DOSSIER HONG SANG SOO

Looking for Reality ‘Between the Cracks’

He says he has found his way as a filmmaker while looking at Cézanne paintings in a museum in Chicago. “I looked, and I
thought: that’s it.” Before, it was a time when the youth of his country, South Korea, faced the military dictatorship in
the street. Not him. “I did stupid things. I was close to suicide. But the violent and idealistic atmosphere of that time left
an indelible impression. The disappearance of this difficult but extremely vital time left my generation with a bitter
aftertaste.” Sitting in the back of a bar, willing to discuss a thousand things, he ponders this past, which he confirms
doesn’t occupy him at all, from an amused distance.

His first three films, three thirds of his oeuvre at present, are finally released in France. “I enjoy it, but I don’t think about
what I’ve done in the past. I’m not interested in becoming an expert on my own films.” And it doesn’t bother him that it
took seven years for the public to finally meet the oeuvre of an artist whose film debut, The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well
(1996), immediately got him recognized as a first-rate filmmaker. “It doesn’t matter. The important thing is that the films
are finally shown. And the French release of these three first titles is going to help me produce the next one.”

At the beginning of the 1980s, circumstances had led the young man (born in 1961) from marginalization bordering on
crime to the United States: “Strangely, it was there that, at 23, I started getting interested in art.” More specifically, in
the art of cinema, for which he didn’t have any feeling whatsoever, even though he had studied film before at Chung-
Ang University. He feels drawn to experimental cinema; a short stay in Paris, “the city of reference for those who love
cinema”, made him discover Robert Bresson’s oeuvre. “Journal d’un curé de campagne made me realize that there was
indeed a possibility to get out of the sterile choice between experimental and Hollywood films.”

An Oeuvre of Details

For four years, he constantly carried with him a copy of Notes sur le cinématographe by the author of Pickpocket.
Careful not to imitate, the filmmaker says he doesn’t try to find forms already invented by others, Cézanne or Bresson,
but is guided by “their life, their courage, their way of addressing things”. Since the astonishing process the conception
of The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well is based on – the film is the result of four scriptwriters working separately – he
continued to map out his own route.

Hong Sang-soo feels like talking about Paris, about the films he loved and defended at the recent Busan International
Film Festival, which discovered him in 1996 and where he was jury president at the end of 2002. He lets himself be led
to his own films, starts the majority of his sentences with “I try to ...”. Not to repeat himself; to construct dramatic
architectures that are pretty strong in order to reassure his producers and pretty open in order to proceed, while
filming, with all the explorations the set has to offer; to film bed scenes as if they were table scenes, “without avoiding
these situations, which are part of our lives”, but refusing any voyeurism.

Poetic by its precision, attentive to duration, to the uncertainty of the moment, to outlined movements and to what
they betray or control: Hong Sang-soo’s cinema seems to consist only of details, of contingent moments that suddenly
get out of hand or explode. “I never aim for generalization; there’s never a global view on society at the origin of a film
or even a shot. It seems to me that reality can only appear between the cracks of discrete, hypothetic, uncertain
elements. I am wary of clichés and big expressions. I do not believe, for example, that something we could call ‘the’
contemporary Korea exists. I never try to share a truth, but only approximations.”

In the heat of shooting the film, each morning writing the daily dialogues, maximally reducing – “I try to get rid of
everything that is not indispensable” – and sometimes changing the whole scene while filming, Hong Sang-soo works
with little-known actors: “Stars are too busy with their image to accept what I ask from my performers.”

Since his well-received first feature film, he has forged a solid bond with the production company Miracin. A well-placed
trust: benefiting from constant critical support, The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well (1996) has sold 50,000 tickets, The Power
of Kangwon Province (1998) 70,000, Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (2000) 120,000, and the magnificent On the
Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate (2002), still unreleased in France, has already drawn 180,000 spectators in
his country of origin.

These constantly increasing “little numbers” encourage Hong Sang-soo to continue along the path he has chosen and for
which he recently gave up the teaching position he has held at the university for ten years. But he doesn’t aim for any
gigantism, considering frugality as his main quality. He even accepts the prospect of one day filming on light video if he
were to encounter any financial difficulties. Nonetheless, the new tools don’t appeal to him at all: “I prefer typewriters
to computers, propeller planes to jets. I feel closer to the previous epoch than to the contemporary shape of the world.”
This phase difference, this distance, has become the basis of one of the most productive oeuvres of contemporary
cinema.

“For me, a film is good if it modifies my way of thinking”

A Conversation with Hong Sang-soo

EMMANUEL BURDEAU, JEAN-PHILIPPE TESSÉ, ANTOINE THIRION 2004

TRANSLATED BY
SIS MATTHÉ
DOSSIER HONG SANG-SOO
The discovery of Hong Sang-soo in France was a sudden one. Three films released together in 2002 – The Power of
Kangwon Province, The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well, Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors – then two more only a couple
of months apart this year: On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate and, today, Woman Is the Future of Man.
The effect of the filmmaker’s massive irruption is double. Of course, a certain style can be clearly identified, labelling
Hong Sang-soo an auteur. But he can be recognized through the manifest simplicity of the processes carried out, as if
they are frozen and then repeated almost identically, providing the idea of an auteur with the apparent denial of
blocked progress. In short, Hong Sang-soo can only be called an auteur because he shows a withdrawal, the conscience
of a limitation, the denial of the visual effect, the refusal to venture into the richness of an imaginary or the meandering
of a complex mise-en-scène. So the term auteur takes its first meaning, developed in relation to Hollywood filmmakers:
the internal work of an individual in a pre-established form, the minor mining of a major form.

By insisting on the compilation of fragments and the capturing of raw material, Hong Sang-soo expresses his distrust
towards the Bazinian ontology, which he replaces with the imperative of art historian Panofsky: “To manipulate and
shoot unstylized reality in such a way that the result has style.” Against the immediately given reality and without
detours, an a posteriori acquired real. With him, raw material is discovered slowly, mediated by a thousand trivial
actions, stubborn repetitions, reflecting a sort of serigraphy. On Hong Sang-soo’s bedside, we find Notes sur le
cinématographe by Robert Bresson. If he is not alone in drawing the procedures of modern cinema from these apodictic
notes, none other is so attached to positioning in front of this essential work the coherent whole of his own methods. In
this interview with Cahiers, he describes his working process clearly and without any grey areas, constructing his own
personal manual, the handbook of a contemporary radicality.

Course. At the age of nineteen, I was supposed to pass the entrance exam to the university. But I did not want to study.
When visiting one of my friends who played the piano, I said to myself that I could maybe compose. But I quickly
abandoned the lessons. Then, a friend introduced me to a theatre director. We were both drunk, sitting side by side.
When I told him that I didn’t do anything, he encouraged me to work in theatre. I had never thought of that and I
thought it was a fun idea. For three months, I prepared the entrance exam of the theatre and cinema department at the
university. Certain professors were very authoritarian, thinking it was important to impose authority in order to work in
harmony. At the cinema department, the hierarchy was less explicit, and the students went about with their cameras. I
decided to change disciplines and then I left for the United States, tired of Korea and school. Until I was twenty-seven, I
did not really direct. I used cinema as a protection. I started drinking. I was devastated. In the US, nothing seemed
important, as I was away from Korea. I made experimental films because I naively thought that, within narrative film,
only a certain type of already codified thing was possible. It was only when I first watched the Journal d’un curé de
campagne by Robert Bresson that I decided to make narrative films.
Woman Is the Future of Man. Some years ago, I found this sentence by Aragon, in the Quartier Latin, on a postcard. I
liked it. I knew that it was going to stay with me, but I didn’t really know why. While writing the film [Woman Is the
Future of Man], it came back [to me] and I decided to recycle it. The reason is simple: my two male characters live in the
present, and the woman apparently belongs in their past. They still remember her and they go looking for her, so she is
their future. But this sentence does not trigger any emotions in me. I don’t succeed in understanding it. The repetition
causes the words to lose their meaning. I like this feeling of strangeness and confusion. My films are constructed on very
concrete situations, but they don’t deliver any message. I hope they result in individual, very different reactions.

Repetition. The comical is caused by people who repeat themselves without realizing it. They are mesmerized by a
model they are perpetually trying to resemble, and they are not paying attention to the present. But of course, no one
can live without ideals. You can never see things as they are. Every day, I engage in a specific situation and some idea
comes between the people and me. I judge them in relation to this idea. This judgment places itself between two
opposed things: good or bad, beautiful or ugly, loyal or disloyal. These two extremes come into conflict and it’s up to me
to decide if the person has done well or acted badly. I arbitrarily take a decision. At home, I think about it, and I cannot
decide with the same clarity. The person is somewhere between these two extremes. It continues to move around. All I
have to do is to trace where the individual is located.

