Hong Sang-soo

 

with actress Kim Min-hee

Hong Sang-soo was born in Seoul, South Korea to a father from North Korea and a mother from South Korea, studying film at the Chung-Ang University there, but got a BFA at California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland and an MFA at the Art Institute of Chicago, while also studying at the Cinemathèque Française in Paris.  Hong is known for complicated narratives, sometimes showing the same events twice, each time through a different character's eyes, but also for the most obnoxious male characters on the planet, especially in his early films, usually grotesquely overbearing, with bad manners and a tendency to get drunk and hop into bed with younger girls, as usually they are artists or professors sleeping with younger students, where they perform miserably if at all.  Impotency is a key ingredient, even if only psychological, as his characters remain in a state of inertia.  He's certainly a minimalist, writes his own films, and remains perhaps the last of the Independent film movement left in South Korean cinema which mostly produces technically polished genre pictures featuring crime, violence, sci-fi fantasy, sex, or politics.  He's left alone to make films in his own universe, though NIGHT AND DAY (2008) was partially financed by France and was filmed in Paris, gaining a more prominent international standing.  Critics love to call him the Éric Rohmer of the East, as his films are nearly all dialogue, examining relationships in much the same way, but that may be misleading, as Hong is far more confrontational in his use of deluded and misbehaving men, using complex narrative schemes in creating a far more experimental style all his own, as his films are a devastating critique of befuddled male abhorrence, where it’s fair to say the abominable behavior on display is universal, the ultimate power play option where men are constantly trying to get the upper hand even while they’re flailing away in utter futility.  They simply refuse to admit their weaknesses, even when they’re caught in the act, juvenile, delusional figures prone to awkwardness and miscommunication.  While not everyone gets this director, none of his films register as a Wow factor, instead they are all low key, intimate, and conversational.  He has an extremely naturalistic style of storytelling, creating a compelling atmosphere, where the first thing that stands out is a complete lack of artifice, particularly in his first few films when he was shooting among the best sex sequences in the modern era, as there are simply no inhibitions, but men are boorish and women are mysteriously attracted to their authority. 

Hong’s delicate plots have the precision and sly wit of Rohmer, the attentive gaze of Ozu, and the pervasive alienation of Antonioni, often set in conspicuously deserted vacation spots, smoky, dimly lit restaurants, and sparse apartments, fueled by amply-flowing Soju and romantic complications.  His impulsive men and resilient women are characters who are never as simple as they seem, engaging in love triangles and verbal sparring that teem with flirtation, misunderstanding, and self-revelation.  Hong came of age during the tumultuous period toward the end of South Korea’s military dictatorship, successfully transitioning to a full democracy in 1987, where a crisis of masculinity captured the anxiety of shifting social norms amid the transition.  With a penchant to revisit the past, Hong’s melancholy intellectuals, artists, filmmakers, professors, and actors, drift through the present moment lost somewhere between their art and real life.  His films are deceptively simple on the surface, focusing on banal, everyday human interactions, which appear to be made up of entirely random or spontaneous dialogue, nothing different from what you might overhear in a café, yet have dense and subtle shades of meaning, which initially seems like a contradiction, where they blend together in look and style, like a new episode in an extended serial narrative, sharing common elements of drinking rituals, male vanity, a resolute failure to learn from mistakes, yet also moments of tenderness and beauty which almost redeems the earlier clumsiness.  Hong’s films generally take the form of a chamber play, with a cast of recurring characters and players set in the decades after South Korea’s transition to democracy, playing out in a consistently middle-class milieu.  Their signature frame is of a man and a woman sitting at a table littered with empty bottles of alcohol.  Conversation will be awkward, sometimes agonizingly so, and this will be exacerbated by Hong’s proclivity for plain framing and long takes, where there will be little action and lots of talking, but despite this, the characters will never overcome some fundamental inability to communicate.  His characters are filled with boorish characters showing past regret and bad alcohol-fueled decisions, only to wake up again the next day and make the same bad decisions all over again, making them easy to identify with and easy to despise.  It would be comical if it wasn’t so real, as humanity is overflowing with mistakes and flaws, as we rarely live up to the kind of person we imagine for ourselves.  Gorgeously photographed and filled with startlingly fresh performances which are as Korea-specific as anything you’ll find, not just moving portraits of broken lovers, but characters who are deeply suspicious of reunifications of any sort, exploring the most difficult regions of his politically and geographically fractured nation’s historical divide. 

