s pitch; taking a yam and splitting it open with his hands (enhanced by a surprisingly loud Foley effect and the yam’s vivid orange glow); taking a bite from each half as he turns back towards the car, without having paid, as the vendor is on the point of calling out to him and we see the rest of the cops getting out of their cars. Cheung walks to the car while his men are approaching the vendor. As the men stream past him on both sides in what almost looks like a choreographed formation, while his partner is left to pay, Cheung gestures with the half-yam in his right hand, first over his right shoulder, then over his left, as if to say ‘you people on my right should get a yam, and you people on my left should get a yam’. The next two shots proceed similarly.

The way this scene works we sometimes catch Cheung alone in the frame, occasionally through an anamorphic lens that exaggerates the extent of empty space around him. He appears to be thinking, looking at his split yam as he’s eating it. The materiality of the yam (as food, but also as an audiovisual object) thus becomes, strangely, the fulcrum for both movement and think-ing. Perhaps because it is ‘pointless’, this scene becomes capable of showing us something about the way people think, interact with objects, and move through space. The discursive logic of this shot-type produces a multitemporal and multi-person picture of thinking – mostly without dialogue. Cheung’s status as a thinking subject is contingent upon framing, camera-movement, blocking and the audiovisual renderings of objects. Cheung’s thoughtfulness thus becomes irreducibly temporalized, subject to a viewer’s apprehension of people and objects sweeping in and out of the frame. When we momentarily catch Cheung isolated in the frame, we still feel the others circulating around him; when we see him as but one figure in a complex choreography, we still regard him as the scene’s conceptual centre.

Music and sound too can help reveal an individual’s subjectivity as contingent, relational and multitemporal. Early on in Breaking News, the lead criminal Yuen (Richie Jen) is briefly isolated in the frame as a musical cue warms up ever so slightly. This film has become known for a seven-minute opening shot that starts quietly and blossoms into a pitched gun-battle. Immediately following this opening shot, the five crooks commandeer a police van and take off. After a few quick shots of the cops, we cut to the van’s interior. The beat-driven, percussive music turns sparser and quieter precisely at the edit-point, as if to accommodate dialogue. But no one speaks. Instead we hear one crook grunt with effort while he squeezes a tourniquet around a comrade’s leg; the belt he’s using groans as it’s pulled tighter. The camera tilts down along the


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injured leg. Blood pools on the floor of the van. Swelling traffic sounds fill out the sonic texture. Things quiet again once the camera pulls back to show all four passengers; the camera pans past Yuen, revealing the driver, who calmly makes a right turn. These men are in the midst of a crisis: one guy is gravely wounded; the whole police-force is after them. The smashed windows and pool of blood make it hard to forget this. But in this shot, and in the single of Yuen that follows it, acting, framing and music create a few seconds of repose. A certain intimacy derives from this little scene’s hands-off sense of being-next-to: the van’s interior becomes an ideal homosocial space, perfectly matched to the five bodies that occupy it. Despite everything that has happened, everything that is happening, these five men command this time and that space. Each guy looks off in a different direction; each bears just enough affect to individuate himself from the others. Together the five men project a heavy what-is-there-to-say silence that delivers a touch of emotionality.

Yuen gains further specificity in the single that follows. For five seconds Yuen’s half-turned face occupies the centre of a widescreen composition that also reveals a lot of human activity through the blown-out window next to him. He just looks straight ahead, though after four seconds the morning sun brightens his face and he’s forced to blink. Right before the cut to this shot, the reduced sonic texture introduces close-miked hand-drums whose ‘naturalness’ stands out in the musical arrangement. Possibly a tabla, these drums sound ‘real’ (as opposed to synthetic) and thus more tactile, perhaps more intimate. To the extent that it conditions the shot of Yuen, this orches-trational move reinforces the convention that a single can register a character’s thoughts. As with the other examples of not-talking we have already covered, we don’t know whether this thinking concerns the future, present or past. Yuen’s (lack of) expression, along with his silence, allows for the possibility that he’s thinking about nothing in particular. Later in the film we learn that Yuen’s comportment hardly indicates indifference. But here we have access only to thoughtfulness and not to any specific thoughts. Since this happens early in the film, it establishes the capacity of music to perform its traditional function of revealing a character’s thinkingness.

