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Advertising and Marketing
Punctuation goes to the moviesPosted by Joel Martinsen, October 11, 2007 5:20 PM
![]() The sexy dot. Chinese movie promoters have discovered the allure of punctuation. An article in The Beijing News last weekend looked at a number of recent arthouse films that have dressed up their titles with dots, periods, and bars, and asked whether there was any deeper meaning or if it was all for show. The center dot is probably the most common example of the phenomenon. According to point 4.14 of the national standard "Use of Punctuation Marks," the mark is used as a word separator in transliterations of foreign-language names. It also separates title from chapter in book citations. There are other common uses, such as separating month from day in the names of date-based events like the September 18 Incident (九·一八事件), but it's really not intended to be used to separate random characters. But sometimes you just have to break the rules. The 2005 musical Perhaps Love was known as 如果·爱 ("if·love") in Chinese. According to director Peter Chan, the dot lends the Chinese title a sense of "perhaps," symbolizing the leading lady's hesitation over her choice between the two male leads. ![]() Perhaps a dot would be nice. This choice of punctuation was also highlighted in the film's promotional campaign. At right is part of a screengrab from the movie website (available at the Wayback Machine). The dot is a meaningless addition to the menu options: "What's New" is 新·消息, "Video Clips" is 看·片段, and "Behind Love" is 舞台·后. Other films that have borrowed the cachet of the center dot include Jay Chou's Secret (不能说的·秘密). TBN reports that the Taiwan distributor said the dot was inserted "purely to look good" (and follows that with a snarky remark about Jay's concern with his image). Johnny To's Oscar contender, Exiled (放·逐) makes use of the dot, as does Chun-Chun Wong's Wonder Women (女人·本色). ![]() The trendy period. The Longest Night in Shanghai (夜。上海) favored the period over the dot, but like the rest of the movie, the title punctuation was widely seen as being all style and no substance. Here's TBN's account:
Ang Lee's Lust, Caution innovates further with the use of a vertical bar: 色|戒. Here's the story behind that choice:
The mistake is compounded by the fact that 色戒 (without the comma or bar) is the Chinese name of Samsara, Pan Nalin's art film about the spiritual journey of a monk who is seduced by Christy Chung. In addition to the vertical separator, there's one other aspect of the movie poster's layout that's typographically interesting. The movie's title reads right-to-left, as was conventional at the time in which the movie takes place. However, all of the text on the poster—from the taglines to the cast list—reads left-to-right. So the natural reading for the title line is also left-to-right, in which case it means "abstinence," just as Eileen Chang originally intended. Links and Sources
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