Negation. In Woman Is the Future of Man, I wanted to make a mix of two things. The first one is an endless negation of
what is false, exaggerated or illusory. Life is a series of situations in which I have to negate what is inside of me. For
example, I meet a girl, she behaves a certain way, does certain things, somehow damages me and for that reason I start
hating her. Next, I can work with the damage inside of me. Do I have to reject it or keep it? This type of negation, which I
practise every day, is an endless job. But I decide not to turn this experience of negation into a system. Otherwise, this
system would, in turn, be negated. Everything I do is constructing my way of quickly and correctly negating, so as to hurt
no one and to feel free again. You will never reach the truth. There is no unique truth that all of humanity can share. We
look for truth and we can’t reach it. However, we already feel emotionally overwhelmed. My feelings are connected to
tiny episodes, trivial stories. So there are two processes in my films: a process of negation which does not become a
system, and the expression of the conflict between being emotionally overwhelmed and an impossible quest for truth.

Reference. A filmmaker can be struck by something in life, a memory coming from other art forms, from a painting, a
photograph, theatre or television, and so on. He thinks he is seizing something tangible. But, really, this thing has already
been filtered. It has already passed a prior interpretation that has given it strength and clarity. By passing into film, this
piece stays the same filtered, deformed thing. Something strikes me and makes sense; but if I go back, there is always
some art object. I work on not using any filtered fragments and on finding raw material. That is why my sex scenes are
often called realistic. In reality, I especially look for blank reference material. For me, a film is good if it provides me with
new feelings and modifies my way of thinking. That is why form is so important for me. We all share the same material.
But the form we use, leads to different feelings or new ways of questioning, to new desires. So I don’t think I can be
defined as formalistic or realistic. These categories simplify things. My first three films could be called formalistic, the
last ones a little less so. I am only conscious of my desires.

Rohmer, Cézanne, Ozu. When I watch Rohmer’s films, they contain what I like in Cézanne. Cézanne stands in front of
something concrete, a mountain, trees or a carafe, and he uses this raw material to move towards abstraction. I like the
lines he draws between a concrete environment and an abstract construction. The history of art seems to indicate that
Cézanne came to a halt and that Picasso, for example, was able to extend and toughen his line. But maybe Cézanne was
really looking for this in between. When I see his paintings, I don’t need anything else. For me, Rohmer seems to connect
the concrete and the aspiration for abstraction in a similar way. In my second and third films, the relationship between
concrete and abstract is sealed: you need to look at the films on two levels. With Turning Gate and Woman Is the Future
of Man, I abandoned this very artificial construction and tried to stay in the middle. If I am connected to modern cinema,
it is not with the intention of continuing the work of auteurs who have preceded me. I don’t feel like following certain
auteurs or already set courses. All the cultural references came to me when I was an adult, while I was abroad. I keep a
lot of auteurs from different arts in mind. This body of work then helps me when I think and film. Ozu, above all, still
gives me the same pleasure.
Index, Details. When I prepare a new film, something has to make me curious and function as incitement. It can be a
formal idea or a narrative situation. I don’t draw up any long-term plans and I don’t stand back and analyze. Woman Is
the Future of Man doesn’t change this process. The situation: two men meet and drink alcohol together. They want to
find a woman whom both have known. As soon as the situation has been identified, I wait and stay open and attentive
to what happens. Pieces come to me in a very independent and irregular way. It can be a dialogue, a psychological
movement between two persons in a bar, or a small motif like a red scarf. I write these life fragments on cards that I
compile into a small index. At the same time, I attempt to find a form of putting everything together. When the pile is
half the height of the final one, I can start writing the script. I choose pieces around the starting situation, which remains
the focal point. Fragments come to me. Every day, on the set, I use them to write the dialogues of a couple of scenes:
some explanations, some actions, but mostly dialogues. Maybe it is the way I treat details which distinguishes my work
from that of other filmmakers. Often, details come and fill in a story that has already been sketched out at length. In my
films, these details are already stacked. It is on a formal level that the redistribution, connection and formation of the
story happen. It is the fundamental point of my working process. Progress is constructed from these fragments.

Repetition/Progress. Even if I don’t try to change situations, the result will be different. I am not intentionally trying to
push forward my style. Sometimes I am tempted, but only in order to enlarge my audience. I try to use my working
methods in a better way. I am not worried. My feelings can’t be the same. If I look at my history, these personality
changes aren’t arbitrary ; they come naturally. Likewise, I don’t know if the archetypal scenes I film run out or if they are
transformed. They are only a reservoir that is gradually filled. If I film archetypes, I can’t change any of them
intentionally, as I don’t do that in life either. I can very well change the future, from one film to the other, the types of
scenes, the characters, but first I have to be encouraged and I need to feel the urge.

We film scenes in the order of the script. I think it contributes to making the scenes more precise and intense. Two
analogous scenes filmed a couple of days apart can be very different. I really prepare everything so that the scenes can
be filmed consecutively. For example, even if my sex scenes resemble each other, I am convinced that they can never be
identical. I write every day. All that happens to me between the takes influences me. I could very well use something I
heard on the bus. Children climbing a hill could appear in the shoot. You need to leave everything open until, in a
second, the end decides.

My Key Dates
HONG SANG-SOO 2005
TRANSLATED BY
SIS MATTHÉ
DOSSIER HONG SANG-SOO
25 October 1960. Born in Seoul. You’ve got to start somewhere.

1968. Elementary school in Seoul. My father and mother separate. The end of normal family life; it broke my heart.

1975. At college. I learn to drink and smoke. The desire to run from what’s inside me gets worse every day.

1979. The assassination of President Park Chung-hee. He had taken power when I was born and lost it when I entered
adulthood. They’re important dates for me and for Korea. He transformed social and political life, but my personal life is
as devastated as before. I drink more and more. I strongly feel the temptation of emptiness and nothingness. I enter
Chungang University in Seoul, where I try to study film.

1982. I leave for the United States, first to the College of Arts and Crafts in California, then to the Art Institute in Chicago.
The opportunity to start a new, healthier life. I recover my health somewhat. This long stay in America is less important
for my film studies than for the recovery of a moral hygiene.

1985. Back to Seoul to get married. I put a sort of protection in place, against the outside world, against the temptations,
the degeneration of life. Ever since, I have been living the life of a married man, and I make sure to stay well-balanced so
that my wife supports me.
1987. Back to Chicago. During a seminar at the Art Institute, I see Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest. A turning
point. I give up experimental video-art cinema and move on to storytelling. That is when I understand that classic cinema
can bring happiness.

1989. Before definitively coming back to Seoul, I spend a couple of months in Paris, at the Cinémathèque française. An
orgy of films.

1992. I have a daughter. She’s the person I think about more than anyone in the world.

1996. My first feature film, The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well. Before that, I knew a few dozen people; after that, I met a
few hundred people. This film is still very strange and foreign to me, perhaps because of my feelings while shooting it. I
was very unhappy, and this film has never been familiar to me. I will have to watch it again to win it over and place it in
my life. But it allows me to travel a lot, to festivals, Vancouver, Rotterdam, Paris, Locarno... And also to continue making
films.

1998. The Power of Kangwon Province. An impression of lightness, clarity, something original.

2000. Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors. A beautiful, sweet film. The most pleasant one to shoot.

2002. Turning Gate. I’m left with a strong impression of warmth.

2004. Woman Is the Future of Man. My favourite film so far. And I believe I will be able to continue loving it.

2005. Tale of Cinema. It’s a little early to talk about it, but it’s the film I shot the fastest, with a lot of energy and
efficiency. I don’t like to rewatch my films, but I know I will one day.

Hong Sang-soo’s Holy Victory

CLAIRE DENIS 2005
TRANSLATED BY
SIS MATTHÉ
DOSSIER HONG SANG-SOO
Daijiga umule pajinnal [The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well] (Hong Sang-soo, 1996)

Matter shows up as such: characters emerge in the economy of the spectacular, of exotic disorientation, brutally, as if in
a Cézanne painting.

At night, in the back of a cab, in the rumpled sheets of a bachelor’s bed, in a city without limits that could cover a whole
territory, we see hotel rooms, restaurants and bars, with nature crouching on the edge of the frame. Visiting a temple
means climbing a road that’s drowned in a group of tourists; boating on a lake means being trapped on a paddleboat
that looks like a big sky-blue apple tree and fills the whole space. The grass, the slope, the mound overlooking the
courtyards, the flowers are miserable.

Like in a Cézanne painting, the subject stands out and appears in full force, without any artifice to mask the honest
perception, the nudity, the coupling. In Hong Sang-soo’s films, everything is thought through, willed, even. The walls are
airtight, but the juxtaposition of the segments frees a kind of hilarious and cruel gas.

The male characters are envious and cowardly. They’re consumed by the hidden competition that sets them against
each other. But, like the film itself, they pursue the heroic quest for their moral (and, for the most part, artistic) truth.

The women are the true heroes, the brave ones. Violated (defeated?), as they are, they remain the masters of time, of
the time that divides the past and the present of the story, of all the time lost to the men. I often think about the end of
The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well, both suicide and take-off. This scene has haunted me ever since I laid eyes on it because
it forces us to instantly return to the film’s structure, to the knot of suffering that ties together all characters.
“Because he was wary of the deviations his vehement temperament led to, Cézanne was not very talkative, not even in
the small circle of his best friends. He stayed quiet until he, inspired by the comments made around him, couldn’t
control himself any longer and launched a witty remark or started swearing to hide his true feelings. Nonetheless, when
he thought it necessary to speak, he voiced his opinion with remarkable logic and clarity. It has to be said that his
imprecations apparently proved right those who made him a revolutionary, while he was only a rebel by indignation.” –
Georges Rivière, 1933

Hong Sang-soo will appreciate the reference to Cézanne, whom he often quotes, and my caution when talking about
him. He is like an offered book, of which we discover that certain pages have been carefully torn out and therefore
everything is suddenly missing. His films don’t need our agreement; they require total rallying.

