Wong Kar-Wai

A partire dalla fine degli anni Sessanta il linguaggio cinematografico è contrassegnato dall’affioramento periodico di una duplice pulsione: a disgregare la struttura narrativa mediante la sostituzione del tempo cronologico, omogeneo, irreversibile, quantitativo e calcolabile, con un tempo esistenziale, inesteso, non divisibile, qualitativo, eterogeneo, non misurabile e reversibile; a dissolvere le voci esterne o interne alla diegesi mediante un sistematico disoriginamento, che è prima di tutto un divorzio tra l’immagine e il sonoro, in direzione, direbbe Michel Chion, di un cinema «acusmatico». In direzione di un cinema che mette in questione l’ontologia e l’innocenza della sua tecnica audio-visiva, smascherando l’ideologia e il dogmatismo che hanno trasformato in religione l’unione di suono e immagine: le voci sono dissociate dai corpi di appartenenza e anche dalle individualità che essi incarnano.

This essay promotes an investigation into the musical discourse in the films of Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-wai, focusing primarily on the way that music is applied to disrupt narrative time, thus creating what Gilles Deleuze called ‘pure optical and sonorous situations’. It also considers the use of popular and preexisting music and the cultural relations established by them, raising the questions of what it means to use songs that are recognizable in a global cultural context, and what they can add to the filmic experience.

[Article paru dans le n°69 de la revue Trafic, mars 2009, https://www.pol-editeur.com/index.php?spec=livre&ISBN=978-2-84682-306-7]
Dans cet article, je mène à partir du cinéma de Wong Kar-Wai en général et de son chef d'oeuvre, 2046, en particulier, une première élaboration du concept d'image-variation (au-delà de l'image-mouvement comme de l'image-temps). Travail théorique ambitieux et toujours en cours d'élaboration.

I´ve tried to make a genealogy of Appadurai´s transcultural landscapes including a Latin American perspective from Silviano Santiago´s inbetween space, Canclini´s interculturality among others so that I could read Wong Kar Wai´s Happy under a comparative perspective and outside a national perspective

Wenyi pian, a Chinese equivalent of melodrama, has been experiencing a revival in Hong Kong cinema at the turn of the twentieth century. As a genre that appeals to the emotions, it is best suited for delivering personal stories set against the backdrop of a changing society. Particularly interesting to the scholars of wenyi is the oeuvre of Wong Kar-wai. His biggest success to date, In the Mood for Love (Fa yeung nin wa, 2000), and its sequel, 2046 (idem, 2004), revisit the classics of the Second Golden Age of Chinese cinema and imbue the traditional wenyi with socio-political sensibilities of Hong Kong in the transitional period. This essay explores how these two films appropriate melodramatic tropes – such as subjective narration, non-linear chronology, extensive use of music and props – in order to portray nostalgia.

Article published in L'Atlante, volume 25, January 2018.

Fallen Angels is directed by Wong Kar Wai, an auteur and one of the key figures of the second New Wave movement in Hong Kong Cinema. Bettinson (2010) notes that Wong Kar Wai is known for his stylistic utilisation of jump cuts, wide angles, shallow focus, slow motion and freeze frames, melding together with the frenzied rendering of saturated colors against the background of multicultural music. Bordwell (2000) describes it as a mixture of Jean Luc Godard’s aesthetics with MTV style editing. Hu and Yeh (2007) emphasise Wong Kar Wai’s penchant for delving into postmodern themes like alienation and emotional states of flux, drawing on the motifs of leaving, arriving and waiting. Recurring symbols are clocks and moving trains, which serve as allegories for the mobility of life and the impermanence of things, people and emotions. As observed by Cubitt and Cameron (2009), the ephemerality of moments in Wong Kar Wai’s films present a deeper political undertone reflecting the blurred, uncertain identity of 90s Hong Kong, during which it was in the middle of transition of its sovereignty from the United Kingdom to the People’s Republic of China.

The dynamics of Wong Kar Wai’s signature techniques will be examined in this essay, with its focal point revolving around the Killer and his Agent, specifically the introductory sequences of the film. Each fleeting moment will be deconstructed to link audiovisual elements with emotional undercurrents, gender interplays and political implications depicted in the film.

