The Sensuous Cinema
of Wong Kar-wai
Film Poetics and the Aesthetic
of Disturbance
Gary Bettinson
Hong Kong University Press
The University of Hong Kong
Pokfulam Road
Hong Kong
www.hkupress.org
© 2015 Hong Kong University Press
ISBN 978-988-8139-29-3 (Hardback)
All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in
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the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Printed and bound by China Translation & Printing Services Ltd. in Hong Kong, China
Contents
Acknowledgments
ix
Chapter 1 Wong Kar-wai and the Poetics of Hong Kong Cinema
1
Chapter 2 Romantic Overtures: Music in Chungking Express
27
Chapter 3 Partial Views: Visual Style and the Aesthetic of Disturbance
49
Chapter 4 Parallel Lives: Poetics of the Postproduction Plot
73
Chapter 5 Frustrating Formulas: Popular Genre and In the Mood
for Love
99
Chapter 6 Appropriations, Relections, and Future Directions
125
Bibliography
141
Index
151
1
Wong Kar-wai and the Poetics
of Hong Kong Cinema
In May 2004 Wong Kar-wai arrived at the Cannes Film Festival, exhausted.
His new film 2046 was a competing entry, but Wong delivered the print twelve
hours late. Festival organizers hurriedly arranged a last-minute screening.
Official selections had to be rescheduled. Disgruntled delegates carped about
Wong’s tardiness. Worse, the film was not finished. Crucial computer-generated
(CGI) sequences had yet to be added; the sound track was defective; whole
scenes remained to be shot. Wong had started production in December 1999,
but 2046 had become a behemoth, impossible to finish. His crew had been
working twenty-four-hour shifts. Now Wong was fatigued and facing censure
from critics and festival delegates. The film would win nothing at Cannes, and
industry experts forecast retribution against Wong. Commentators debated the
long-term effects on Wong’s career: Would Cannes ever accept him back again?
The Cannes debacle has become part of Wong’s legend. To Wong’s detractors, this episode highlights the faults of a self-indulgent filmmaker. By their
account, Wong is a notorious wastrel, adopting a shooting ratio so high that
entire plotlines are excised from the final cut. His productions balloon over
schedule and over budget. He is disorganized; the shooting commences without
a script, and he may shoot forty takes of a scene, looking for something ineffable. His method can be “taxing on the actors,” Tony Leung wearily notes (Yoke
2000: 30). However, Wong is feted as one of the world’s finest directors. As a
personality he is iconic, the omnipresent sunglasses an indelible trademark. As
a beacon of Hong Kong cinema, he has kept that industry in the public spotlight, even when its fortunes were flagging. Critics hail him as a master of film
technique and a romantic artist of the first order. His critics might decry his
purported profligacy and self-indulgence, but without his unique production
methods—the relentlessly varied takes and rough cuts, the protracted shooting
schedules—Wong’s films would lose the distinctive aesthetic that makes them
so singularly exhilarating and elusive. Put simply, Wong makes splendid films.
2
Wong Kar-wai and the Poetics of Hong Kong Cinema
Two years after the Cannes fiasco, he was invited back to the festival . . . as
president of the jury.
This book treats Wong’s films from the perspective of a poetics of cinema. It
is concerned with his films as artworks and as aesthetic objects. It seeks to illuminate their narrative and stylistic systems and to account for how they affect
spectators. The book places his cinema in context, tracing patterns of influence
to pertinent cinematic traditions. More polemically, the book theorizes a poetics
of Wong’s cinema to fruitfully provide a greater appreciation of the director’s
artistic achievement. This broad conceptual approach—what David Bordwell
calls a poetics of cinema—has so far been marginal to studies of Hong Kong
films and filmmakers. Since the early 1990s the reigning approach to Hong
Kong film has been culturalism, which posits broad correlations between films
and social phenomena. Throughout this book, I aim to show that a poetics can
shed light on aspects of Wong’s cinema typically neglected by culturalist criticism. Another task of this monograph is to explicate and critique the dominant
theories applied to Wong’s films. These theoretical stakes frame the book’s
practical criticism, its formal analyses of Wong’s films. These analyses, in turn,
provide the marrow of the book. It is only by closely attending to Wong’s films
that their artistic richness and complexity can be appreciated.
A Biographical Sketch
Wong Kar-wai was born in July 1958 in Shanghai. At age five he immigrated to
Hong Kong with his parents; two older siblings remained behind, stranded in
Shanghai’s French Quarter as the Cultural Revolution gathered force. Raised
in effect as an only child, Wong grew up in the teeming Tsim Sha Tsui District,
his isolation compounded by the region’s alien dialects. (Wong would not
become fluent in Cantonese and English until his teens.) His father managed
a trendy nightclub; his mother adored movies, ushering the child to matinee
shows. The local theaters served up a diverse menu—Hollywood epics and
westerns, British Hammer studio films, Japanese ghost movies, French policiers, Mandarin and Cantonese films. In his late teens Wong began studying
graphic design. He earned a diploma in the subject, graduating from the Hong
Kong Polytechnic in 1980. Shortly after, he enrolled in the training program of
local terrestrial station TVB. A stint writing serials and soap operas led to permanent employment at Cinema City, an independent film studio specializing in
comedies with a local flavor. Though Wong chafed at the studio’s house style,
he spent much of the 1980s dutifully hammering out scripts. The finished films
were occasionally diverting and mostly disposable—The Haunted Cop Shop of
Horrors (1987), Just for Fun (1983), and Rosa (1988) are typical titles. More
important was Wong’s introduction to colleagues such as Jeff Lau, Patrick
Wong Kar-wai and the Poetics of Hong Kong Cinema
3
Tam, and Frankie Chan, later to become long-term collaborators. After two
years spent writing Tam’s high-end effort Final Victory (1987), Wong became
a partner in a new independent company, In-Gear, for which he would sign his
first feature.
As Tears Go By (1988) piggybacked on the local triad-gangster trend, a
genre revivified by John Woo’s hugely popular A Better Tomorrow (1986).
Wong’s maiden film was shrewdly packaged as a commercial enterprise—the
film’s star, Andy Lau, had proven form in the triad genre; a Cantopop tune was
chosen to accompany a crowd-pleasing MTV-style sequence; and gangster-film
tropes ensured periodic stretches of kinetic spectacle. Ultimately, though, As
Tears Go By was distinguished by its visual flair. Its moody palette was de
rigueur for late 1980s triad films, but its step-printing technique brought fresh
energy to the genre’s chase-and-fight sequences. This technique, as deployed in
As Tears Go By, liquefies hard blocks of primary color into iridescent streaks
of light; its unfamiliar rhythms, moreover, wield a potent affective charge. The
film’s visual aesthetic, engineered by Andrew Lau and Patrick Tam, augured
what many critics think of as Wong’s signature style. At the same time, several
of the film’s shots possess a geometric precision atypical of Wong’s later work.
Local critics championed Wong’s distinctive aesthetic. He was quickly
earmarked as an exciting new director, one of several pioneering a “second
new wave” of Hong Kong filmmakers.1 As Tears Go By found popularity and
critical acclaim, empowering Wong to venture into more ambitious filmmaking. The film that followed, Days of Being Wild (1990), seemed indifferent to
current fads. Relegating scenes of physical action, the film swerves from Hong
Kong’s action genre. As romance drama, it avoids the genre’s cuteness and
levity. Days of Being Wild seems intent on defying mass taste: its plotting is
as enervated and languorous as its male protagonist, it solicits sympathy for a
scoundrel, its portentous images bear the gravity of thematic significance, and
its non sequitur ending risks anticlimax. Some critics found the film ponderous,
others profound. Ultimately, mass taste prevailed, the expensive production
culminating in a conspicuous commercial failure. Nevertheless the film accumulated honors. In the years that followed, critical appreciation deepened; by
2012, Days of Being Wild would be ranked the fifth-greatest Hong Kong film
ever made.2
1.
2.
This second wave of directors emerged in the mid-1980s and included Stanley Kwan, Peter
Chan, Gordon Chan, Ching Siu-tung, Mabel Cheung, Alex Law, Clara Law, Jacob Cheung,
and others. The first new-wave directors, most of them graduating from local television in the
late 1970s, comprised socially conscious and artistically adventurous filmmakers such as Ann
Hui, Patrick Tam, Tsui Hark, Yim Ho, Allen Fong, and Alex Cheung.
In March 2012, Time Out Hong Kong published a critics’ poll of the “100 greatest” Hong
Kong films. Five of Wong’s films appeared on the list: Happy Together (#79), Ashes of Time
(#53), Chungking Express (#25), Days of Being Wild (#5), and In the Mood for Love (#1). See
4
Wong Kar-wai and the Poetics of Hong Kong Cinema
In a way, the film’s local failure was beside the point. With Days of Being
Wild, Wong targeted an altogether different market—not the local audience
nor even the pan-Asian market but the international audience for foreign art
cinema, accessible via the festival circuit. One index of Wong’s market strategy
is his use of Asian stars. At the local level, relying on stars brings fiscal rewards,
enticing financiers and audiences. But Wong’s casting also reveals an astute
sensitivity to the international art cinema market. His star players—Leslie
Cheung, Maggie Cheung, Andy Lau, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Gong Li, Brigitte
Lin, Zhang Ziyi—were renowned on the international film circuit before Wong
worked with them. Moreover, they were perceived to be affiliated with artistically significant filmmakers and projects of high cultural value.3 From this
angle, Wong’s casting strategy—relying on actors with strong international
profiles—betrays the director’s transnational ambitions. Since Days of Being
Wild, his films have been intended less for the local market than for international festival distribution. Wong’s success on this network brands him not
only as a “Hong Kong” director but as an international purveyor of film art—a
reputation consolidated by his subsequent output, including such “prestigious”
portmanteau films as Eros (2004) and Chacun son cinéma (2007).
By the mid-1990s Wong had assembled a cadre of trusted associates. At the
production level, his entire oeuvre is unified by favorite colleagues. Production
designer and editor William Chang and cinematographer Christopher Doyle
proved crucial in shaping Wong’s aesthetic. Composers Frankie Chan and
Roel A. García lent a percussive energy to Wong’s mid-1990s work. And to
the aforementioned list of players can be added Chang Chen, Jacky Cheung,
Takeshi Kaneshiro, Carina Lau, and Faye Wong. With one long-term associate, writer-director Jeff Lau, Wong founded Jet Tone Films, an independent
production company formed in 1992, largely by necessity. Days of Being Wild
was a financial disaster. Investors balked at its inflated budget, cost overruns,
and meager returns. They shied away, too, from Wong’s practice of shooting
without a full-fledged script. “Nobody wanted to produce my films,” Wong
3.
Time Out Hong Kong (March 14–27, 2012), 21–34. I surmise that the high position of Days
of Being Wild, and its rising stock in the past decade, is partly attributable to public affection
for Leslie Cheung, whose death in 2003 is annually commemorated in Hong Kong.
