Wong Kar-wai Research Articles

Exploring Philosophical Dimensions in Wong Kar-wai's Filmography

Exploring Philosophical Dimensions in Wong Kar-wai's Filmography

Wong Kar-wai’s Argentine Affair: Happy Together as a Translingual and Multimodal Adaptation

Abstract In 2021, a 4K-restored rendition of Wong Kar-wai’s iconic film Happy Together (1997) returned to theatres across Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Argentina, marking the film’s enduring transnational appeal two decades after its Cannes premiere. This article investigates the film’s intricate cultural ties to Argentina. I argue that Happy Together not only enhances the cultural connections between Hong Kong and Argentina but also showcases Wong’s translingual and multimodal approaches to film adaptation. ‘Translingual’ refers to the film’s literary source: I demonstrate how Wong skilfully wove elements from Manuel Puig's 1973 novel The Buenos Aires Affair into his film through a threefold Spanish-English-Chinese process of rewriting. Subsequently, I contend that various cultural facets of Argentina—the literature of Puig, the soundscape of Piazzolla’s tango, and the landscapes of the Iguazú Falls and Tierra del Fuego—contributed significantly to the Hong Kong auteur’s multimodal adaptation. In short, this article proposes a dialogic perspective on Hong Kong cinema by considering Argentina as a reflective mirror brimming with aesthetic and geopolitical implications. Through the lens of Happy Together, this study moves beyond Western-centric reception paradigms by spotlighting the cultural and socio-political affinities between Latin America and Asia, thus bringing to the forefront the often-overlooked transpacific connections within the Global South.

A Study of Film Aesthetics of Wong Kar-wai --Taking Fallen Angels as an Example

A Study of Film Aesthetics of Wong Kar-wai --Taking Fallen Angels as an Example

Stories about Somewhere Else: Mobility and ‘Spatial Others’ in Hong Kong Cinema

ABSTRACT As a migrant city, Hong Kong has produced numerous diasporic films that portray physical mobility and fluid identity as the city’s cultural style. This cultural picture has changed since the 2000s with the rise of localism. As the debate about localism has grown heated, the concepts of mobility and fluidity have seemingly become obsolete. Many Hong Kongers have emigrated to other countries due to the changes in the contemporary political climate, which urges us to read these films in a new context. This article focuses on the works of Wong Kar-wai and Ann Hui, who have consistently made films about journeys and ‘spatial others’. By analysing Wong’s In the Mood for Love (2000) and The Grandmaster (2013), and Hui’s Song of the Exile (1990) and The Golden Era (2014), I illustrate how these films construct a local identity in relation to mobility and why they offer new insights into the debate about Hong Kong’s contemporary culture. Bringing these films into dialogue with the localist discourses, I argue that mobility should be reconsidered a crucial component in the construction of local culture and identity in modern-day Hong Kong.

‘Take the longest way to cross the street’: mobile women in Wong Kar-wai’s films

As an acclaimed Hong Kong director, Wong Kar-wai has created numerous figures of mobile women, such as the martial artist in The Grandmaster (2013) and the lone traveler in My Blueberry Nights (2007). However, the issues pertinent to women in his films are often overlooked. In recent decades, feminists have examined women’s mobility as a challenge to the gendered spatial division between public and private spaces. In society, popular media is powerful in constructing the notion of space, while cinema can question the fixed ideas of gendered space. However, feminist work in media geography is still relatively rare. By subverting the conventional elements of various genres, Wong repositions women in cinematic space and reflects the global trend of women’s mobility. Wong’s films demonstrate the geographical power of cinema by deploying the transnational elements of Hong Kong and Hollywood genres to negotiate the meanings of gendered space. By revealing the cultural significance of Wong’s works in relation to gender and space, this article argues that the studies of genres and their variations are crucial at the intersection between media geography and feminist geography as an emergent research direction that could broaden the horizons of both fields.