Italian architect Gio Ponti’s designs for Hong Kong client Daniel Koo Shing-cheong at both the Shui Hing Building in Tsim Sha Tsui (1963, now Prestige Tower) and Koo’s private home in Tai Tam (1963) were high-profile commissions that modestly experimented with materials in cladding and façade construction more than half a century before Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron designed glazed-ceramic and cast-aluminum envelopes for monumental buildings in Hong Kong’s cultural sector – the M+ Museum of Visual Culture (West Kowloon, 2020) and Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage and Arts (Central, 2018). Along with Norman Foster’s Hongkong Shanghai Bank (1983), Paul Rudolph’s Lippo Building (1986) and I. M. Pei’s Bank of China (1990), Ponti’s Shui Hing was cited in at least one well-known travel guide at the end of the 1980s, as among the works of architectural merit from the latter part of the British colonial era worth seeing, and was the only project of the group in Kowloon. Koo’s house on Deep Water Bay Road, on the other hand, never had such status. It has always been relatively unknown.

Ironically, Ponti’s now forgotten Shui Hing, for which the Milan-based architect designed the façade and interiors, stands across from one of Hong Kong’s most celebrated film locations, Chungking Mansions (1961), a composite building studied for its ethnic, economic and social complexity, made famous by filmmaker Wong Kar Wai’s Chungking Express (1994). Aimed at fostering trade relationships through Hong Kong-Milan designs that experimented with open interiors, surface textures, and relationships between building and environment, Ponti’s commissions for Daniel Koo were part of the same critical historical moment as Chungking Mansions: a period between the attempted electoral reform of the 1946 Young Plan – which would have enfranchised more Chinese residents with decision-making power – and the post-crisis social reforms that followed the 1967 leftist riots. This essay contributes to studies that inquire into the impact that architectural experiments in Hong Kong had on visiting architects and their designs elsewhere. Its main objective, however, is to explore architecture’s political unconscious, discussing Shui Hing and the Villa Koo as an important lost chapter in the history of Hong Kong modernism and, the city’s politics of consumption. Lastly, the epilogue describes the process by which research for the essay took shape after several encounters with works by Hong Kong artist Leelee Chan.

Wong Kar Wai often treats love in his films as an ephemeral vapour, a missed opportunity, a fleeting emotion that never acted upon becomes an ephemeral memory buried by time. In Happy Together (1997), however, he takes a different approach. Here, queer love represents not a form of fulfilment but a means to misery, as pathological and indeed dysfunctional. Wong's explorations of queer love are discussed at length in this essay.

This article argues that the concept of wuyi (‘martial ideation’) forms the aesthetic core of kung fu cinema. Rather than focusing on the expressive amplification of emotion, martial ideation negotiates action and stasis through stabilization and eventually reaches a state of tranquillity. In The Grandmaster (Wong, 2013), such an ideational experience is sketched through the Buddhist notion of guan (‘perspicaciousness’). Perspicaciousness is embodied by three ways of ‘seeing’ in the mise-en-scène, including ‘listening bridge’ in martial arts performance, ‘looking back’ in narrative structure and ‘visioning’ in theme. In this light, Wong’s kung fu debut treats the southern hand-to-hand combat tradition not as a spectacle, but as an embodied knowledge that links kung fu practice with Chinese aesthetics and philosophy.

This essay sets out to theorize the nostalgia boom that has held East Asia in thrall to the past for some years now. It begins by noting that this nostalgic sentiment often has an ersatz cast, not least since much of it harks back to epochs—Showa-era Japan, 1930s Hong Kong, colonial Taiwan—of which the ‘remembering’ subject has no bodily recollection. This strange vogue for the unremembered past is typically interpreted as a flight from time, and from a troubled particular present in particular: Japan's oil shocks, the looming Hong Kong handover, KMT rule in Taiwan, and so on. The present essay argues, however, that this scene realigns its component parts into a different picture when we view it through the comparative lens. Seen not contextually, but intertextually across the region, this yearning for yesteryear expresses not just a flight from time, but from place, too, and from one locale in particular. This abandoned site is the city of lived memory, a psycho-physical topos to which nostalgia has quite obstinately refused to stick. Underlying this reticence is the notion that the ‘really remembered’ city is not a proper ‘place’: earthy, gemütlich, and thus worthy of nostalgia. This notion persists across East Asia, and most especially in its literature and cinema, despite the plain fact that cities are ever more the region's primary site of dwelling. And behind this refusal to reconcile with the city as a place of home and hearth lies, unsurprisingly, the same queasy trepidation about modernity that has both plagued and sustained cultural practice both in East Asia and abroad. The essay concludes, however, by looking at two recent films—by Miike Takashi and Wong Kar-wai—which articulate an alternative aesthetic of nostalgia, and thus bring about something of a rapprochement between ‘place’ and the city-we-know.