Consider, for example, the following films, all of which achieved various kinds of international success and which preceded Wong’s initial collaboration with the star in question. Leslie
Cheung: A Better Tomorrow (1986), A Chinese Ghost Story (1987), A Better Tomorrow II
(1987), Rouge (1988); Maggie Cheung: Police Story (1985), Project A II (1987), Police Story
Part II (1988); Andy Lau: Boat People (1982), Twinkle Twinkle Lucky Stars (1985); Tony
Leung Chiu-wai: Love Unto Waste (1986), City of Sadness (1989); Gong Li: Red Sorghum
(1987), Judou (1990), Raise the Red Lantern (1991), The Story of Qiu Ju (1992), Farewell My
Concubine (1993); Brigitte Lin: Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983), Police Story
(1985), Peking Opera Blues (1986), Dragon Inn (1992), Swordsman 2 (1992); Zhang Ziyi:
The Road Home (1999), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Hero (2002).
Wong Kar-wai and the Poetics of Hong Kong Cinema
5
says, “so I had to start this company” (Forde 2000: 23). Ashes of Time (1994),
the new firm’s first production, was an investor’s nightmare—with a budget of
HK$47 million, Wong’s sprawling wuxia epic took two years to complete, and
it was eventually denied distribution in the West. (It would later be restored
and repackaged as Ashes of Time Redux [2008] and released theatrically in
world markets [Figure 1.1].) By now Wong had gained notoriety as a profligate
director. As if to prove he could work cheaply and fast, Wong embarked on a
“quickie,” Chungking Express (1994), during a two-month hiatus from Ashes
of Time.
These two films, released in 1994, were rich in contrasts. Ashes of Time is a
historical costume epic, tonally somber and introspective; Chungking Express
is urban, modern, and infused with a breezily wistful temperament. Whereas
a distribution agent foiled the Western release of Ashes of Time, Chungking
Express gained prominent Western exposure, distributed in the United States
under the patronage of Quentin Tarantino and Miramax Films. Nevertheless,
both films consolidated authorial themes salient in Wong’s previous and subsequent films: the friction between social mores and romantic desire, the longing
to surmount psychic inertia, the capricious forces that thwart or furnish
personal encounters, the impregnability of time and memory, the burden of
individual choice and responsibility. Again, though, the two films registered
their material differently—if Ashes of Time seemed suffocated by the weight of
its themes, Chungking Express wore its ideas lightly. The success of Chungking
Express brought Wong international recognition.
If Wong’s next film, Fallen Angels (1995), looked derivative of this popular
hit, the two films differed sharply in visual style, affective tone, and plot structure. Still, Fallen Angels coaxed audiences to spot connections with Chungking
Express. Wong elaborates the game of cross-referencing at a metatextual level
too. A dense web of intertextual allusions recycles characters, locales, and
music cues across the entire oeuvre. The apparent integrity of Wong’s authorial
universe tantalizes viewers into positing connections among his films’ narrative
agents and events. This is the sport of an auteur cinema—presupposing an
intimate knowledge of his body of work, the filmmaker rewards the initiated
viewer with intertextual referencing.
Critics dismissed Fallen Angels as superficial, but it remains a complex
work, not only a brooding noir but a delicate, poignant meditation on fatherson relationships. Unlike Fallen Angels, Happy Together (1997) bolstered
Wong’s critical cachet. A gay romance story shot largely in Argentina, the film
ruminates on themes of exile and absent fathers—themes that found social
resonance in the year of the handover. Another (transnational) context for
Happy Together was the 1990s new queer cinema. Unlike many films of this
trend, however, Happy Together avoids camp and caricature, wringing pathos
6
Wong Kar-wai and the Poetics of Hong Kong Cinema
from Tony Leung’s soulful performance. The Cannes Film Festival feted Wong
for Happy Together, awarding him the Best Director palm in 1997. Thereafter
his career would be closely intertwined with Cannes. He chaired the jury in
2006; My Blueberry Nights (2007) opened the festival the following year. On
the festival circuit more generally, Wong has won admirers and critics in equal
measure. Though Happy Together and In the Mood for Love (2000) took major
prizes, the 2046 affair hurt his reputation. Most critics, however, failed to note
that Cannes frequently exhibits unfinished films (see Corless and Darke 2007:
179). Today, Wong regards the Cannes festival as both a production deadline
(forcing him to terminate the editing phase) and a kind of high-profile test
screening (which subsequently determines further revision and fine-tuning).
After the triumph of Happy Together, Wong announced his next project.
Summer in Beijing was to be shot largely in Mainland China, but disputes with
the Chinese censoring body (over filming in Tiananmen Square) persuaded
Wong to abandon it. Instead he forged ahead with In the Mood for Love, his
paean to period Chinese melodrama. Turning away from the zestful brio of his
most recent work, Wong returned to the statelier rhythms of Days of Being
Wild, prompting critics to compare Wong to Hou Hsiao-hsien. In the Mood
for Love became a worldwide success and initiated a Chinese-language film
renaissance in the West (e.g., Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon [2000], Hero
[2002], Infernal Affairs [2002], House of Flying Daggers [2004], Kung Fu
Hustle [2004], and others). This renaissance included Wong’s 2046, a production begun in 1999 and beset by difficulties. An ambitious science-fiction film,
2046 required elaborate CGI sequences that added months to the schedule.
The severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak in 2003 caused
further delays. By the time 2046 emerged, four years had passed since Wong’s
previous feature film. It would be another three years before My Blueberry
Nights, Wong’s first foray into English-language cinema. Filmed in the United
States, this romance-drama employed Hollywood stars, embraced Hollywood
genres (including the road movie), and reached down into American mythology. The film was perceived as a failure relative to Wong’s previous work.
Still, My Blueberry Nights confirmed a production strategy rarely pursued in
Hong Kong. As his local contemporaries sought coproductions with Mainland
Chinese partners, Wong looked increasingly to Europe for finance. His recent
reliance on French capital, in particular, testifies to his renown in France as an
auteur filmmaker. His ability to attract European and US funding, moreover,
attests to the irreducibly transnational bent of his cinema.
As the first decade of the twenty-first century wore on, mooted projects
fizzled out. A thriller entitled The Lady from Shanghai and a film about
Hurricane Katrina came to naught. The Grandmaster, a kung fu drama
centered on Bruce Lee’s sifu, was characteristically beset by interruptions and
Wong Kar-wai and the Poetics of Hong Kong Cinema
7
delays. As obstacles postponed the film’s completion by years, Wong stirred
anticipation virally using teaser trailers and promotion art. (The Grandmaster
would eventually open in Asia in 2013, becoming Wong’s most successful film
in Mainland China.) Amid these setbacks, however, Wong’s stock showed
no sign of waning. In Sight & Sound’s 2012 critics’ poll, In the Mood for
Love ranked 25th in the list of the greatest films of all time. In the same year,
the film topped Time Out’s poll of the greatest Hong Kong films yet made.
Wong’s international esteem is unparalleled among Hong Kong’s second-wave
filmmakers. Today, Wong stands not only as the finest director in Hong Kong
cinema but as one of the finest directors in the world.
Some Broad Assumptions
Wong’s biographical legend can usefully illuminate aspects of his films. Noting
Wong’s cinephilia, for instance, cues us to spot intertextual allusions within
the work or to consider the oeuvre in relation to other filmmaking traditions.
However, Wong’s legend also accrues fallacies that must be redressed. One
premise holds that Wong’s films are principally or wholly sensuous. On this
view, the films are essentially superficial: they elevate style over substance;
they disguise vacuity with visual pleasure. This premise casts Wong as an
aesthete, preoccupied with sumptuous audiovisual style. A strong version of
this position is epitomized by David Thomson, for whom Wong’s oeuvre is
ravishing yet vacuous (2010: 1053). A weaker version grants the films’ “depth”
but perceives them as primarily stylistic ventures. Buttressing these premises
is the assumption that Wong’s viewer is “seduced” by aesthetic beauty (Blake
2003: 343). Overwhelmingly, the viewer is characterized in passive terms—as
“spellbound,” “bewitched,” “mesmerized.” Then there is Wong the postmodern director, here again committed to surface impressions: his films serve up
pastiche; they introduce radically new forms. Fragmentation governs their
compositional strategies and characterizes the experience of the viewer, and
the films are steeped in nostalgia. Still further, the legend presents the image
of Wong the allegorist. Irrespective of explicit subject matter, the films are
presumed to be “about” Hong Kong’s 1997 handover to China, imperialism,
globalization, postcolonialism, or some other sociohistorical phenomenon.
Wong as aesthete, postmodernist, allegorist—this book reconsiders these
aspects of the popular legend. I certainly do not deny that Wong’s films are
highly sensuous, that they are innovative, or that they engage with social
issues, but I do attempt a more nuanced account of these features than the constructed legend provides. I also contest the tacit and pervasive critical assumption that Wong’s films are properly understood—best understood—as cultural
allegory—more, that their cultural value and artistic merit stems precisely from
8
Wong Kar-wai and the Poetics of Hong Kong Cinema
their embedded social meanings. This assumption underlies what I call the culturalist approach to Wong’s cinema. It is, I believe, the most widely adopted
perspective in Wong scholarship. The remainder of this chapter provides an
exegesis and critique of its broad premises and practices, before introducing an
alternative—and to some extent, complementary—critical approach. I then go
on to rehearse the book’s main arguments.
Abbas’s Culture of Disappearance
Ackbar Abbas’s Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (1997)
offers a paradigmatic instance of the culturalist approach. Abbas draws his
thesis from the historical circumstances of the moment. In the wake of the
1984 Joint Declaration, which formalized Hong Kong’s return to China in
1997, the British colony faced potentially seismic cultural change. For Abbas,
the countdown to the 1997 handover triggered a pervasive crisis of identity:
“Now faced with the uncomfortable possibility of an alien identity about to
be imposed on it from China, Hong Kong is experiencing a kind of last-minute
collective search for a more definite identity” (1997b: 4). This search for a
new identity, however, threatened the extinction of Hong Kong’s distinctive
heritage: its colonial identity, cultural traditions, and social values. Exacerbating
this “space of disappearance” was the rise of globalization, further endangering local identity and tradition (3). “Disappearance” thus arises from the
intermeshed forces of imperialism and globalization. These forces conspired to
engender a collective sense of impermanence, a pervasive social anxiety. What
would become of Hong Kong in the postcolonial era? Would its subjectivity
and legacy simply vanish?
From the 1980s, Abbas argues, the new Hong Kong cinema began addressing this historical situation. A few films tackled the issue explicitly, but most
evoked it indirectly by means of film technique. The local cinema’s “new”
images caught “the slipperiness, the elusiveness, the ambivalences” of Hong
Kong’s precarious cultural space (Abbas 1997b: 24). Disappearance was
conjured in oblique ways, and visual style became a vessel for social meaning.
