#Introduction:
Welcome to You Zhou and Minwoo’s field trip report. Today, we are going to talk about a film which is called “City of Glass”. To start the report, we should make a general introduction about this film. This film shows a struggling love story between a man and a woman. Their love story begins at the period of their university life. Specifically, their university was the University of Hong Kong. Because this film was taken in HKU, the film seemed very familiar from our point of view.
#Architecture related to the film:
1: Lady Ho Tung Hall
So to begin with the first scene, the airplane crosses the city and the camera shoots the buildings to start this love story. The director uses low-angle shots to shoot the tall buildings that symbolize Hong Kong. And now in the second scene, shows the activities that they are doing in Lady Ho Tung hall. What is interesting about this scene is the setting, the stairs in Lady Ho Tung’s hall. This was the place where both male and female protagonists meet up together. The hall sports team culture influenced the protagonists’ love a lot because the sports team helped them get closer to each other.
2: University Hall and Main Building
Now, the fourth scene takes place in the main building on the HKU campus. This is where they start growing their love for each other. The main building has not changed much, it still keeps its fusion of western and Chinese architectural design. Plus, it is still used for teaching, lectures, and studies. However, Lady Ho Tung changed a lot. It was newly built in 2000 and changed to the Lady Ho Tung hall that we know today. In this film, the old Lady Ho Tung’s hall represents the start of their love but when the hall was rebuilt, their lover started to end. Lady Ho Tung in this film represents a love bridge between the man and the woman and it also links the storyline from the past to modern times. As you can see in this next scene, this scene shows various couples dancing in the dance hall. The dance hall in the scene is called University Hall, University of Hong Kong. This scene is taken in the University hall because its blend of traditional and modernized architectural design suits very well with the dance hall atmosphere. We have visited this place and found out that now it is used as a dining hall for residents. Now, this scene is when the woman tries to call the man who has left to France. As they are physically away from each other, it was very hard to contact each other with the technology back then. So this black-and-white scene shares how the woman felt about long-distance love. Here, we see the buildings again in low-angle shots but this time, it is very foggy and blurred. This emphasizes how unclear their love was.
#Special Shoots:
The next scene is the airplane scene. As you can see, this scene is taken with an aerial shot. With this filming method, the whole view of Hong Kong can be seen. There are two airplanes flying in this scene which signifies that the man and the woman are finally back together in Hong Kong. I found this specific part very interesting because the directors use a building as a mirror and film the reflection of two airplanes. Now, this is a scene when the man’s wife visits the man and the woman had to fly alone to not get caught cheating with the man. Again, it is an aerial shot but this time only one airplane, signifying the disappointment and loneliness the woman felt. This scene takes place on Lady Ho Tung’s stairs again. The setting of this scene is a reunion for celebrating the re-opening of Lady Ho Tung’s residence hall. This scene was taken in a point-of-view shot. The man is filmed with a high-angle shot and the woman is filmed with a low-angle shot, this is because, in the scene, the man was below the woman. In the previous scene, the Lady Ho Tung stairs were a love gateway but in this scene, it becomes an uncrossable gateway. Here, the man gets a flashback of his time with the woman and an interesting feature about this is that the flashback was in orange tone and his current situation, without the woman, was in blue tone. This contrasting color tonality shows how happy the man was when he was with the woman and how much he is depressed without her.
Group members:
You Zhou 3035949360
Jeong Minwoo 3035983914
You selected some very nice visuals (video clips) from the film to show. Yet, it is a pity that most of your analysis focuses on the surface meaning while I am sure your work can be elevated to another level when you analyze the selected scenes with more personal thoughts, explaining the relationships on why/how the city’s urbanscape symbolizes the love story, the contrast between the architectural spaces the film used in the first-half of the story when they were young in college versus those were used when they formed different families.
I also appreciate your mention on the aerial shots of the film, I suggest you to consider more on how the idea of ‘glass’ represents Hong Kong, or even their relationship. Good choice of materials yet more polishes on the way to present thoughts are needed!