Cinematographer Christopher Doyle, recently in town at the beginning of the month as a guest with the Seattle International Film Festival, assembled an impressive yet small exhibition of his photography on view for a breezy and short exhibition at Howard House. The quick 10-day exhibition — The Space of a Kiss — coinciding with SIFF's final week and jointly produced between the gallery and the festival, offered viewers with a glimpse into the world of Doyle's camera work on location.
If Christopher Doyle's name may be unfamiliar, the Australian-born cinematographer and gregarious personality has lent his visual mark on many films, primarily working in Hong Kong, and honing his compositional style. Doyle, whose impressive credits include work with several filmmakers including Gus van Sant (Psycho), Ki-Yong Park (Motel Cactus), Phillip Noyce (Rabbit-Proof Fence) and recently with Thai director Pen-Ek Ratanaruang for Last Life in the Universe, has an impressionable eye for detail and sensitivity to his subjects. Mostly known for his long-time collaborations with Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai, the work on view highlighted scenes from Wong Kar-Wai's films in this exhibition culled from his on location portfolio.
More than mere snapshots, Doyle's visually rich images are works of art unto themselves. Their portraiture extracts the context of the image with the film's narrative and distills an intimate space with the viewer in a moment in time. Place is important, but only to inform the location — a bedroom, a bar, a hallway. And several of the images seem to suggest the characters inhabit a life past midnight on the edges of an urban demimonde comprised of clubs and restaurants.
These images frame the setting, whether in Hong Kong, Bangkok or Buenos Aires, and posit a glimpse of a private drama captured through his camera and freezes the moment extended by the larger work in the films they are from. Candy colors and neon glow hum under the nocturnal light of noir-like interiors, and express less than iconic portraiture than an ambience imbued by the character's mood. Tony Leung, for instance, stares through the cherry red curtains in a corridor ("The Space of a Kiss, Tony Leung, In the Mood for Love") wearing a sharp black suit in a scene from Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love. In "A Cloud in Trousers, Tony Leung, Happy Together, Buenos Aries" — from Wong Kar-Wai's Happy Together — he appears behind French doors near an entry to a Buenos Aires bar, over lit with blue-tinged neon. Maggie Cheung — in "Coming Out?, Maggie Cheung, In the Mood for Love, Hong Kong" — grimaces with the smile of a lover sparked seemingly from a surprised greeting in cozy backlit bedroom in the film In the Mood for Love.
The immediacy of the images are haunting, lingering with familiar faces, but collapse time, cinematic memory and nostalgia together in an eternal present. The context of place, usually an urban interior, conveys a slight melancholic familiarity. Perhaps that's why Doyle's stylish palette is so intensely resonant; color carries a seductive charge when night becomes morning and all is still by 3 AM.
