HONG Sangsoo

By HUH Moonyung

When HONG Sangsoo's debut work, "The Day a Pig Fell into the Well," was released in May 1996, the nation's film critics were thrown into shock. The cinematic language in the film was unprecedented in Korean film history. Since then, HONG has continued to show his own distinctive style with near perfection in his following works. This book, written by HUH Moonyung, one of the most distinguished film critic in Korea, is intended to help readers to better understand the cinematic world of HONG Sangsoo. The book also includes the analyses of a prominent film critic, David Bordwell and a renowned French film director, Claire Denis.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Seoul Selection
• Release date: Apr 10, 2013
• ISBN: 9781624120015

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Author

Preface

Korean film young bloods PARK Chan-wook, BONG Joon-ho, KIM Jee-woon and RYOO Seung-wan, have come together to form a club called Director’s Cut. During every end-of-year party, these directors hold an award ceremony to grant prizes to selected winners among Korean films of the year. The club is small and the award ceremony is simple, but the films chosen by these most active, young and capable directors for the year’s best list are always interesting. The award for best director in 2006 went to HONG Sangsoo.

It is an unofficial award and won’t be included in any official records, but I was impressed by HONG Sangsoo’s winning the best director’s award. At the end of every year, there are three major film award ceremonies, which are broadcasted through major media channels. Strangely enough, none of HONG Sangsoo’s films, with the exception of his debut work, have been even placed in the list of nominees. Furthermore, it has been a long time since he was included in the list of best directors selected by the Association of Korean Film Critiques. This was true even when Cahiers du Cinema included Conte de Cinema in its top 10 list in 2005.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that HONG’s films are completely disregarded by the Korean press or the intellectuals. In terms of the quantity of critiques made for individual films, HONG has always occupied the top position. Moreover, prominent Korean movie magazines have always placed his films on their list of the best. However, HONG’s films in Korea are considered the cream of a tiny cultural crop. For example, director LEE Chang-dong’s films are not categorized as typical commercial films, but he was successful in attracting an audience of about one million per film and has received recognition for his artistic achievements. And while director IM Kwon-taek’s recent films have been miserable commercial failures, his efforts to discover cinematographic beauty have always been highly praised by the Korean artistic community. However, despite HONG Sangsoo receiving passionate support from Korean cinephiles, he carries ambiguity that can’t be easily accepted. I think this provides evidence that his films are very fundamental. HONG Sangsoo himself was not a cinephile, but his films have become an important reference for Korean cinephiles. That is because his films have questioned the nature of movies and redefined it. He holds a sort of contempt for films as institutions and strictly adheres to his own ways during the process of creation. This doesn’t mean that he is an avant-garde artist, displaying complex images and symbols. On the contrary, he never gives up stories and he tries to prove that, in the narrative of film, something stronger and completely different from our expectations can unfold. One of the important achievements his films made in modern cinema is that he renews our means of understanding and perception of the world through images, or a complex body of senses, and at the same time through narrative.

In this book, I didn’t attempt to interpret HONG Sangsoo’s films. This book was intended to help people who take interest in HONG’s films to better understand the director. I rather placed more importance on the interview for this reason and tried to organize the features of HONG’s work in a comprehensive format. However, I can’t help but place high expectations on the thoughtful analysis on HONG Sangsoo’s creative works by David Bordwell and Claire Denis. David Bordwell points out how HONG’s films differ from contemporary Asian films and how those differences make his films so unique. HONG Sangsoo’s friend and renowned French film director, Claire Denis, clearly pierces into different roles played by women and men in his films and delicately describes texture and layers that are carried in HONG’s films. I would like to personally thank contributors who have been very helpful.

I would also like to thank someone who has contributed immensely to this book. I am very much indebted to SEONG Ji-hye. She majored in theory of cinema in France and made a beautiful debut film Before the Summer Passes Away in 2006, but she took part in the interview session with HONG Sangsoo, whom she respects very much, and carefully arranged it. More importantly, she pointed out my personal shortfalls when carrying out the interview, and provided me with sharp and creative input. It was also her efforts that have made it possible to include Claire Denis’ writing in this book. If there is anything useful in this book, half of it deserves her credit. She and I have spent the last days of 2006 very happily conducting interviews with HONG Sangsoo. I would like to thank her deeply. Of course, whatever shortfalls or errors that may remain in this book are all my doing. (The generous assistance at the last moment from many people should be acknowledged. Especially KIM Choong-il, KIM Kyung-hyun, Harry KIM and PAK Do-shin have made great contribution in reducing the errors of this book. I’d like to express my gratitude for their friendship and kindness.)

HUH Moonyung

Summer, 2007

Seoul

On the Director

I need not ramble over the earth and sky to discover a wondrous object woven by contrasts, greatness and littleness infinite, intense gloom and amazing brightness—capable of arousing pity, admiration, terror, contempt simultaneously. I find that object in myself.

