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Primarily as a result of his own statements in various interviews, much ink has been spilled over Wong Kar-wai’s literary tastes and cinephilia. The names Murakami, Cortazar, Puig, Garcia Marquez and Liu Yichang on the one hand and Hitchcock, Suzuki, Scorsese, Bertolucci and Antonioni on the other appear with increasing frequency in the literature on his cinema. And yet the extent of the influence of these texts and authors on Wong’s cinema remains unclear. This is not only because I am naturally skeptical of directors’ statements about their own work, but also because tracing influences sheds only partial light on the finished product. The texts and materials that are said to have played a major role are often not so much models dutifully transposed or transformed but rather ways of getting started, little more than a springboard. They are for Wong but another element in a heady mix of influences, ranging from modernist novels to narrative, visual and aural motifs drawn from local films and popular culture. High and low, new and old, and local and global are all thrown onto a blank canvas, one that assumes shape, relief and perspective only during the notoriously crucial and, in Wong’s case, often extremely laborious process of editing. Without the benefit of the director’s comments, it is in any case hard to detect influences apart from those that are patently obvious. Even in the case of the novel that inspired In the Mood for Love /《花樣年華》, Liu Yichang’s TêteB êche, besides some apparent parallels in structure and the intertitle quotations — unattributed anyhow! — one is hard put to trace a direct transposition of the motifs and characters of the literary source.1 If one was unaware of the derivation beforehand, the relationship of the film to the novel might well go overlooked. Indeed, literary and visual models have a way of insinuating themselves into the 13 Global Music/Local Cinema: Two Wong Kar-wai Pop Compilations Giorgio Biancorosso ch13(229-245).indd 229 25/05/2010 3:05 PM 230 Giorgio Biancorosso body of a Wong Kar-wai film so that they blend in to the point of disappearing as independent entities. Non-diegetic music — the original music written as a background score for a film — partakes of this as it is often modelled on preexisting works and styles, sometimes shamelessly imitating them, and yet also disavows these models in the process. In most cases, recognizing the sources or models of a film score is simply not crucial to its understanding. Pre-existing songs are a different case. By their very nature and short of being radically rearranged, they retain their identity as independent, alreadyconstituted artefacts that betray a distinctive point of origin and a context of production, as well as a known reception history. Does this relate to the fact that songs stand out in the sonic fabric of the perceptual everyday as well — in a way that, say, images, do not? Indeed, why do images need framing while songs do not? Is this the reason that they are themselves used as a framing device of sorts — in films as elsewhere? And if so, can the use of a song in film be legitimately called a form of quotation or, at least, a conscious intertextual reference? Whatever the answer to these questions, songs offer a prima facie secure, reliable window onto Wong Kar-wai’s musical knowledge, taste and ability to probe the global music market. Wong uses songs frequently, often as a fundamental component of the narrative machinery of his films; so much so, in fact, that Yeh Yueh-Yu has suggested they may be responsible for the unique charm of his oeuvre (Yeh, 1999, p. 121). A complete study of the pop compilations of Wong’s films would, of course, be beyond the scope of this essay. Here I wish to limit myself to examining how the director’s use of pre-existing songs has undergone drastic changes under the strictures of a new working environment. I will do this through a close reading of the pop compilations of Fallen Angels /《墮落 天使》(1995) and Wong’s first English-language production, My Blueberry Nights /《我的藍莓夜》(2007). Both films, despite their somewhat marginal standing in the Wong Kar-wai canon, are paradigmatic in that they rely heavily on pre-existing songs, and on popular idioms more generally. They provide perhaps the best demonstration yet that, despite endlessly looping mantras on Wong as a “visual artist”, predictably voiced again...

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