Some Notes on Hong Sang-Soo

The first highlight of the film year has been Harvard's Hong Sang-soo series, that played over the last weekend of January and first of February. They showed 8 of his 11 films, and he was there for two nights, doing the Q&A thing - all told, a very pleasing event. (Despite some god-awful weather outside.) He is an intriguing director, one who deserves thought - I'm not sure if I am quite ready to write anything too substantial about his films, though I'd like to. In the meanwhile - given that my thoughts are fragmentary and partial - I will offer some notes on his work, as well as his appearance at Harvard. (A big disadvantage of this approach, though, is that I find that I've made lots of casual references to the films - which are a definite challenge to find and see... I think, however, a lot of the things I mention here are present in enough of his films, that anyone who's seen a couple should be able to know what I'm talking about...)

1) As for the Q&A - these things can be a mixed blessing - some people thrive in those situations, others seem completely lost. Hong came off somewhere in the middle. He's a mumbler (maybe from jet lag? the weather? I don't know), and rather evasive. He circled questions, never quite addressing anything directly - making lots of claims to do it all on intuition, never you mind that AIC degree... Never mind as well the playfulness and patterning of the films themselves, their self-reflexivity, etc. In truth -it seems that he was trying to avoid some kinds of questions - "themes" - in fact, he spoke quite clearly about his working methods and ideas. You can see where the patterns and repetitions in his films come from, you can see the working methods that create the films he makes....

2) He talked about his films starting from everyday things - I could be wrong, but I suspect he means objects as much as incidents. His films have a powerful attention to objects - phones and wallets and clothes and things like cameras and cable cars, cars, and so on. They structure the films, markers of movements and changes; they are also the subject of many incidents - the scenes in Virgin Stripped Bare By her Bachelors discussing how to hold chopsticks, the passage of scarves in Tale of Cinema, Woman is the Future of Man, etc.... Virgin might do this the most - chopsticks in a couple scenes; napkins, forks or spoons, the cameras, gloves, the sheet, etc. Sometimes, the treatment of these objects does seem to carry meaning - like the talismanic nature of something like the red scarf in Woman is the Future of Man, or the contrast between the new video camera and the obsolete 8mm camera in Virgin, or the way Jingu in Oki's Movie riffs on the empty juice box...

3) Building on that - incidents cycle, of course, situations - repeated in films, repeated between films: losing/forgetting wallets (and money) - which happens in several films... things like the impotence and double suicide scenes in Turning Gate and repeated in Tale of Cinema... And more general types of scenes - walks with people in parks, nature, etc - Kangwon, Turning Gate, Oki's Movie... impromptu visits - Turning Gate, Woman is the Future of Man...

4) Structures - doubles and repetitions are absolutely fundamental to Hong's films. They are everywhere, at every level, taking many different forms, doing a number of different things. Repetition becomes a formal element, and not just a way of exploring perspective, or re-evaluating events. I mean - in some films, the repetition is purely formal: Virgin, for example, repeats the story twice, slightly differently - somewhat paradoxically, this makes it more about the content, about differing perspectives, about subjectivity... that quality is stronger still in films like Oki's Movie and Tale of Cinema, that acknowledge shifting levels of narration - that part of what we see is a film-in-a-film. But repetition also occurs in other ways: Oki's section of Oki's Movie, for instance, does this - showing two walks through a park, with 2 different men. This plot device - actions (sometimes words) being repeated, by the same characters, or other characters, happens quite often in Hong's films - Turning Gate's two parts show first a man pursued by a woman, then a man pursuing a woman - it repeats several moments and situations, and repeating old stories as well... Finally - events, episodes, etc. are repeated (as I've been saying) across films - plot elements (usually frustrated love triangles); the impotence/suicide episodes in Turning Gate and Tale of Cinema; all the other repetitions listed above (wallets, scarves, walks in parks, calling people the wrong name, etc.) Actors and character types recur - not quite with the obsessive formalization of an Ozu film, but with some similar effects... The result of all this is, in a way, to turn your attention away from questions about the material - the "modernist" questions of how individuals experience and process events - to questions about form - the more "post-modernist" (or formalist) question of the shapes themselves. Which may have psychological implications as well - as you shift from attention to how one experiences their own life, to how those experiences are inevitably shaped by form - how we experience things as repetitions, how we organize our experiences into patterns. How things today are given meaning by the contexts we put them in - by the things that have happened in the past - a process of sorting and classifying.

I don't know how much that has to do with what Hong Sang-soo is after in these films - though it is not impossible he's thinking on those lines. But it is an interesting phenomenon - and his method, of arranging individual films primarily as exercises in subjectivity, while emphasizing the patterning ("parametric") devices between films - seems to lead you there. To think about how these formal elements relate to questions of subjectivity....

5) He spoke quite a bit about improvisation - not as such, but - his method of working.... to start with very brief treatments of the stories - to look for actors who would fit the characters in this treatment - then to write the script shaping the characters around the actor, as a type, as a person... Then - he said - he would end up writing the actual dialogue on location the day of shooting, and give the actors just enough time to memorize the lines before shooting... And it strikes me that his films have the elements of improvisation - the looseness and ability to surprise within a fairly simple and sometimes rigid structure. Their repetitions, the simplicity of the basic situations, help in this method - they provide the structure and connections for the film, and allow the dialogue and actors to develop the emotional impact...