Throughout Kar-Wai´s -so far- twenty nine film projects, his treatment of love has become one of the pillars that characterise his style, along with his known cinematic aesthetic. The love represented by Kar-Wai is a love that does not present the usual characteristics, not the ones found in the melodramatic film genre, nor the ones that belong to the romantic narrative that issue from the XVIII century. Which are, then, the characteristics of this love and how is it constructed?

　　本論文分析王家衛《花樣年華》中的一小片段，從第275個鏡頭到第298個鏡頭，總共24個鏡頭的電影文本分析。本論文從德勒茲的《皺褶》、和柏格森的《思想與動力》的理論做為出發，來分析這一小段電影中快步的上下樓梯與在走廊中的疾步，因此，在樓梯的往上運動與往下運動，成了哲學思考與電影分析的挑戰。樓梯為一個具體的皺褶形象，王家衛把樓梯、走廊、運動、不同的電影技法與錯誤的電影剪接，將這些不同的形式與不同的思考，藉著錯誤的剪接來結合在一起，形塑他特有的電影皺摺。因此，這一小段影片，是王家衛在《花樣年華》中最大的意義陷阱，也挑戰著電影研究的實踐。 /  This paper aims to analyze a sequence, from shot 275 to shot 298, in Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love. Starting from Deleuze’s “the Fold” and Bergson’s “Thought and Movement,” this paper tries to analysis the rapidly going-up-and-down stairs scene and trotting-through-corridor scene in this sequence, in which, the movements of going up and down stairs become a philosophical and cinematic analysis challenge. Wong Kar-wai transforms the stairs, which can be seen as an embodiment of the fold, in the sequence and combines it with corridor, movement, and variety of cinematic techniques by the use of ‘continuity error’ editing aesthetic, to construct his very own cinematic fold. Therefore, this sequence becomes a trap of meaning, which challenges the practice of cinema study.

For all its graphic splendor, In the Mood for Love delights in what it does not show. There are many explanations for the visual ellipsis, including nostalgia for bygone Shanghai, lament for the disappearing culture of Hong Kong, the melancholia of missed opportunities, and the recognition that passions can never be fully consumed. Yet the averted look is also the lynchpin of Wong Kar-wai's construction of space and time, which resists the structure of desire. What I call " the disengaged gaze " consists of limiting the camera's vision, thereby unmooring the framed view from the course of events. Furthermore, the disengaged gaze separates the camera's (and spectators') point of view from that of the film's characters. The gaze is not so much derailed from due course as left to explore alternative images. In particular, the disengaged gaze finds expression in Wong's use of offscreen space. Important clues to characters' actions and emotions can only be guessed, since they take place outside – often beyond – the visible frame. Onscreen developments are visually displaced, and in turn replaced, by the spectator's ideation as defining the cinematic event. The inherent subjectivity of this form of film watching turns every incident into a random coincidence that engages the viewer in exploring its possible meanings. Watching In the Mood for Love is demarcated by indulging in cinephiliac moments. Cinephilia, as I evoke it in this chapter, is a specific mode of relating to cinema and judging films. Cinephiliac sensibility, as a tradition established by the Cahiers critics since the 1950s, celebrates among other elements an auteur's ability to distill cinema to the experience of space and time, embracing a reality effect that resists excess. Cinephilia privileges certain moments – individual shots and even smaller fragments – to be appreciated and analyzed. Cinephiliac moments in In the Mood for Love function as entry points for enjoying and interpreting the A Companion to Wong Kar-wai, First Edition. Edited by Martha P. Nochimson.

