Remixing Wong Kar-wai

Like his fellow filmmakers Stanley Kubrick Quentin Tarantino and Sofia Coppola Wong Kar-wai crafts the soundtracks of his films by jettisoning original scores in favor of commercial recordings. In <i>Remixing Wong Kar-wai</i> Giorgio Biancorosso examines the combinatorial practice at the heart of Wong's cinema to retheorize musical borrowing appropriation and repurposing. Wong's irrepressible penchant for poaching music from other films-whether old Chinese melodramas Hollywood blockbusters or European art films-subsumes familiar music under his own brand of cinema. As Wong combs through musical and cinematic archives and splices disparate music together exceedingly well-known music loses its previous associations and acquires an infinite new constellation of meanings in his films. Drawing on Claude Lévi-Strauss's concept of bricolage Biancorosso contends that Wong's borrowing is akin to a practice of creative destruction in which Wong becomes a bricoleur who remixes music at hand to create new and complete self-sustaining statements. By outlining Wong's modus operandi of indiscriminate borrowing and remixing Biancorosso prompts readers to reconsider the significance of transforming preexisting music into new compositions for film and beyond.