Wong Kar-Wai Retrospective Opens with Wong in Person for NY premiere of Grandmaster on August 10

Wong Kar-wai, the influential Hong Kong Second Wave filmmaker, internationally renowned for his visually dazzling and emotionally resonant work, will be the subject of a retrospective at Museum of the Moving Image from July 12 through August 24, 2013. The New York premiere of The Grandmaster on August 10, with Wong Kar-wai in person, is the centerpiece of this comprehensive retrospective, which includes theatrical screenings of all ten of the director's feature films. The Grandmaster, a wuxia epic and biopic which marks the auteur's astonishing return to genre filmmaking, is being released by The Weinstein Company on August 23.

As his films have garnered widespread critical acclaim, Wong Kar-wai has become one of the most influential film directors of his generation. His impressionistic, evocative movies capture the fleeting nature of time and love and the chaotic swirl of contemporary life. They frequently feature protagonists who yearn for romance in the midst of a knowingly brief life and scenes that can often be described as digressive, exhilarating, and containing vivid imagery. These millennial-defining works are among the most celebrated and critically significant films of the Hong Kong Second Wave.

With his eagerly awaited new movie, The Grandmaster, he reinvents the martial arts genre while reuniting Tony Leung and Zhang Ziyi, the stars of his science-fiction epic 2046. The film follows the storied life of Ip Man-Bruce Lee's mentor-through moments of major historical overturn in China, from the end of the Sino-Japanese War to the Imperial British rule over Hong Kong, in sublime elliptical action-vignettes.

The series was organized by Assistant Film Curator Aliza Ma and Chief Curator David Schwartz.

The series will be accompanied with an online symposium on Reverse Shot. Special thanks to The Weinstein Company and Kino Lorber.

SCHEDULE FOR 'WONG KAR-WAI,' JULY 12-AUGUST 24, 2013
All screenings take place at Museum of the Moving Image, 36-01 35 Avenue in Astoria. Screenings are included with Museum admission and free for Museum members unless otherwise noted. Tickets for Friday evening screenings (when the Museum offers free gallery admission) are $12 adults / $9 students and senior citizens.

Chungking Express
FRIDAY, JULY 12, 7:00 P.M.
Dir. Wong Kar-wai. 1994, 98 mins. 35mm. With Takeshi Kaneshiro, Brigitte Lin, Tony Leung Chiu-Wai. With all the speed and polyphony of the mega-city, Chungking Express is a definitive and sui-generis millennial city-symphony. Shot on location with a small crew on a short hiatus during the production of Ashes of Time, Wong pays homage to Hong Kong by posing two contemporaneous stories of strange love against each other. The dual plot follows lonely cop 223 (Takeshi Kaneshiro) and his pursuit of a mysterious blond-wigged woman (Brigitte Lin) in Kowloon, and the "accidental" meetings between lonely cop 663 (Tony Leung) with playful and quirky Faye (Faye Wong) in Lan Kwai Feng, both linked by the sensational fast food stand, the "Midnight Express." With some of Chris Doyle's most intoxicating cinematography on display, the film's surrounding architecture is brilliantly fused with its own electrifying formal design.

Fallen Angels
SATURDAY, JULY 13, 7:00 P.M.
Dir. Wong Kar-wai. 1995, 96 mins. 35mm. With Leon Lai, Michelle Reis. This nourish prelude to Chungking Express was derived from the third act of its screenplay, and filmed in the same claustrophobic spaces of Tsim Sha Tsui. Fallen Angels is a thrilling ride into the nocturnal doomed love lives of a few solipsistic beautiful outlaws: a nihilistic killer-for-hire, his agent, femme fatale Blondie, and-in a parallel universe-delinquent Ho Chi Moo and little Charlie. Hyperstylized in delectable wide-angle shots in both high-contrast black-and-white and searing colors, Fallen Angels is one of Wong's most stunning films.