This non-melodic musical cue helps put nonverbal thinking out there where audiences can see and hear it. Of course what I’ve described is so quick and subtle it can easily be missed. Even if you catch it, it may not mean much to you. The same could be said for the other two transitional sequences I’ve discussed. As little scenes like this add up in Breaking News, however, they lend weight and dimensionality to ordinary body/brain activities, giving nonverbal thinking a place alongside the dialogue and the plot. It matters that this body/brain activity can sometimes look like reflection or deliberation, and that the film sometimes privileges an individual subject, albeit for short stretches. But as even these three scenes remind us, thinking is contextual and contingent, rela-tional and collective – it happens in collaboration with objects, spaces, culture and other people. To’s cinematic approach gives a picture of thinking as not just inside an individual’s head. It makes thinking the site of several crucial conjunctions: inside/outside, self/environment, self/others and body/mind.

MusIC, sound, voICe

But what kind of thinking emerges from this kind of music? The musical cue I’ve just considered (from early on in Breaking News) de-emphasizes melody, harmony and vocality in favour of rhythm, instrumental textures and a



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9. See Chion (1995: 230) on Bach’s Italian Concerto in Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (1991).

10. I’ll define ‘groove’ minimally here as a short, repeated unit that provokes a beat-acknowledging comportment; we’ll assume it’s presented by rhythm-section instruments (guitar, keyboards, bass, drums, percussion) or their digitally produced cousins.

controlled use of dynamics. Its texture asserts itself as collectively produced and mostly percussive; it doesn’t include traditional film-scoring tropes of individual subjectivity or emotionality. Thus this cue does not project ‘memo-rability’, at least in the melody-focused way this aesthetic category has been defined in western-derived film music. The constant sixteenth-notes make this an example of what we call motor rhythm; moreover, most if not all the sounds have been sampled and looped rather than performed by musicians in real time. In this sense, it is ‘mechanical music’, ‘anonymous’, merely ‘steady’ if not ‘indifferent’. As such this cue would count as Chion’s ‘anempathetic music’ – music that just goes, in an ‘undaunted and ineluctable’ manner. It cannot ‘directly express its participation in the feeling of the scene’ (1994: 8–9, see also Chion 1985: 122–26, 1995: 228–32; Gorbman 1987: 159–61).

Chion’s empathy/anempathy pairing causes problems, especially as he elaborates it. On one hand he is careful to note a range of musical styles (and non-musical sounds) that can create anempathic effects. He mentions music boxes, Muzak, the persistent zither in Reed’s The Third Man (1949), quaint instruments like the celeste, and machine-noises like that of the electric fan in Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975); it can even be Bach.9 His examples all ring true. But on the other hand this anempathetic music, ‘which would recon-cile us to life’s indifference’, hovers a bit too closely around the ‘frivolity and naïveté’ of ‘dance bands’ and other ‘generic music [musiques fonctionnelles]’ (Chion 1985: 126; 1994: 8). Empathetic music, by contrast, typically partakes of western-art-music norms. One worries that Chion has granted his own indifference to groove-driven music too great a role in the definition of musical anempathy.10 Dance music may seem anempathetic if the protagonist doesn’t feel like dancing. But is there something about a focus on grooves, beats, percussion and rhythm that tends to make music indifferent? Does a string section do better than a rhythm section at conveying emotion? And do sampled, synthesized, digitally processed and sequenced percussive sounds have trouble connecting with characters’ feelings? Chion doesn’t quite say yes to any of this. But while he describes many ways that potentially empathetic music works anempathetically, he spends little time showing how empathy might emerge through unconventional musical means; groove-driven popu-lar music is never granted that capacity. Post-1997 Hong Kong action film soundtracks contain mostly digitally produced groove-driven music in popu-lar idioms, so they either lack sufficient empathy or they tell us that Chion’s scheme needs adjusting.

The music accompanying Yuen and Co.’s escape in the police van ought to count as empathetic music. This musical cue does (to borrow Chion’s words) ‘express its participation in the feeling of the scene, by taking on the scene’s rhythm, tone and phrasing’. It does not seek to function as high- intensity ‘chase music’. Nor does it show the world’s indifference: its matter-of-factness delineates a controlled emotionality in which reality and subjec-tivity seem well balanced. This music’s digitality, groove-drivenness and emphasis on dynamic textures over memorable melody actually help it hug the scene’s emotional contours. I’ve already noted the way the arrangement ‘responds’ to the action and sound-design, and to the shift from a group shot to a single. And vocality, a more traditional means for registering emotion, is not entirely absent from the musical texture. Three times, at two-measure intervals, a single pitch swells in to occupy the foreground – not a melody, but a throaty tone where a melody would fit in the musical arrangement; a bit like a dove’s cry, though in a tenor register better suited to male subjectivity.


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It connects both timbrally and narratively with the drastic tourniquet-tightening that immediately precedes it. The guy with the injured leg doesn’t scream in pain; the music doesn’t fill this empty affective space with a texture-lacerating melody or a dissonant chord. Instead the musical cue presents this single gesture that lies timbrally between a scream and the groaning sound the belt creates. This is indeed empathetic music, appropriate to both the style of the diegesis and the music’s production-practices.

