In past weeks I spent living Wong Kar-Wai’s Fallen Angels.  I arrived in Brooklyn on Monday, July 2, and I returned on Saturday, July 7.  My itinerary was built around films from the Kino International library screening at Lincoln Center, where I have never been, and my first film was to be Fallen Angels, which I have seen but never on the big screen.

A friend of mine had been flown up to New York by an Internet company bent on him learning their ‘system,’ and they furnished him, through Craig’s List, with a railroad car style apartment in Williamsburg. The tenants of this apartment, who we surmised to be socialists, had gone on holiday and put their home up for rent.  Books about John Reed (Mexican insurgente), Peter the Great and the intricate world of tattoos belonging to imprisoned Russian criminals served as bathroom reading material.  Over the kitchen table hung a six-foot tall oil painting depicting the nighttime execution of a political/social undesirable, probably from the Franco era.  Loaded rifles were inches from his face and above his head, floating like a thought-bubble, was a clipart banner that read, “Do not mourn me, Organize.”  This resonated with me, but doubtless not per the artist’s original intention.  I took it to mean that when you spend time in a city like New York, and there is not a film festival to speak of…then weep not and create a film festival of your own.  If you would like to volunteer for this festival next year, then please write to The Fallen Angels Film Festival.

My history with Fallen Angels is no impertinent matter.  I once turned down an opportunity to see the film on the big screen when I hadn’t yet learned of WKW.  Later, after a Hong Kong cinema class, I rented the film and watched it alone late one night.  The next morning, I woke early to watch it again.  So this past week, when I claim to have lived the film, I mean just that.  I lived it.  Yes, I lived through the experience of watching the 90-some minutes of the film, but that is not exactly what I mean.  Emotions, settings, characters, storylines, shots, songs: all of these elements began to crop up as I interacted with the city and its people. 

Many, if not all of us, have lived movies before, most often willfully.  After seeing Last of the Mohicans, I would run around in the woods behind my parent’s house fending off Huron warriors with a tomahawk I bought at a flea market.  I can recite scenes from Die Hard and The Terminator and Big Trouble in Little China.  But what happened to me in the past week was beyond my control.  Brooklyn’s graffiti strewn buildings and incessant jack hammering became, respectively, Hong Kong’s neon signage and Wong Chi-Ming’s streams of bullets.  Planes over Williamsburg became the ramped, trailing aircraft I saw just days before on the screen at the Walter Reade Theater--those planes completely ignorant of the inner workings of my own personal Hotel Chungking Express below.

Not until I read the typed up ‘apartment info’ left by the socialists did I really begin to understand that life was imitating art. Mother Theresa, if she had been a cinema-fearing woman, would have declared it a miracle.  If not a miracle, then at the very least it was a betrothal.  This memo indicated that as guests we were to clean any linens or dishes we dirtied, take out the trash, etc., leaving the apartment as we had found it.  Leave the apartment without a trace--like a killer’s assistant.  I hoped I wouldn’t soon find myself with two 9mms ready to massacre a bunch of card playing gangsters.  (Luckily, I never did.)  But I did become a mute who couldn’t hold down a job, desperately trying to force people in posing for photographs for me.  I sat alone in the socialist’s apartment like the cleaner, thinking about who had used the room just a week before.  Picking up a full trash can to empty it out stopped me in my tracks.  There were receipts in plain view and a calendar of the local natatorium’s swimming lessons, which I soon found myself walking by every day.

With myself as the narrator, I rode the subway and wondered when I’d lose my father and realizing that in our home movies Mom and Dad are conspicuously underrepresented.  The collective He Zhiwu of my brothers and I never turned the camera on them.  What followed was lonely reverie of wandering through the city thinking back to a conversation I had with a friend a week before about how moviemaking can suck the life out of you.  Our idle chat was kick started by A Mighty Heart’s touching story but after many twists and turns, I was left questioning the very institution that forged me: the cinema.  Should I give up on it?  Does the cinema destroy artists?  Is it useful to watch movies all the time or should I spend my time globetrotting on a volunteerism spree?  Walking away from that purgative chat left me pierced by cynicism and despondency about the movies, despite knowing that my innate idealism would eventually rally and recover. 

Loving movies is a commitment I entered into not knowing full well what demands it would make of me.  It’s always been more than just a hobby, a dreamy diversion, but seeing Fallen Angels and living that film for nearly a week incinerated all reservations I had about movies being the most important outlet in my life.  I had confronted myself with a decision I made unconsciously years ago to hunt faraway films and everyday filmmakers.  An appeal had been made by my good sense to the ludicrous questioning of movies’ importance to me.

So, by midweek, when I was falling in love with a complete stranger, knowing they could be a killer or a cleaner or my soul mate (but not a mute because she took my drink order verbally.), I fully embraced the surrendering of myself to the enjoyment of cinema and the propagation of it.  When loneliness became my companion on the streets of the biggest city and it seemed like summiting Everest to just connect with a stranger about life and movies, I felt even closer to the characters in Fallen Angels, lonely people eluded by love and companionship.  However, during my Fallen Angels Film Festival, no matter how complete this loneliness may have seemed at times, it was never absolute.  Someone else was going through the same thing I was.  Stepping into the subway one evening cornered by a bout with cinematic solitude, I heard a solitary musician playing “Quizás, Quizás, Quizás”, which was never played on the bubbly Wurlitzer in the bar in Fallen Angels, but it assuredly had to be one of the choices, which WKW tucked away for a film he would make years later, one I also hope to live.

The cinema will die only if you let it die.~Unknown filmmaker