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Reviewed by:
  • Wong Kar-wai: Auteur of Time
  • Audrey Yue (bio)
Stephen Teo . Wong Kar-wai: Auteur of Time. World Directors Series. London: British Film Institute, 2005. vii, 151 pp. Hardcover $80.00, ISBN1-84457-028-2. Paperback $23.95, ISBN1-84457-028-0.

Wong Kar-wai is Hong Kong's most critically acclaimed director renowned for his collaboration with the A-list of Asia's movie stars, a mega celebrity star cast that include Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Andy Lau, Brigitte Lin, Carina Lau, Zhang Zhiyi and the late Leslie Cheung. His mood films inspire fashion trends, as seen in the recent neo-Orientalist revival of the high collared cheongsam; his music pastiche, fusing the electronic trip hop of Massive Attack, the folk pop of the Mamas and Papas, with the yellow music of Zhou Xuan and the Latin ballads of Nat King Cole, resound again and again long after the film is watched; his fish- and scope-eye cinematography reinvent the orthodoxy of cinematic framing and the mise en scène; and these aesthetics combine to reinvigorate the film art of storytelling through a lingering desire with the art of time and space. A sorcerer of memory, he is the master of repetition, style, the modern, and postmodern. With only eight films over the last fourteen years, Wong has, in his young career, created a distinct genre that has earned him the status of a great auteur.

That Wong Kar-wai has inspired film courses and film retrospectives at universities and film festivals all over the world is not at all an overstatement. His films are as closely dissected and as passionately devoured as those by Scorsese, Kurosawa, or Hitchcock. Stephen Teo's recent book on the director, commissioned by the British Film Institute as part of its World Directors Series that includes Yash Chopra, Jane Campion, and Atom Egoyan, is one in the line of books that have been published in recent years devoted to the study of the auteur. Compared to others such as Jeremy Tambling's Happy Together and Ackbar Abbas' Ashes of Time published by the Hong Kong University Press, or the similarly-titled Paris edited collection by Jean-Marc Lalanne, Teo's account is by far the most accessible and readable.

The book traces the origins of Wong's cinema by examining the influence of his 1960s Shanghai cultural roots and other cinematic and art styles. Teo intertexualizes Wong's postmodern aesthetic by referencing the masters of cinemas in the likes of Orson Welles, Erich von Stroheim, Douglas Sirk, Alain Resnais, Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Goddard, and Mikio Naruse. On cinematic framing, Teo again quotes art history like an eclectic encyclopedic list: van Gogh, Richter, Rembrandt, Olsen, Michelangelo, Bacon, Dali, de Chirico, and Duchamp. These references are replete throughout the book and risk subsuming the film texts to a larger metatext of European grand film masters and great painters. For example, examining the jerk motion fisheye camera work that captures the blond-wigged Brigitte Lin [End Page 261] eluding a cop in the alleyways of Chung King Mansions in the Chungking Express (1994), Teo writes: "These scenes fulfil the need to tell the story quickly, and do it with remarkable clarity, given that [co-cinematographer] Lau fractures the surface of his images like a cubist painter, thus enhancing the idea that many things are happening at the same time. Like Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, Brigitte Lin's character has multiple body parts" (p. 62). In another description of Maggie Cheung in the critically acclaimed In The Mood for Love (2000), he further speculates: "[T]he vision of [her] ascending and descending the staircase in quick, indistinct, staccato movements serves equally to remind us of Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) or Gerhard Richter's Woman Descending the Staircase (1965), and indeed Cortázar's 'Instructions on How to Climb a Staircase'" (p. 132). These classic cinematic moments in Wong's oeuvre have already been rigorously explored by scholars such as Gina Marchetti and Marc Siegel to evoke the claustrophobic effects of a congested city; yet Teo has omitted these in favor of an analysis that reifies the...

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