Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 58-62).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 71-75).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 58-62) Also available in print.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 71-75). Also available in print.

Comment faire un travail scientifique si le chercheur est déjà trop obsédé par son objet d’étude et si, d’ailleurs, ce dernier n’est pas seulement un objet réifié mais doté d’une certaine réalité de l’âme ? La distance délicate entre le subjectif et l’objectif est ainsi l’enjeu principal de cette thèse, une recherche dont le chercheur est un cinéphage devenu cinéphile, qui est hanté par sa passion pour son objet bien vivant qu’est le cinéma de Wong Kar Wai mais qui a envie de vivre symboliquement cette passion. Il s’agit donc de l’équation personnelle d’après C. G. Jung et de cette distance ironique selon Antoine de Baecque. Vis-à-vis d’une telle difficulté méthodologique qui est en fait une occasion très généreuse, une approche empirique et une attitude religieuse se proposent. D’où le chercheur-cinéphile se lance dans un itinéraire homérique, à la recherche de son mythe du cinéma total qui n’est rien d’autre que son archétype du cinéma dont le symbole vivant se veut exactement Wong Kar Wai. Cette recherche devient, au fur et à mesure, une découverte, vu que la nostalgie n’est pas ailleurs, mais chez soi. Dans une telle circumambulation sous la forme d’une mise en abîme, le rapprochement entre une histoire du cinéma et une Histoire du cinéma n’est qu’inéluctable. Re-contextualisés sont les souvenirs personnels du chercheur du cinéaste hongkongais et plusieurs protagonistes rencontrés dans sa cinéphilie (Bresson, King Hu, Langlois, Bazin, Tarkovski, la bande de Truffaut, Dumont, etc.) sur la route et envisageable est une filiation toujours en devenir entre ce qui arrive avant et ce qui vient après. Que ces pages soient une scène de la création-critique et que la fonction cinéphile se manifeste à travers elle. / How to conduct a scientific work if the researcher is himself already incurably obsessed by his study material? This question fits in quite well for the present case, since the PhD student is an inveterate lover of Wong Kar Wai’s cinema. In other words, the situation is that of a cinephage-turned-cinephile — extremely conditioned by a living work inescapably defined by an amorous aura — who is trying to find a way out, in a relatively rational way, that is to say, symbolically, to deal with this entanglement as mise en abyme. Two methodological as well as deontological perspectives are thus drawn on, “the personal equation” adapted by C. G. Jung and “the ironic distance” coined by Antoine de Baecque. Hopefully, the writing of this dissertation could be regarded as a circumambulation whose goal is nothing more than its very process which is a nostalgic yearning for the cinema archetype, or, in terms of André Bazin’s idea(l): the myth of total cinema.

In Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Gilles Deleuze distinguishes two regimes of audiovisual thought. In the regime of the movement-image, such thought is constituted by two processes. The first, differentiation/integration, expresses a whole that changes through the intermediary of the shifting relationships between the objects and people on screen. The second, specification, gives images a determinate function in a sensory-motor schema, through which perceptions are linked to actions in rational intervals of movement. With the regime of the time-image, as I understand it, thought instead comes to mean, as Deleuze puts it in Foucault, to experiment and problematize, and “knowledge, power, and the self are the triple root of a problematization of thought” (95). It is my argument in this thesis that Deleuze’s work on cinema is of great utility in carrying out filmic analyses that seek to detect and draw out the consequences of strategies of filmmaking that make knowledge, power, and self problematic. Furthermore, such a mode of analysis is particularly valuable in attending to new films that confront us with novel means of organising problematic audiovisual thought. My arguments are made through consideration of two films each from four directors: Wong Kar-wai, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Pedro Costa, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. While there are many important differences between the works of these filmmakers, their films nevertheless lend themselves to an approach that seeks to determine how thought becomes problematic in specific cases. Similarities and resonances are brought out between these films and those that Deleuze uses himself in making his arguments and shaping his concepts, but I also identify new problems that we encounter in the works of these filmmakers, which extend the range of meaning of some of those concepts. One such concept that is of particular importance in this thesis is “belief in the world”. There is always something in those films that pass into the regime of the time-image that is asystematic, which breaks up and multiplies thought, multiplies the thinkers we are made to inhabit. Our relation to the world of the film is therefore unstable and uncertain, and calls for belief, since films themselves in this regime produce new links between humans and the world, rather than firmly establishing a realistic state of things, a temporal and spatial matrix that accords with that which we experience in everyday existence. Such films thus make us receptive to a thought different from that interiorised thought through which, as Nietzsche writes, the apparatus of knowledge abstracts, simplifies, and takes possession of the world and others (Will, no. 503, 274).