But the character of this little scene may suggest that empathy too has shifted along with the narrative approach, audiovisual practices and musical idioms. How do new sorts of feeling and thinking emerge from the sound/image relations in a scene like this? There are two basic answers to this question. First, the status of this thinking and feeling becomes uncertain; we should not be surprised that Chion’s scheme fails to catch it. This scene lacks dialogue and overtly ‘expressive’ behaviours; it does not even include a true close-up. As I’ve said, the music marks these absences sympathetically rather than trying to fill them. Thus this musical cue’s ‘participation in the feeling of the scene’ depends on textural processes as much as discrete musical objects: it relies on the coming-in-and-out or (yet more subtly) the swelling and falling of individual musical objects like the hand-drums and the humanly-pitched dove’s cry. That is, the scene’s thinking/feeling becomes available through musical shifts that are hard to verbalize and easy to miss. This means further that the very possibility of musical empathy gets bound up with aesthetic and technical regimes that require specific cultural knowledge, viewing/listening practices, and modes of diffusion. If you don’t attend to the music, you don’t know the musical codes, or you can’t actually hear things clearly enough, you may fail to grasp the musical features this creation of empathy depends on: the element of effort, the collaborative dimension, the micro-variations on short patterns, the play with and against conventions.

This leads to my second point, about the nature of the ‘musical empathy’ projected by such a scene. The cue I’ve described consists of musical mate-rials that are normally heard relationally. None of its strata would typically appear alone or as the foreground element of a texture: its little percussion- patterns, one-note synthesizer parts and other isolated sound-objects only make sense as part of a collectively produced groove or other manifold texture. Its emphasis on percussive sounds, and on bringing these sounds in and out of the musical texture, both facilitates this approach and points towards groove-driven popular music. For sonic and cultural reasons, then, this musical cue conveys two key features of the thinking/feeling the scene presents: a sense of collectively produced energy and effort, and an imbrication of thinking with hapticity (touch, ‘feel’) as a mode of intimacy. So this sort of musical empathy can register a being-human that does not rely on spoken language but does engage the whole body/brain/culture network and does need other people in close proximity. While traditional ‘empathetic music’ targets clearly deline-ated emotions – an individual’s response to an event, a strong feeling shared between characters on-screen – this musical approach underscores more generalized feelings with blurrier outlines. What is shared here comes across as ordinary, homosocial and fully embodied.

Yes, the effects of this musical empathy are radically contingent. But this music may succeed better than traditionally empathetic music at communi-cating the scene’s feelings. This musical cue provokes certain responses at a less-than-conscious level: you may entrain to its beat, for example, and you may respond viscerally to the vocality of the humanly-pitched dove’s cry.



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11. OfteninthescorestoTo’sfilmsthere’saprominentguitar,ormultipleguitarsasinPTU,orasitar,oud,etc.LoTayu’sthememusicforElectionemploysapipa,whichworksasothertotheguitar:itiscloseenoughregistrallyandtimbrally,andintermsofitsmodeofperformanceanditsfunction,toresembletheguitar,butitsChinesenessallowsittobeheardasa(thematicallyappropriate)swerveawayfromwesterninstrumentation.

This less-than-conscious level, I’d suggest, is proper to the empathy I’m seek-ing to register here. Empathy of this kind does not require privileged access to anyone’s subjectivity. It connects more with the fact of shared humanness and the possibility of and conditions for empathy. Music, like gestures and facial expressions, becomes important as a site (beyond language) where thoughts and feelings can be externalized. In this sense, failing to hear how this music participates in the scene’s emotionality means failing to recognize the on-screen people as thinking/feeling others. One might say that hearing any music as anempathetic constitutes such a failure: music, for its part, always encodes human ‘participation’. In To’s poetic, then, the individual subjectiv-ity of a figure like Yuen is somewhat devalued – elusive, vague, contingent, other-dependent – but (by way of compensation) subjectivity is rendered as collective, embodied and audiovisually accessible. As such the music here renounces conventional expressivity but offers instead a groove-driven inten-sity that’s collaborative, bodily and inherently multitemporal.