As his career progressed, Hong also spent time teaching screenwriting at the Korean National University of Arts (KNUA), launching his own production company Jeonwonsa in 2004, carving out a space outside the traditional film industry, insulating his work from the scrutiny demanded by larger productions.  Making 35 features over the past 30 years, Hong is arguably the most prolific filmmaker on the planet, typically making low-budget films for only $50,000 to $100,000, often serving as the writer, director, producer, cinematographer, editor, and musical composer among other roles, which affords him the freedom to work extremely quickly and with very limited means, where there is a Letterboxd Director Profile for Hong Sangsoo.  Hong embraces the power of spontaneity and improvisation, usually withholding the script until the day of the shoot, developing the scenes and dialogue day by day with the actors, which may explain his elusive style, working quickly on the set and in the post production, as his films may be fully edited just days or weeks after the film is finished shooting.  Coming out of the generation of New Korean Cinema, with the end of the nation’s military rule and the relaxing of government censorship, Korean film experienced a kind of renaissance, where familiarity with Hollywood genre films has made directors like Bong Joon-ho and Park Chan-wook into household names, yet Hong is unique for never venturing into commercial fare, as his films have only gotten smaller and smaller in budget.  Unafraid to make movies with short runtimes, this allows him to work faster, more cost effectively, and embrace stories that might not otherwise be told, while self-financing all his films, which leaves the power of production in his hands.  Starting with WOMAN IS THE FUTURE OF MAN (2004), Hong has been making variations of the same film, where a professor or esteemed professional meets with a group of students or admirers, spending the duration of the film smoking and eating noodles, also drinking profusely and behaving badly in a culture that is otherwise dominated by male power, yet with TALE OF CINEMA (2005), Hong has increasingly used stylistic methods to advance the narrative, where only in the second half of that film do we realize we’re watching a film-within-a film.  In The Day He Arrives (Book chon bang hyang) (2011), Hong creates a disorienting effect with a filmmaker visiting the same bar on three different occasions, yet viewers may have a hard time distinguishing whether these are different days or a continuation of the same frame of mind, where the confounding effect is reflective of the continuing instability of growing up in a peaceful and wealthy country that’s still living in the midst of the Cold War, as there’s always a potential for the eruption of violence.  

Hong was initially inspired by Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (Journal d'un curé de campagne) (1951) as a formative influence, yet he was equally inspired by Cézanne, whose art created the foundation for Cubism by using geometric shapes, multiple viewpoints, and breaking down traditional perspective.  While studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the late 80’s, several of Cézanne’s paintings were on display, with Hong describing his love for the painter many times, calling his work “perfect,” “flawless,” a balance of the abstract and the concrete.  Hong’s films are as mundane as Cézanne’s bowl of apples, which he painted hundreds of times, transporting the tedious and monotonous into terrestrial realms.  Since 2010 Hong has consistently and radically reinvented his approach to the medium, from the repurposing of his signature zoom as a vehicle that balances between comedic and tragic registers, to his mesmeric utilization of repetition, ellipses, and general temporal disruption.  More recently, Hong’s tone has shifted from insecure males toward the perspectives of women, perhaps coinciding with his much publicized romantic relationship with actress Kim Min-hee, which began with 2016 Top Ten List #8 Right Now, Wrong Then (Ji-geum-eun-mat-go-geu-ddae-neun-teul-li-da), which may be a marker for the beginning of the current phase of Hong’s career, with the actress working exclusively with Hong after that, while also making two films with French actress Isabelle Huppert, In Another Country (Da-reun na-ra-e-seo) (2012) and Claire's Camera (La caméra de Claire) (2017).  These collaborations reflect a continuing addition of new aesthetic ideas, transitioning from the foibles of his self-centered male protagonists to films in which the male consciousness is secondary, if not entirely absent from the film, creating instead new complex relationship dynamics that may reflect the speed of his working methods, allowing Kim and other actors the freedom to use their own experience.  In later films like On the Beach at Night Alone (Bamui haebyun-eoseo honja) (2017), Hotel by the River (Gangbyeon Hotel) (2018), The Woman Who Ran (Domangchin yeoja) (2020), In Front of Your Face (Dangsin-eolgul-apeseo) (2021), and By the Stream (Suyoocheon) (2024), the narrative arc is almost entirely determined by the interactions between women.  This same period since 2015 has coincided with a resurgent feminist movement in South Korea and an increasingly vitriolic backlash.  For “post-political” men of the mid-20th century, the lack of political potential came with the promise of meritocratic, economic ascendancy untroubled by political strife, but it’s always the women for whom this atemporal vacuum has never been conceivable, whether due to the presence of sexual violence or persistently unequal living standards.  Over time, it has become abundantly clear that each of Hong’s films are part of something larger, a broader canvas, and the most illuminating way both to view and consider these films is as a total body of work.  With that in mind, this month we’ll explore some of his more recent films that haven’t always been readily available or properly evaluated, all pieces of the same puzzle. 

