Costume Changes, Overlapping Histories: In the Mood for Love and 2046

Abstract

“All memories are traces of tears,” thus reads the first intertitle of 2046 (2004), which, as In the Mood for Love/Fa yeung nin wa (2000) had done before it, uses this throwback gesture to silent cinema to intersperse brief, poetic commentary at a few crucial points in the narrative. Yet, most likely, when one thinks of memory as a trace, one thinks of images, not tears. In the case of film, to speak of the image as trace is a manner of acknowledging that the images that a camera captures are forever a mark of the past. Cinema, in fact, depends on such traces, on those imprints that the world leaves of itself on a celluloid surface, which only later are arranged into narratives. Because of cinema’s ability to embalm and resurrect moments past, memory has proven to be an enduring subject for film and film studies, especially in the postwar era. More recently, given the advent of digital media, which allows for images to both travel at great speeds and be amply reproducible, the asynchronous character of memory has become an enduring object of fascination. Digital mediums further boast the capacity to manufacture an image of the world without ever having to come into contact with that world, be it objects, landscapes, or the human form. In this manner, the digital image closely approximates memory’s own capacity to embellish and color the traces of a world now past. And thus, though digital capture can still record traces of the world, it has completely transformed our relationship to “photographic” images.