Because it evoked the political situation indirectly, a film could be read for social
comment “regardless of subject matter” (24; italics in original). Thus films as
different as Stanley Kwan’s Center Stage (1991) and Wong’s As Tears Go By
were assimilated to the “problematic of disappearance” (ibid.). According to
Abbas, moreover, the new cinema did not merely evoke the historical situation;
it critiqued it. As Tears Go By, for instance, problematizes visuality; a “general
sense of visual overload” complicates the act of looking (36). Abbas takes this
unorthodox visuality as a critique of the colonial gaze, that is, a gaze intended
to produce social subjects, promoting a way of seeing that fosters acceptance
Wong Kar-wai and the Poetics of Hong Kong Cinema
9
of colonial space. As Abbas puts it, “Because Wong’s film consistently gives
us a form of visuality that problematizes the visible, it can be said to represent
and critique such a space” (36). Ostensibly a formulaic gangster film, As Tears
Go By thus becomes a political text by virtue of its “techniques of disappearance” (8).4
Abbas’s analysis rests on a heuristic frequently employed in the culturalist
approach. At an abstract level, Abbas starts with a general theory of culture
and maps this conceptual scheme onto a group of artworks. Abbas’s interest in
these films is frankly illustrative, principally concerned with their propensity
to prove the a priori theory. Abbas is explicit on this matter: “I will use [the
cultural objects] to pursue a particular theme: the cultural self-invention of the
Hong Kong subject in a cultural space that I will be calling a space of disappearance” (1997b: 1). Here a theory precedes film analysis and is applied to
films in top-down fashion. Culturalist approaches, I shall demonstrate shortly,
have often relied on such routines. That the new Hong Kong films respond to
and represent (albeit obliquely) the 1997 situation, that they critique (rather
than, say, celebrate) this situation, and that this critique is embedded in visual
techniques—Abbas’s thesis hinges on these contestable assumptions. The risk is
that Abbas’s interpretive moves create a causal link among several unsubstantiated assumptions, a problem that has often hindered the culturalist approach
in general. Moreover, the critic often equivocates as to how far cultural critique
is intended or recognized by the filmmaker. Are the film’s meanings implicit or
symptomatic? Can they be assigned to the filmmaker’s explicit materials, or
are they “leaked” by the text involuntarily as structured absences? Cultural
readings have tended to fudge this issue. Culturalists often imply authorial
intention, but problematically this intention is not always taken to be conscious on the part of the filmmaker. From a privileged position of omnipotence,
the critic reveals intentions the filmmaker does not know he or she has.
Abbas’s discussion spotlights another characteristic of culturalist readings.
Reacting to what he sees as critics’ homogenization of Hong Kong cinema,
Abbas stresses the diversity of local filmmaking (1997b: 18–19). He exhorts
critics to avoid “gross simplification,” such as that which reduces all Hong
Kong cinema to action spectacle. “There is,” he writes, “ . . . no easy homogeneity to Hong Kong cinema, in spite of appearances” (19). Yet in the same
paragraph, Abbas goes on to say, “The films that are made cannot be reduced
to ‘a single metanarrative’ but represent so many disparate attempts to evoke
a problematic cultural space” (ibid.). To be sure, the new Hong Kong cinema
4.
In a later work, Abbas claims that his thesis holds good for Hong Kong’s postcolonial cinema
too. Invoking Wong as an exemplary case, he writes of “the continuing relevance of . . . the
cinematic—the production of images inside and outside cinema that respond to mutations
in Hong Kong’s geo-political, economic and cultural situation. The cinematic in this sense
remains central to the project of cultural studies in Hong Kong” (Abbas 2001: 624).
10
Wong Kar-wai and the Poetics of Hong Kong Cinema
cannot be reduced to the action genre. But neither can it be wholly assimilated
to the critic’s conceptual structure (“disappearance”). In disclaiming one generalization, Abbas imposes another. Though he cautions against homogenizing
Hong Kong cinema, he falls prey precisely to this tendency. The catchall dimension of Abbas’s heuristic seems to me a limitation of culturalist criticism, which
invites a fairly damning criticism: in the culturalist approach, the a priori thesis
is all, and all encompassing.
The Culturalist Approach
In the 1990s arguably no writer exerted greater influence on the field of Asian
cinema studies than Abbas. But to take the measure of the culturalist approach,
it is necessary to expand our discussion beyond his work. Scholars allied to
the culturalist turn embraced Abbas’s tropes of disappearance, as well as the
broader symptomatic and implicit hermeneutics guiding his approach (already
well-entrenched as a disciplinary practice). Surely no Hong Kong filmmaker
received more culturalist analysis than Wong, and this scholarly attention
yielded riches. Studies by Stephen Teo, Gina Marchetti, Rey Chow, and others
have greatly enriched the field’s understanding of Wong’s films and Chinese
cinema in general, often basing culturalist readings on careful scrutiny of the
films’ aesthetic features. The very best of this work displays the undoubted
virtues of culturalist criticism. In its broadest compass, culturalism situates the
film within and against pertinent contexts, including its immediate sociohistorical milieu. Culturalism can demystify anomalous features of the work that
escape “internal” motivation. It can illuminate the film’s implicit or symptomatic meanings. And it provides a welcome corrective to the perception that
Hong Kong cinema and its filmmakers are politically disengaged. At an abstract
level, however, the culturalist approach has harbored problematic practices and
routines. Some of these problems stem from the weaknesses of Grand Theory,
such as the critic’s reliance on top-down interpretation, symptomatic criticism
(allegorical readings, reflectionism), and recourse to punning maneuvers. Other
problems arise from conceptual tropes pertaining to Hong Kong cinema and
culture. It is worthwhile to examine these problems in detail.
A recurring tendency within socio-allegorical criticism involves thematizing the film’s characters and personifying geographical regions. Teo provides
a paradigmatic instance of this maneuver, mounting a symptomatic reading
of 2046: “On an allegorical level, the film denotes Hong Kong’s affair with
China through Chow’s affairs with Mainland women: Zhang Ziyi, Faye Wong,
Gong Li, and Dong Jie (playing Faye’s younger sister who has a brief fling with
Chow)” (2005: 149). (Note Teo’s reliance on a pun—“affair/s”—to open up
the associative link he wishes to pursue.) Under this personification heuristic,
Wong Kar-wai and the Poetics of Hong Kong Cinema
11
the critic’s interpretations soon become repetitive. If Teo’s interpretive frame
can be mapped onto the characters in Days of Being Wild, the film allegorizes Hong Kong’s impending reunification with the motherland. We might
consider Hong Kong to be personified by Yuddy (Leslie Cheung); Britain to be
represented by Yuddy’s foster mother, Rebecca (Rebecca Pan); and China to
be embodied by Yuddy’s biological mother (Tita Muñoz), depicted in the film
as an austere and implacable matriarch. Interpreted this way, Hong Kong’s
prospects under Chinese sovereignty look decidedly bleak—unable to reconcile
with his true parent and estranged from his adopted home, Yuddy’s fate is
doomed. The fable that Yuddy recites, about a bird without legs, could be read
along similar lines. Evoking themes of rootlessness, the fable correlates Yuddy
(Hong Kong) with the aimless bird, which is destined to perish when it lands
(in China). That the bird in the fable was “dead all along” might be construed
as a critique of prehandover Hong Kong, the British colonizers having divested
the city of its authentic and unique cultural identity.
With a little finessing, this reading would be passable as an example of the
personification heuristic. Yet the account contains obvious infelicities. Reading
the bird fable this way obliges us to execute two interpretive moves—first, to
perceive the bird as a personification of Yuddy (as most commentators do)
and, second, to perceive Yuddy (now aligned with the wayward bird) as a
metaphor for Hong Kong. The accumulation of metaphors is not hermeneutically sophisticated. This approach also relies to a large extent on a partialized reading strategy, selecting certain characters (even minor ones, such as
Yuddy’s birth mother) and omitting others (including major protagonists such
as Su Lizhen), depending upon which agents best fit the interpretive frame.
Worse, this interpretive frame reveals nothing that the hypothetical critic had
not surmised in advance of the analysis. The critic simply concludes that Days
of Being Wild is “about” Hong Kong’s relationship with China, much as 2046
is—thus reproducing the same interpretation in cookie-cutter fashion. Each
film’s distinctive features are minimized, flatly suppressed by a top-down heuristic. This heuristic might be endorsed for foregrounding the films’ thematic
affinities. But the affinities yielded by the personification heuristic risk being
spurious and facile, imposed upon the work a priori rather than constructed
from specific features within the work. At worst, the heuristic betrays the hypothetical critic’s hermeneutic intransigence and reveals little about the shared
traits and preoccupations of the films themselves.
Central to the culturalist enterprise are questions of identity and public “consciousness,” notions beset by conceptual difficulties. If the notion of identity is
often conceptually vague, the notion of a public consciousness is also problematic. For instance, the culturalist sometimes claims that the public “consciousness” operates at the level of the individual’s or the society’s unconscious—an
12
Wong Kar-wai and the Poetics of Hong Kong Cinema
impossible position to defend or discredit, for who is to say what dwells in the
unconscious? In such cases, what is attributed to the populace as a collective
sensibility can look more like hermeneutic categories imposed onto a society
by cultural commentators.
Like Abbas, Teo (2000) considers identity a central trope of Hong Kong
cinema. Both critics assume that, in prehandover Hong Kong, a drastic effort
to define local identity consumed both the general populace and the region’s
cinema. “If I were to choose one word to characterize Hong Kong cinema,” Teo
writes, “I would choose Identity” (2000). He goes on:
From Jackie Chan to Wong Kar-wai to Clara Law to Sammo Hung—from
action pictures to art pictures—it is possible to see Hong Kong pictures as
sharing one perennial theme, that of identity: the quest of, the assertion of,
the affirmation of, identity. (Teo 2000)
Here again the specter of homogenization raises its head. In this case, though,
a totalizing assertion homogenizes Hong Kong films as dissimilar as “action
pictures” and “art pictures” (along with differences, one might suppose, within
those broad categories). Teo’s premise also invites top-down interpretations,
obliging the critic to show how every Hong Kong film makes identity its major
theme. The very notion of identity is conceptually (and conveniently) nebulous,
the easier to summon evidence of it in a diverse range of films. Whether applied
to Hong Kong films or Hong Kong society, the trope of identity is sufficiently
vague to be applicable to all cases; but as a catchall, predetermined schema its
utility and meaningfulness are limited.
Most generally, top-down culturalism bears a cluster of conceptual and
methodological drawbacks. As Grand Theory, culturalism risks the pitfalls of
simply “applying” theory. The routine of mapping a preexisting theory onto
a given case is easily repeatable but essentially facile; at worst, it can distort
both the film and the preexisting theory. Furthermore, if the culture offers
up movies amenable to the critic’s cultural thesis, it also furnishes numerous
counterexamples. Not every Hong Kong film in the early 1990s featured bleak
endings, a pessimistic mood, accelerated motion, and other purported repositories of 1997 allegory. Reducing films to political allegory, moreover, downplays
their commitment to spectacle. For one symptomatic critic, the shopping mall
climax in Police Story (1985) and the clock tower stunt in Project A (1983)
evoke cultural disappearance (Collier 1999). But first and foremost these
sequences set out to create a visceral impact, furnishing an affective, sensuous,
physiological experience. Deriving allegory from such sequences is not (necessarily) wrongheaded, but reducing such sequences to allegory disregards
the ways filmmakers utilize craft traditions to generate palpable effects and
responses. By stressing local identity as central to a film’s concerns, moreover,
Wong Kar-wai and the Poetics of Hong Kong Cinema
13
the culturalist may underplay the film’s address to an international audience.