Twice-told Tales
JAMES QUANDT 2007
DOSSIER HONG SANG-SOO
Geuk jang jeon [Tale of Cinema] (Hong Sang-soo, 2005)

“I don’t think you really understood the film.”

Yong-sil in Tale of Cinema (2005)

You wouldn’t want to hang out with Hong Sang-soo. So cringe-making is the Korean director’s acuity about social
relations – the petty vexations, vanities, and evasions that constitute most so-called alliances – that one can only infer
that he spends much of his time noting others’ foibles for use in his films. Hong never exempts himself from this
inquisition; indeed, his seven features can be read, if reductively, as a project of auto-excoriation. His work teems with
Hong look-alikes, alter egos, and surrogates, most of them self-absorbed, obtuse, feckless, forever doing the wrong
thing: insisting on paying a host for a home-cooked meal; crying out the name of another woman in the middle of sex;
drunkenly demanding a blowjob from a long-abandoned girlfriend; upbraiding or abusing servicepeople; borrowing
money from a grieving acquaintance at a hospital ; ignoring the reluctance, discomfort, or pain of the women they fuck.
“Life is a challenge,” says Sun-young, a married woman being pursued by Kyung-soo, an actor, in the second half of On
the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate (2002). “What ?” obliviously replies the distracted Hong proxy, who is
determined to bed her. “Do you like my moves?” he inquires once he is thrusting inside her; and when he later suffers a
bout of impotence, he blithely asks, “Shall we die together cleanly without having sex?” (a proposal that gets restated by
the callow male in the film-within-the- film in Hong’s Tale of Cinema). Kyung-soo may have memorized as a mantra a line
tossed at him earlier in the film – “Even though it’s difficult to be a human being, let’s not turn into monsters” – but, like
many of Hong’s men, he doesn’t realize that his heedlessness has become its own kind of indignity.

Standing apart from the clamor of current Korean cinema, with its obsessed vengeance seekers, live-octopus eaters, and
river-dwelling mutants, forty-six-year-old Hong Sang-soo has secured his international reputation over the past decade
with a septet of muted, structurally complex films – elliptical, exacting work that puts him more in the company of Hou
Hsiao-hsien, Jia Zhang-ke, and Tsai Ming-liang. Though his visual style is less distinctive than any of theirs – reticent and
functional, if not self-effacing, its long takes in the service of naturalism rather than formal design, its proximate but
observational camera achieving a simultaneous intimacy and dispassion – Hong’s aesthetic is no less precise, particularly
in the intricacy of his narratives.

Hong’s ‘tales of cinema’ are often bifurcated, with each half reflecting or counterpointing the other, as in his early
masterpiece, The Power of Kangwon Province (1998), which presents one story, about a young woman on vacation in
the eponymous setting; then another, about a professor taking a trip to the same place; and then, in a cubist coup,
reveals them as simultaneous and interconnected. The second telling returns to sites, objects, and incidents from the
first to cast them in a different light, fill in gaps in our knowledge, or open new mysteries. Reiteration becomes reversal
in Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (2000), the most complicated instance of Hong’s doubling. Its halves, each
divided into chapters, are titled with terms of contingency – ‘Perhaps Accident’ and ‘Perhaps Intention’ – as if to
underscore a lack of established veracity. Commonly interpreted as a ‘he said, she said’ account of a love affair in which
parallel but contradictory versions of the same events leave the audience uncertain as to which variation is the correct
one, Virgin was shot in black-and-white, Hong said, “to better enableviewers to distinguish the differences” between the
repeated “identical” scenes. (He sees color as a distraction.) That a scholar recently mapped out Virgin’s ‘deceptive
design’ in a detailed three-page grid to argue that the film is actually more linear and synchronous than previously
thought only confirms how confounding Hong’s narrative fragmentation can prove.

More than most, Hong’s films command attentiveness. Shots, motifs, objects, dialogue, and events return, often
transmogrified in their second appearances – a dropped fork becomes a spoon, napkins replace chopsticks. Seemingly
unimportant figures – for example, in Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, a chef walking across a parking lot,
diminished to insignificance by an overhead shot, or, in Woman on the Beach (2006), a pair of ‘extras’ power-walking
down the right side of the frame – come back as narrative or temporal markers, or even as consequential characters,
leaving a viewer to feel like David Hemmings in Blowup, scrutinizing Hong’s every image for clandestine signifiers.
Placement in the frame is also paramount, as ostensibly casual groupings turn out to be extremely deliberate in their
composition – meant to signal social unease, deceit, or shifting allegiances. Watching the second half of Virgin, one
mentally scrambles to reconstruct the ‘unstudied’ groupings of the first, as the virgin and her two controlling suitors
seem to replay their fraught exchanges in reconfigured formations, and it is not always easy to recall if or how they
differ. (That Cézanne, a proto-Cubist, is one of the director’s artistic touchstones is no surprise; Hong, like Bresson,
another of his formative influences, is a metteur en ordre – an imposer or maker of order, a finder of hidden forms.)

The impetus for Hong’s binary structures – his trademark, despite similar doublings in other recent Asian films (e.g.,
Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady (2004) and Syndromes and a Century (2006); Jia’s Still Life (2006)) – has
been variously construed as a manifestation of the divided being of Korea, as mere narrative play, or as a modernist
strategy, inherited from Resnais and Antonioni, with its attendant arsenal of themes: time and memory, and the
fallibility of the latter; the elusiveness of truth, the flux of meaning, and the unknowability of others; and the seepage
between life and art. Alas, none of these explanations appears to fit Hong, who wears his seriousness lightly.
Epistemology and politics seem foreign to his fixed, restricted world of actors, artists, and professors, experts at passive
aggression as they tend to their banked resentments, nursed grudges, and hidden hurts. Politics, if broached at all, is
mentioned jokingly (think of the publisher who is preparing a novel about Marx in Hong’s first film, The Day a Pig Fell
Into the Well (1996)), or obliquely (Kyung-soo refers to The Making of a Radical by American socialist activist Scott
Nearing as a life-changing text in Turning Gate but uses it merely as a prop to pursue Sun-young). Similarly, the false
cues and ruses of Hong’s storytelling seem less to signify anything so profound as the dissolution of truth and identity
than simply to assert an aesthetic signature: just as Godard conceives in terms of collage, Hong arranges by reiteration.

Hong’s tightly battened structures belie his free approach to directing actors. The cast improvised most of the dialogue
in The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well. Turning Gate never had a finished script, only a treatment, which was withheld from
the actors before shooting began. They ‘fell into the film’ without any knowledge of the plot or characters, and received
their lines for the day’s work each morning. The unnerving realism of Hong’s many scenes of inebriation – his flailing,
ineffectual characters often succumb to sluices of booze – is reportedly won by occasionally getting his actors sloshed
for the shoot. (Jae-hoon, in Virgin, says he used to drink five bottles of soju and three of whiskey at atime, to which Soo-
jung pragmatically responds, “How about I be your girlfriend only when you’re drunk?”) The precision of performance in
Hong’s films – copious dialogue impeccably delivered by flush-faced tipplers in riskily unedited takes – is therefore all
the more astonishing.

As much as Hong’s titles invoke Cheever, Aragon, Duchamp, and Renoir, and his films quote Rimbaud or are influenced
by Ozu, Murnau, and Bresson, he seems uninterested in homage. Hong was initially inspired by Bresson’s Diary of a
Country Priest (1951) and reveres the master’s Notes on the Cinematograph (1975), a Pascalian collection of aphorisms
about filmmaking. But almost everything in Hong’s style contravenes Bresson’s edicts in that little book, from his
fondness for establishing shots to his extensive use of nondiegetic music, which is strikingly insipid, all advert perk and
tinkle on simulated calliopes, marimbas, or squeeze boxes. (The midpoint transition from the film-within-the-film to the
film ‘proper’ in Tale of Cinema is signaled by a shift in the music – an inappropriately bouncy tune that seems to mock
the suicidal despair of the boy as he cries, “Mom ! Mom !” – from nondiegetic to diegetic status.) Indeed, if Hong shares
an affinity with any director, it is Buñuel, whose spirit is apparent in the small, quietly ominous mystery of the two men
who own a bag factory in Turning Gate; in the surreal funeral in Pig, interpolated into the narrative without signal or
segue; and especially in the ceaseless succession of ‘obscure objects of desire’ and the men who obsess over them,
purblind in their pointless amour. (Sex is often drunken and fumbling, the women imploring their partners not to touch
their hair, not to hurt them so much, to hurry, to stop.) Breton’s edict that “events will not tolerate deferment” does not
obtain in Hong, for whom waiting and delay are controlling motifs; in the perpetual state of déjà vu generated by his
reiterated structures, Hong’s characters are forced to abide, lay over, hang fire, by clients, lovers, hookers, waiters, and
airline clerks, and to stifle their unhappiness at the tarry. (Soo-jung’s suspension in a stalled cable car in Virgin offers a
representative metaphor for the arrested state of many of Hong’s characters, as does the little one-way walk in the
snow at the beginning of Woman Is the Future of Man (2004).)

