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There is a look in Chungking Express that people have been trying to name for thirty years. It feels like slow motion and like chaos at the same time. One person nearly still while the city tears past them, everything smeared.

The technique is step printing, and Wong Kar-wai built a signature out of it.

It is not slow motion

Ordinary slow motion is a frame rate trick. Shoot at 48 frames per second, play it back at 24, and you get smooth, detailed, dreamy movement. More information, stretched out.

Step printing works the other way. You shoot at your normal rate, then stretch the footage in the edit by duplicating frames. No extra information, just the same frames held longer. That is where the jumpiness comes from. You have seen it in the opening of Reservoir Dogs.

What Wong actually did

The Chungking Express look is two techniques stacked.

In the film’s first segment the crew combined step printing with undercranking, which means shooting at a much lower frame rate than normal. They shot at six frames per second, then printed each frame four times.

Those six frames per second are the real secret. A lower frame rate means a slower shutter, which means each frame sits exposed for longer. The blur in those shots was not added later. It is actual light dragging across the frame while it was being captured.

The second segment does something different with the same idea. The central actors hold still or move very slowly while everyone around them moves at normal speed. The characters end up sealed inside their own tempo while the city rushes by, which is the emotional argument of the whole film delivered through frame rate.

Spielberg used a version of it in Saving Private Ryan, at the moment the film drops into Tom Hanks’ point of view and he takes in the carnage around him. Everything Everywhere All At Once quotes Wong directly.

Try this on your next project

You can test half of it tonight. Duplicating frames costs nothing but time in your editor, so pull a clip you already have and try it. The undercranked blur has to happen in camera, so you have to plan that shot before you are on set. Knowing which half belongs to production and which half belongs to post is most of the skill.

Who made this

• Host: Daniel Andersen
• Writer: Matt McGee
• Editor: [TK]
• Animation: [TK]
• Music: [TK]

Keep going: The Sounds of Star Wars · The Kuleshov Effect

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About Global Lens

Global Lens is a film education series from Ineffable Films, a 501©(3) nonprofit working out of San Diego, New York, Los Angeles and Boston. Each episode traces a single technique or cultural contribution that shaped cinema, with an eye on the filmmakers and traditions that standard film history tends to skip. The series sits inside our wider work empowering emerging and underserved filmmakers through mentorship, festival access, education and community screenings.

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