The Filmmaker as Music Bricoleur: Wong Kar Wai’s Soundtracks

Abstract

In this talk I seek to shed new light on the age-old practice of borrowing in the arts by taking a close look at the musical nexus at the heart of Wong Kar Wai’s cinema. Wong’s use of pre-existing music is shaped by the circumstances of his films’ production and reception, the history of Chinese-language cinemas, and the involved relationship, in his oeuvre, of cinephilia and musicophilia. Against this context, I chart the emergence of a unique modus operandi which I interpret as a way of channeling creatively a lifetime of chancing upon, collecting and listening to music in the commercial and artistic entrepôt of Hong Kong. Directing films, I wish to argue, turns Wong Kar Wai the music lover and end-user into a bona fide composer or better re-composer of the very repertoires he explores—the filmmaker as music bricoleur.