Much has been written about the Chinese-born Hong Kong-based film director Wong Kar-wai and his films, particularly in relation to the socio-cultural contexts of Hong Kong before
and after the handover to China, and the transcultural aesthetic traditions in his works. Beyond academic and critical domains, Wong’s reputation has largely been generated by fans. Taking advantage of the large scale user-generated content associated with the director on YouTube, this essay explores day-to-day discourses that shape Wong’s persistent auteur reputation. The essay proposes a multimodal discursive and textual analysis of YouTube mashups that takes into account long-standing debates on cinephilia, media fandom and film authorship. The findings reveal a discourse of pleasure surrounding the appropriation and ownership of canonised movies, a taste homology between cinephiles and cult music fans, and tension among audiences with different identity politics. The circulation of these videos in the public domain by different agents can be seen as the exchange of ‘forms of capital’ (Bourdieu, 1993: 2) that creates distinctions among transcultural fan groups, which are connected in an ad-hoc basis. In the process, the reputation of the director as a film auteur is affirmed, expanded, and occasionally challenged.

In this essay I will focus on film and power and implications of the use of spaces and architecture in its production. I will do so by using Wong Kar-Wai’s films because of his focus on the urban domain and how the Self becomes reinserted into the world. Typically, in director Wong Kar-Wai’s films stories are not only about where the characters are but also about “how an urban setting shapes characters and make them who they are”.  I will also focus on slow architecture, Wong's strategy of slowing down film speed to transform space and consider Guy Debord’s notion of the derive, developed in the 1960s as Wong’s memories of Hong Kong are, to explore a shared dreaming of space in a historic and contemporary context. Wong's films, In the Mood for Love and Chungking Express are discussed with an emphasis on Wong's repeated use of romantic love and the decision of his characters not to love, as a key narrative in his films.

Wong Kar-wai is undoubtedly one of cinema’s great colorists. His films are renowned for their distinctive ‘smudge-motion’ style, in which colors segue and blur into each other. As color in cinema is a product of collaboration between the director, production designer and cinematographer, this chapter emphasizes Wong’s creative partnership with his collaborators – most of all, William Chang, Wong’s long-term art director, costume designer and editor, who has worked with him on all of his films. Treating color as a form of montage, it explores Wong’s color strategies in the context of Western and Chinese color aesthetics, showing how his films both conform to and depart from classical conventions whilst engaging in color-experimentation similar to modernist artists. In its close analysis, the chapter considers the distinctive ways in which color is used in Wong’s cinema: color lends his work an authorial signature; it synergizes with music; it captures the vitality of his landscapes; it reveals the play of memory; and implants narrative enigmas. In this way, it shows how color carries much of his films’ affective charge and is intrinsic to the expression of his social and philosophical themes.

Hong Kong’s “modern new wave” cinematic movement emerged during the late 1970s and early 1980s. According to Abbas (1997), there was a shift in the style and images of film, from the typical Kung-Fu action films, that were popular in USA, to a cinema that responds to a specific historical situation. In 1997, Hong Kong entered a phase of uncertainty after the handover of sovereignty from UK to China (Chan, 2004), which caused a lot of confusion and instability among citizens of Hong Kong. Though they were glad to be part of Mainland China, their motherland, still the future for them was vague and unclear due to the appearance of endless possibilities, for example there were fears of less freedom of expression, major changes in the lifestyle and negative effects on the economy (Chan, 2004). Thus, Hong Kong, being a state with no past, became situated within a state of constant motion (Usen, 2013), moving towards nothingness, “a place removed from time, striving for a collective history that will never achieve” (Usen, 2013).  The new wave marks the beginning of defining what it is to live in Hong Kong and highlighting the nation as a spatial subject, rather than just a collection of physical aspects (Wypkema, 2005). Among the filmmakers who emerged at that time was the internationally acclaimed director Wong Kar-wai, whose efforts was to preserve Hong Kong’s identity from being lost (Usen, 2013). The aim in this article is to experience Hong Kong’s real life through one of Wong’s critically acclaimed films “Chungking Express (1994)”, where we are immersed in the middle of a chaotic, confusing and an unclear environmental setting, reflecting a certain social and political turning point that was about to hit the nation in a couple of years. Through the film’s fractures images, the characters and the physical settings, I tend to clarify and analyze Wong’s intention when he said in an interview “It’s a movie about Hong Kong. It reflects the way people felt at that time”.