 

Filming/No Filming. Notes on the latest films of Hong Sang- ...   Sulgi Lie from Media Commons, November 27, 2023

Curator's Note

Since Introduction (2021) at the latest, a new metafilmic tendency has emerged in Hong Sang-soo’s meandering body of work or, better still, in the non-body of his works: they are all films that attempt to fathom the non-making or non-ability to make films from different perspectives. Whatever the reasons for their impossibility, the film projects—whether past or future, desired or promised, planned or spontaneous—in Introduction, In Front of Your Face (2021), The Novelist’s Film (2022), Walk Up (2022), In Water (2023), and In Our Day (2023)  turn out to be unrealizable: they demonstrate to us the failure of movies. Even in those films in which the film-within-a-film supposedly succeeds in the end, as in The Novelist’s Film, doubt creeps in as to whether the finished film will see the light of day at all or be kept under lock and key as an unsuccessful or unfinished film. While Hong’s earlier films, such as Tale of Cinema (2005) or Oki’s Movie (2010), each follow programmatically from their titles, Hong’s new works share a logic of Filming/No Filming, a variation on Alain Resnais’s Smoking/No Smoking (1993), which is about nothing other than filming the No Filming, the non-filming.

Hong’s paradoxical maneuver of staging the non-existence of a film as a film has its literary equivalent in the practice of the diary, on which Maurice Blanchot once wrote that it represents a protective device against the actual act of writing and exposes the great work that is to be written to an eternal postponement. Blanchot even goes as far to claim that the writer only keeps a diary of the work that can never be written. In a more contemporary sense, the diary could be understood as a specific technique of procrastination that writes down the fact of writer’s block itself. If you can’t write, you write about the fact that you can’t write. And if you can’t make a movie, you make a movie out of it. Blanchot says the following about the insignificant nature of the diary: “In the diary there is, as it were, a pleasant mutual compensation of two equally important facts. He who does nothing with his life writes that he does nothing with it, and so at least something is done. Those who allow the fleeting events of everyday life to keep them from writing turn to these fleeting events and tell of them by describing them or finds pleasure in them, and his day is already filled.” While in Hong’s earlier films, the film-within-a-film—even if it is usually only retrospectively marked as such—materializes before the viewer’s eyes, the more recent films withdraw this treacherous quasi-object from visualization.

But the fact that the film-within-a-film is shifted into negation does not mean that it does not take on an imaginary existence as an absent figure in the mind of the viewer, who can imagine the unmade film as a possible film in the imagination. As is so often the case with Hong, this virtualization of the film-within-a-film is set in motion by a prior verbalization of the visual, by means of which the idea of a possible film gains contour—a process that is also referred to in art history as “ekphrasis.” Hong only uses this device to subtly undermine it, as the focus is usually not on a finished image or finished film that could then be described verbally afterward, but on a vague verbal or written sketch, of which it is unclear whether it will ever make the leap into visualization. Hong shows us that every film based on a screenplay always brings a proleptic ekphrasis into play, in which the audiovisual form of the film based on it is never determined in advance, unless one believes Hitchcock’s bon mot that filming bored him because it merely realized his mental cinema. In Hong’s case, however, the relationship between the preliminary script and the subsequent film becomes even more complicated because, as we know, there is no “script” or even a Hitchcockian storyboard at the start of shooting, but only a fragment of a screenplay, a rudimentary sketch that’s only completed or unfinished in the process of filming. If Hong’s production method is already based on a radically precarious form of ekphrasis, it’s perhaps not surprising that the projected films in his movies also remain in an unfinished project status.

However, in the films, the reasons for no-filming are manifold and by no means only attributable to the creative block of the filmmakers portrayed, as the unwillingness to act is also rampant among the actors: In Introduction, Young-ho (Shin Seok-ho) is asked by his mother to meet with a famous older actor (played by Hong regular, Gi Ju-bong), who’s been tasked to motivate Young-ho to resume his acting studies. The meeting is ill-starred from the start, as Young-ho brings his friend (Ha Seong-guk) along without prior notice, thus breaking the rules of politeness. After emptying a few bottles of soju in an uncomfortable mood, Young-ho explains to his mother and mentor-to-be why he gave up acting: during the shooting of a student film, his role demanded he kiss a girl.