Hong’s emphasis on time, memory, and deferred desire has led to the inevitable comparison to Wong Kar Wai, whose
most recent films, with their slurred montage, luxe visual design, and aura of cloistered romanticism are, stylistically,
pretty much the opposite of Hong’s. The directors’ names may rhyme, but their films don’t. One need only compare the
temporal scheme of Woman Is the Future of Man, with its carefully delineated summer/past-winter/present dichotomy,
and the swoony spiraling of time in In the Mood for Love (2000) and 2046 (2004) to note their differences. In Wong,
longing is a function of absence. Mood, for instance, takes place in a setting that has vanished, and it is structured
around a love affair between characters we hear but never really see; many of its most anticipated events are left
incomplete or off-screen, in the realm of the imagined, desired, or divined. (In this and other ways, the film is a distant
relative of Marguerite Duras’s India Song (1975).) Time past is time lost, regained only through the imagining of an
unattainable place and an elusive love. In contrast to Wong’s aching emphasis on loss, yearning, and regret, the
atmosphere in Hong, even when his films twist and rewind time, is more lucid than Proustian.

Hong’s is a cinema of missed connections (Kyung- soo and his friend take a ferry to the eponymous temple in Turning
Gate but turn back before seeing it, convinced there’s “not much there”), of inclement weather (off-season and winter
predominate, and Gate begins and ends in driving rain), of self-deluding conversation. Frequently compared to Eric
Rohmer because his ineffectual characters seem to talk more than act, deceive themselves and others, misinterpret
motives and events, and take various psychological byways to defer their futures, Hong has built a distinctive world for
his inadequate men and resilient, barely enduring women. His keen attention to setting – a series of unremarkable bars
and restaurants (as in Ozu, his favorite director), anonymous hotel rooms with slithery chenille bedspreads and fake
everything, unlovely streets, deserted alleys, and ironically deployed tourist sites (Kangwon Province, the Turning Gate
temple, Shinduri Beach) – accentuates the feel of drift and dislocation.

For critics who complain that by the time of Woman Is the Future of Man Hong had created a cul-de-sac for himself, his
repetitions having become in themselves repetitive, Hong’s latest films, Tale of Cinema and Woman on the Beach, with
their insiderish world of filmmakers and routine reliance on the romantic triangle, might confirm a sense of aesthetic
stall. But much is new in both films, particularly the radical resurrection of a shot long abjured by contemporary
directors. Not only does Tale introduce Hong’s first use of voice-over, typi- cally viewed as a lazy device – telling, not
showing, and all that – but there is also an insistent reliance on the zoom, similarly thought slovenly. On the moral or
ethical continuum for shots, the zoom stands opposite to the fixed, long (preferably distant) take, which has been
assigned qualities of integrity, even purity, in its noninterventionist, ‘whole’ recording of reality. The zoom, an intrusive
visual punctuation to emphasize emotion, direct attention, and isolate detail, is conversely assigned qualities of
artificiality, expedience, and coercion. That Frederick Wiseman, avatar of observational documentary, employed zooms
(e.g., in Basic Training (1971)), and Rossellini, conventionally described as the father of neorealism, built his late style
around the use of the Pancinor zoom lens surely complicates this simplistic schema. But the zoom remains associated
with slatternly ’70s cinema, so when, midway through Tale, it suddenly becomes apparent that the zoom-happy film we
have been watching is the creation not of Hong (though, of course, it is) but of the ailing director who is a character in
the film proper (i.e., the latter half of Tale), one initially assumes, with considerable relief, that the zoom was one of
Hong’s sly indicators – along with some unsubtle performances and telenovela confrontations – that the first half was
made by another (and lesser) director. Not so. In the second half, made by Hong in the style of Hong, the zoom
reappears in no less obtrusive and clumsy form. Hong defenders have proffered unsatisfactory explanations for his use
of the zoom, and the director has been vague about his motive for this startling departure from his usual staging in the
long take, so the issue remains unresolved.

If the doublings in Tale of Cinema – the Marlboro Reds, Seoul Tower, eyeglasses store, Yong-sil’s name, etc. – seem a
trifle obvious, the film accounts for the brazen repetition by emphasizing the suspicion of Dong-soo in the second half of
Tale that his life story, which he divulged to the director of the film we see in the first half, was usurped for that script.
Thus Hong appears to acknowledge his own penchant for lifting incidents from the lives of his actors and acquaintances
to include in his films. In Hong’s latest, Woman on the Beach, which is something of a career summation, his self-
reproach takes on a more mordant tone. Joong-rae, a film director who is the pivot not only between the film’s two
romantic trian- gles but also between its two halves, is another of Hong’s hurtful jerks, a volatile narcissist and a classic
master of the faintest praise: he compliments his production assistant’s girlfriend, Moon-sook, an aspiring songwriter, by
saying, “You sing the way an average person would. I like the amateur feel of it.” Joong-rae may be widely recognized
and admired, but when he outlines the idea for his new film – whose gluey title, About Miracles, signals its banality – the
concept seems so precious, one wonders whether Hong means to undercut his character or whether Joong-rae’s chain-
of-fate scenario involving a mysteriously ubiquitous Mozart tune and a mime is indeed meant to indicate his genius.
(Most of Hong’s professional males are in some way second-rate, blocked, wanting.) In any case, Joong-rae, who
appears to be one of Hong’s many stand-ins, also seems to test experience against its usefulness in art – something he
makes apparent in the silly diagram he draws to explain his psychology to Moon-sook – and no doubt steals details from
the lives of clueless acquaintances for use in his films. (Again Hong seems to mock himself, in that the diagram reflects
the double-triangle narrative pattern of his cinema; it is as much formula as philosophy.)

Few can rival Hong for his portrayals of social awkwardness and embarrassment, of nurtured grievance, fueled by booze,
erupting into accusation: the reunion of two school chums in Woman Is the Future of Man, for example, their drunken
lunch roiling with resentment until it bursts into absurd allegation, that the one hugged the other’s wife ‘American
style.’ Woman on the Beach, though acclaimed as Hong’s sunniest, funniest, most whimsical, generous, and accessible
film, has some of the director’s crudest moments, in which characters don’t seem to care whether it is difficult being
human or not – being monstrous is second nature.

The casual ease with which Moon-sook disparages and abandons her mate, openly inviting the seduction of Joong-rae,
and the childish pleasure the two take in sending the pathetic, increasingly hysterical boyfriend the wrong way on the
darkened beach are (exquisitely) painful to witness. Hong and his actors miss no note of abasement, need, and
manipulation, every soju-assisted insight designed to sting and wither: “You’re different from your films,” Moon- sook
tells Joong-rae. “You’re a Korean man.” She means: vain, insecure, controlling, parochial. “You’re reckless but not
loathsome,” she assures him, which passes for flattery in Hong’s world.

Hong’s use of the zoom in Beach is more assured than in Tale of Cinema: a tight shot begins with only Joong-rae and
Moon-sook in frame and then zooms out to reveal that the hapless boyfriend is also present, the effect neatly capturing
the latter’s cruel exclusion by the duo, his ‘third wheel’ status. And though the film retains Hong ’s dual structure, with
its inevitable reiterations – Moon-sook is alienated from her father in the first half ; the woman who becomes her
romantic rival is alienated from her mother in the second ; and so on – there are enough felicities and mysteries to save
it from Tale’s schematism. Joong-rae’s weeping, prostrate prayer before three bare trees complicates our sense of his
character, and Moon-sook, at once humiliating and humiliated, is one of Hong’s most complex women. (Issues of trust
and faith are important to the women in the film but are typically misunderstood by the men.) Beach, however, tilts
dangerously toward literalism. A motif involving a white dog is both redundant and blatant, a needless restatement of
the theme of abandonment. An earlier, more ambiguous Hong would have left uncertain the identity of the man who
terrorizes Joong-rae and Moon-sook with his motorbike; an egregious insert reveals what we have already guessed. And
Joong-rae’s mishap with an unused muscle that has him hobbling through the last part of the film suggests the kind of
short-hand lesser artists resort to: physical disability as metaphor for psychic infirmity. Like Yong-sil in Tale of Cinema,
Hong seems unsure that we can really understand the film.

Drinking / No Drinking
JOACHIM LEPASTIER 2012
TRANSLATED BY
SIS MATTHÉ
DOSSIER HONG SANG-SOO
(1) Da-reun na-ra-e-seo [In Another Country] (Hong Sang-soo, 2012)

Is Hong Sang-soo part of the family of artists (a category that includes makers as important as Ozu and Modiano) that
‘always sign the same work’ ? The idea is so well received that it can’t be of any service to the filmmaker; but the one
who never thought that nothing resembled more the last Hong Sang-Soo than the Hong Sang-Soo before last may cast
the first stone. His films would thus be chapters of a vaster and more continuous oeuvre to which the work of time
would give its material and density, a sort of deliberately unfinished journal, constantly putting the same narrative
patterns into the work: emotional hesitation and vacancy, seduction strategies in all their playful and/or derisory
dimensions, the impossible reversibility of the male and female views on these matters. Considering the oeuvre to be a
continuous flux also means gauging it as a vast landscape, with its own relief, irregularities and peaks of intensity, but
also with its own tunnels and false flats generating, even among supporters, moments of fatigue. In this continuous
body of work, certain titles seemed less decisive, giving in to repetition. In discussions among admirers of the filmmaker,
no one agrees on the highs and relative lows and each leaves the discussion unchanged. That is where it gets tricky.
Everything also depends on the first Hong Sang-soo film you discovered and liked, on the time that has passed between
each of his films, on whether or not you liked seeing many films by the same filmmaker in a short amount of time (his
first three films from the end of the last century were only released in France in one burst in 2003, and he has since
delivered almost one film a year) – so many subjective assessments that challenge the usual critical grid.