The scores for To’s films hardly reject melody, however. It’s true they don’t often present cross-marketed canto-pop songs, despite putting many singing stars (like Kelly Chen) in front of the camera; and fleshed-out songs are rela-tively rare in these films. But melody is where To wants the music-production process to begin. According to composer Chung Chi-Wing, To asks to hear theme music soon after he hands you a film-scoring assignment. This theme music has lexical priority, as well, and it is understood as necessarily melodic: ‘The first thing he told me was to create a good theme tune so that people will automatically think of the film when they hear the music’. Chung accepts this regime partly because once To approves the theme music he ‘let[s] me do whatever I want[];’ all the same, Chung is asked to do ‘thirty cues but they’re expected to be finished in two or three weeks’ (Pun 2006: 196). So melodies, including and beyond the theme music, tend to be schematic and pastiche. Because they need to deliver a high degree of sonic and cultural specificity quickly and cheaply, these melodies are often presented on instruments that are inexpensive to contract and easy to record, and that can also signal efficiently their idiomaticity and cultural meanings. The classical guitar that appears at the beginning of Breaking News is but one of many such examples.11

How is this emphasis on melody compatible with the groove-driven, layered, texture-focused approach I’ve described? Melodic and groove- oriented cues coexist in a fruitful tension on these soundtracks because both bear a heightened sonic and cultural specificity. Melody remains important for its capacity to convey emotionality and directionality. It matters too that melody is the last place where the naïve picture of music as transcending the particularities of its timbres, context and occasion still holds. But in To’s films, melodies, like percussive sounds and other sonic objects, are shaped in a way that makes them multidimensional: they become inseparable from their timbres, dynamics, spatial position, reverb, rhythmic feel and so on. Sonic materiality becomes essential to all these films’ music. This object-oriented approach has roots in American popular-music production-practices that accelerate after World War II. Changes from the 1950s into the 1970s worked towards clearer differentiation of elements in a mix, and thus supported a more heterogeneous collection of materials. Beginning in the 1960s this added up to a new kind of musical discourse, in which smaller musical objects started to resemble objets trouvés. A sense of particles constituting the musical discourse, and of objects in the stereo field, can make a recorded song feel like an assemblage. As such these records embodied multiple sets of values: different

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12. An attractive example of Ollano’s cinematic side is ‘La Couleur’, from their self-titled album.

genres, different modes of continuity, different sorts of comportment. In To’s films this object-oriented approach means that musical gestures – melodic or non-melodic – can jut out. These small musical objects can efficiently signal cultures, places, genres and historical moments, and they can mark or embody specific temporalities.

The enhanced sonic materiality of recent cinema has been one entailment of a broad, slow convergence between music production and film sound-design. In a discussion that moves beyond technological-determinist accounts, Donnelly acknowledges that we are in an age of ‘converging digital sound technology’: ‘sound designers use “musical software”’ and ‘music can sound like sound effects’ (2009: 104–07). These converging music/sound production-practices share an aesthetic emphasis on concreteness and specificity, particu-larly in the work of finding, processing and deploying sounds. Convergence between music composition and sound-design has also to do with the tastes and backgrounds of the people involved. Breaking News’ co-composer Chung Chi-Wing studied drama, not music, at Hong Kong’s Academy of Performing Arts, while his collaborator Ben Cheung has a more conventional music background. Guy Zerafa, the composer for Cheun jik sat sau/Fulltime Killer (To, 2001), Triangle and others, is a conservatory-trained guitarist and lutenist with pop-music leanings who also studied flamenco guitar. Xavier Jamaux was in the ‘cinematic’ French trip-hop duo Ollano before composing the soundtracks for To’s San taam/Mad Detective (2007) and Sparrow.12 By contrast Martin Chappell, To’s main sound-designer along with Charlie Lo, was a rock musician who had been surviving as a roadie and radio engineer before he started working in film. Their tastes clearly differ as well: Cheung works along the grain of recognizable idioms and catchy musical materials; Zerafa and collaborator Dave Klotz have pop-producers’ ears for precisely rendered timbres; Jamaux often alludes to earlier styles. Chung’s approach can be char-acterized by a reticence to create mood or intensification in the traditional manner: ‘I like to avoid highly charged (very tense or melodramatic) scenes. I prefer to wait till it’s over to begin my music’. These approaches coexist with Lo and Chappell’s unusual assertiveness: during Chung’s favourite no-music moment, a scene in PTU (To, 2003) that shows a group of cops carefully ascending a dark stairwell, we hear Chappell’s complex extra-diegetic sound-collage amplifying, collectivizing and externalizing the cops’ experience of fear (Pun 2006: 186, 188, 196).

The twin focus on melody and sonic materiality, in the context of Hong Kong production-practices and alongside the musicalized sound- design, defines the approach to music in To’s films. Melody still leads, but in an object-oriented musical approach wherein the cues are built up from a heterogeneous group of particularized fragments (sometimes melodic, sometimes not) that come and go, interacting with the musicalized Foley and ambient sound. The nature, source, function, duration and sonic surroundings of a melody – and the simple question of melody’s presence or absence at a given moment – take on an outsized role in these films, especially given the uncritical melody-centricity of most post-1997 Hong Kong action film sound-tracks. We don’t know what sounds will enter the mix, nor how they’ll be blended together.