See Figure 1 from Introduction (2021) in the website gallery above.

Out of a guilty conscience towards his girlfriend Ju-won (Park Mi-so), he was unable to play the kiss, as the acting of faking feelings suddenly seemed fundamentally wrong and dishonest to him. As a result, he dropped out of university. Hearing this, the older actor—now thoroughly drunk—loses his temper and screams at Young-ho: it doesn’t matter whether the feelings are real or fake; every touch between a man and a woman is love. In Introduction, the student film does not materialize because Young-ho refuses to accept the fictitiousness of fiction and insists on the sincerity of feelings, that they can never be “acted.” The older actor takes the diametrically opposed position by insisting that even fake feelings are real. While Hong’s films deny the viewer flippant moral judgments of his protagonists, in Introduction, sympathy for Young-ho prevails, who not only suffers under the pressure of authority, but also represents a different ethic of love in art and in life.

In Hong’s next film, In Front of Your Face (2021), the planned movie-within-a-movie fails to materialize not because of youthful sincerity, but masculine contemptibility. One of a long line of Hong’s ridiculous men, director Jae-won (Kwon Hae-hyo) once again stands out in particular: the formerly famous actress Sang-ok (Lee Hye-young, the daughter of director Lee Man-hee) returns to Korea from the United States. At a meeting with Jae-won, who does not hide his admiration for her, she confesses to him over a few glasses of schnapps that she is terminally ill and does not have long to live. Jaewon begins to cry and promises Sang-ok that he will make one last intimate short film with her. He would also love to sleep with her. The tearful promise of an epitaph is followed the next day by its breaking, the baseness of which is drastic even by Hong’s standards. By voicemail, Jae-won takes back everything he had promised her so pathetically before, blaming it on the alcohol: it was just drunken blather, the promise not sincerely meant, words quickly forgotten.

See Figure 2 from In Front of Your Face (2021) in the website gallery above.

What we will not forget, however, is Sang-ok’s long laughter, the laughter that breaks out from her after hearing the message, that carries the deep pain caused by this insincere man and the ridicule he so rightly deserves: Hahaha with a vengeance.

If every Hong film is always a repetition and a sequel to an earlier Hong film, then The Novelist’s Film (2022) can be seen as a direct replica of In Front of Your Face, in which Lee Hye-young gets her well-deserved revenge on Kwon Hae-hyo: On a trip to a suburb of Seoul, Lee, playing Jun-hee, a writer who hasn’t written anything in a long time, accidentally meets a well-known director—played by Kwon Hae-hyo of course—who once offered to adapt one of her books, which ultimately never materialized. With visible discomfort, the director tries to explain that it was not him but the “top dogs,” i.e., the producers above him, who were responsible for this decision. It is obvious that this is an outright lie, otherwise, the director would not have hidden from Junhee and confronted her only at his wife’s request. But Jun-hee’s resentment towards him only really erupts when she, the director, and his wife meet by chance in the park Gil-soo (Kim Min-hee), an actress who, for unknown reasons, is no longer acting. When the director expresses his regret over this and claims that she’s wasting her talent, Jun-hee snaps at him: Where does he get the right to judge the decisions and paternalistically patronize Gil-soo? In Front of Your Face: Is this not the double revenge for two failed films? In any case, the situation becomes unpleasant, the director and his wife leave, while Jun-hee and Gil-soo engage in friendly conversation. Jun-hee tells Gil-soo that she has always wanted to make a short film; she wants her to act in it. No Filming/Filming: A writer unable to write, whose last film project failed to materialize because of a cowardly director unable to direct, meets an actress unable to act and wants to make a short film with her, even though she is not actually a filmmaker. At the end of the film, this novelist’s film actually comes to fruition, and Gil-soo watches it in the cinema, just like we, the viewers, see Jun-hee’s film, which changes from black and white to color, like at the iconic end of Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev (1966). So what is this short film about, this film where Jun-hee picks flowers and whispers to the camera “I love you”? It is nothing other than a film by Hong Sang-soo, who, standing behind the camera, uses his own voice to say “I love you” back to Kim Min-hee.

See Figure 3 from The Novelist’s Film (2022) in the website gallery above.