False Symmetries and Oblique Reverse Shots

Rather than trying to decipher a rectilinear path in this filmography, let us consider it as a card game, where the
spectator is free to choose his or her favourites, to see how they relate according to certain hierarchies or deeply
personal connections. The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well (1996) already installed this game: four stories with inversions of
main and secondary characters. But the informality used by Hong Sang-soo, far from the voluntary relay path of a
‘circular screenplay’ or the trick of film choral, underlines his unique concern as a story- teller: to install biased points of
view and oblique reverse shots between incomplete stories, and to insert in each of the fragments a lateral illumination
that was unsuspected from the outset.

The starting trilogy installs formal structures that he will never stop recycling afterwards: puzzle films (The Day a Pig Fell
Into the Well, Oki’s Movie, In Another Country), diptych films in which one and the same place hosts two stories that
intersect through different echoes (The Power of Kangwon Province, Woman on the Beach, Hahaha) and a variant of the
‘film cut in two’ in which the story seems to rewind or even restart and repeat with surprising nuances (Virgin Stripped
Bare by Her Bachelors, On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate, Tale of Cinema). In Hong Sang-soo’s films,
unity is constructed through a collection of scattered fragments or falsely symmetrical subparts. His art of the caesura,
very strong in his first films, a lot vaguer afterwards, could even place him on the side of the metric filmmaker while, at
first sight, his way of filmmaking seems rather nonchalant and his language rather ordinary. In reality, his absolute
mundanity remains a decoy. Of all renowned filmmakers of the last ten years, he is without a doubt the one that has
least searched for signature effects and immediate tokens of seduction, with the relative exception of the beautiful
harshness of his black and white films. He remains a filmmaker of pure visual prose, all the while constructing stories
whose framework is related to pure, poetic arbitrariness. So is Hong Sang-soo a filmmaker of prose or poetry? It’s a pity
that Pasolini isn’t around anymore to give us the answer.

Geometry of Uncertainty

Poetic cinema? Maybe. Musical cinema? Without a doubt, as so many stories function in several movements, like suites
or sonatas. But beyond these impressions, also supported by his apparent looseness (increasingly smaller production,
increasingly shorter shoots, more and more day-by-day written scripts), Hong Sang-soo’s cinema remains one of the
most structured around. His formalism resides inhe dialectic between the indecisiveness and volte-faces of his
protagonists and the confidence of his modelizable screenplay constructions, like pure geometric manipulations, but of
an unstable geometry. In the image of the moving polygons, the protagonist of Woman on the Beach scribbles in order
to explain his erratic theory on the preconceptions and the elusive truth of beings.
Thus, On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate and Tale of Cinema are deliberately constructed around axes
of symmetry, but also around homotheties between a short narrative model and the film as a whole. In both stories, the
protagonists relive, without even realizing it, the legend that was told to them (the one of the snake and the one of the
princess in On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate) or the film they went and saw (the one about the
suicidal lovers in Tale of Cinema). Nonetheless, even if the models are designed, we stay far away from the expansion of
a fictional model into the scale of a feature-length film. On the contrary, these ‘stories in the story’ feed delicious
modulations of the old ploy of the mise en abyme. Although Tale of Cinema multiplies the comings and goings between
fiction and reality, it avoids a systematic feel by having an equally stylistic screenplay treatment of the film and the ‘film
within the film’. The two levels of the story don’t interlock with each other, but play on random and infinite effects of
reflection, in both meanings of the term. Hong Sang- soo’s big issue is the invisible infusion of the novelistic into
everyday life. At the end of On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate, the fate of Gyung-soo, a priori a
protagonist without any quality, has become as poignant as the fate of the snake in love with the princess. But when
exactly did the mutation take place? It’s hard to say exactly.

Seeing, seeing again, perceiving, but without grasping the invisible tipping point: that was already the formal challenge
of Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, with all of its decals (of scenes) and shifts (of tempo), out of synch repetitions
of moments that acquire a different meaning by being, the second time around, launched a little later, cut a little earlier,
lengthened by some dialogue or silence. This rhythmic rule, which could have only appeared as a rhetorical exercise on
the polysemy of film editing, actually paved the way for what is today the essence of Hong Sang-soo’s style: the
exploration of a game of substitution and duplication that plays with the spectator’s memory and anticipation.

The combinations of the four fragments of Oki’s Movie are therefore much more twisted than what the destitution of
their juxtaposition suggests. The impossibility to unravel the exact temporal and fictional links between the stories
(flashbacks? recollections? phantasmatic rereadings?) is part of the productive doubt about the truth of persons and
affects which is constantly explored by the filmmaker. Always the same patterns, thus, but are they in different
configurations? The answer resides in his last two films, in which Hong Sang-soo deliberately confronts the return of the
same by accumulating repetitions in such a playful way that he touches on pure screenplay jubilation, doubled with a
very Buñuelian irony when it comes to the casting. In The Day He Arrives, the same actress plays the role of the ex and
the woman the protagonist falls in love with. The construction of In Another Country, with its triple role for Isabelle
Huppert and its recurring characters, is as much based on the pure experience of the chemistry of feelings
(consecutively bringing three women into an a priori identical environment and observing the different reactions) as on
pictorial observation (changing the foreground figure to see how the background evolves). Far from any rigidity, this
dispositif proves incredibly malicious, in the image of the character of the lifeguard, who is identical in the three stories
but behaves much more unpredictably than the spectator’s expectations. We expected ‘again’, but we get ‘either, or’.
That is precisely Hong Sang-soo’s sleight of hand: making us believe that he is constantly directing the same film in order
to quietly ameliorate the construction of his scaffolding of fictional deployment, a drunken cousin of Smoking/No
Smoking, which would rather be called Drinking/No Drinking in his case. Cheers, dear Hong Sang-soo! Cheers to you and
to your cinema!

Déjà Vu
JAMES QUANDT 2013
DOSSIER HONG SANG-SOO
Book chon bang hyang [The Day He Arrives] (Hong Sang-soo , 2011)

Near the end of Alain Resnais’ masterpiece Muriel, a man sings a music hall chanson about time and memory that
mournfully repeats the word déjà to emphasize the rue of those who “fear the future, regret the past.” He could be
describing Hong Sang-soo’s aimless characters – “I have nowhere to go,” Seongjun says at the outset of The Day He
Arrives – trapped in the past, their prospects tentative save for one sad certainty: routine will become the eternal
return. Unlike the twice-told tales of Hong’s early career, in which his films’ second halves reiterate their first, revisiting
sites and incidents to revise their meaning, Hong’s recent works, including his latest, In Another Country, often repeat
episodes more than twice – literally, déjà vu all over again – varying the version of events to cast doubt on their veracity
or to offer cubist scrutiny of his complicated characters. In The Day He Arrives, a soju-fueled cross between Last Year at
Marienbad and Groundhog Day, Yoo Seongjun, a lapsed director self-exiled to the provinces, roams the streets and bars
of Seoul much as X wanders the hallways and gardens of Marienbad, through an endless repetition of settings,
characters, and incidents, each reiteration calling previous accounts into question. “I don’t remember a thing,” the bar
owner Ye-jeon insists after Seongjun apologizes for what something he has just done, her protestation recalling A’s
many disavowals of the past in Marienbad. Whose version does one trust: his, hers, neither?

The affinity between Hong’s comedies of social discomfort and Resnais’ and Robbe-Grillet’s glacial metafictions may
appear far-fetched; the Korean’s wintry city in which pissed-up disputes and wounding faux pas proliferate, seems a
universe away from the rococo architecture, formal gardens, and elegant aristocrats of the Frenchmen’s summertime
château. However, like Robbe-Grillet’s obviously autobiographical work – “I have never spoken of anything but myself,”
he writes in Ghosts in the Mirror: A Romanesque – Hong’s cinema has increasingly relied upon narrative game playing
and fragmentation, the use of doubles and look-alikes (here, the same actress playing the passive-aggressive ex-
girlfriend Kyung-jin and her mirror image opposite, the sweetly flustered Ye-jeon), anachronism and jumbled
chronology, unreliable narration and compulsive repetition, all cardinal elements of Robbe-Grillet’s films and novels.
Indeed, one wonders if Novel, the bar to which Seongjun repeatedly returns, is one of Hong’s sly jokes – he knows
English, admires French culture, and loves word play – in that its name denotes both ‘new’ and ‘book,’ as in Robbe-
Grillet’s nouveau roman. The Day He Arrives, shot in black-and-white, though its online trailer is in color (and in reverse
action!), stresses temporality in its present-tense title, then deranges it through repetition and continuity-defying ruse
(e.g., copious snow falls and too quickly disappears). Seongjun’s past keeps impinging upon the present: he encounters
an actress, a leading man, a producer, a fan, a former student, all of them unwanted reminders of his previous life.
Seongjun tells himself at the outset that he will pass quietly and quickly through Seoul, and informs people that he is in
the city for only three or four days, but the film’s ambiguous chronology leaves him in a state of suspension, ensnared in
Hong’s looping recurrences. (Muriel’s time-trapped characters keep announcing their imminent departure from
Boulogne, then find reasons to defer.)