Thesis (M. A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

Ayant réalisé neuf longs-métrages entre 1988 et 2007, aussi que plusieurs campagnes publicitaires, vidéo-clips, courts-métrages et projets collectifs, Wong Kar-wai est un des réalisateurs contemporains les plus importants actuellement. Issu de l'industrie cinématographique fortement commerciale de Hong Kong, Wong est parvenu à attirer l'attention du circuit international des festivals de cinéma avec son style visuel unique et son récit fragmenté. Considéré par plusieurs critiques comme le poète de la recherche d’identité de Hong Kong après 1997, Wong Kar-wai défie toutes les tentatives de catégorisation. L’étude qui se poursuivit ici a donc pour objet essentiel de fournir une analyse attentive et complète de son oeuvre, tout en se concentrant sur les traits stylistiques qui donnent à ses films une unité. Ces caractéristiques correspondent à une certaine façon de raconter des histoires, de composer des personnages et des récits, de manipuler le temps et d'utiliser des ressources techniques de sorte que ses films offrent une identité cohérente. L'objectif est d'analyser les différents composants de ses images pour découvrir comment ses films communiquent les uns avec les autres afin de créer une identité unique. Pour atteindre cet objectif, je pose comme hypothèse de travail que le cinéma de Wong est marqué par une structure dualiste qui permet à ses films de présenter des qualités contradictoires simultanément. La plupart de mes arguments se concentrent sur le travail du philosophe français Gilles Deleuze, qui a proposé une théorie du cinéma divisé entre l’image-mouvement et l’image-temps. Je considère que sa théorie fournit un cadre valide sur lequel les films de Wong peuvent être projetés. Tandis que ma recherche se concentre sur l’interprétation textuelle des films, je profiterais également d’une analyse comparative. / With nine feature films released between 1988 and 2007, as well as several advertising campaigns, music videos, short films and collective projects, Wong Kar-wai is one of the most important contemporary filmmakers currently working. Hailing from Hong Kong’s highly commercial film industry, Wong has managed to attract the attention of the international film festival circuit with his visual style and fragmented narrative. Considered by many critics as the poet of Hong Kong’s quest for identity post 1997, his cinema defies every attempt of standardization. The main goal of this study is to provide an attentive and comprehensive study of his body of work, concentrating on the stylistics traits that make his films part of a coherent unity. These characteristics correspond to a certain way of telling stories, of composing situations and characters, of manipulating time and the use of technical resources so that his films offer a coherent identity. The objective is to analyze the different components of his images, to show how his films communicate with each other in order to create something unique. To achieve this objective, I put forward the hypothesis that Wong’s cinema is marked by a dualistic structure that allows his films to present opposite qualities at the same time. Most of my arguments are based on the thoughts of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, whose own dualistic theory of cinema presented in his books Cinema 1: the movement-image and Cinema 2: the time-image, provides a valid framework upon which Wong’s films can be projected. While the research concentrates on the textual analysis of films, I will also benefit from comparative analysis and additional disciplines.

Ayant réalisé neuf longs-métrages entre 1988 et 2007, aussi que plusieurs campagnes publicitaires, vidéo-clips, courts-métrages et projets collectifs, Wong Kar-wai est un des réalisateurs contemporains les plus importants actuellement. Issu de l'industrie cinématographique fortement commerciale de Hong Kong, Wong est parvenu à attirer l'attention du circuit international des festivals de cinéma avec son style visuel unique et son récit fragmenté. Considéré par plusieurs critiques comme le poète de la recherche d’identité de Hong Kong après 1997, Wong Kar-wai défie toutes les tentatives de catégorisation. L’étude qui se poursuivit ici a donc pour objet essentiel de fournir une analyse attentive et complète de son oeuvre, tout en se concentrant sur les traits stylistiques qui donnent à ses films une unité. Ces caractéristiques correspondent à une certaine façon de raconter des histoires, de composer des personnages et des récits, de manipuler le temps et d'utiliser des ressources techniques de sorte que ses films offrent une identité cohérente. L'objectif est d'analyser les différents composants de ses images pour découvrir comment ses films communiquent les uns avec les autres afin de créer une identité unique. Pour atteindre cet objectif, je pose comme hypothèse de travail que le cinéma de Wong est marqué par une structure dualiste qui permet à ses films de présenter des qualités contradictoires simultanément. La plupart de mes arguments se concentrent sur le travail du philosophe français Gilles Deleuze, qui a proposé une théorie du cinéma divisé entre l’image-mouvement et l’image-temps. Je considère que sa théorie fournit un cadre valide sur lequel les films de Wong peuvent être projetés. Tandis que ma recherche se concentre sur l’interprétation textuelle des films, je profiterais également d’une analyse comparative. / With nine feature films released between 1988 and 2007, as well as several advertising campaigns, music videos, short films and collective projects, Wong Kar-wai is one of the most important contemporary filmmakers currently working. Hailing from Hong Kong’s highly commercial film industry, Wong has managed to attract the attention of the international film festival circuit with his visual style and fragmented narrative. Considered by many critics as the poet of Hong Kong’s quest for identity post 1997, his cinema defies every attempt of standardization. The main goal of this study is to provide an attentive and comprehensive study of his body of work, concentrating on the stylistics traits that make his films part of a coherent unity. These characteristics correspond to a certain way of telling stories, of composing situations and characters, of manipulating time and the use of technical resources so that his films offer a coherent identity. The objective is to analyze the different components of his images, to show how his films communicate with each other in order to create something unique. To achieve this objective, I put forward the hypothesis that Wong’s cinema is marked by a dualistic structure that allows his films to present opposite qualities at the same time. Most of my arguments are based on the thoughts of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, whose own dualistic theory of cinema presented in his books Cinema 1: the movement-image and Cinema 2: the time-image, provides a valid framework upon which Wong’s films can be projected. While the research concentrates on the textual analysis of films, I will also benefit from comparative analysis and additional disciplines.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 64-67).