In this film of no filming, Hong Sang-soo uses his own highly private and intimate video diary, which records real fragments of insignificant life, to fictionalize an ingenious autofictional and metafictional twist as a writer’s film-within-a-film: The realest of life is de-realized into a fiction within a fiction. Hong thus fulfills the diary’s hope of being able to “elevate the meaningless life to the surprising stroke of luck of art and the formless art to the unique truth of life.” But ironically, even this romanticist life-as-movie-within-a-movie does not get the last word: in the last shot of the film, Gil-soo comes out of the theater visibly irritated, seemingly bothered by what she has just seen. It can therefore be assumed that this short film may never be released and will remain a private exercise for Jun-hee. No Filming: The film we see is negated by the viewer of herself.

Another variation of not being able to make films can be found in Walk Up (2022): Here, once again, Kwon Hae-hyo plays a director, Byung-soo, who meets Lee Hye-young playing a Mrs. Kim, in whose titular four-floor walk-up live several tenants that Byung-soo visits in the Hong-typical simultaneous succession. This time, the reason Byung-soo is tired of making films proves more mundane: there is simply not enough money. Gilles Deleuze once said that the movie will be over when there is no more money. At the end of Walk Up, the beleaguered Byung-soo stands in front of the tower house: he has just received the news that there will be no film because there was never money to begin with. If you group In Front of Your Face, The Novelist’s Film, and Walk Up into a trilogy, then the last can be read as gentle revenge on Kwon Hae-hyo, who in the first film refuses to make the film out of wretchedness, in the second film was unable to push through the promised film against the producers out of cowardice and opportunism, and is now condemned to no filming by the producers. So it is hardly surprising that he is not “up” in the last shot of Walk Up, but rather quite “down.”

See Figure 4 from Walk Up (2022) in the website gallery above.

In Water (2023) also continues this crisis of filmmaking: Three friends, cameraman Sang-guk (Ha Seong-guk), actress Nam-hee (Kim Seung-yun), and director Seung-mo (Shin Seok-ho), want to shoot a short film on Jeju Island, but the heavily melancholic Seung-mo has no real idea what to shoot. Once again, money is extremely tight; they procrastinate, in typical Hong fashion—until Seung-mo comes up with an idea after a chance encounter with a local garbage collector and a phone call with his ex-girlfriend (Kim Min-hee). And so, the crew slowly starts shooting. But what emerges at the end of this shoot is once again a “no movie,” as the line between reality and fiction is once again “blurred”—in the literal sense: In contrast to The Novelist’s Film, this suicidal movie-within-a-movie blurs the difference not between film and life, but film and death. In this respect, In Water is one of Hong’s darkest films, along with Hotel by the River (2019), which also inscribes the negation of the cinematic into its radically alienated visual texture: If one is used to low-definition images from Hong’s other films (especially In Front of Your Face), In Water—shot completely out of focus in parts, such that one can barely recognize the actors’ faces—‘lowers’ them even more

See Figure 5 from In Water (2023) in the website gallery above.

At the premiere of the film at the Berlinale, some viewers were irritated and wondered whether it was a projection error, but the ‘error’ was simply the film. In Water’s camera looks as if it’s been submerged in water or like a very nearsighted person without glasses. Autofictionally, it’s possible that the blurred images capture Hong’s deteriorating eyesight. Is this how Hong, who has also taken over the cinematography of his films since Introduction, sees the world? Or is the blurring aestheticizing, a pictorial effect aiming for mere beauty? On the contrary, Hong’s “understyle” is decidedly about the inferior quality of the (digital) image. The impressionist painting of a Monet is only invoked to undermine it: Nihilistic impressionism is what you could call the terrible beauty of the final image.The old poet Hong Ui-ju (Gi Ju-bong again) also suffers from the nihilism of a suicidal death drive in In Our Day: prescribed a strict ban on alcohol and nicotine by his doctor because of his ailing heart,  but tempted by his young admirers Ki-joo (Kim Seung-yun), who is making a documentary about him, and Jae-won (Ha Seoung-guk) to imbibe: Drinking or No Drinking? Meanwhile, Kim Min-hee as Sang-won, who has grown tired of acting and is living with her friend Jung-soo (Song Seon-mi) after a stay abroad, is visited by her young cousin Ji-soo (Park Mi-so), who naturally wants to study acting of all things. As in Introduction, Hong demonstrates anachronistic courtesy rituals between young and old, master and student, which turn out to be dysfunctional despite appearances, as the students never behave as respectfully as they pretend to. No one shows with greater socio-phenomenological precision than Hong how the forced performance of traditional hierarchies is actually an expression of their erosion. At the end of In Our Day, too, there is a final image that is as beautiful as it is terrible, as funny as it is tragic, as ridiculous as it is serious.

Video Essay, "The More You Look: Hong Sangsoo and Paul Cézanne"(BFI)  YouTube (5:13)