왕가위 영화의 비선형적 시간성과 감정의 지속 = Nonlinear Temporality and the Persistence of Affect in the Films of Wong Kar-wai

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This article examines the films of Wong Kar-wai by rethinking cinematic time not as a narrative principle that advances events toward resolution, but as a condition through which emotions are generated, delayed, repeated, and transformed. Wong Kar-wai’s films are marked by recurrent temporal markers—clocks, dates, seasons, expiration dates, and repetitive music—which clearly signal a heightened sensitivity to time. While previous studies have addressed these elements in relation to thematic symbolism, postmodern presentism, or the historical and cultural context surrounding Hong Kong before and after the 1997 handover, they have not sufficiently explained how time operates as an affective structure in which emotions persist and mutate beyond events. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's concept of the time-image and Henri Bergson's notion of durée, this study conceptualizes time in Wong Kar-wai’s cinema as an affective temporality in which perception and emotion remain suspended after action is deferred or exhausted. In these films, repetition does not function as the reproduction of identical events or feelings, but as a generative condition through which emotions recur with different intensities and rhythms. This temporal logic resonates with Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the plateau, which describes a non-linear state of duration that does not converge toward beginnings or endings but persists in the middle as a field of intensities. Through close analyses of Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express, Ashes of Time, In the Mood for Love, 2046, Eros: The Hand, and The Grandmaster, this article traces how affective time in Wong Kar-wai’s films is progressively articulated through images, memory, bodily gesture, posture, and rhythm. Rather than representing time as a thematic motif, Wong Kar-wai’s cinema constructs a distinctive cinematic form that enables spectators to sensorially experience the persistence and transformation of emotion over time. In doing so, his films propose a mode of cinematic thinking in which time is not resolved but endured, felt, and continually reconfigured.