This is especially pertinent to figures such as Wong Kar-wai, John Woo, and
Jackie Chan, whose Hong Kong films harbored ambitions beyond pan-Asian
markets. Lastly, the credence afforded allegorical accounts is often wholly
reliant on the critic’s rhetorical ingenuity; one must simply accept that x (i.e.,
a feature of the text) represents, say, a collective disquiet toward the 1997
handover, without the benefit of empirical evidence. As Noël Carroll puts it,
“Given enough latitude, you can probably allegorize anything to say whatever
you wish, but that won’t establish causal connections where there are none”
(1996: 42).
None of this is to deny that local filmmakers absorb materials from their
social milieu. I do not, for instance, suggest ignoring the 1997 handover as a
causal factor in, say, Days of Being Wild. But one must recognize that filmmakers assign these materials varying degrees of importance in any given film.
Topical subject matter may permeate to the very marrow of the work, or it
may assert a negligible influence upon the finished film. In any case, the basic
material is inevitably deformed to some degree by the fiction-making process.
For instance, the genesis of 2046, we are told, stemmed from a historical
circumstance within Wong’s milieu (China’s assurance that Hong Kong will
remain a special administrative region for fifty years); but 2046 drastically
deforms this referential material, not least by virtue of its overt science-fiction
elements. The finished film makes no explicit reference to the actual historical situation. It is not that the film’s political dimension—explicitly flagged in
the title—is mere window dressing; rather, it provides a point of departure, a
kernel or conceit enabling Wong’s idées fixes fresh elaboration. As with any
social allegory, moreover, the deformation of the work’s materials produces a
primary level of discourse—consisting of characters, settings, actions, and so
on—that is sufficiently removed from allegorical meaning to warrant analysis
in its own right.
Socio-allegorical hermeneutics also provides critics a useful tool in arguing
for a filmmaker’s significance. Allegorical readings provide an expedient way
to boost a director’s social relevance and critical esteem without obliging the
critic to prove artistic ingenuity or innovation. Certainly there is no doubt that
allegorical treatises by both Western and Asian critics contributed to Wong’s
burgeoning critical reputation during the 1990s. Still today, I argue, film
studies scholars predominantly approach and appreciate Wong’s films through
culturalist lines of reasoning. For Teo, Wong’s 1990s output “elucidate[s] the
great issues of the decade,” including the angst-inducing handover, civil rights
for gays, and equal opportunities for women (2005: 161). Of Happy Together,
Teo asserts, “Seen today, the power of the film resides in its sense of being a
memorial to the pre-1997 anxiety of Hong Kong” (110). From the culturalist
14
Wong Kar-wai and the Poetics of Hong Kong Cinema
perspective, these films possess cultural value primarily because they speak to,
and speak for, the culture. This is indeed one facet of their value. It is the
purpose of this book, however, to show that the value of Wong’s films resides
at least as much in their artistry as films. Nonetheless, if allegorical readings
inflate Wong’s cultural cachet, I should also note Wong’s own savvy in alluding
to social reference points. Naming his film “2046,” for instance, in part constitutes a shrewd marketing gambit, a “hook” attracting cultural commentators
to a film whose political content is, arguably, negligible. For critic and filmmaker alike, then, symptomatic hermeneutics offers strong advantages, despite
the array of conceptual and methodological pitfalls that addle the approach.
If Abbas’s cultural theory of Hong Kong cinema inspired allegorical readings
of Wong’s films, it also informed a cognate culturalist tendency: reflectionism.
Here the critic conceives the film not as embedding a “hidden” narrative but
rather as reflecting the attitudes of the public it is perceived to be addressing. The
reflectionist does not try to demonstrate causality but settles for a more or less
tenuous linkage of film and social realm. Of Chungking Express, for instance,
one critic claims that “collective anxiety about the handover is reflected in the
situation of Brigitte Lin’s blonde-wigged gangster” (Taubin 2008). Similarly,
film scholar Janice Tong, evoking Abbas’s culture of disappearance, finds the
Hong Konger’s experience of temporal flux “reflected in Wong’s destabilising
cinematographic self-image of Hong Kong” (2008: 65). Both writers require
at least two leaps of faith—first, to accept that there is collective anxiety
(Taubin) or temporal instability (Tong) among the local populace triggered by
the impending handover and, second, that Wong’s film reflects precisely this
collective experience. As with allegorical readings, reflectionist criticism relies
for its cogency upon the critic’s rhetorical ability to persuade the reader—in
lieu of causal explanations—of abstract notions immanent within both the film
and its proximate milieu.
Sometimes the critic expands reflectionism beyond societal metaphor, so
that the films are burdened with a freight of symptomatic meanings. One
standard heuristic perceives the films as reflections of the biographical author.
Teo (2005), for instance, construes Wong’s films as essentially autobiographical, with the director’s personal history discernible at several levels of narration. The narrative settings of Days of Being Wild and In the Mood for Love
recreate Wong’s childhood milieu (5), the visual strategies of As Tears Go By
“attempt to translate [the filmmaker’s] innermost feelings into images” (24),
and characterization in Days of Being Wild “reflects the director’s fundamentally shy nature” (43). That In the Mood for Love excises sequences set in the
1970s indicates that the decade does not hold personal resonance for Wong:
“it was probably an uneventful period when [Wong] would have gone through
primary and secondary schooling” (13). Even setting aside this recourse to
Wong Kar-wai and the Poetics of Hong Kong Cinema
15
speculation, the author-reflection heuristic becomes murky when Teo slides
between the director as biographical individual and as authorial “personality.”
Teo appears to invoke the latter when claiming that Killer in Fallen Angels
“reflects Wong Kar-wai, the author” (87). Whether this claim is persuasive (and
I argue in Chapter 4 that Killer does not embody Wong’s authorial worldview), the author-reflection schema is here clearly of a different order than that
employed previously (e.g., when discussing Wong’s shy nature). Likewise, Teo
means to denote authorial personality, rather than biographical figure, when
stating that voice-over in Fallen Angels “expos[es] [Wong] as perhaps dangerously schizoid, split into several personalities. I am not suggesting that Wong
himself is psychotic” (88). Wong’s characters are assumed to reflect both the
biographical individual with a personal history and the cinematic author who
articulates a personal vision.
The author-reflection heuristic becomes murkier still when applied to contrasting, even contradictory, cases. For Teo, “Fallen Angels, like all of Wong’s
films, is told from the multiple perspectives of its characters, and all of them
reflect Wong, the writer and author” (2005: 88). Among the problems with
this sweeping claim is that it irons out crucial differences among the film’s
characters, who are hardly of a piece and among whom Wong encourages us
to weight judgments (see Chapter 4 of this book). It is not explained how the
specific traits and trajectories of these various agents are unified into coherent
form nor how they manifest an authorial worldview. Nor is it specified precisely in what ways the characters of Fallen Angels dovetail with those of Days
of Being Wild, in whom Teo also perceives Wong’s reflection. Indeed, Teo’s
point might be precisely that the characters are not alike, that, moreover, they
represent contradictory subjectivities. Each one possesses a distinct personality
and they all reflect Wong, hence the view of Wong as “perhaps dangerously
schizoid.” By extension, Wong’s authorial personality must be read as schizophrenic, fragmented, contradictory—an interpretation consistent with Teo’s
broadly postmodernist line of criticism. I will not digress here except to iterate
that, as I attempt to argue in subsequent chapters, Wong’s films exhibit a highly
consistent and coherent worldview. My present point is that the author-reflection model—potentially useful but beset by conceptual difficulties pertaining to
the ontology of the “author”—becomes yet another mode of reflection theory
imposed upon the work.
The accretion of reflectionist schemas puts a strain on both the film’s levels of
meaning and on the cogency of the critic’s interpretation. Teo’s study of Wong
embraces social reflection as an explicatory schema. Even Wong’s post-1997
Hong Kong work, he argues, “mirrors the pathology of Hong Kong society in
the 1990s” (2005: 164). But Teo goes on to invoke still another reflectionist
frame, asserting that “the downbeat mood of Wong’s films reflects the mood of
16
Wong Kar-wai and the Poetics of Hong Kong Cinema
the [Hong Kong film] industry as it lingers on the downswing” (165). In sum,
Teo saddles the films with a surfeit of associational baggage: the films reflect
the author-as-biographical-person, the author-as-formal-component, the 1997
collective mood, and the waning Hong Kong film industry. Any film would
buckle under so much symptomatic weight. Moreover, the critic’s reflectionist claims risk looking tenuous, even arbitrary. As Bordwell points out, “An
ingenious critic can make virtually any film reflect anything” (2011: 23).5 If
a film’s mood is broadly downbeat, how does one know that it is the 1997
zeitgeist, and not, say, the blue funk of the film’s director, that is being reflected?
And what should be made of those numerous moments in Wong’s films that
are decidedly not downbeat but euphoric? Why should the film’s mood be
assumed to be reflective of anything at all? Since interpretation here rests on
loose associations, nothing prevents us from substituting 1997 anomie with
any other somber affair culled from the historical milieu. At an abstract level,
the reflectionist heuristic lacks the emphasis on concrete causal explanations
promoted by a poetics of cinema.
If Hong Kong films are overburdened with symptomatic meanings, so too
are they saddled with contradictory ones. For Natalia Chan Sui Hung, the
postcolonial Hong Kong cinema—a period identified with the 1997 countdown—constitutes a nostalgia cinema, its films mounting a two-tiered system
of meaning. On the one hand, they exhibit yearning for a bygone era in Hong
Kong history; on the other hand, they are prompted to such nostalgia by contemporary anxieties about the region’s posthandover future. The nostalgic
experience, Chan writes, “helps to manage the unpleasant present by celebrating the past and transcending the future” (2000: 264). Citing as a characteristic
case Days of Being Wild, Chan goes on to suggest that the film’s cinematography “highlights not only the nostalgic feeling of love of the 1960s but the
social insecurity of the 1990s” (267). Like Teo, Chan asks the film to bear the
weight of multiple conceptual structures, but these structures are also mutually
exclusive. A single feature of visual style becomes the locus both of affirmative
feeling (nostalgic affection) and negative feeling (present insecurity).6 In a sense
Chan evokes both allegory (the film, though set in the 1960s, is also “about”
1990s Hong Kong) and social reflectionism (a feature of visual style reflects
social disquiet). Precisely how cinematography embodies affective moods
goes unanalyzed; indeed, the causal relation between Hong Kong’s “nostalgia
cinema” and larger social processes does not come into focus. The accepted
5.
6.
For Bordwell’s astute critiques of reflectionist criticism, see Planet Hong Kong (2011: 23, 29)
and Poetics of Cinema (2008b: 30–32).
The objection could be raised that it is one function of symptomatic readings to expose social
contradictions, but Chan is not explicit about this. Further, it is not evident how a basically
consistent cinematographic style can express incoherent attitudes.