Happy Together
SUNDAY, JULY 14, 6:00 P.M.
Dir. Wong Kar-wai. 1997, 96 min. 1997, 96 mins. 35mm. With Leslie Cheung, Tony Leung Chiu-Wai. Recalling the magical realism that Wong admired in the Latin American literature of Manuel Puig and Julio Cortazar, Happy Together begins as a road movie-following two male lovers as they journey from Hong Kong to Argentina on a quest to see the great Iguazu Falls and achieve some stability in their volatile relationship-and gradually transforms into a piercing, revelatory rumination on loneliness, self-destruction, and amour fou. Emboldened by Chris Doyle's lush cinematography and featuring remarkable performances from its two stars, Happy Together was one of Wong's most internationally acclaimed films, garnering him Best Director prize at Cannes in 1997. "From afar (Buenos Aires is Hong Kong's antipodes), [Wong] crystallizes the anxieties and hopes of Hong Kong people on the eve of the return to China," wrote Tony Rayns.

Ashes of Time Redux
SUNDAY, JULY 21, 2:00 P.M.
Dir. Wong Kar-wai. 2008, 100 mins. 35mm. With Leslie Cheung, Tony Leung Ka-fai, Brigitte Lin, Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Carina Lau, Charlie Yeung, Jacky Cheung, Maggie Cheung. Prompted by a necessary undertaking to preserve the original 1994 film's surviving elements, Ashes of Time Redux is not merely a restoration but a stunning reorchestration of Wong's sweeping wuxia epic, creating an even more intensified expression of the director's singular sense of cinematic construction. Wong's second feature, shot on location near Mongolia in Mainland China, chronicles the encounters and interlocking love triangles between a group of wandering swordsmen, bounty hunters, and other shadowy characters against the entropic spiral of a staggering desertscape. Both expansive and intimate, and featuring a veritable galaxy of Hong Kong superstars and stylized fight sequences, Ashes remains one of the greatest and most unique achievements in the wuxia genre. As the director himself has said, "[It's] more than a standard martial arts film; it's Shakespeare meets Sergio Leone in Chinese."

Days of Being Wild
SUNDAY, AUGUST 4, 5:30 P.M.
Dir. Wong Kar-wai. 1990, 94 mins. 35mm. With Leslie Cheung, Andy Lau, Maggie Cheung, Carina Lau. Marking Wong Kar-wai's first film with two of his key collaborators-cinematographer Chris Doyle and set designer William Chang-Days of Being Wild was a box-office disappointment but a runaway critical success, and was soon hailed as a key work of the Hong Kong Second Wave. The first in Wong's triptych of scintillating unrequited love stories (followed by In the Mood for Love and 2046), Days of Being Wild chronicles the tempestuous relationships between playboy heartbreaker Yuddy and his romantic victims Lulu and Li Su Zhen, celebrating the reckless exuberance of youth while overlaying it with a wistful sense of ephemerality. Personifying Hong Kong's anticipatory anxieties for its future and a longing tenderness for its past memories, Days of Being Wild is perhaps "cinema's ultimate unfinished masterpiece" (Sam Ho).

As Tears Go By
SFRIDAY, AUGUST 9, 7:00 P.M.
Dir. Wong Kar-wai. 1988, 102 mins. 35mm. With Andy Lau, Maggie Cheung, Jackie Cheung. Wong's impressive debut As Tears Go By is a gangster film with all the brazen audacity of its characters. Filled with his characteristic themes of alienation and longing, the story follows gangster and drifter Ah Wah as he tries to protect his friend Fly from slipping into fatal danger with a large gang and falls in love with youthful and vibrant Ah-Ngor. Although often critically eclipsed by his later works, it is an early masterpiece. "Drenched in romanticism, it has one of the great music montages in Hong Kong film," writes David Bordwell, "and a finale that you feel lifting from genre formula to pictorial poetry."

