“Hong Kong created me. The energy and space and the intimacy of people’s relationships, and the intensity of it, and the colors… That’s what pushed me toward what I’m doing now. Hong Kong created my life, and created the rhythm and the dance of the films we do.” ~ Christopher Doyle, “Kickstarter Blog”
For some hardcore film fans – the kind of people who’d sniff and pointedly correct you if you said they loved movies – knowing that Christopher Doyle is a film’s cinematographer is sometimes a bigger selling point than the film’s cast or director. Best known for his work with the brilliant director Wong Kar Wai, Doyle is a hugely celebrated artist (and star) in his own right. His sensuous, painterly approach to creating images for the screen has resulted in a singular style admired around the world.
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In the Mood for Doyle (the title being a play on In the Mood for Love, his classic collaboration with Wong Kar Wai), is a short but incredibly informative look at the life and creative process of the man himself. At the start of the documentary, director Gus Van Sant says of Doyle, “He’s like a beatnik. He has the background and the education of somebody who is self-taught, who has taught himself about all these different things in the world, all these different places that he’s lived.” The film then proceeds to flesh out the life of an aesthete from a non-arts background whose refined eye and sense of beauty is innate. For those two qualities he – both consciously and instinctively – set out to educate himself in order to better harness and hone his gift, and the result is some of the most beautiful imagery in all of cinema.
A native of Australia who has lived and worked across Asia for over thirty years, Doyle makes it clear throughout that Asian aesthetics and culture are at the core of his aesthetic practice and philosophical belief. (And oddly enough, he expresses his points of identification without indulging any transracial bullshit.) One of the biggest strengths of In the Mood for Doyle is the way director Yves Montmayeur crafts it to not only illuminate the ways Asian culture has shaped his subject, but to also serve as a valentine to Asian life. A generous use of Doyle-shot film clips intercut with original footage of talking heads, people on the street, and Doyle’s various work spaces give a rich and round view of his life, and his assertion that “In order to be an artist, you must be generous.”
As the viewer is taken from Hong Kong to Bangkok to New York, and back again, with Doyle retracing the locations of films such as 2046 and In the Mood for Love and dropping nuggets of inside info (like the films set in Hong Kong were actually shot in Bangkok), he slowly emerges as a master teacher in a couple of ways. On the technical side, that means he explains how he uses all of his senses when figuring out how to shoot something, even the sense of smell. As we watch him retrace his steps for filming In the Mood for Love, he tells us – both implicitly and explicitly – that the act of creating, if you are really smart, is to stay moored into the process of discovery, even after you have settled on whatever aesthetic or practical choice needed to be made. You need to still be open to new information and options. And after explaining how he chose to light a textured wall for maximum visual effect, he makes the larger point that, “The choices you make force you into a particular direction, and that is what becomes what people call style.”
The film goes out of synch just under a quarter of the way through, but it’s worth it.
Ernest Hardy is a Sundance Fellow whose music and film criticism have appeared in the New YorkTimes, the Village Voice, Vibe, Rolling Stone, LA Times, and LA Weekly. His collection of criticism,Blood Beats Vol. 1: Demos, Remixes and Extended Versions (2006) was a recipient of the 2007 PEN / Beyond Margins Award.