Wong Kar-wai and the Poetics of Hong Kong Cinema
17
routines of top-down criticism, at least on this occasion, absolve the culturalist
critic from the burden of proof.
Chan’s discussion exemplifies another broad tendency within culturalist
theory—postmodernism. It has become critically orthodox to perceive Wong as
a postmodern filmmaker; certainly some of Wong’s most dedicated commentators characterize him thus (Brunette 2005; Teo 2005; Tsui 1995). In what sense
is Wong’s cinema postmodern? For some critics, the films are postmodern not
only in their visual narration—the fragmented editing patterns, for example—
but in their narrative elements, such as Ouyang Feng’s role as archcapitalist
in Ashes of Time (Tsui 1995: 106). The postmodern experience also manifests
itself in the oeuvre’s imputed “newness,” its cultivation of an innovative film
aesthetic. I certainly do not dispute Wong’s innovativeness, but I will propose
presently that it is more accurate to see Wong’s films as recasting preexisting
norms of Hong Kong’s popular cinema rather than as inventing norms ab ovo.
This is not to negate the postmodernist view but rather to qualify it—Wong’s
films, though innovative, are not wholly new insofar as they rely upon and
rework some well-entrenched principles of local and transcultural storytelling. Finally, the postmodernist critic (and the culturalist generally) emphasizes
what I call the temporal salience of 1980s and 1990s Hong Kong cinema.
Films that are part of this trend foreground temporality as something complex,
elusive, and transitory; the split time zones in Rouge (1988) or the juxtaposed
rates of motion in A Better Tomorrow and The Killer (1989) are characteristic examples. Accordingly, postmodernists examining Wong’s cinema pretune
their attention to instances of temporal salience. Smudge motion, step printing,
jump cuts, freeze frames, elliptical cutting, anachronistic music, period settings,
tropes of memory and missed encounters—such features are magnified by
the postmodernist applying implicit and symptomatic meanings (Figure 1.2).
Inevitably, the films’ temporal salience is treated as a direct result of social
events. Consciously or unconsciously prompted by the Joint Declaration, local
filmmakers (it is argued) began to thematize the notion of time ebbing away—
hence what critics have called an “end-of-an-era sentiment,” a “doomsday
mentality,” a “fin-de-siècle cinema,” and a “crisis cinema.” I will return to some
of these arguments in later chapters, but suffice it to say that bending features
of the film to fit a preconceived thesis repeats the interpretive errors assailing
certain culturalist writings on Hong Kong cinema.
I have tried to suggest that, for all its virtues, top-down culturalism harbors
significant shortcomings. By extension, there is a strong incentive to seek an
alternative (yet potentially complementary) approach compensating for the
flaws of meaning-centered criticism. This is not a repudiation of culture or
interpretive practice. It is rather an appeal to not, as it were, put the cart before
18
Wong Kar-wai and the Poetics of Hong Kong Cinema
the horse. Tzvetan Todorov here refers to literary studies, but his comments
hold just as good for film criticism:
[I do not espouse] a denial of the relation between literature and other
homogenous series, such as philosophy or social life. It is rather a question
of establishing a hierarchy: literature must be understood in its specificity,
as literature, before we seek to determine its relation with anything else.
(1969: 71)
Often, culturalists move directly to the secondary level of the work, leaving
the impression that the surface discourse is straightforwardly graspable. Yet
as subsequent chapters will try to demonstrate, the surface level of Wong’s
films—however sensuous and beguiling—is typically fraught with perceptual
and cognitive obstacles that render comprehension difficult. Before proceeding
to “read” the film for allegory, the viewer must first master the film as a film,
that is, grapple and come to terms with the film’s often complex surface level.
A good deal of how the film affects us springs from this primary level of discourse. Though Teo argues that the power of Happy Together springs from its
social resonance, it seems to me that the film is no less powerful at its denotative level. Bordwell argues, “To treat these lovelorn films as abstract allegories
of Hong Kong’s historical situation risks losing sight of Wong’s naked appeal
to our feelings about young romance, its characteristic dilemmas, moods, and
moves”—risks losing sight, in other words, of the films’ delightful (and difficult) surfaces (2011: 178). To bypass the work’s primary level is to neglect
the complexities in Wong’s cinema, its appeals to the emotions, and its sheer
mastery of craft.
Bordwell’s Transcultural Poetics
As doctrine-driven criticism dominated Asian film studies, Bordwell proposed
an alternative approach to the study of Chinese film. Bordwell outlines the
stakes of this approach in a 2001 essay published in Post Script, “Transcultural
Spaces: Toward a Poetics of Chinese Film.” Here Bordwell advances a bottomup, comparative, and empirical historical poetics of Chinese-language cinema
(restricted here to the cinemas of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland China).
According to Bordwell, a poetics approach to Chinese film (and to films in
general) focuses centrally on (1) overarching form, the relation of parts and
wholes in the film’s (or films’) large-scale composition; (2) stylistics, the norms
and conventions of audiovisual style; (3) spectatorial activity, the viewing
effects created by the dynamics of form and style; and (4) historical poetics,
how and why formal and stylistic patterns stabilize or mutate over time (2001:
9). As a conceptual framework, poetics pursues explanations to fine-grained
Wong Kar-wai and the Poetics of Hong Kong Cinema
19
questions about the film’s composition and effects. Unlike Grand Theory, which
takes as its point of departure an abstract theoretical proposition, Bordwell’s
poetics operates inductively from the bottom up. The poetician starts not from
a broad theory of culture but from the film’s particularities. From here he or
she generates explanations for the film’s distinctive patterns of form and style.
In contrast to most culturalist approaches, poetics gives priority to a given
film’s integrity, to the film medium’s specificities, and to the filmmaker’s choice
situation within historical and institutional constraints (10).
How does the transcultural figure in Bordwell’s discussion? As conceived
by Bordwell, the poetics approach is intrinsically comparative. It surveys a
range of pertinent filmmaking traditions and practices, looking not only for
divergence but for convergence. The transcultural perspective illuminates
norms of composition and comprehension that operate across cultures. Here
poetics runs counter to cultural essentialism, whose strongest version denies
the possibility of cross-cultural translation. However, as Bordwell points out,
“Chinese films, to put it bluntly, are Chinese; but they’re also films” (2001: 11).
As films, they constitute potent vehicles of transcultural expression. Moreover,
they employ schemas pervasive in other national cinemas. If the culturalist
program, stressing prehandover angst, is too narrowly parochial, Bordwell’s
transcultural poetics widens the playing field, relating Hong Kong cinema to
norms and practices widely shared across filmmaking cultures. Focusing on
transcultural conventions of film style, Bordwell demonstrates that Chinese
filmmakers recast and elaborate these conventions in inventive ways. He charts
the transcultural emergence of the planimetric shot in Mainland Chinese
cinema (revived from the 1970s and 1980s European art cinema) and of the
distant long take aesthetic in Taiwanese cinema (recasting the tableau tradition
of early European cinema). As for Hong Kong cinema, its commercial filmmakers adapted the stylistic norm of “intensified continuity” from Hollywood
(itself a stylistic mutation of classical continuity).7 Directors such as John Woo
did not merely adopt the idiom of intensified continuity but revised it to their
own ends. Intensifying intensified continuity, Woo, Tsui Hark, Johnnie To, and
others reworked Hollywood style for greater pictorial precision, clarity, and
kineticism (14).
Regrettably, Bordwell’s poetics approach has had limited impact on the
research field. Emilie Yeh’s “Politics and Poetics of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Films,”
published in the same journal issue as Bordwell’s essay, attempts to redress
the dominance of culturalist hermeneutics in Hou Hsiao-hsien scholarship.
Another Hou expert, James Udden, has brought a poetics perspective to the
7.
Planimetric shots station the camera perpendicular to a background surface, encouraging
lateral as well as depth staging. Intensified continuity is characterized by fast cutting, close
framings, extreme lens lengths, and restless camera movement.
20
Wong Kar-wai and the Poetics of Hong Kong Cinema
films of Hou and Wong (2000, 2006). These studies offer exemplary cases
of inductive criticism and close analysis, building upon Bordwell’s poetics of
cinema. Bordwell himself exemplified the poetics approach in his Planet Hong
Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment ([2000] 2011), as well as
in several research essays.8 Nevertheless, within the discipline at large, Grand
Theory and top-down hermeneutics still prevail, while cultural studies has held
sway since the 1980s. Despite a legacy including Rudolf Arnheim, André Bazin,
Noël Burch, Sergei Eisenstein, and the Russian formalists, Bordwell’s poetics
and Kristin Thompson’s neoformalism (see Thompson 1988) remain minority
research programs. Yet there are compelling reasons for taking up the research
project of poetics.
Because poetics is less centrally concerned with interpretive practice, it does
not restrict our understanding to what films mean. As Bordwell has elaborated
in other works (e.g., Bordwell 2008b, 1989), poetics does not exclude hermeneutics but extends its ambit to broader interests. Chiefly, poetics enhances our
grasp of the work’s composition. It does so not by applying a general interpretive
scheme but by approaching the film inductively. Top-down analysis prioritizes
the a priori theory; bottom-up analysis privileges the film. The latter approach
enables the poetician to illuminate aspects of style and structure without producing endlessly repetitive readings. Because poetics focuses on the film’s functions and effects, moreover, it can postulate causal relations between the film’s
qualities and the viewer’s activity. As such, it is apt to spotlight the filmmaker’s
artistry—for instance, by positing correlations between the viewer’s responses
and the filmmaker’s creative choices. By contrast, culturalist approaches pay
relatively little heed to the filmmaker’s craft knowledge. Poetics, then, can illuminate the way the film’s components shape the viewer’s activity; it can elucidate the role of the viewer, reconstructing the processes of inference making,
hypothesis framing, and other perceptual and cognitive activities that guide
the viewer’s comprehension. Culturalists, in contrast, have tended to subsume
effects to general theories of culture. A typical heuristic involves inferring the
effect a filmic device has upon the viewer (e.g., handheld camera and rapid
cutting produce disorientation) and then interpreting this effect as a symptom
of the a priori theory (e.g., disorientation betokens cultural instability and disappearance; see, for example, Tong 2008: 65–66). If culturalism reduces the
viewer’s activity to a nebulous, univocal “condition” (e.g., cultural anxiety),
poetics systematically reconstructs the viewer’s moment-by-moment uptake.
Poetics often goes beyond the work to enrich knowledge of genres, institutions, and social contexts. By means of bottom-up analysis, the poetician can,
8.
See, for example, the following essays in Bordwell’s Poetics of Cinema (2008b): “Aesthetics
in Action: Kung-Fu, Gunplay, and Cinematic Expression” (395–411) and “Richness through
Imperfection: King Hu and the Glimpse” (413–30).