Sinophone becoming in Wong Kar-wai’s in the mood for love (2000)

Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000) tells the story of Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chen, who, in learning that their spouses are engaged in an affair, fall in love themselves. However, in vowing to “never be like them,” Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chen abandon their affections and, by the end of the film, go their separate ways. As many have suggested, In the Mood for Love is as much a melodramatic love story as it is an allegory of Hong Kong’s precarious political situation since the British handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997. But rather than understanding the failure of their relationship in the limited sense of Wong’s representation of the difficulties ahead for Hong Kong’s political reunification with China, we argue that In the Mood for Love should be read as Wong’s portrayal of an opening to a form of life and identity that resists the narrative of Chinese essentialism often purported by the CCP. We explore this potentiality by examining how Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chen’s role-playing of their spouses’ affair, the film’s non-linear sense of time and the continual juxtaposition and confluence of East and West through dress, food, and music function as constructs of Gilles Deleuze’s crystal image. We further contend that the film’s repeated use of the crystal image suggests a Deleuzian reading of the potential processes of deterritorialization and, what we call, Sinophone becoming for both individuals and communities that constitute the Chinese diaspora.

Building a Timeline for LGBTQ+ Global Cinemas (1910–2019): Movie Production Trends from a Collaborative Internet Cinema Database

Building a Timeline for LGBTQ+ Global Cinemas (1910–2019): Movie Production Trends from a Collaborative Internet Cinema Database

Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive

Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive

Indecent Female Images in Wong Kar-wais Films

Wong Kar-wai's movie text has its own unique female image, feminism and male position, which are intertwined. It seems to have different flavor and unresolved contradictions. The indecent women's films are reborn and subverted. The important carrier of Wong Kar-wai's movie narrative link-love, and discusses the status and identity of women in love, and summarizes the fate of women's love. In Wong Kar-wais films, women are the contradictory body that longs to break through the shackles and to obtain ideological liberation, economic liberation and personality liberation. The thesis mainly combines two films: "2046" and "the hand". Based on the feminist theory, this paper analyzes the indecent images of women in Wong Kar-wais films. This paper expounds the theme expression and construction method of Wong Kar-wais female narration, and relates the indecent female image with the drifting social groups, so as to form a cultural review of the indecent images of women in the movies.

An Analysis of Wong Kar-wai's Film Style

An Analysis of Wong Kar-wai's Film Style

Mirrors and the Aesthetics of Space: The Use of Mirrors in Chinese Director Wong Kar-wai's Film Days of Being Wild

As an important part of visual culture, especially after its commercialisation, cinema plays an important role in constructing social ideologies. This article will analyse the extraordinary possibilities of mirrors for the spatial shaping, psychological portrayal of characters and the aesthetic construction of cinema with reference to the use of mirrors in the famous Chinese director Wong Kar-wai's film Days of Being Wild.

Review: Vulgar Beauty: Acting Chinese in the Global Sensorium, by Mila Zuo

Review: <i>Vulgar Beauty: Acting Chinese in the Global Sensorium</i>, by Mila Zuo

The Memories of Journeys: Spatialization of Time in Wong Kar-wai’s Nostalgic Films

There is usually an agenda behind the rewriting of history. As an acclaimed Hong Kong director, Wong Kar-wai has made several nostalgic films set in 1960s Hong Kong, namely, Days of Being Wild (1990), In the Mood for Love (2000), and 2046 (2004). Relating to Hong Kongers’ anxiety over the 1997 handover, Wong’s films are part of a wider symptomatic cultural phenomenon in Hong Kong cinema. In his nostalgic films, time is often spatialized. With his constant interest in mobile space, such as hotels and trains, he creates an alternative perspective to question the grand narrative of history. In his reconstruction of the past, there is never any cultural purity or origin to revisit. Rather, the past is presented with itinerant characters, mobile space, and cultural ambivalence, enabling multiple narratives of history. Focusing on the use of space, this paper analyzes how Wong’s films engender a reflective form of nostalgia, and challenge both official history and the linear concept of time. Wong’s nostalgia, I argue, is not only a response to Hong Kong politics, but also a paradigmatic text illustrating nostalgic writing’s resistance to official historical discourses.

