A Companion to Wong Kar-wai

Martha P. Nochimson has taught in the Department of Film and Television at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, and at Mercy College, where she developed and chaired a program in Film Studies. She is the author of several books, including most recently An Introduction to Film Genres (2013), David Lynch Swerves: Uncertainty from Lost Highway to Inland Empire (2013), World on Film: An Introduction (Wiley Blackwell, 2010), and Dying to Belong: Gangster Movies in Hollywood and Hong Kong (Wiley-Blackwell, 2007). She has been invited to appear on television in her capacity as a film and media critic in the United States, Canada, and France, and she has covered international film festivals in New York, Montreal, and Istanbul for over a decade. Her numerous articles about world film and interviews of major directors have appeared in Cineaste, Film Quarterly, and The New Review of Film and Television Studies. Further information is available at her website: www.marthapnochimson.com.

Notes on Contributors ix

Acknowledgments xv

Part One Introduction

Wong Kar-wai: Invoking the Universal and the Local 3
Martha P. Nochimson

Part Two Mapping Wong’s Liminality

1 Transnational Wong 23
Ken Provencher

2 It is a Restless Moment: Wong Kar-wai and the Phenomenology of Flow 47
Joseph G. Kickasola

3 Wong Kar-wai and his jiang hu 80
Bérénice Reynaud

Part Three Thresholds of Texture and Mood

4 Wong Kar-wai’s Cinema of Repetition 115
Ackbar Abbas

5 Wong Kar-wai: The Optics of the Virtual 135
Angelo Restivo

6 Color Design in the Cinema of Wong Kar-wai 153
Shohini Chaudhuri

7 The Value of Re-exports: Wong Kar-wai’s Use of Pre-existing Soundtracks 182
Giorgio Biancorosso

Part Four In the Corridors of History and Culture

8 Wong’s Ladies from Shanghai 207
Gina Marchetti

9 The Sinophone Cinema of Wong Kar-wai 232
Audrey Yue

10 New Queer Angles on Wong Kar-wai 250
Helen Hok-Sze Leung

11 “Pity about the furniture”: Violence, Wong Kar-wai Style 272
Karen Fang

12 In the Mood for Food: Wong Kar-wai’s Culinary Imaginary 295
Mike Ingham and Matthew Kwok-kin Fung

13 Chungking Express, Tarantino, and the Making of a Reputation 319
David Desser

Part Five Close-up of Wong’s Inflections of Time and Space

14 Chungking Express: Slow – Images – Ahead 347
Raymond Bellour (translated by Allyn Hardyck)

15 Wong Kar-wai: The Actor, Framed 353
Joe McElhaney

16 Infidelity and the Obscure Object of History 378
Vivian P.Y. Lee

17 Metonymy, Mneme, and Anamnesis in Wong Kar-wai 397
Thorsten Botz-Bornstein

Part Six Focus on Individual Films

18 Serial, Sequelae, and Postcolonial Nostalgia: Wong Kar-wai’s 1960s Hong Kong Trilogy 419
Yiman Wang

19 We Can’t Go On Not Meeting Like This: Fallen Angels and Wong’s Intertextuality 438
Martha P. Nochimson

20 The Third Reality: In the Mood for Love 462
Michel Chion (translated by Claudia Gorbman)

21 Cinephiliac Engagement and the Disengaged Gaze in In the Mood for Love 467
Yomi Braester

22 Wong’s America, North and South: My Blueberry Nights and Happy Together 485
Ken Provencher

23 Queer Utopias in Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together 508
Carlos Rojas

24 Wong Kar-wai’s Genre Practice and Romantic Authorship: The Cases of Ashes of Time Redux and The Grandmaster 522
Stephen Teo

25 Wong Kar-wai, Auteur and Adaptor: Ashes of Time and In The Mood for Love 540
Wai-ping Yau

Filmography 558

Appendix I Wong Works in Television Chih-ting Chen 562

Appendix II Wong Works in Advertising Chih-ting Chen 569

Selected Bibliography 586

Index 600