Within this approach, the division between dialogue, music, Foley sound and ambient sound can blur, even though their traditional functions still matter. Sounds detach from their conventional roles. Percussive cues can convey emotionality while melodies distance us from the narrative. Dialogue



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13. On this topic more broadly see Gorbman (2011). Gorbman brings out the complexity of a scene in Kurosawa’s Ikiru that seems to resonate in Throw Down (2011: 165–66). In an interview included on the Throw Down DVD, To says he asked Cherrie In, who plays an aspiring singer, not to sing too well, while he notes that a developmentally disabled character who does more singing than speaking is played by a musician (Calvin Choi Yat-chi) rather than an actor.

can have more to do with establishing a sense of place, time or presence than with advancing the narrative or disclosing characters’ feelings. Voices are used in odd ways. Foley sounds take on the functions of conventional dramatic scoring. Chappell ‘plays’ his ambient wind-sounds on a keyboard, creating subtly musical effects (Bordwell 2008). Empathy can be encouraged by unac-customed means while vocality can serve unexpected purposes. We will see that this approach often works in service of a multitemporal, layered, hetero-geneous picture of thought. Above all it assists in projecting multiple, shared or distributed subjectivities.

Vocality and melody stand out as familiar sites of subjectivity, feeling and communication. Melody has a traditional link with vocality, but To’s sound-tracks often pull them apart to create particular effects. Chung’s aggressively ‘synthetic’ synthesizer timbre in the theme for Cheung fo/The Mission (1999) would be one such example, as would many others in which the melody appears on percussion instruments or other sharp, clipped, un-vocal sound-sources. The Mission’s theme could have been ‘gripping and tense, just like a cop film’, Chung acknowledges. Instead, he responded to severe budgetary constraints and To’s ‘romantic’ approach by creating a synthesizer melody over a drum machine’s ‘cha cha beat’. This theme’s crude production-values may make traditional empathetic identification difficult: the technical limita-tions of this score embarrass Chung in retrospect, even though ‘people have told me more than once that they like [the] roughness’. But again, To’s group-oriented and other-than-verbal narrative strategies push towards new modes of empathy. Chung says the ‘silent rapport and cameraderie between the men reminded me of dance’: ‘It’s that feeling. I can’t describe it. Let’s just call it the dance between men’ (Pun 2006: 188).

In these films vocality too is separable from typical cinematic uses of a singing or speaking voice. Yau doh lung fu bong/Throw Down (2004) includes both artless and artful diegetic singing.13 The non-diegetic scoring contains a lot of wordless singing, like the soulful melismas in Breaking News and the vocal percussion in Sparrow. Breaking News and Hak se wui/Election (2005) include non-melodic chanting. Mad Detective features prominent whistling, and vocal samples in the manner of Laurie Anderson’s ‘Oh Superman’, as part of varied arrangements in which voices come and go. And singing voices do not necessarily appear in song-like structures or with typical accompani-ments: Throw Down has notable instances of diegetic a cappella song, and Triangle ends with unaccompanied non-diegetic singing; near the end of Sparrow some wordless a cappella singing precedes old Fu’s sonically isolated moans of sadness. Dialogue too becomes a way to problematize vocality. Lam Suet, one of To’s favourite actors, has a Mainland accent: ‘My Cantonese … [has] a unique sound … which audiences seem to like’ even though it could be considered ‘a flaw, as it’s harsh on the ears’ (Pun 2006: 226). Characters actually talk about each others’ accents. Cell phones compress and distort the sound of voices, which To’s films exploit narratively and thematically; Breaking News especially presents many sorts of sonically mediated dialogue. This vari-ety of sounds and functions defamiliarizes traditional uses of the voice. It makes the films more narratively mobile and better able to represent multiple subjectivities and the heterogeneity of thought.

