The ambivalent identity of Wong Kar-wai's cinema
With nine feature films released between 1988 and 2007, as well as several advertising campaigns, music videos, short films and collective projects, Wong Kar-wai is one of the most important contemporary filmmakers currently working. Hailing from Hong Kong’s highly commercial film industry, Wong has managed to attract the attention of the international film festival circuit with his visual style and fragmented narrative. Considered by many critics as the poet of Hong Kong’s quest for identity post 1997, his cinema defies every attempt of standardization.  The main goal of this study is to provide an attentive and comprehensive study of his body of work, concentrating on the stylistics traits that make his films  part of a coherent unity. These characteristics correspond to a certain way of telling stories, of composing situations and characters, of manipulating time and the use of technical resources so that his films offer a coherent identity. The objective is to analyze the different components of his images, to show how his films communicate with each other in order to create something unique.  To achieve this objective, I put forward the hypothesis that Wong’s cinema is marked by a dualistic structure that allows his films to present opposite qualities at the same time. Most of my arguments are based on the thoughts of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, whose own dualistic theory of cinema presented in his books Cinema 1: the movement-image and Cinema 2: the time-image, provides a valid framework upon which Wong’s films can be projected. While the research concentrates on the textual analysis of films, I will also benefit from comparative analysis and additional disciplines.
Wong Kar-wai Cinema Hong Kong Gilles Deleuze Film aesthetics Narratology Asian cinema