East Asia by the Book! CEAS Author Talks: Giorgio Biancorosso - "Remixing Wong Kar-Wai" - Paola Iovene
Giorgio Biancorosso will discuss his book Remixing Wong Kar-wai: Music, Bricolage, and the Aesthetics of Oblivion. He will be joined in conversation with Paola Iovene.
At the Franke Institute for the Humanities
About the Book: Like his fellow filmmakers Stanley Kubrick, Quentin Tarantino, and Sofia Coppola, Wong Kar-wai crafts the soundtracks of his films by jettisoning original scores in favor of commercial recordings. In Remixing Wong Kar-wai, Giorgio Biancorosso examines the combinatorial practice at the heart of Wong’s cinema to retheorize musical borrowing, appropriation, and repurposing. Wong’s irrepressible penchant for poaching music from other films—whether old Chinese melodramas, Hollywood blockbusters, or European art films—subsumes familiar music under his own brand of cinema. As Wong combs through musical and cinematic archives and splices disparate music together, exceedingly well-known music loses its previous associations and acquires an infinite new constellation of meanings in his films. Drawing on Claude Lévi-Strauss’s concept of bricolage, Biancorosso contends that Wong’s borrowing is akin to a practice of creative destruction in which Wong becomes a bricoleur who remixes music at hand to create new and complete, self-sustaining statements. By outlining Wong’s modus operandi of indiscriminate borrowing and remixing, Biancorosso prompts readers to reconsider the significance of transforming preexisting music into new compositions for film and beyond.
About the Author: Giorgio Biancorosso’s work investigates the boundaries of music and sound in the theater, cinema and digital media. He is the author of Situated Listening: The Sound of Absorption in Classical Cinema (Oxford University Press, 2016) and Remixing Wong Kar Wai: Music, Bricolage, and the Aesthetics of Oblivion (Duke University Press, 2024). Biancorosso is the co-founder and editor of the journal SSS (Sound-Stage-Screen) and the co-editor of Scoring Italian Cinema: Patterns of Collaboration (Routledge, forthcoming).
Biancorosso is Professor of Music and inaugural director of the Society of Fellows at The University of Hong Kong. He is currently 2024-25 Luce East Asia Fellow in Musicology at the National Humanities Center, N.C.
About the Discussant: Paola Iovene is Associate Professor in Chinese Literature, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, at the University of Chicago.
EAST ASIA BY THE BOOK! CEAS AUTHOR TALKS SERIES
The East Asia by the Book! CEAS Author Talks series showcases CEAS faculty, alumni, and special guests who provide author talks and book launches as a way to engage the broader community in conversations regarding key scholarship on East Asia. This series features a presentation by the author(s) that is often facilitated through conversation with a discussant, following by a question and answer session with the audience. For more information on the series, follow the link here: https://ceas.uchicago.edu/events/east-asia-the-book-ceas-author-talks
PHOTOGRAPHY/VIDEOGRAPHY
Please note that there may be photography taken during this educational event by the University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies for archival and publicity purposes. By attending this event, participants are confirming their permission to be photographed and the University of Chicago’s right to use, distribute, copy, and edit the recordings in any form of media for non-commercial, educational purposes, and to grant rights to third parties to do any of the foregoing.
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