Abstract: Placing the growth of East Asian film authorship within the context of new cinephilia and transcultural film fans, this chapter draws attention to the vernacular participations of auteur culture via user-generated paratexts. Examining official and fan-made mash-ups, collectible objects, and stories of cinephile pilgrimages related to the Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai, the chapter explores the way film authorship has proliferated outside the domain of the film industry, and through discourses that both reaffirm and challenge previous conceptions of film authorship in relation to East Asian cinema.

Keywords: cinephilia, fan culture, intertextuality, collectibles, fan pilgrimage

Wong Kar-wai made his directorial debut with the Hong Kong action-drama film As Tears Go By in 1988, compared to Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets (1973) by critics (Lee, 2021, para. 5; Tambling, 2003, p. 1). The movie gained good box office receipts, won two Hong Kong Film Festival awards and was screened non-competitively at the Cannes Film Festival (Lee & Lee, 2017, p. 20; Semaine de la Critique, n.d.). By 2018, the film had reached its 30th anniversary and the Hong Kong-based newspaper South China Morning Post published a reflection on Wong's career covering all of his ten films to date, ranking them “from good to great” (Lee E., 2018). Noting that Wong turned 60 the previous year, the article encouraged its readers to check out “some of the finest Chinese-language films ever made” (Lee E., 2018, para. 2) in case they were not familiar already.

In 2016, despite not having released new films for a few years, the director continued to gain extensive attention through a network of paratextual references to his past body of work by academics, news outlets, and a growing generation of fan artists. Apart from English-language monographs on the director published from 2005 onwards (cf. Bettinson, 2015; Brunette, 2005; Teo, 2005), a substantial edited collection, A Companion to Wong Kar-wai, was also released with 25 essays on various dimensions of the director's works (see Nochimson, 2016). In the same year, there was a children's book, The ZOO-vre of Wong Kar-wai, being shared on Twitter; this was made by the filmmaker and art therapists Isaac and Valerie Chung and featured all of Wong's ten films with quirky pages such as an image of two cows eating in a restaurant with the caption “in the moo for love” (Chang, 2016).