The audio side of To’s intense audiovisuality externalizes thinking. Sound reminds us that thinking happens by means of the senses, that the ‘inner’ supervenes on what’s outside. Sound is quintessentially out there in a way that shows how ‘thoughts … are made of the same stuff as things


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are’ (1987: 1158): with a sonic object the thought of the object is the same as the object. As multiple sonic objects appear before us, and resonate in our memories, their multitemporalities can register the heterogeneous and layered character of thought. The convergence of sound-design and music destabilizes the entrenched temporalities of music (beat, meter, phrase, section, song, and the longer arcs of styles and genres, not to mention musical memory), Foley sound (the time of an action, event or process), ambient sound (constancy or gradual change) and dialogue. Everything we hear bears particular – and multiple – temporal implications, modes of continuity, and structural entail-ments. Together, and in concert with the image-track, these sounds can create an unpredictable swirl. To’s films respond to this multiplicity with scenes that pointedly withdraw key elements, like music, ambient sound or dialogue. Solo singing occasionally takes control, for example, wiping out the dialogue and ambient sound. It’s characteristic that these songs serve the ends of multiplicity and ‘collectivity;’ they accommodate ‘forces whose movements are larger than the individual’. This is where musical numbers usually tend, according to Herzog, and they are where To’s films on the whole try to go (2010: 116). Similarly, when sound takes over from music in these films, the mechanisms of what has been called ‘subjective sound’ work to convey multiple subjectivities, as we will shortly see. This will lead to a concluding discussion of what this multiplicity means, how it reflects the body/brain/culture network in which it is bedded, and where it might point – towards distributed and sometimes even other-than-human subjectivities.

sound and dIsTrIbuTed subJeCTIvITIes

Donnelly shows how recent cinema can make ‘sound effects … take on more of the functions traditionally associated with music’. He argues that this can change not only sound/image relations, but also the status of the diegesis and the cinematic depiction of subjectivity (2009: 112; see also 113–16 and passim). One example that seems to pluralize subjectivity is a 45-second span of Breaking News when the sound-effects are processed and mixed to create aesthetic effects that would normally be assigned to a musical cue. This happens towards the middle of the seven-minute opening shot. When the crooks have assembled on the sidewalk and await the resolution of a clueless uniformed cop’s inspection of their car, the low rumble helps signify danger. It works like a ‘sinister’ melody in the bass would, in traditional (or modernist) dramatic scoring, particularly as it is musicalized: it’s subjected to changes of pitch, timbre and amplitude; filtering of its fundamental and its partials, and beating effects; and it has a more sustained envelope. It becomes a stratum rather than a transient effect.

The rumble is combined with the more-than-diegetic sounds of jackham-mers and metal saws, which too have been processed and made more contin-uous. The jackhammers have heavier reverb; suddenly there are more of them in the soundscape. They’re slowed down, making the iterations more discrete. The fundamental is higher, creating greater intensity. The amplitude, compression and high-frequency component make the jackhammers sound closer, despite the reverb. The saw-sounds are especially rich. There are also newly introduced sounds that are contiguous (temporally and registrally) with the extended saw but that sound like cross-syntheses of saw/voices and saw/jackhammer. The off-screen voices, too, are filtered and treated to extra reverb, making them a more than literal representation of diegetic sound. These four



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14. Donnelly discusses metallic sounds in Saw, where they form the core of the music-sound convergence: ‘manipulated in digital samplers but retaining their original metallic sonic character’, they are also clearly thematized (2009: 118).

15. Donnelly notes that ‘[i]n psychological terms, such sounds are perceived as a potential threat in that they hang in uncertainty for the perceiver’ (2009: 116).

16. This complex plan was soon one-upped by the ‘four tables’ sequence in Throw Down. This tour-de-force shows four simultaneous, sustained (and sometimes interactive) conversations (see Teo 2007: 170–72).

17. To’s phrase, as recorded in Teo (2007: 240).

sound-structures (voices, low-frequency rumble, jackhammers, metal saws) appear early on in the film – indeed before the opening shot – in ways that don’t problematize their diegetic status, even though they are all unseen and mostly remain so, and even as the low-frequency sound does not immediately suggest a source.

The modified saw-sounds almost become a melody. Their bowed-metal quality, different pitch-levels, changing dynamics (including expressive swells) and equalization, along with the heavier spreading, makes them work melodically. But these saw-sounds do so without creating the affective reas-surance melody normally provides.14 One could hear these sounds as strug-gling to be a melody, the struggle emblematized by the friction of metal on metal. Metallic sounds seem well suited to this function: they stand out soni-cally, they reveal the work of making sound, and culturally they serve as a figure for urban labour. Thus they remind us that each of these sounds reveals a trace of human activity: no matter how distorted, each metallic whine or thud reflects a worker’s actions. The metallic sounds are also easy to accept as part of the Hong Kong soundscape: they fit the dense, mixed-use neighbour-hood of Tai Kok Tsui and stand apart from ‘nature’, the ‘organic’, the ‘animal’, the ‘human’ in ways that sounds of skin, wood, air and liquid can’t.

