Remixing Wong Kar-wai: Music, Bricolage, and the Aesthetics of Oblivion(Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society)

Like his fellow filmmakers Stanley Kubrick, Quentin Tarantino, and Sofia Coppola, Wong Kar-wai crafts the soundtracks of his films by jettisoning original scores in favor of commercial recordings. In Remixing Wong Kar-wai, Giorgio Biancorosso examines the combinatorial practice at the heart of Wong’s cinema to retheorize musical borrowing, appropriation, and repurposing. Wong’s irrepressible penchant for poaching music from other films-whether old Chinese melodramas, Hollywood blockbusters, or European art films-subsumes familiar music under his own brand of cinema. As Wong combs through musical and cinematic archives and splices disparate music together, exceedingly well-known music loses its previous associations and acquires an infinite new constellation of meanings in his films. Drawing on Claude LÉvi-Strauss’s concept of bricolage, Biancorosso contends that Wong’s borrowing is akin to a practice of creative destruction in which Wong becomes a bricoleur who remixes music at hand to create new and complete, self-sustaining statements. By outlining Wong’s modus operandi of indiscriminate borrowing and remixing, Biancorosso prompts readers to reconsider the significance of transforming preexisting music into new compositions for film and beyond.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments  ix Introduction. Musical Borrowing Redux  1 1. Splicing  28 2. Poaching  63 3. Owning  87 4. Redressing  117 5. Oblivion  158 Notes  187 Bibliography  209 Index  221

About the Author :
Giorgio Biancorosso is Professor of Music at the University of Hong Kong and author of Situated Listening: The Sound of Absorption in Classical Cinema.

Review :
“With the consummate skill of a discerning expert listener, Giorgio Biancorosso unpacks Wong Kar-wai’s mercurial feats of borrowing from an extensive sonic archive East and West, feats that enable startlingly fresh fictional worlds to emerge in Wong's films. This admirably fine-grained book brings to the study of world cinema and Hong Kong culture a whole new threshold of aesthetic finesse and conceptual sophistication. A game-changing achievement.” - Rey Chow, author of (Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture) “Remixing Wong Kar-wai makes a major contribution to the fields of film studies, musicology, and related areas. Giorgio Biancorosso’s arguments are wholly original, compelling, and provocative while his textual analyses of key films and music are exceptionally illuminating. His book teems with important arguments and fascinating ideas. Focusing centrally on Wong Kar-wai’s deployment of preexisting music, Biancorosso advances original and fertile notions such as the director-as-recomposer. An important and timely book.” - Gary Bettinson, author of (The Sensuous Cinema of Wong Kar-wai: Film Poetics and the Aesthetic of Disturbance)