Doing the same thing over and over again yet expecting different results was Einstein’s definition of madness. But there are films that affect us in a completely different way every time we watch them, and those discussed here, ironically, depict men who are doomed to repeat themselves. In the article “On Repeat: The Poetics of Eternal Recurrence in Vertigo, Last Year at Marienbad and 2046” we dwell on numerous links that connect these films to other works by the same director (Alfred Hitchcock, Alain Resnais and Wong Kar-wai) and to each other – from obsessive reconstruction of the past at the core of each story to the music score reminiscent of opera – and make a special emphasis on their most striking common feature, circularity on the narrative and visual levels. We subsequently compare this recurrence, established by means of repetition, quotation and imagery, to Nietzsche’s philosophy of eternal return. Best described in The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s concept of eternal return opposes Christian linear temporality to the millennia-old notion of cyclical time. Proposing that history repeats itself, Nietzsche oscillates between the fear and the lure of repetition, just like the characters Scottie, X and Chow, who seem to be unwittingly acting out traumatic experiences over and over again. Instead of following a linear development, the plots of Vertigo, Last Year at Marienbad and 2046 form a circuit where past conditions the present and future. Though not only their narratives, but also cinematography and soundtrack are ruled by repetition and variation. We argue that recurring patterns, although they may not be registered consciously upon the first viewing, ultimately reinforce the idea of eternal recurrence and prompt the audiences to engage ever more closely with these films over successive viewings.

Article published in Cineforum, Volume 25, December 2016.

This chapter situates Wong Kar-wai’s “The Hand” in its transnational context through its relation to the American and Italian segments of the anthology film Eros (2004). The fact that “The Hand” was meant to appeal to an international audience highlights the importance of considering the roles of “modes of spectator address” and reception when considering conceptualizations of transnational cinema. In discussing these conceptualizations, chapter will engage in an examination of the cinematic address and film style of “The Hand” to suggest we reconsider the eros and embodiment of Eros in terms of more complex understandings of desire and corporeality. In the end, this reconsideration allows for a rethinking of “transnational cinema” beyond simple categories of geography, signification, and representation.

El cineasta chino Wong Kar-wai ha edificado su particular obra como un estudio de los mecanismos del recuerdo, la memoria y la reconstrucción del pasado. Este objetivo resulta especialmente sintomático en una época que se exhibe orgullosamente como post-histórica. Su película '2046' es un caleidoscópico puzzle sentimental ambientado en la convulsa historia contemporánea de la ciudad de Hong-Kong, precisamente en vísperas de su anexión a China. Este artículo analiza esta película en relación con otro título esencial sobre la memoria, 'El año pasado en Marienbad', de Alain Resnais, para estudiar el modo en que el cine postmoderno retrata nuestros paisajes del recuerdo, en tiempos de fragmentación y disolución de las identidades.

The article examines Wong Kar-wai’s oeuvre in the context of film criticism. Given that his films have rarely been successful in Hong Kong, the director has traditionally catered to international audiences, and in doing so, exploited multi-cultural sources, generic conventions and various marketing strategies. Screenings at influential film festivals and critical appraisal have helped Wong Kar-wai gain a cult following, but, contrary to his avant-garde reputation, Wong is more interested in the expanding mainland market and transnational mainstream public. We propose to analyse the critical reception of Wong Kar-wai in the West and its impact on the production, distribution and popularisation of his ten feature films.

utilizando la metodología del análisis textual (básicamente semiótica, psicoanálisis y estética) analizamos el film Fa yeung nin wa, centrándonos en la relación de deseo incumplido de los personajes protagonistas e intentado relacionar esa incapacidad del deseo con la algunos elemento biográficos y personales del director, Wong Kar-wai.