What are the purposes of these extra-diegetic sounds? They avoid the intrusiveness of music as such, keeping us in the world of the diegesis even as they hint that it does not represent an objective picture of a real-world space. This sound-collage adds a subjective dimension to the setting’s reality, even if we don’t experience it from a single, clear point of view. Because the primary affect here is fear, ambiguous sounds seem especially apt.15 As music would, the sound helps convey the affect of fear/suspense. More subtly, it depicts the space as it’s bound up with this affect, suggesting the recesses with-out the camera really exploring them. So this becomes thinking-saturated space without taking on the cast of a particular character’s subjectivity: the affects, emotions and thoughts are out there in the space, flowing in and around the contours of this Tai Kok Tsui street corner.

Crucially, this 45-second stretch contains three concurrent streams of dialogue, each of which has its own on-screen site.16 Sometimes these sites are all in the frame at the same time. The complex audio mix of sound-collage and dialogue matches the visual distribution of on- and off-screen people (including the workers represented by the Foley sounds). Often in To’s films an assertive audiovisuality serves to simultaneously present multiple subjectivities. Here we move towards a kind of distributed subjec-tivity. The many-peopleness, starting with the on-screen speaking characters and extending to the sonic traces recorded by the distorted jackhammers and saws, makes thinking/feeling a kind of collectively experienced force.

ThoughTs ouT There – ThInKIng beyond The huMan

Films reflect the body/brain/culture network. That is, they demonstrate how cultural life and body/brain processes influence, depend on and mix into each other (Connolly 2002: xiii; see note 4 above). But films do so collabo-ratively. A film renders a body/brain/culture network; it doesn’t merely show ‘the way things are’. The networks that emerge from To’s post-1997 action films are highly stylized. Take the world of Throw Down: muscle-memory of judo-technique, ‘a positive view of life (jiji rensheng)’,17 and contrasty lighting-schemes are inextricable from the characters’ cognitive and less-than-cognitive


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18. Carol Vernallis draws attention to a much-shown crocodile as a kind of genius loci (2013: 64).

body/brain processes. Or think of the body/brain/culture network that emerges around the umbrella in Sparrow’s dialogue-free climactic scene: this ordinary black rain-shield becomes a weapon, a buffer, a disguise, a necessary incon-venience, a physical weight, a source of (and obstacle to) balance, a kino-sphere, an amplifier of ambient sounds, a visual frame, a shape, an edit-point, an element of visual rhythm, a basis for choreography, an intertext (film noir, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, The Avengers), a trace of British colonialism and an emblem of commonality and social harmony. I’ve sought to demonstrate that this stylization does not entail a flattening-out of thought’s complexity. Visual and aural vividness help externalize thinking, bringing out its multitemporality, heterogeneity and relationality. A final example will reveal the far end of To’s audiovisual approach, where thoughts gain materiality and subjectivity prolif-erates beyond the human.

Shell-games, hidings out and runnings around dominate To’s portion of Triangle. A swirl of objects, people and myriad fauna creates an insistent sense of multitemporality. As night falls, a corner of a swampy village becomes an unremittingly dense soundscape teeming with visual activity. Because the film’s first half is resolutely urban, this shift to a contrasting ‘nature’ setting might be expected to decrease the flow of background audiovisual information. Instead the darkness envelops everything, provoking many new sorts of speedy or slow comportment; the outdoors press in on the built environment; and the animal encroaches on the human.18 An audiovisual plan that governs much of To’s cinematic discourse works most aggressively here. Sound pushes in towards the centre of the stereo field, from within and beyond the frame, making the ambiance exaggeratedly loud and proximate. At the same time the widescreen image pushes out, along the x-axis, towards the frame’s edges – filling the frame with information. Where the Wellesian depth-of-field plan conveys the temporal multiplicity of an individual’s memory and experience, according to Deleuze (1989: 105–16), To’s plan gives us simultaneous streams of everyone and everything a film’s world contains.

What stands out in all this unreduced complexity? A rare ‘static’ moment can reveal the materiality of thought, and a broad audiovisual contrast – lights on versus lights off – can bring out a thinkingness beyond the human. This sequence’s principal shell-game involves four identical white plastic bags with different contents (an antique coin-vest, money for a gun buy, lots of pills, and random crap designed to feel like the coin vest). Everyone freezes as a pony-tailed crook starts unwrapping what he thinks is his bundle of cash. It turns out to be the bag of junk. The sound-design includes a loud, scratchy, high-frequency stratum. Eventually this sound is naturalized as a sizzle; we’re in a humble snack-bar, its proprietor is cooking. But not immediately. Because of when it’s initiated – precisely once the package has been fully unfolded and its contents are visible to all, once its status has started to sink in – this scratchy sound gets linked to the package. For a full fourteen seconds this sound seems to carry the knowledge this object communicates. The object crackles as its meanings create friction with the thoughts of the people who encounter it. We hear this realization happening as thoughts meet the object. The materiality of thought gets a boost from heightened sound. This is not exactly ‘subjective’ sound; it’s thinking happening partly outside people’s heads. The object emanates energy that the characters’ thoughts ignite.

