Wong Kar-wai and the Poetics of Hong Kong Cinema

Following a biographical sketch of Wong Kar-wai, the introductory chapter identifies several fallacies about Wong’s cinema that the rest of this book seeks to redress. It explicates the dominant critical mode to which Wong’s films have been subjected – culturalist theory – and indicates some significant shortcomings in this model. At the same time, it advocates a poetics approach to Wong’s cinema, highlighting the relative virtues of a formalist and cognitive analysis. Finally, the chapter defines and discusses Wong’s distinctive “aesthetic of disturbance,” an auteurist trait that unifies Wong’s films at the levels of audio-visual style, plotting, narration, and genre uptake.