6 - Celebrity Authorship and Multiple Mediated Bodies

Summary

Abstract: This chapter extends discussion on the self-projections of auteurs as part of an increasingly mediated screen culture to the consistent branding and championing of a specific filmmaker as a star/celebrity auteur. Focusing on Wong Kar-wai, known for his conspicuous use of sunglasses, references to cigarette smoke and an aura of jazz filmmaking, the chapter explores this filmmaker's “cool” star image, along with his collaborations in the transnational fashion industry and with high-end brands that have helped to foster Wong's public celebrity status. The chapter also examines fan embodiments of Wong's star-auteur persona; these reveal the way that the filmmaker's body and body of work have been reworked as memes or pastiches, allowing others to engage in the extension of self in contemporary participatory culture.

Keywords: persona, sunglasses, jazz, branding, meme, embodiment

As part of expanded transmedia auteur culture and the growth of East Asian cinema in the last two decades, I have so far highlighted the way two selected East Asian auteurs (Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Kim Ki-duk) responded to market demands for authorial presentations and dramatizations, studying different forms of paratextual self-projection. Significantly, these paratexts function as a form of creative and self-reflective negotiation, allowing the filmmakers to respond to the sociocultural climate and discourses surrounding their works and reputations. This chapter continues to explore how filmmakers and associated parties respond to public interest around the figure of the film auteur, with a particular focus on a director who has been framed as a star-auteur and a celebrity figure, especially through wider commercial domains. My third case study in Part II of this book is thus the Hong Kong-based filmmaker Wong Kar-wai, whose public persona is highly recognizable and who has become a source of cultural fascination just as much as his stylized movies have since the early 2000s.

In my earlier account which explored Wong Kar-wai's transnational stardom, emphasis was on the “hybrid Chineseness” shaped by Wong's consistent public biography as a Shanghai-born, Hong Kong-based filmmaker who grew up with multicultural influences, reflected in his works (see Promkhuntong, 2014). I paid attention to the fluid identities shaped by “power structures of nations and states” that feed into accounts of transnational film stars (Meeuf & Raphael, 2016, p. 3). This, in turn, allowed an exploration of the director's transnational authorial position in relation to shared cultural memories and stories of border-crossing.