Nobody speaks. The gangster looks at the junk, then at the guys who should’ve given him money, then at a corrupt cop’s identical package. He could’ve articulated something he’s thinking, but his (or anyone’s) verbalized



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thoughts would have reduced the multitemporal complexity. Dialogue would proceed too slowly, relative to the speed of thought, and could never capture the swirl of thoughts running through his head, let alone those of all six people involved. The fast-changing facial expressions of six people about to speak, not knowing what to say or even if they want to speak, better convey the thinkingness here – a thinkingness uniformly triggered by this object and sustained by the heightened sound. The absence of talking still matters. But speech is not the model for the thinking depicted here. Physical movement is its closest kin. As thoughts ricochet among the packages and the people, five other characters are literally speeding around, running up and down the narrow footpaths and into the snack-bar. Some eventually smack into each other. In this crude choreography there’s nothing particularly human. Nor is there anything specifically human about the non-cognitive body/brain proc-esses the packages provoke: twitching, sweating, gulping, blinking quickly, tipping forward, clenching the jaw-muscles. The darkness, the animals, the insects and the swampy setting seem to force the characters into an other-than-human comportment, especially when the lights go out.

Turning off the lights provides cover for the characters who clandestinely flip the switch. It gives all the characters some freedom to move, even as it stops them seeing what’s happening. But the film’s audiovisual ‘reaction’ to the lights’ winking out creates a broader shift. We get a new sonic scheme, partly realistic – the machine-noises stop, some insect-choristers go silent – but also reflective of the ways perception changes in the dark. Music especially seems to thrive in this doubly darkened audiovisual scheme. The music ‘comes out’ in this unlit nightworld – suddenly faster, louder, denser, lower, more tactile. This new scheme encourages certain sorts of nocturnal comportment, a kind of scurrying close to the ground. It creates the conditions for a new group of night-creatures to emerge. Because these creatures rely on hearing and touch rather than sight, the film uses heightened sound and music to reveal their special multisensory economy. The characters become these new night- creatures. We hear, feel and barely see them scampering around. This is how they think and what they do.

Here we are far removed from civilized society, the urban environment, rational thought, and the autonomous individual. This body/brain/culture network needs frogs as much as pills, swampwater as much as money, a croc-odile as well as a crook-in-charge. Its characters and culture lie beyond the human. Perhaps this sequence represents an extreme case. But on the whole To’s approach can register a complexity in which not-talking communicates feel-ings more eloquently than speech, the collective possesses greater specificity than the individual, the ordinary is where the action is, multiplicity is what’s singular, rhythms exist only in the plural, and thinking needs space outside the head.

aCKnowledgeMenTs

I owe serious thanks to Allan Cameron, Anna Schultz, Carol Vernallis and especially Jean Ma for their helpful and perceptive comments.

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—— (1999), The Mission, Hong Kong: Milkyway Image Ltd.—— (2001), Fulltime Killer, Hong Kong: Milkyway Image Ltd.—— (2003), PTU, Hong Kong: Milkyway Image Ltd.—— (2004), Breaking News, Hong Kong: Milkyway Image Ltd.—— (2004), Throw Down, Hong Kong: Milkyway Image Ltd.—— (2005), Election, Hong Kong: Milkyway Image Ltd.—— (2007), Mad Detective, Hong Kong: Milkyway Image Ltd.—— (2008), Sparrow, Hong Kong: Newlink Development Ltd.Tzara, T. (1975), Oeuvres Complètes/‘Complete works’, vol. 1, Paris: Flammarion.Vernallis, C. (2013), Unruly Media: YouTube, Music Video and the New Digital

Cinema, New York: Oxford University Press.



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suggesTed CITaTIon

Kronengold, C. (2013), ‘Multitemporality and the speed(s) of thought in Johnnie To’s action films’, Journal of Chinese Cinemas 7: 3, pp. 277–295, doi: 10.1386/jcc.7.3.277_1

ConTrIbuTor deTaIls

Charles Kronengold is Assistant Professor of Music at Stanford University. He is the author of the forthcoming Live Genres in Late Modernity: American Music of the Long 1970s and a book-in-progress, Crediting Thinking in Soul and Dance Music. He has published on twentieth-century western art music, popular music, film and aesthetics.

Contact: Department of Music, Stanford University, Braun Music Center, Stanford, CA 94305-3076, USA.E-mail: [email protected]

Charles Kronengold has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.


multitemporality and the speed(s) of thought in johnnie to's action films

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