Poetics of the Crystal-Image: Dreams in &lt;em&gt;Mirror&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Ashes of Time Redux&lt;/em&gt;

This paper delves into recurrent dreams and related recollections in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror and Wong Kar-wai’s Ashes of Time Redux. Gilles Deleuze has called Mirror a film of “turning crystal” because it reflects the two sides of the protagonist’s relationship with his mother and ex-wife by juxtaposing them in a mysterious labyrinth of past-present-future. The crystal imaging refracts four sides of two couples by showing the bonding of the parents along with the connection to his ex-wife and son. The same structure is apparent in Ashes of Time Redux where another set of two bilateral symmetries is initiated between Yaoshi Huang, Feng Ouyang, and Ouyang’s lover through the constant blending of their self-differentiation. First, the study addresses the ways the turning crystal characterization strongly points to latent Freudian symbols from the childhood dacha and the peach blossom lake in the recurrent dreams to explore a forbidden love buried in the Lacanian pre-Oedipal mirror stage. Secondly, the study proposes to observe the convergences and differences of these two films with respect to the “turning crystal” structure composed of four manifestations: an interior-and-exterior home route, circularity structure, doubleness in the characterization, and an incestuous triangle of Oedipal-vertical vs. sibling-lateral. Wong and Tarkovsky’s films succeed in producing visualizations of Deleuze’s time-synthesis by combining past recollection, present dream, and promising future. Their films are accessible to the flow of time that moves from the conscious interior to the exterior unconscious to display the deep impact of (dis)remembrance.

Wong Kar-Wai's Ashes of Time (東邪西毒) : From Hero’s Martial Arts to Humanistic Martial Arts

Wong Kar-Wai's Ashes of Time (東邪西毒) : From Hero’s Martial Arts to Humanistic Martial Arts

Lost in Time: Memory, Repetition, and Representations in Wong Kar-wai’s Trilogy

La trilogie cin&#233;matographique comprenant Days of Being Wild (1990), In the Mood of Love (2000) et 2046 (2004), r&#233;alis&#233;e par Wong Kar-Wai, apporte une nouvelle perspective au r&#233;cit du voyage dans le temps tel qu&#8217;il est repr&#233;sent&#233; en Asie de l&#8217;Est en remettant en question le concept lin&#233;aire du temps. 2046 de Wong Kar-Wai est l&#8217;aboutissement de sa trilogie. 2046 lui permet de r&#233;imaginer le temps tel qu&#8217;int&#233;gr&#233; dans un espace sp&#233;cifique, la chambre 2046. Wong Kar-Wai utilise le contexte historique de Hong Kong en 1966 et 1967 comme intrigue secondaire pour ses histoires de d&#233;sespoir et de trahison. L&#8217;espace de la chambre 2046 devient la plate-forme d&#8217;un pass&#233; non r&#233;solu. Gr&#226;ce &#224; leur qu&#234;te sans fin, les personnages du film voyagent dans le temps pour r&#233;cup&#233;rer leurs souvenirs perdus et trouver des rempla&#231;ants pour leurs amants perdus. Ils rencontrent une s&#233;rie d&#8217;&#233;checs avant de conclure que ce qu&#8217;ils ont d&#233;couvert n&#8217;&#233;taient que des doublons. En 2046, certaines rumeurs sugg&#232;rent que rien ne change, malgr&#233; le fait que personne n&#8217;est jamais revenu du pass&#233;. La chambre est un espace dans lequel le pass&#233; consomme le futur. 2046 devient un nombre associ&#233; &#224; un traumatisme perp&#233;tuel et r&#233;p&#233;titif. Le film incarne un sentiment de d&#233;connexion de la r&#233;alit&#233; et de l&#8217;existence actuelles, ainsi qu&#8217;une obsession &#224; l&#8217;&#233;gard de la perte imaginaire. La chambre 2046 embourbe les personnages dans la qu&#234;te non r&#233;solue d&#8217;un amour pass&#233;. Les personnages du film se lancent dans une recherche sans fin&#160;; personne ne revient jamais de 2046 car il n&#8217;y a qu&#8217;une seule origine irrempla&#231;able pour le temps perdu, et on ne peut que s&#8217;attarder sur sa m&#233;moire.

