Cinephiles, music fans and film auteur(s): Transcultural taste cultures surrounding mashups of Wong Kar-wai's movies on YouTube

Wikanda Promkhuntong
2015 unpublished
Much has been written about the Chinese-born Hong Kong-based film director Wong Kar-wai and his films, particularly in relation to the socio-cultural contexts of Hong Kong before and after the handover to China, and the transcultural aesthetic traditions in his works. Beyond academic and critical domains, Wong's reputation has largely been generated by fans. Taking advantage of the large scale user-generated content associated with the director on YouTube, this essay explores day-today
more » ... s that shape Wong's persistent auteur reputation. The essay proposes a multimodal discursive and textual analysis of YouTube mashups that takes into account long-standing debates on cinephilia, media fandom and film authorship. The findings reveal a discourse of pleasure surrounding the appropriation and ownership of canonised movies, a taste homology between cinephiles and cult music fans, and tension among audiences with different identity politics. The circulation of these videos in the public domain by different agents can be seen as the exchange of 'forms of capital' (Bourdieu, 1993: 2) that creates distinctions among transcultural fan groups, which are connected in an ad-hoc basis. In the process, the reputation of the director as a film auteur is affirmed, expanded, and occasionally challenged.
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