Wong Kar-wai and the Poetics of Hong Kong Cinema
21
for instance, theorize generalized principles governing a body of films—say, the
signature traits of an individual author or the reigning tendencies of a national
cinema. In addition, poetics positions the film in history. Its emphasis on historical and transcultural norms enables a perception of the film’s indebtedness
to past and culturally diverse traditions. Hence poetics often has occasion to
refine postmodernist critics’ hyperbolic claims of “newness.” This is not to
say that poetics dismisses contemporary films as inescapably derivative. As an
inherently comparative undertaking, poetics can highlight continuity as well
as change, indebtedness as well as innovation. In all, the poetics approach circumvents many of the flaws of culturalism while opening profitable avenues
of its own. The above cluster of virtues is by no means exhaustive. Even so, I
think it summarizes some ways in which poetics offers a preferable alternative
to top-down culturalist hermeneutics.
What of the “thorny” issue of culture and society? Does poetics not neglect
cultural forces in favor of a blinkered emphasis on the aesthetic object? The
very proposition of a transcultural cinema indicates this is not so. Bordwell
simply weights his emphasis differently than many culturalist critics do. If
culturalism often puts an accent on cultural difference, Bordwell attunes his
analysis to the affinities between cultures. As he succinctly puts it, “Culture not
only divides us; it unites us” (Bordwell 2001: 23). Moreover, if society impacts
movies, as culturalism contends, this impact is not direct and unmediated.
Several layers of mediation intercede between the film and its social milieu.
The concrete forces of the filmmaker’s working situation, mode of production,
and institutional and historical circumstances impinge more proximately upon
the film than a broad feature of society does. Bordwell proposes that the critic,
as a default, starts from the film and moves outward—the better to achieve
plausible causal links among the film, its proximate conditions of production,
and wider social causes (2008b: 32). Thus Bordwell does not ignore society but
reverses the culturalist’s priorities. The poetics of cinema he advances does not
oppose cultural hermeneutics, hermeneutics in general, or general theories of
cinema in toto. It highlights the importance of fine-grained close film analysis,
of the priority of the film above predetermined general theories, and of the
critic’s obligation to create causal correlations between the film and society
that are concrete, plausible, and (at least potentially) empirically verifiable.
Bordwell’s poetics, then, does not discount social and cultural factors. But it
does diminish the woolly assumptions of social-reflection theory, along with
other Grand Theories of culture and society that seldom provide causal explanations of the sort a poetics strives for (31).
The chapters that follow pursue a poetics of Wong’s cinema. In adopting
this approach I am not trying to argue for replacing one method or perspective (cultural hermeneutics) with another (poetics or formalism). Film analysis
22
Wong Kar-wai and the Poetics of Hong Kong Cinema
should not reject cultural readings nor should it deny the value of interpretation tout court. I assume that the poetics approach can coincide with cultural
hermeneutics as complementary practices. For the methodological reasons
outlined in the previous section, however, the poetics approach and top-down
heuristics do not always mesh well. Yet it is perfectly conceivable that a poetician could mount, say, a socio-allegorical reading of 2046 from the bottom up,
moving from concrete features of the film to general conclusions concerning
social factors. A poetics of cinema, therefore, does not preclude allegorical
interpretation. Nevertheless, this book places primary emphasis on the films’
denotative level, searching out patterns of composition and style; identifying
textual motivations, functions, and effects; and reconstructing viewer responses
(perceptual, cognitive, affective) cued by the work. This denotative level is not
of concern only to the poetician interested in film art. Even allegorical critics
should aim to know the film’s surface intimately. I take it as given that allegorical content is always necessarily mediated by explicit textual features. One can
only “access” embedded meaning by engaging with the film’s primary level, its
surface structure of style, story, and character. Studying this level of discourse,
then, is not only essential to appreciating a filmmaker’s mastery of craft. It is
also necessary for the ascription of implicit or symptomatic meanings to the
work.
Wong’s Aesthetic of Disturbance
Central among this book’s arguments is that Wong’s cinema cultivates an
aesthetic of disturbance. To explicate this idea, I need to set Wong’s aesthetic
against some key tendencies governing contemporary Hong Kong films.
Bordwell identifies several of these features in his “Transcultural Spaces” essay
and elsewhere (e.g., 2008b: 395–411). From the 1970s to the 1990s, he argues,
Hong Kong directors adapted Hollywood’s continuity practices to fresh effect.
Close-ups, fast cutting, focus racking, and fluid camera movement were repurposed for a cinema based on expressive movement. Local directors harnessed
these features to the principles of pictorial clarity and legibility, enabling the
audacious movements of a swordsman or a kung-fu master to be crisply delineated. These pictorial principles are perhaps most visible in the action genre,
though they govern other types of film too—romantic comedies, supernatural
dramas, historical sagas. Even within Hong Kong’s action cinema, however,
directors adopted the legibility principle in different ways. Jackie Chan gives
primacy to the profilmic event, stressing the spectacle’s actuality; John Woo
“constructs” action analytically, relying heavily on close-ups, rapid editing,
camera movement, and the like. Both directors, despite their contrasting styles,
prioritize the pictorial legibility of the spectacle. Against this context, Wong’s
Wong Kar-wai and the Poetics of Hong Kong Cinema
23
films can look utterly opaque. Yet Wong repudiates neither the legibility principle nor the cluster of devices drawn from intensified continuity. Instead, he
mounts an aesthetic of disturbance, rather than outright violation, of the norms
of maximal pictorial clarity holding sway in the local cinema. Visual schemas
of legibility are revised in the formalist sense of “roughened form,” the play
of devices within the work that complicates, retards, or thwarts the viewer’s
perception and understanding (see Thompson 1988: 36–37). Just as Bordwell’s
transcultural directors recast norms circulating within and between milieus, so
Wong reworks the local cinema’s legibility, pressing toward an aesthetic fostering perceptual and cognitive challenge.
Not that Wong’s aesthetic of disturbance is solely or even chiefly visual. It is
my contention that disturbance penetrates all parameters of his work. Again,
this is partly a corollary of Wong’s effort to flout the transparent devices of local
cinema. Take, for example, narrative plotting. In the 1980s and 1990s, popular
Hong Kong films made plot architecture maximally salient, explicitly parsing
stories into discriminable episodes (Bordwell 2011: 114–26). From the outset,
Wong also adopted the principle of episodic construction. At times, however,
he roughens the schema in ways that obscure the plot’s distinct phases. Tacit
ellipses conceal progressions in the story, sending the viewer’s comprehension
into disarray. At a more abstract level, the plot’s architectural design—explicitly
episodic in most Hong Kong films—becomes harder to perceive; hence, critics
tend to label Wong’s plots “fragmentary” and “disjointed” rather than episodic.
In addition, Hong Kong movies of this period incline toward moral perspicuity.
Manichaeism is part and parcel of local films, as of popular cinema everywhere. Even the eponymous hero of The Killer, a paid assassin, comes forward
as fundamentally virtuous. Wong, however, disturbs this norm of moral clarity,
placing fairly malevolent and amoral protagonists at his films’ center (think of
Days of Being Wild and Fallen Angels). Popular Hong Kong films also furnish
explicit emotional appeals. The emotions portrayed and elicited tend to be saturated, specific, and unambiguous; in other words, these films traffic in strong
basic emotions. Wong’s films are also emotional experiences, but they tend
to depict and arouse more diffuse emotion states. His protagonists—many of
them disinclined to emote openly—are prone to express the “higher emotions,”
that is, emotions that are complex, compound, or contradictory. At the level
of effects, moreover, the films resist both the transparent emotions of popular
cinema and the remote austerity of the art film. Drenched in mood, Wong’s
cinema elicits powerful yet diffuse emotional responses.
In these and other ways, Wong disturbs the principles of clarity and legibility intrinsic to Hong Kong’s popular cinema during the 1980s and 1990s.
Nevertheless, as this book tries to make clear, Wong’s experimentation takes
place within self-imposed formal constraints. Perhaps surprisingly, his films
24
Wong Kar-wai and the Poetics of Hong Kong Cinema
bear the hallmarks of organic unity. The films are formally experimental, but
they are also characterized by compositional coherence and integrity. The
tension between these impulses—toward disunity on the one hand and organicity on the other—contributes greatly to the films’ fascination and dynamism.
Contradictory impulses also obtain at the level of visual style. While sensuous
imagery entices viewers toward passive absorption, a host of perceptual difficulties forces them to stay cognitively alert. The Wong Kar-wai film both
exhilarates and exasperates. If the films are frustrating, this is due to Wong’s
roughening of popular norms. And here the very fact that Wong roughens—
rather than radically subverts—established schemas behooves me to qualify
the postmodernist claims of a radically new aesthetic. Instead, I conceive an
aesthetic of disturbance; that is, an aesthetic that roughens existing norms in
ways that both nourish and nonplus the eye, posing obstacles to the viewer’s
perception and understanding.
Why would Wong foster such an aesthetic? I can posit some gross hypotheses. Most crudely, Wong is a self-conscious auteur, and he seeks distinctiveness.
From the start he defined a signature that marked him off from his contemporaries. Later, when the local industry responded with rip-offs, he reworked
his stylistic program to outstrip his imitators. “Too many people are ‘doing’
Wong Kar-wai these days,” he stated in 1997, “so I have to do something else”
(Rayns 2008a: 33). He is also self-consciously a “world cinema” director, cognizant of the importance of the festival circuit. Wong understands that festival
approval frequently goes to films probing the boundaries of film form, genre
conventions, and norms of national cinema. In the late 1980s, local films like
Peking Opera Blues (1986), Rouge, and The Killer proved that offbeat genre
films could win international respect, preparing a path for Wong’s own entry
onto the festival market. Further, Wong is a passionate cinephile, well-versed in
film history. He has cited as influences the modernist generation of European
art filmmakers, including Antonioni, Godard, Truffaut, and Fellini. Like Wong,
these auteurs pressed the limits of form without abandoning narrative. Their
films evince a ludic approach to film style (compare Wong’s topsy-turvy shots
in Happy Together and the address to camera in Fallen Angels), they pose
difficulties of perception and understanding (consider Last Year at Marienbad
[1961] and Hiroshima, mon amour [1959]), and they can be visually sensuous
(e.g., Red Desert [1964], Le mépris [1963], Domicile conjugal [1970], La
dolce vita [1960]). More proximately, Wong was weaned on Hong Kong genre
cinema (e.g., Shaw Brothers’ huangmei operas and wuxia pian), a tradition
of cinematic spectacle that was nothing if not visually sensuous. We might
consider, then, Wong’s aesthetic as drawing upon and blending these local and
foreign influences. Another factor is Wong’s background working in the commercial industry. Allied with his art film sensibility, the knowledge of popular
Wong Kar-wai and the Poetics of Hong Kong Cinema
25
filmmaking he acquired informs an aesthetic at once abstruse and accessible. In
addition, we could identify different personalities at work within a collaboration. If Wong relishes improvisation, chance, and accident, his editors (William
Chang, Patrick Tam) reassert the formalities of structure at the postproduction phase. As I argue throughout this book, Wong’s aesthetic of disturbance
springs in large degree from Wong’s work routines and mode of production.
