The Value of Re-Exports: Wong Kar Wai’s Use of Pre-existing Soundtracks

Abstract

One of the most significant – and overlooked – aspects of Wong Kar-wai's cinema is the use of music from other films, ranging from pre-revolutionary Chinese melodramas to Truffaut. The way in which Wong revives old scores presents us with a paradox, however. Whether employed as temp-track or added in at the eleventh hour, the music is either so little known or so thoroughly transformed that it is difficult, if not impossible, to register its intertextual resonances. Why, then, does the director borrow in the first place? Wong's reliance on pre-existing soundtracks, I argue, is a transfiguration into artistic practice of a distinctive expression of Hong Kong's famed re-export economy: the repackaging of imported goods as if they were her own.