Wong Kar‐wai's Genre Practice and Romantic Authorship: The Cases of Ashes of Time Redux and the Grandmaster

Abstract

What does it mean to say that Wong Kar-wai has made genre films in the instances of Ashes of Time (both the original, released in 1994, and its superseding Redux version, released in 2008) and The Grandmaster (2013)? The truism applied to Wong in his career up to now is that he is a high-modernist Romantic auteur and his films are invariably set in contemporary times. Furthermore, Wong's films are all constructed according to modernist-structuralist imperatives of authorship. The two genre films (Ashes of Time belonging to the wuxia genre and The Grandmaster to the kung-fu genre) appear on the outset to contradict this notion. Both are also period films which belie the perception of Wong's contemporariness and unabashed modernism. Wong's Romantic aura has arisen out of his status as an auteur – he controls the environment and conditions of his creativity, taking his time in making a film, usually without a fully written script, and after releasing his films returns to them with a mind to revise and rework. His films also exude Romanticism, which is seen as the primary conceptual underlining of his modernist style. This chapter examines Wong's Romantic authorship by counterposing it with structural ideas of desire and suffering (influenced by Buddhism) that are apparent in his two genre films. It analyzes the two films to form a comparative critique and at the same time seeks to re-examine Wong's touted Romanticism, interpreted as modernist structuring of desire. Does Wong's adherence to genre practices align with his Romantic methodology?

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