The Book’s Structure
In Poetics of Cinema, Bordwell distinguishes among analytical poetics (concerned with such matters as audiovisual style, constructional form, and themes),
historical poetics (studying the film’s historical circumstances and its contexts
of reception), and a poetics of effect (focusing upon the viewer’s activity). The
chapters that follow reside predominantly in the first and last of these domains.
Each chapter considers how Wong’s compositional strategies try to steer the
viewer’s uptake in particular ways. As such, the book presupposes a problemsolution heuristic governing the filmmaker’s activity. Brian Boyd summarizes
this perspective thus:
We can see authors as problem-solvers with individual capacities and preferences making strategic choices within particular situations, by shaping
different kinds of appeals to the cognitive preferences and expectations of
audiences—preferences and expectations shaped at both specieswide and
local levels—and balancing the costs against the benefits of authorial effort
in composition and audience effort in comprehension and response. (2009:
396)
Filmmakers, like literary authors, compose the work so as to encourage particular kinds of pickup. (This assumption contrasts the culturalist trope of unconscious directorial activity.) In addition, the filmmaker may set himself problems
in the form of artistic challenges. As Jacques Rivette rhetorically puts it:
Is challenge too slim a criterion [for art]? But what was Michelangelo’s
fresco technique or Bach’s fugue technique if not the compulsion to invent
an answer to some vexing question (and I’ll say nothing of the infinite challenges of technique and construction—often subtle to the point of seeming
trivial—which all artists secretly impose on themselves, and which will
never be known to the public). (1985: 277–78)
Wong’s aesthetic of disturbance, reworked by the director throughout his
career, might be perceived in terms of both kinds of problem-solution model.
Most broadly, this book attempts to illuminate the interface among film, filmmaker, and viewer. That is not to say that the book slights historical matters.
26
Wong Kar-wai and the Poetics of Hong Kong Cinema
On the contrary, it attempts throughout to identify historical norms and to
situate Wong’s cinema against pertinent historical traditions.
The questions I pursue range across Bordwell’s three domains of poetics.
What principles of composition characterize Wong’s films? Why are they
composed as they are? What continuities of style, story, and theme unify the
oeuvre? How are the films designed to elicit particular responses? How do
they draw upon and recast particular traditions? To this cluster of questions
I would add: How have Wong’s films been theorized by critics and scholars?
These questions unify the chapters that follow. The book’s overall structure
mirrors the poetics method itself, beginning with close attention to specific
features of the films and widening the scope to examine pertinent contexts
(e.g., genre, historical poetics, appropriation, and influence). Each chapter
takes as its primary focus a single aspect of Wong’s filmmaking—musical style,
visual style, narration, and genre. Treating each aspect separately enables the
critic to provide detailed analyses of the films’ functions and effects. Of course,
all these filmic aspects work together, and I do not neglect how, say, Wong
coordinates music with visual style. However, for analytical purposes, isolating distinct components gives a greater purchase on each one, and ultimately,
on the whole. To isolate features of the work also enables a confrontation of
critical assumptions about those features (for instance, that Wong flouts genre).
Finally, the book’s format lets me ask, “How does an aesthetic of disturbance
manifest itself in each of these aspects of the work?”
The next chapter examines Wong’s musical practices and principles of
musical organization. It begins by surveying the critical frameworks customarily applied to Wong’s musical style. Like the other main chapters, I treat Wong’s
corpus generally before presenting a case study. The analysis of Chungking
Express in Chapter 2 introduces one of the book’s thematic leitmotifs (indeed,
a leitmotif braided throughout Wong’s films)—that of authenticity, a key preoccupation for Wong and his protagonists. Chapter 3 treats visual style. Here
I elaborate what I take to be Wong’s stylistic “dominant,” namely, his principle
of disturbance. The salient feature of Wong’s visual style, this chapter suggests,
is its tactics of compositional and perceptual disturbance. In Chapter 4 I turn
to the formal principles of Wong’s storytelling, arguing that his films display
robust formal unity. Chapter 5 centers on Wong’s controversial engagement
with popular genre. This chapter’s main analysis of In the Mood for Love seeks
to bring together this book’s parameters of study—music, visual style, narrative discourse, and genre. The final chapter isolates and reviews the book’s
major claims. It reiterates the importance of a poetics approach to Wong’s
films (and to Chinese films generally). Put simply, the poetics approach helps
us appreciate the art of Chinese cinema.
Index
2046 (2004), 1, 6, 10, 11, 13, 14, 22,
33, 34, 38, 54, 55, 59, 61, 62, 67,
78, 79, 81, 83, 84, 85, 86, 101, 102,
117, 129
Abbas, Ackbar, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 28, 50,
52, 58, 99, 134–35
Air America (1990), 44
All About My Life (2012), 131
All’s Well, Ends Well (1992), 135
All That Heaven Allows (1955), 112, 117
American Beauty (1999), 136
Anderson, Laurie, 94
Antonioni, Michelangelo, 24, 71, 82, 83
Arnheim, Rudolf, 20, 136
Arnold, Andrea, 131
Ashbrook, John, 100
Ashes of Time (1994), 3, 5, 17, 28, 51,
53, 60, 63, 64, 65, 77, 78, 81, 85,
86, 87, 97, 99, 100, 101, 104, 129,
130, 131–32
Ashes of Time Redux (2008), 5, 97, 138
As Tears Go By (1988), 3, 8, 9, 14, 28,
30, 50, 51, 53, 70, 73, 76, 80, 84,
85, 91, 99, 100, 117, 132
Avanti! (1972), 105
Baisers volés (Stolen Kisses) (1968), 85
Ballistic Kiss (1998), 131
Bazin, André, 20, 104, 136
Beals, Gregory, 138
Before Sunrise (1995), 133
Before Sunset (2004), 133
Bergman, Ingmar, 71, 107
Berry, Chris, 62, 134, 135
Better Tomorrow, A (1986), 3, 4, 17, 51
Better Tomorrow II, A (1987), 4
Betz, Mark, 58
Beyond Our Ken (2004), 131
Biancorosso, Georgio, 33
Big Sleep, The (1939), 79
Binns, Alexander, 28
Blade, The (1995), 131
Blake, Nancy, 7
Block, Lawrence, 75
Boat People (1982), 4
Bordwell, David, 2, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21,
22, 23, 25, 26, 30, 39, 46, 49, 50,
54, 55, 58, 63, 66, 77, 80, 82, 84,
85, 90, 97, 99, 100, 106, 107, 119,
120, 125, 134, 136, 138
Borges, Jorge Luis, 97
Bosley, Rachael K., 54
Boyd, Brian, 25, 109
Branigan, Edward, 119
Brecht, Bertolt, 89
Brooke, Michael, 57, 73
Brooks, Peter, 106
Brooks, Xan, 57
Brown, Dennis, 40, 41
Brunette, Peter, 17, 28, 34, 56, 57, 58, 63,
73, 82, 87, 95, 96, 99, 122
Buenos Aires Zero Degree (1999), 97
Burch, Noël, 20
Butterfly (2004), 131
Cameron, Allan, 56, 57, 73, 105
Campbell, Joseph, 79
152
Index
Cannes Film Festival, 1, 6
Cantopop, 3, 32, 35, 47
Carroll, Noël, 13
Cassegard, Carl, 96
Center Stage (1991), 8
Certified Copy (2010), 133–34
Chacun son cinéma (2007), 4
Chan, Frankie, 3, 4
Chan, Gordon, 3
Chan, Jackie, 12, 13, 22
Chan, Natalia Sui Hung, 16
Chan, Peter, 3
Chan, Stephen Ching-kiu, 51
Chandler, Raymond, 79
Chang Chen, 4, 61, 126
Chang, Justin, 56, 69
Chapple, Lynda, 58, 95
Charity, Tom, 28, 44, 100
Chatman, Seymour, 39
Chaudhuri, Shohini, 29
Cheang, Soi, 50, 100
Chen, Kaige, 62
Cheng, Scarlet, 56
Cheung, Alex, 3
Cheung, Jacky, 4, 132
Cheung, Jacob, 3
Cheung, Leslie, 4, 11, 61, 65, 67
Cheung, Mabel, 3
Cheung, Maggie, 4, 60, 97, 102, 105,
122, 133
Chinese Ghost Story, A (1987), 4
Chinese Odyssey 2002, A (2002), 132
Ching, Siu-tung, 3
Chion, Michel, 44
Chow, Rey, 10, 53, 105, 114
Chow, Stephen, 132
Chow, Valerie, 45
Chung, Danny, 32
Chungking Express (1994), 3, 5, 14, 26,
27–48, 49, 52, 53, 55, 56, 57, 59, 60,
61, 65, 67, 68, 70, 72, 73, 79, 80,
81, 82, 83, 88, 89, 100, 101, 102,
103, 104, 117, 118, 129, 131, 132
Cinema City, 2
City of Sadness (1989), 4
Cocteau, Jean, 59
Cole, Nat King, 36, 108, 133
Collier, Joelle, 12, 51, 52, 53, 54
Confidentially Yours (1983), 33
Cook, Pam, 53, 60
Cooper, David E., 109
Coppola, Sofia, 132
Corless, Kieron, 6
Corliss, Mary, 107
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000),