Hong’s feckless men are forever doing the wrong thing: insisting upon paying a host for a home-cooked meal or crying
out the name of another woman in the middle of sex. Seongjun, another of Hong’s ineffectual or ‘blocked’ alter egos –
his films sometimes slip from self-reproof into auto-excoriation – initially seems more solicitous of women than previous
incarnations, but his empathy begins to resemble mere sententiousness. “Be strong,” he tells his ex-girlfriend after an
abject bout of crying and the usual drunken fumble that passes for affection in Hong. “Be easy on yourself, just take it
one day at a time,” he counsels the actress, palpably anxious to elude her. “Just take in these marvels of life,” he advises
her on their third encounter (“You again!”). “I want you to be happy… I want to make you happy,” he tells the bar owner
after sex, then promptly abandons her. In Hong’s cinema, sluices of booze escalate conversation into confession and
often into combat. (Hong has suggested that he gets his actors sloshed for the shoot, all the better to authenticate their
inebriation.) “It is difficult to be human,” someone says early in Hong’s Turning Gate, “but let’s try not to become
monsters, okay?” The smashed and volatile Seongjun suddenly slips from one to the other, inviting three film students
for drinks, buying them fruit like a kindly father, and then exploding in drunken, irrational rage: “Fuck! Stop copying
me!” he screams as he staggers into the night.

One of the most cinephilic, prolific, and thematically consistent Asian directors to emerge in recent decades, Hong
leaves a trail of auteurist markers in his characteristically wry and melancholic The Day He Arrives: the many references
to the cold (indicating his taste for winter or inclement weather); Ozu-like shots of street posts and restaurant signs (and
that enigmatic interjection of the net overhanging a batting range, almost a ‘pillow shot’); a dog (here gone missing);
and the promiscuous use of the shot long abjured by most modernist directors, the zoom. Increasingly employed since
its advent in Hong’s Tale of Cinema, the zoom appears at least two dozen times in The Day He Arrives, sometimes
restrained for purposes of reframing but more often not: jerky, diffident, and, when wedded with a pan, bluntly
emphatic. Odd as it may seem, Hong’s inspiration for reviving this cheesy device might be none other than the ultra-
subtle Eric Rohmer, who has often been cited as the Korean director’s formative influence. Rohmer’s slow, discreet
zooms delicately pinion his characters within the frame, prodding them to disclose their inner beings, which they
falteringly, sometimes fatuously do. (See, in particular, Le rayon vert.) Hong turns his frames into traps, employing his
static shots, long takes, and zooms to lock his similarly garrulous and self-deluding creatures in the inescapable image,
intensifying their physical unease and social awkwardness with his relentless inspection. (When Boram and Youngho
cross the road in the cab hailing sequence, their departure from the frame registers as escape from a pressure zone.) At
film’s outset, Seongjun chafes under the anxious attentions of the actress, his evident desire to bolt emphasized by
Hong’s immobilizing frame. At film’s end, Seongjun is once again captive, scrutinized by not one but two cameras. He
has arrived, but isn’t going anywhere.

Infinite Worlds Possible

Interview with Hong Sang-soo
FRANCISCO FERREIRA, JULIEN GESTER 2015
INTRODUCED BY
• ROGER KOZA

Set in Suwon, about thirty kilometers south of Seoul, Hong Sang-soo’s Golden Leopard-winning masterpiece is divided
into two sections which are almost exactly the same. Even the opening credits are repeated once the film reboots an
hour in, though with one subtle yet noticeable difference placed there for attentive viewers to make of it what they
may: the title, at first Right Then, Wrong Now, has been reversed to read Right Now, Wrong Then. Both parts of the film
have two main characters, a few secondary ones, and take place in the same public spaces: a temple, a bar, a restaurant,
a university auditorium, an alley, and a street. The subject is the usual one for Hong: desire, as articulated in the
everyday verbal and non-verbal exchanges between men and women from a specific social class. The verdict is also the
same: communications between males and females are often well-meaning but ultimately defective (if not total
failures), and thus they contain the potential for both humor and heartbreak.
The plot of Right Now, Wrong Then is formed by a minimal situation upon which a delay and a set of variations of brief
scenes are established. Hong’s narrative method lies in delaying the initial premise that would normally be immediately
developed by other filmmakers in order to reach a satisfactory resolution. Rather, Hong’s minor-key story is structured
in a way that never fully closes what it started; when the main characters have left the screen, the film may be finished,
but the ending remains open to all possible universes. In Right Now, Wrong Then this entails the premature arrival in
Suwon of, yes, a filmmaker, Ham Chumsu (Jeong Jae-yeong), to present his latest film at a festival and deliver a talk.
Because he’s arrived a day early by mistake and has free time, Chumsu decides to visit a temple where he meets Yoon
Heejun (Kim Min-hee) – a beautiful, wistful young woman who aspires to become a painter – in the room of the temple
devoted to receiving blessings. After a chat in the temple they leave together to have a coffee and then go visit her
atelier; later on, they dine and drink together, then pay a visit to some of her friends. Finally, Chumsu walks Heejun
home, where she still lives with her mother. Next day, he presents his film, and has a particularly rancorous exchange
with the moderator of his Q & A. That’s all.
The narrative power of Hong’s film is based on delaying and stretching time, with the idea being to postpone actions in
order to intensify some of the characters’ behavioral traits in relation to modifications generated by the characters’
conversations. What we find in all of Hong’s work is an order in this repetition, a grammatical pattern. An hour into Right
Now, Wrong Then, this gets – literally – duplicated, as if the film contains a remake of itself within itself. While the film’s
situations are repeated following the exact same order, as is usual in Hong differences are produced within this
repetition, caused by reasons that are not fully understood and based to a large degree on chance. Changes happen
through minimal variations, both in terms of the emotional construction of the characters and, in some instances,
modifications in the development of situations. The premise of this game of repetitions and duplications is the uncertain
nature of any relationship or situation. For example, in the first part, when the characters visit Heejun’s atelier, she acts
insecure, and in reaction Chumsu overpraises her painting, which is seen onscreen in great detail (thus generating the
later awkward situation where his words are thrown back at him). In the second version, for whatever reason, Heejun is
more sure of herself, and Chumsu’s comments on the painting are much more critical, while the painting itself remains
off-screen. This minimal difference in Heejun’s attitude leads the same situation with the same characters towards a
different result, illustrating how reliant Hong’s structure and dramatic action is on contingency.
The main gags in Hong’s seemingly effortless comedies are linguistic, verbal entanglements based on a slight
disconnection between what a character says and does, and the way this disconnection is perceived. As in a number of
Hong’s other films, the mechanism behind Right Now, Wrong Then can be encapsulated in the utterance of a single
word, which here is ‘sensitivity.’ Uttered at a specific point in a conversation, this word becomes the cause of a
misunderstanding because it is also a sign that denotes something else, something unsaid. Such words are always
associated with the power evoked through one character’s description of the other, a presumably keen observation
through which unknown personality traits are revealed and become a cause of unconscious pleasure. In a brilliant
passage set in a café near the end of the first part of Right Now, Wrong Then, Heejun’s friends realize that Chumsu’s
advice to Heejun about her art – that she doesn’t know where she’s headed, and because of this she’s bound to discover
more in the process, even if this will be a difficult path requiring courage to reach the end – are precisely the same
words Chumsu uses to describe his own filmmaking in interviews. Projection here is a discernible mechanism: what he
sees in her is what he values about himself.
It should be mentioned that Jeong Jaeyeong, who won the Best Actor prize at Locarno, is extraordinary. The naturalism
of his actors is a trademark of Hong’s cinema, but Jeong’s nuanced performance – most notably during an extended
passage in a sushi restaurant where he drunkenly professes love and proposes marriage, his indescribable face
juxtaposing shame and happiness distorted by soju consumption – is especially remarkable given that Hong’s actors
have to perform knowing that, as their director often employs long takes, there likely won’t be any close-ups where they
can use facial gestures to help them convey a feeling or a deep emotion. The only opportunity for the actors to unveil
unsaid feelings at a closer proximity to the camera comes in Hong’s characteristic reframings within a single shot, the
forward and backward zooms which usually coincide with some alteration in the emotional frequency of the verbal
interaction (sometimes with changes in the setting). There are thirty-two zooms in Right Now, Wrong Then, which
almost without exception occur when there are changes in the nature of a conversation’s logic or in the emotional
consequences provoked by dialogue. In the first version, during the café scene, Heejun finds out the famous director
whom she is falling in love with is married with children. When the situation becomes clear, the camera slowly zooms
forward on Heejun and relocates her right in the middle of the frame, where her emotional modification is made
intensely evident.
Detractors might claim Hong Sang-soo is merely doing the same thing over and over again, but it’s clear that he has
become a specialist in employing repetition as a filmic and anthropological structure. Paradoxically, the lightness of his
films achieves an extreme degree of depth. Repetition is one of the most delicate and difficult devices to deal with in
general, because something that appears to be always the same sooner or later ends up drifting away into something
unexpected, an unstable trans- formation that can only be captured and controlled by a patient filmmaker. In creating a
remake of his film within the same film, Hong reaches the truth of his subject matter not through words themselves, but
by filming failures in human communication between stereotypical characters – here, an arrogant filmmaker and a
struggling young artist – particularly in relation to the indirect speech game played during the development of sexual
attraction. The secret lies in using stereotypes in order to then move away from them, and through that operation offer
a glimpse at a behavioral matrix.
Over the course of its two-hour running time, Right Now, Wrong Then renounces any trace of neatness or stylistic
affectations, which is not to say that beauty is cast away. The final shot of Heejun walking away from the cinema on a
snow-covered street is, without a doubt, an honest expression of all that is pleasant in the world. The same can be said
about an unassuming opening insert showing a statue of Buddha on a roof adjacent to the house of Heejun and her
mother. Beautiful shots such as these are speckled throughout the film without being overstressed – they are there for
those who look carefully – and taken as a whole these represent a truly astonishing visual regime that traps in its spell
those viewers who are open to it. It wouldn’t be such a bad thing to stay and live inside of Right Now, Wrong Then. This
is a kind and beautiful film. And those are in short supply.
Roger Koza

