Abstract: Paying particular attention to the growth of commissioned short film and video art as part of the network of paratexts that fosters transnational auteur culture, this chapter examines artworks made in-between feature films which also function as paratexts created and performed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul and his collaborators. The formal elements in these works, shaped through different intertextual connections, experiment with different filmmaking strategies and collaborations to allow the exploration of a self-reflexive auteur persona. Embraced by fans and circulated on different platforms over time, the creation and re-circulation of these short films/paratexts illuminates the filmmaker's way of strategically locating himself within local sociopolitical contexts and global film and art worlds. These materials also offer a glimpse of future exploration on authorship that engages more with the process and practice of co-creation.

Keywords: short film, performance, persona, self-reflexivity, co-creation

Expanding out of the process in which the knowledge of a filmmaker as an auteur has been formulated through various practices and paratextual creations by institutional and cinephilic agents, as discussed in Part I, this and the following two chapters explore filmmakers’ own ways of responding to their assigned authorial positionings, and to the changing conditions shaping their lives and works. I am particularly interested in the way individual filmmakers choose their own mode and medium of self-projection in response to the positioning of them as public figures along the lines of a star/celebrity. Each of my three representative filmmakers responds to their authorial reputations in vastly different ways. Focusing on the Thai filmmaker/intermedial artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul, this chapter pays particular attention to the use of commissioned short films and a self-projected interview as ways to negotiate a sense of self with long-term collaborators in various contexts. Chapter 5 discusses the self-confessions and performative excess of Kim Ki-duk which reveal performative strategies to develop cult authorship amidst the context of controversies and subsequent media call-outs. Chapter 6 expands the focus on directors’ self-projections to the championing of a celebrity auteur via self-branding, collaborations with transnational fashion industry and high-end brands, as well as fan embodiments of Wong Kar-wai star-auteur persona. Subsequently, these three chapters signal the close ties between film authorship, the development of self-projection in the art world, and star/persona/celebrity studies in today's media landscapes.