The Wardrobe of Cinema

The Wardrobe of Cinema Costume is an essential element in cinema. It has been used widely as a storytelling device to distinguish characters, time, geographical location and cultural background of the story. This video essay examines the role of costume in films by using Qipao, particularly in the film In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000). In the film In the Mood for Love , the art director William Cheung has put a great effort into using costume as a storytelling device by designing over 20 different types of qipao for the protagonist Su Lizhen. Qipao, a type of traditional Chinese fitting dress, peaked its popularity in Hongkong during the 1960s. Therefore, Qipao as a costume that has a representative time period is helpful for spectators to distinguish the era and location that the story took place. The video essay has catalogued the 20 different types of Qipao into three major categories depending on the colour, pattern, frequency of appearing and the interaction with the mise-en-scene. Then, it interprets the role of Qipao by breaking down the central relationship into three phases based on the categories. The differentiation of colours and patterns of the protagonist’s Qipao has reflected the complex inner world of the protagonist Su Lizhen in each stage. Su Lizhen’s delicate costume is an efficient cinema language to enrich the personality of the character and complement the storyline.

No Free Tickets

No Free Tickets

Always Liminal, Always in Transition: Hong Kong as Staircase City

This article analyses the ‘stair culture’ of Hong Kong Island, a place that is constrained by its topography, economic, and social-historical conditions. Staircases are interwoven into an infrastructure of vertical and horizontal pathways. Instead of just being a means of access, staircases play a key role in shaping the urban island. Through a critical examination of these structures and relevant literary and filmic texts (Leung Ping-Kwan’s poems, Wong Kar-wai’s films, and Tsai Ming-liang’s Walker series [2012]), the article provides a way of understanding the extent to which the perception of Hong Kong Island is re-imagined by way of an urbanscape punctuated by staircases. Staircases have the ability to mix up people in different classes in such places as the Central to Mid-Levels area and Sai Ying Pun Centre Street. Both districts are initially connected by staircases and later escalators. By examining the impact of escalators (such as high-speed gentrification, closing down of local stores, and the loss of real public spaces) and the effects of staircases on cultural activities in different areas, this article argues that staircases expose the nature of a classed society in Hong Kong Island – and, by extension, Hong Kong as a whole – and represent a nostalgia that is potentially productive.

VISUAL ANALYSIS OF FILMS IN THE CONTEXT OF COLOR BY DIRECTORS WHO GRADUATED FROM VISUAL ARTS

This study aims to make a visual analysis of each of the films of six artists-directors who received visual arts education and to examine the elements used in the films in the context of visual arts. The artist-directors selected as a sample in the study are Akira Kurosawa, David Lynch, Wong Kar-Wai, Peter Greenaway, Robert Bresson, Andrzej Wajda. These directors were selected with a homogeneous sampling method, one of the purposive sampling methods. In this context, the selected directors have been chosen because they have received visual arts education, the branches of art they are interested in, and have different cultural codes. Visual content analysis, one of the qualitative research methods, was used in this study. The content analysis approach of visual data, which is one of the main methods of analyzing visual materials and data, was used. For this purpose, first, all the films were watched by the researcher, and the image files were arranged in scenes and systematized for examination. The colors used in the resulting movie scenes were visualized in the Procreate program. In addition, the analyzes are philosophically based on the rise and retreat movement that occurs because of the dark and light fighting in Paul Klee's Theory of Colors. A film belonging to each director was examined with the visual analysis method. As a result of the analyzes carried out, it is seen that visual art education has great effects on the use of the color in the films of the directors who receive visual art education. In addition, it has been concluded that in the films of the directors, the narrative has a visual weight and, in these films, which we can call art cinema, photographic images with a linear story are frequently included.