— Alexis De Tocqueville

An Event in Korean Cinema History

When HONG Sangsoo’s debut work, The Day a Pig Fell into the Well, was released for the first time in May 1996, the nation’s film critics were thrown into a shock. Characters were wandering about while there was no clear suggestion of what was on their minds. Dialogues and situations were drifting around the surface of the text, with no clear psychological motives. Scattered structure made it difficult to distinguish between the main story and the digressions. The camera was objectively and motionlessly looking at these circumstances, where everything collided. Characters were described so elaborately that they gave you goose-bumps. Bulky and heavy reality in the movie was delivered intensely. The cinematic language spoken in this film was unprecedented in Korean film history. Korean movie critics thought of names like Robert Bresson and Louis Bunuel, but they agonized over the genealogy of a movie that was completely unique. Of course, their attempts ended to no avail.

HONG Sangsoo showed his own distinctive style in his debut work with near perfection. The surfacing of The Day a Pig Fell into the Well was chronicled as an important event in Korean movie history, and a Korean movie magazine, Cine 21, compared it to a gunshot that shook Korean film history. In 1997, The Day a Pig Fell into the Well won a grand prize at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and the name HONG Sangsoo slowly emerged among European film circles. In 1998, his second movie The Power of Kangwon Province was invited to Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival and the French critics began to treat him warmly. Charles Tesson, a former editor-in-chief of Cahier du Cinema, praised him highly by saying, HONG Sangsoo is unique in that all his stylistic experiments such as double or circular structure, crossing of time, which are distinct in recent Asian films, served exquisitely for exploration of every character presented in the film.

From his shocking debut work to the seventh project, Woman on the Beach, HONG Sangsoo consistently attempted to show the incoherent and fragmented nature of human life as it is, surpassing the propaganda of blind idealism and baseless hope for ourselves, which imprison our life in the fog. Shortly after finishing his debut film, he confessed that he received inspiration from Notes on the Cinematographer by Robert Bresson. Reading this Proverbs-like book which doesn’t mention any specific methods of directing, HONG came to think of films as media with no preconception and made movies using methods of his own formulation.

David Bordwell thinks that although HONG Sangsoo belongs to the Asian Minimalist school, along with Hsiao-hsien Hou and Tsai Ming-liang, HONG possesses potential and individuality that transcend the league. He explained as in an interview with HONG, his creativity as follows. Asian films these days are overly elliptical, sometimes to the degree that the story feels empty. They ignore the stages of a drama, remain silent on the character’s background and each individual episode is self-serving. The main problem is that in these movies, the narrative plays only a minor role. But when I saw your (HONG’s) films, I found that various elements were ‘interactive.’ … Superficial devices are related to the larger structure, and the balance between these two is superb.

Scene and Shot

HONG Sangsoo is famous for a work style that is more instinctive than premeditated. He convinces actors and staff with a brief treatment at the pre-production stage and instantly writes a script on location on the day of the shooting. Through this method, which requires high levels of concentration, he tries to capture the delicate feelings of the weather, the place and the condition of actors developed on that day.

It is necessary to point out that HONG Sangsoo is one of the directors capable of deriving the best performances from actors, at least in Korea. He granted leading roles to many different types of actors, from the top stars to unknown newcomers, and they have repaid him by displaying their best—or at least the most impressive—performances in their acting career. This may not be very distinctive to foreign audiences compared to other elements in HONG Sangsoo’s films. Generally speaking, an actor’s performance in a film tends to be accepted as more abstract when seen by audiences using different languages. If an actor or actress gave a strong impression to an audience that doesn’t speak the same language, in most cases he or she derives intense empathy from the audience by performing extreme emotions. Perhaps this is the reason why method acting is less bound by the limitation of borders.

The Day a Pig Fell into the Well, 1996

Korean audiences receive incomparably strong impressions of the acting in HONG Sangsoo’s films, with HONG’s way of using dialogues being just one of the reasons. He doesn’t limit the function of dialogue to convey meaning, and values the materiality brought out by the actor’s tone of voice.

Ambiguous speech, inaccuracy in pronunciation and intended or unintended use of double meaning, along with awkward words, are something we face quite often but ignored by most other films. HONG’s movies, however, maximize the functions of these elements. To give an example at this point, in Conte de Cinema, Yeong-sil says, I want to like it, while she is making love to Dong-su. But in Korean language, this sentence is grammatically wrong and an unnatural expression. What’s more, due to her inaccurate pronunciation, it sounds like I want to die. The double meaning carried by this line has a great significance in Conte de Cinema, considering that the film talks about death and pleasure. But the subtlety of this line could hardly be delivered properly when translated into other languages.

Apart from the materiality of voice, there are so many elements that HONG Sangsoo derives from the actors, which are not valued in other films: small bodily movements (think about how Dong-su leans onto Yeong-sil while they are talking right after the alumni reunion in Conte de Cinema), manners of walking (pay attention to the way Chang-uk chases Jung-rae in Woman on the Beach and two female passersby walk rapidly past him),