NEW YORK PREMIERE:
The Grandmaster
With director Wong Kar-wai in person
SATURDAY, AUGUST 10, 8:00 P.M.
Dir. Wong Kar-wai. 2013, 123 mins. DCP courtesy of The Weinstein Company. With Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Zhang Ziyi, Chen Chang. Wong's most recent feature marks his seventh collaboration with leading man Tony Leung Chiu- Wai and the auteur's astonishing return to genre filmmaking. A wuxia epic and biopic which possesses the spirit and levity of a King Hu masterpiece, the film follows the storied life of Ip Man-Bruce Lee's mentor- through moments of major historical overturn in China, from the end of the Sino-Japanese War to the Imperial British rule over Hong Kong, in sublime elliptical action-vignettes. Reinvigorating wuxia form with inimitable aesthetic grandeur and complex narrative strategies, The Grandmaster brilliantly synthesizes elemental principles of kung fu with tenets of historical national discourse to striking revelatory ends.
TICKETS: $25 public / $15 Museum members / free for Silver Screen members and above. Advance tickets are available to Museum members exclusively until July 19 when tickets will go on sale to the public.

My Blueberry Nights
SUNDAY, AUGUST 18, 7:00 P.M.
Director Wong Kar-wai. 2007, 95 min. 35mm. With Norah Jones, Jude Law, Rachel Weisz, Natalie Portman, David Strathairn. Wong's first feature film in English is a dreamy, exhilarating road movie with Norah Jones-in her film debut-as a heart-broken woman who leaves New York City and takes a soul-searching trip across America, from Memphis to Las Vegas. Along the way she encounters a series of offbeat characters including a compulsive, desperate gambler and a melancholic cop drinking himself into oblivion.

In the Mood for Love
FRIDAY, AUGUST 23, 7:00 P.M.
Director Wong Kar-wai. 2000, 98 mins. 35mm. With Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Maggie Cheung, Rebecca Pan. With Fei Mu's Spring in a Small Town (1948) and Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) amongst its inspirations, In the Mood for Love evokes the Golden Age of Shanghai romantic melodrama while transcending it in its luscious and exacting formal design. Unfolding in languorous dream-time-despite all the clocks on the screen, the film's chronology is sometimes traceable only by Maggie Cheung's dazzling assortment of cheongsam-to the unforgettable score by Shigeru Umebayashi, In the Mood chronicles the intense friendship and sublimated desires between two mutually cuckolded neighbors in its tale of passion tragically thwarted. Winner of the Technical Grand Prize at Cannes for its elegant mise-enscene-the Wong-Chris Doyle- William Chang trifecta assisted by long-time Hou Hsiao-hsien cinematographer Le Ping Bin-In the Mood for Love is one of cinema's greatest odes to longing and desire.

2046
SATURDAY, AUGUST 24, 5:00 P.M.
Director Wong-Kar wai. 2004, 129 mins. 35mm. With Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Gong Li, Faye Wong, Takuya Kimura, Carina Lau, Zhang Ziyi, Maggie Cheung. Written almost at the same time with In the Mood for Love and weaving together narrative strands and characters from both that film and Days of Being Wild, 2046 completes Wong's loose triptych of unrequited love stories set in bygone "GoldenAges." The film's title refers simultaneously to the hotel room where Mood's Chow Mo-wan and Li Su-zhen nearly consummated theiraffair, the futuristic dystopia that Chow creates in a series of pulp novels, and the fateful year when the "One Country, Two Systems" regime will expire in Hong Kong following the Mainland handover. 2046 takes the viewer on a train ride through time to destinations unknown, introduces new characters (a futuristic Japanese traveller, a female android) and resurrects familiar ones (Mood's Chow and Li, Days's Lulu) to reveal markedly and mysteriously different facets of their perpetually protean selves.

Museum of the Moving Image (movingimage.us) advances the understanding, enjoyment, and appreciation of the art, history, technique, and technology of film, television, and digital media. In January 2011, the Museum reopened after a major expansion and renovation that nearly doubled its size. Accessible, innovative, and forward-looking, the Museum presents exhibitions, education programs, significant moving-image works, and interpretive programs, and maintains a collection of moving-image related artifacts.