4, 6
Daisy Kenyon (1947), 107, 119
Darke, Chris, 6
Davis, Bob, 54, 73
Days of Being Dumb (1993), 132
Days of Being Wild (1990), 3, 4, 11, 13,
14, 15, 16, 23, 56, 61, 73, 76, 78,
79, 80, 81, 97, 127, 129, 132
de Carvalho, L. M. M., 29, 31, 32
de Gaulle, Charles, 112
Delerue, Georges, 33
Deleuze, Gilles, 31, 32, 53, 54, 56
Dissanayake, Wimal, 28, 51, 53, 105
Dolan, Xavier, 132–33
Domicile conjugal (1970), 24
Dong, Jie, 10
Douchet, Jean, 58
Doyle, Christopher, 4, 38, 54, 60, 66, 67,
75, 129
Dragon Inn (1992), 4, 6
Drunkard, The (2010), 132
Eagle-Shooting Heroes, The (1993), 132
Eisenstein, Sergei, 20, 38
Ekman, Paul, 62
Elley, Derek, 73
Eng, David L., 134
Eros (2004), 4, 84
Expect the Unexpected (1998), 113
Fallen Angels (1995), 5, 15, 23, 24, 28,
32, 33, 34, 36, 57, 58, 64, 65, 67,
68, 74, 78, 80, 81, 85, 87–97, 128
Farewell My Concubine (1993), 4, 135
Farquhar, Mary Ann, 62
Fei, Mu, 107
Fellini, Federico, 24
Fight Club (1999), 83
Final Victory (1987), 3
Index
First Love: Litter on the Breeze (1997),
131
Fish Tank (2009), 131
Follow, The (2001), 84
Fong, Allen, 3
Fonoroff, Paul, 29, 56
Forde, Leon, 5, 74
Forrest Gump (1994), 44
Fraigneau, André, 59
Frater, Patrick, 138
From Beijing with Love (1994), 132
Fugitive Kind, The (1959), 78
Full Contact (1992), 136
Galasso, Michael, 40
Garcia, Roel A., 4
Garrel, Louis, 133
Garwood, Ian, 31
Ghost (1990), 31
Godard, Jean-Luc, 24, 28, 29, 71, 103
Gong, Li, 4, 10, 60, 61, 102, 138
Grandmaster, The (2013), 6, 7, 125,
126–31, 137, 139
Greenhalgh, Cathy, 38, 60
Grodal, Torben, 47, 112
Hampton, Howard, 29
Hand, The (2004), 61, 62, 63, 67, 81, 84
Happy Together (1997), 3, 5, 6, 13, 18,
24, 28, 35, 36, 50, 55, 57, 58, 64,
65, 66, 67–69, 70, 73, 75, 81, 82,
85, 97, 100, 110, 125, 129, 132,
134–36, 137
Haunted Cop Shop, The (1987), 2
Hawke, Ethan, 79
Heidegger, Martin, 110
Hero (2002), 4, 6
Hewett, Ivan, 47
Hire, The (2001), 84
Hiroshima, mon amour (1959), 24
Hitchcock, Alfred, 102, 117
Holden, Stephen, 92
Hole, The (1998), 131
Hottest State, The (2006), 79
Hou, Hsiao-hsien, 6, 19, 20, 49
House of Flying Daggers (2004), 6
Howe, Desson, 106
Hu, Brian, 30, 44, 47
153
Hui, Ann, 3
Hung, Sammo, 12
Hunter, Stephen, 59
Imitation of Life (1934), 107
Imitation of Life (1959), 106, 112
Infernal Affairs (2002), 6, 84
In-Gear, 3
In the Mood for Love (2000), 3, 6, 7,
14, 26, 30, 31, 33, 34, 41, 43, 46,
49, 55, 56, 58, 62, 64, 67, 72, 74,
76, 78, 80, 85, 86, 88, 89, 94, 95,
97, 99, 100, 102, 103, 104, 105–24,
127, 128, 129, 131, 132, 133, 134
Ip Man, 126–31
Ip Man (2008), 126, 128
Ip Man 2 (2010), 126
Jeong, Seung-hoon, 53, 54, 56
Jet Tone Films, 4, 132, 138
Jia, Zhangke, 49
Jin, Yong, 78
Jones, Kent, 97
Jones, Norah, 60, 79
Jonze, Spike, 132
Just for Fun (1983), 2
Kafka, Franz, 111
Kaneshiro, Takeshi 4, 39, 60, 87
Kauffmann, Stanley, 63
Kazan, Elia, 79
Keep Cool (1997), 131
Kei, Sek, 33
Kei, Shu, 33
Kelly, Gene, 29
Khondji, Darius, 66
Kiarostami, Abbas, 133–34
Kidman, Nicole, 138
Killer, The (1989), 17, 23, 24
King, Geoff, 102
Ko, Blackie, 132
Krutnik, Frank, 31
Krzywinska, Tanya, 102
Kung Fu Hustle (2004), 6
Kwan, Stanley, 3, 8, 97
La dolce vita (1960), 24
Lady from Shanghai, The, 6, 138
154
Index
Lai, Leon, 87
Lam, Ringo, 54, 71
Lang, Robert, 108
Last Year at Marienbad (1961), 24
Lau, Andrew, 3, 4, 70, 85
Lau, Andy, 3, 76, 80, 100
Lau, Carina, 4
Lau, Jeff, 2, 4, 132
L’avventura (1960), 82
Law, Alex, 3
Law, Clara, 3, 12
Law, Wai-ming, 33
Leahy, James, 28, 29, 60
Léaud, Jean-Pierre, 85
Lee, Bono, 37, 60, 69, 113
Lee, Bruce, 6, 126
Leigh, Vivien, 79
Le mépris (1963), 24
Lemmon, Jack, 105
Leone, Sergio, 33, 129
Les amours imaginaires / Heartbeats
(2010), 132–33
Le Sourd, Philippe, 129
Leung, Chiu-wai, Tony, 1, 4, 6, 41, 60,
67, 82, 84, 97, 101, 105, 122, 126,
132
Leung, Ping-Kwan, 55
Li, Cheuk-to, 33, 105, 113, 124
Lim, Dennis, 38, 138
Lin, Brigitte, 4, 14, 39, 65, 79
Lincoln (2012), 128–29
Linklater, Richard, 133
Liu, Yichang, 78
Longest Nite, The (1998), 113
Longtime Companion (1990), 135
Lost in Time (2003), 113, 114
Lost in Translation (2003), 132, 133
Love Unto Waste (1986), 4
Lumet, Sidney, 78
MacMurray, Fred, 108
Macquarrie, John, 109
Made in Hong Kong (1997), 131
Ma, Jean, 53, 57, 78, 83, 85, 90
Marchetti, Gina, 10, 55
Martinez, David, 28, 29, 34, 48
Maslin, Janet, 29
McCarthy, Todd, 56
McElhaney, Joe, 60
McGrath, Declan, 38, 75, 77
Méchaly, Nathaniel, 129
Miao Miao (2008), 138
Mildred Pierce (1945), 112
Mills, Juliet, 105
Miramax Films, 5
Mok, Karen, 87
Morricone, Ennio, 28, 129
Morrison, Susan, 28, 29, 103
Moyers, Bill, 79
MTV, 3, 29, 30, 31, 33, 47, 49, 58, 59,
72, 94, 95
Mulvey, Laura, 95
Muñoz, Tita, 11
My Blueberry Nights (2007), 6, 35, 36,
50, 57, 64, 66, 67, 69–72, 73, 75,
79, 82, 100
Neale, Steve, 102, 104, 109
Needham, Gary, 55
Nelson, Rob, 133
Nicholson, Jack, 83
Ohayo (1959), 110
Once Upon a Time in America (1984),
129
Ozu, Yasujiro, 49, 62, 110
Pan, Rebecca, 11
Parents’ Hearts (1955), 107
Passenger, The (1975), 83
Peking Opera Blues (1986), 4, 24
Philadelphia (1993), 135
Plantinga, Carl, 110
Polan, Dana, 31, 58
Police Story (1985), 4, 12
Police Story Part II (1988), 4
Powers, Cat, 79
Preminger, Otto, 107, 119
Project A (1983), 12, 52
Project A II (1987), 4
Puig, Manuel, 78
Qin, Jian, 107
Queer Story, A (1997), 135
Raise the Red Lantern (1991), 4
Index
Rayns, Tony, 24, 75, 78, 79, 99, 100, 129
Red Desert (1964), 24
Red Sorghum (1987), 4
Reis, Michele, 87
River, The (1997), 131
Rivette, Jacques, 25
Road Home, The (1999), 4
Robey, Tim, 129
Robinson, Luke, 59
Rohdie, Sam, 29, 75
Rohter, Larry, 126
Romney, Jonathan, 29, 57
Rosa (1988), 2
Rosenbaum, Jonathan, 137
Rossellini, Roberto, 133
Rouge (1988), 4, 17, 24
Rushton, Richard, 53, 82
Russell, David O., 132
Safe (1995), 135
Sailer, Steve, 58
Sarris, Andrew, 139
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 109, 117
Schneider, Maria, 83
Scorsese, Martin, 28, 131
Secret Window (2004), 3
Shaw Brothers, 24, 71
Shin, Thomas, 113
Shumway, David R., 31
Siegel, Marc, 134
Silver Linings Playbook (2012), 132
Sinnerbrink, Robert, 107–8
Sirk, Douglas, 106, 107, 108, 112
Sleepless in Seattle (1993), 31
Smith, Greg M., 108
Smith, Jeff, 35, 36, 42
Smith, Murray, 74, 82, 83, 121
Spielberg, Steven, 128
Spring in a Small Town (1948), 107
Stahl, John M., 106, 107
Stanwyck, Barbara, 108
Stella Dallas (1937), 106, 112
Stephens, Chuck, 96, 99
Sternberg, Meir, 77
Stokes, Lisa Odham, 38, 51
Story of Qiu Ju, The (1992), 4
Strathairn, David, 70
Streetcar Named Desire, A (1951), 79
155
Stringer, Julian, 32, 47
Summer in Beijing, 6
Suzhou River (2000), 131
Swordsman 2 (1992), 4
Tambling, Jeremy, 35, 51, 57
Tam, Patrick, 3, 25
Tan, Ed S., 84
Tarantino, Quentin, 5, 28, 104, 131
Taubin, Amy, 14, 59, 73
Teo, Stephen, 10–18, 29, 53, 55, 58, 59,
64, 65, 73, 75, 77, 78, 80, 84, 96,
105, 107
There’s Always Tomorrow (1956), 108
Thompson, Kristin, 20, 23, 136
Thomson, David, 7, 59
Those Were the Days (1997), 131
Tirard, Laurent, 38, 104, 118
Tobias, Scott, 52
Todorov, Tzvetan, 18, 120
To, Johnnie, 19, 50, 104, 113
Tom at the Farm (2013), 133
Tong, Janice, 14, 20, 51, 53, 54, 56
Toop, David, 32
Top Gun (1986), 31
Truffaut, François, 24, 33, 85, 101, 103,
104
Tsai, Ming-liang, 49, 131
Tsui, Clarence, 126
Tsui, Curtis K., 17, 28, 51, 53, 58, 65, 82
Tsui, Hark, 3, 19, 54
Turan, Kenneth, 106
Turner, Lana, 106
Turn Left, Turn Right (2003), 113, 114
Twinkle Twinkle Lucky Stars (1985), 4
Udden, James, 19, 32, 54
Umebayashi, Shigeru, 108, 129
Ventura, Elbert, 32
Vernallis, Carol, 30
Vertigo (1958), 102
Viva Erotica (1996), 131
Vive l’amour (1994), 131
von Sternberg, Josef, 66
Voyage to Italy (1954), 133
Wang, Qingxiang, 126
156
Index
Washington, Dinah, 42, 45, 46
Weinstein Company, The, 131
Weisz, Rachel, 79
Weitzman, Elizabeth, 109
Welles, Orson, 138
wenyi pian, 105, 107, 108
Whatever You Want (1994), 131
When Harry Met Sally (1989), 31
Wilder, Billy, 105
Williams, Tennessee, 78, 79
Wilson, Flannery, 32
Wong, Faye, 4, 10, 30, 38, 39, 42, 47, 60,
86, 102
Wong, Freddy, 132
Wong, Jing, 131
Woo, John, 3, 13, 19, 22, 49, 54, 71
Wooton, Adrian, 29
wuxia pian, 5, 24, 53, 78, 99, 100, 132
Yau, Esther C. M., 53
Yau, Ka-fai, 53
Yeh, Emilie, 19, 30, 32, 44
Yellow Earth (1984), 62
Yim, Ho, 3
Yip, Wilson, 126, 128
Yoke, Kong Kam, 1
Young, Charlie, 87
Yue, Audrey, 31, 53, 134
Yuen, Woo-ping, 130
Zhang, Che, 49
Zhang, Jin, 126
Zhang, Rui, 129
Zhang, Ziyi, 4, 10, 60, 126
Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain
(1983), 4