Francisco Ferreira and Julien Gester: We know that Right Now, Wrong Then is the title of your movie from the festival
program, but in the opening credits, before we know this film will have two parts, we see it’s called Right Then, Wrong
Now. One might think that you’d changed the title at the last minute before the world premiere. This leads us to
something which is not new in your films but was never so clear as in this one: the notion of déjà vu, something that is
not conscious in real life but that cinema can reproduce as a construction.
Hong Sang-soo: We could say that, yes. I didn’t think about déjà vu as the basis of my formal structure and yet... Well, in
the second part, the character of the director doesn’t know the girl he meets. We cannot say that she reminds him of
someone or something from his past. But the audience knows him and knows her when the second part begins. But I did
give Jeong Jae-yeong the instruction to act as if he had an immediate, strange connection with her, a strong sympathy –
to feel like you know her, but you can’t explain why. In this sense, talking about déjà vu makes sense.
As you explained in the press conference, you shot the first part, edited it and then showed it to the actors, so the actors
were aware of how the situation was structured, even if their characters in the second part are not. Perhaps because of
this, in the second part one could say that there is some kind of moral improvement, even an elevation, in the way they
relate to each other. But maybe déjà vu is actually what makes certain that everything doesn’t go perfectly the second
time around, because it’s a troubling feeling.
In comparing these two parts, if I can call them parts, some elements can be well connected and make the audience feel
that they can explain the difference between the two in terms of morals and attitudes. But some elements are not
meant to be like that, and the two worlds are meant to be quite independent. If one is able to offer a clear explanation
about the relationship between the two parts, then that can be a pleasant thing. But that encloses everything...
You know what I mean ? This way we can proceed with some pleasure of making sense, but still feel that the two parts
are quite independent. Not one moralistic message. Let me make a drawing...

Just look at these two circles in the drawing as two independent worlds. If you believe there’s a clear reason for these
two worlds to exist, once you find a clear meaning between them, then these worlds themselves disappear. Once we
make clear sense out of these two worlds, they are just used up. It happens that it’s not easy to give them a clear
meaning. So all the questions are kept alive if there’s an infinite possibility of worlds. It’s like a permanent reverberation.
Even though the two parts are parallel worlds, still, continuity is important in the film, the fact that the second part
comes after the first one. If you were doing videos for an art gallery, you could show both parts on two screens at the
same time, and things would happen in a parallel way.
Even if you put it together like that, you have to see something first, then something next. You can’t avoid the time
frame. What’s important is what you think over the course of the experience of going through that time frame.
I don’t believe you’ve ever shot a film in Suwon.
No, this was my first time.
Is there something special about that city? What was your feeling when you shot there?
Nowadays I start my films with almost nothing, I mean, basically with two things: places and actors. I didn’t know
anything about Suwon. Maybe I read a couple of things a long time ago that gave me a feeling about the place. It’s kind
of a bleak city. I went there one day, met some people, walked in the neighbourhoods, and decided to work there. For
example, the sushi bar in the movie is a place I just found by chance. The owner is a very nice guy, I told him, “I’m Hong
Sang-soo, I’m a filmmaker, and I’ll be shooting in three weeks with my small film crew. My way of working is kind of
strange, so I don’t know the exact date. Can you allow me to do that ? Maybe I will come back twice or three times, but I
will inform you as soon as I know.” He said, “OK, but not on the weekends.” So I made some deals with these places, but
I didn’t know what I would do there, I just chose them intuitively.
Are first impressions important to you when you meet an actor that you’re planning to work with?
It might be a prejudice of mine, but I believe that when I meet an actor, first impressions are the starting point for
everything. The person interests me above all, that’s the core: I see them as persons and have no opinion about their
work as actors. I often don’t even know what films they have done before. Based on this impression, sometimes I
remember something that happened to me a long time ago, some situation, some dilemma or lost memory.
How did it happen this time with Kim Min-hee, whom you’d never worked with before?
As simple as this: I asked her if she was available to work with me during this period. So then I had two main characters
and some locations. At that point I have maybe two months before shooting, and some thoughts may emerge, but I
never finalize them. I make some important decisions three or four days before the first day of shooting, like if I’m going
to shoot a scene in front of the palace, and the characters will meet each other there. So I call the places, and tell them
we will shoot something there. Very early on the first day of shooting I start writing the script for that day, in the office
or even at the location. I start at 5:00 or 6:00 am, and it can take three hours, sometimes five hours to write.
For how long have you been working this way, without a full script?
For my first three or four films I did it like everybody else. Then I started to avoid the script, and I had like twenty pages
summarizing the whole thing. But even this, as I used to call it, ‘treatment,’ became more and more compressed over
the years. This compression became something more radical when I shot Oki’s Movie (2010). I just had a few notes. The
‘treatment’ was gone.
You write better under pressure?
I kind of enjoy it, yes.
I’m interested to know how your films ‘flirt’ with reality and with your own life and experiences. Let me give you two
examples: I didn’t know Kim Min-hee, and when I googled her name, the first thing I read was that she was a model
before she became an actress – which is something her character Heejun refers to. Then at the end of the second part,
she is at the cinema watching Chumsu’s last film and, as you mentioned in the press conference, what we hear is the
sound of your previous film Hill of Freedom (2014). Your films may not be based on real characters or your life, but
there’s always a transmission.
But there has to be, of course. Anything that is important for you may be important for your film...

Imagine this rectangle is real life. I try to come as close as possible to it. How ? Using details of my life, things I’ve lived,
things I heard from other people I know or I just met. I always mix different sources, and it’s never about myself, but it
looks like something that happened, or looks like its about me. I want it to be like that. I realized that when I was 23 and
was writing a script based on a real story. I felt too tense; I couldn’t move. I needed distance. In the same way, my films
are never a parallel line to reality. What I tend to do is to follow an arrow towards reality, avoiding it at the very last
second.
You said before you don’t care what your actors have made before working with you. But still, you almost always use
professional actors. It means you value and trust their skills and ability to act.
I worked with total amateurs before, in The Power of Kangwon Province (1998). I realized that at the same time they are
genuine, showing us their true colors, but their thickness is too slim. It’s weak. It happens that my line, which seems
natural, is actually artificial. It has to be very precise, and amateurs cannot adapt to it. That’s why I work with
professionals: they can be very precise and do what I want them to do. But I don’t see them as actors when I first meet
them.
Have you ever fired an actor?
Once I almost did. I wanted to get rid of an actor. He had many stupid ideas. So I called him, he came to my apartment,
and then we went to the playground at night and talked... and he agreed he would do things differently.
You said yesterday that you always think of the same types of characters and situations because you are the same
person. But you’ve been making films for twenty years now. And you’re not the same person. As you show in your films,
when things repeat, everything that remains is transformed.
Yes. For instance, I felt differently twenty years ago about my mother than I do now. But I can use the same elements
and show at the same time what changes I’ve experienced. Sometimes totally new elements come to me, but I don’t
look for them in each film, I don’t feel I need them – what I do with the same elements is important. The kind of
dilemmas and problems I’m interested in in life only change gradually. My main character is a film director, but he could
be someone else, with another profession. But since I know quite well what a filmmaker is, things just became easier for
me this way.
You are constantly looking for new faces, new actors, but you stay faithful to the same technical team, especially your
cinematographer Park Hong-yeol. Is it crucial for you to keep a kind of family together?
Well, filmmaking is one of the most important things in my life. When I make films, I want to be happy and surrounded
by good people. They don’t have to be really skillful, nor famous, it’s just important to me that they aren’t assholes.
Do you always decide where to put the camera?
I decide that !
And only one camera?
Only one. Always. I decide the angle, as the angle says many things, as does the camera movement.
For example, in the first part we see the canvas she is painting, but not in the second...
Two different shots with two different points of view. When I meet a director of photography for the first time, I always
tell him that he has to accept that I’m going to decide the angle. That’s the first question.
Do you have time to rehearse with your actors?
When actors read my script in the morning, they start to memorize the first scene. I give them maybe thirty minutes
with the script, then I meet them, and they read the lines – it’s a precious moment that I really enjoy. Then I correct a
little bit, not much, it takes maybe thirty more minutes, and then we start shooting. We then go on to the second scene
of the day, and while we are moving locations and setting up the next scene, we repeat the process.
And you do very few takes?
Usually less then ten, sometimes fifteen. In very rare cases I can go up to thirty takes. But usually it’s seven or eight.
Why are there always scenes of people drinking in your films?
Because I like to drink; it’s an important aspect of my life. Why should I avoid this kind of situation I’m so familiar with? I
have no hobbies. Many people fish or travel, etc. I don’t.
Would you ever consider making a film with an actor who doesn’t drink?
I did it! I respect the taste of each of them. Some of them just couldn’t drink – their faces became red – so then I gave
them fake soju. For me it’s just more comfortable to be seated and drinking soju than... coffee.
You are often compared to the same directors, for example, Eric Rohmer. But are there other artists who influenced you
who are not so obvious?
I don’t know who I should mention, but they are almost all writers, novelists. Hemingway is important, Chekhov and
Dostoyevsky too. But the artist I admire the most is Cézanne. When I discovered his paintings at graduate school, I
thought they were perfect – I don’t need anything else. I felt an intimacy that really touched me. I had the feeling of
being in front of perfection.
I hesitate to bring it up, but in press conferences there is always someone who asks you about your use of zooms, even if
in this film there are instances where you use them differently, sometimes revealing a character who is out of frame...
I cannot explain to you why I use zooms, I really can’t. I started using them on my sixth film. I just felt one day that I
would like to get closer to the actors without cutting the shot. By doing it I discovered that I could create a special
rhythm in continuity. And it’s so easy. I just kept doing it ever since. I didn’t want to make it my trademark.
It was an accident?
But all the important things that happened to me in my life were by accident! Becoming a filmmaker was certainly one
of them. The people I met, the women I fell in love with... I was 20 years old and doing nothing, not even preparing for
my university exams, and I met this playwright. He was drunk. I sat beside him, and he asked me, “Sang-soo, what are
you doing in life ?” “Nothing,” I said. “Well, you might be good as a theater director.” Then I thought about this and
entered university to study theater. Their department happened to be quite bad. I didn’t like their doctrines. So I looked
outside the window, and there was the film department on the other block, and there were two or three guys going on
the street to shoot with a camera. So I transferred to the film department.
Will you ever act in one of your films or are you too shy?
I’m shy, but not too shy. But I know I’d be a terrible actor so I guess that will never happen. Or at least it’s beyond my
horizon.

Idiocies. A Poetics of the Real

JACQUES AUMONT 2017
TRANSLATED BY
SIS MATTHÉ
DOSSIER HONG SANG-SOO
(1) Bamui haebyun-eoseo honja [On the Beach at Night Alone] (2017)

In Hong Sang-soo’s work there is a constant trait, which is neither really stylistic (it’s not a matter of form), nor frankly
thematic (it’s not a matter of content either), and which returns, like a butterfly – and even, as its course is erratic, like a
moth, the ultimate uncatchable insect. You will forgive me for calling this trait idiocy, a striking word that somehow
touches the singular art, so difficult to describe in sentences, of this not exactly talkative filmmaker.

Why ‘idiocy’? First of all, in the regular meaning of the word, which aligns it with the unreasonable or the arbitrary:
“Everything that happens is, anyway, ‘idiotic’. Because we need to understand the term in the broadest sense: stupid,
without reason, like the infinity of possibilities; but also simple, unique, like the totality of the real.”1 What happens in
Hong’s stories, so true and amusing, is most often idiotic in that sense: a hodgepodge of relationships,
misunderstandings and improbabilities. Think of the script of Hahaha (2010), in which two old friends endlessly drink
makgeolli, each telling his own summer adventure (in black and white), without ever noticing that it’s the same (in
colour). In addition, as Clément Rosset underlines, idiocy also resembles idiom, even the idiomatic: that which is typical
of someone, of a singular being, that which makes someone different from all others and which is ineffable almost by
definition. The misfortunes of Hong’s not so heroic heroes are banal, to the point where, due to characterizing them,
and no one else’s misfortunes, they cease to be so. Drinking too much makes you puke (Virgin Stripped Bare by Her
Bachelors [2000]), that makes sense, but having a relationship with a married woman does not necessarily lead to being
slaughtered in the company of another woman (The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well [1996]).

I am, however, aiming at yet another aspect of idiocy. First of all, I think of certain details – of their incongruous but yet
necessary presence, of their opacity and arbitrariness, of their profound insignificance and their indefinite resonance –
in short, of little things that don’t really make the narrative machine or the semiotic machine of films work, but that
open them up to something unknown, which can have no other name than the real, if by the real we mean that which
we will never know because we are too busy dressing it in an imaginary reality. I will give two examples that will allow
me to explain this, one from an older movie and one from a recent movie.

1. The Power of Kangwon Province (1998): leaving with a friend to tour this tourist-province par excellence, the hero
puts a secretary at his university in charge of taking care of two goldfish. They are placed in a bowl that is well exposed
to daylight and protected from the sun by a sheet of paper. The movie ends with the bowl, moved to a cluttered nook;
there is only one fish left. What to do with this detail? I have several solutions: I can call it insignificant, irrelevant to the
course of the story, and forget about it. I can, on the contrary, try to semiotize it at all cost, try to find a clue for an
unnoticed enigma, in line with the idea of Raoul Ruiz’s ‘secret film’ or Peirce’s abduction.2 I can, more simply, make it
mean something in another sense, that of metaphor, reading into it something like the discrete poeticization of a kind of
melancholy. But I can also – and my hypothesis is that this is the most Hongian position – refuse all of these
interpretations and be content with revealing it, with seeing it exist, accepting that it doesn’t signify anything, at least
nothing specific. The fish were there, I saw them, they had a destiny, which doesn’t concern me and of which I will never
know if or how it concerned or affected the characters. This detail, both figurative and narrative, puts me in front of
what I, both in my everyday life and in film, continue not to see: the real – which precisely does not make sense, exists
outside of me, only concerns me by accident or by refraction and therefore does not enter into my scenarios of reality.

2. Like You Know It All (2009): animal after animal (and again sticky and cold), we can see a little green frog
incongruously appear by the swimming pool, in two stages: seen by the hero but not by his companion (nor by us: the
frog is off screen); then seen by us, but possibly not by anyone in the story. A moment of pure image, entirely made of
the little apple-green creature’s swimming gestures – unless we need to establish a link with the contemptuous remark
uttered shortly after by the hero about a rival film director: “The frog has forgotten his life as a tadpole.” Or, even
better, the little yellow-green caterpillar that happily moves forward, like an animated caterpillar, making a big loop with
every ‘step’: it arrives unexpectedly at the feet of the hero’s friends who are upset by the mysterious betrayal by their
friend and are hugging each other. The caterpillar is there, fresh and yellow at their naked feet – and it does not make
sense. (Conversely, think of the earthworm of Weekend (1967), and the deep metaphysical thoughts it inspired in Jean
Yanne and Mireille Darc.) Fleeting images - loosely connected to the ironic melancholy that bathes the whole movie.
Such idiotic images, for once, that we hesitate to say it.

Of the ‘idiotic’ type, as well, but more profound, I would consider the mineral that the hero is watching when his friend’s
wife is in the shower. It’s a volcanic stone; we recognize it immediately. What is it doing there? Why does the character
grab hold of it? Is he thinking of the stone? Or is he already thinking of the young woman - naked next to him? The
perfect idiocy of this detail is that we will never have an answer to these questions, not even to the more elementary
but more important question for the story: What happens after his empty look at this volcanic stone? We are, with this
question, at the heart of Hongian aesthetics and ethics: while the director Ku watches the stone without seeing it, the
music starts; a panning shot horizontally leads us to the glass door of the shower, then vertically to the underwear left
on the floor by the young woman. Cut. Ku leaves his friend’s house, the wife doesn’t say goodbye, a zoom frames the
window of her room; we seem to hear muffled sobbing. A couple of shots later, Ku receives an offensive letter from his
friend, suggesting he has attacked the young woman. Finding the accusation unjust, he goes to his friend, who welcomes
him by throwing the famous pumice stone at his head, threatening to knock him out. This is already a beautiful
coincidence – unless the stone has, mysteriously, played a part in the alleged abuse of the woman. Has there been any
abuse, in fact? Is it not the young woman who has misinterpreted whatever gesture about which we will know nothing?
Nothing: it is the only word that fits, and that’s all that will be clarified by the movie – with only one, idiotic exception:
the relationship between the volcanic stones and the abduction of a friend’s wife.

People will say that, like with the goldfish, metaphors could explain everything: if these stones are volcanic, maybe they
have a contagious power, transforming the non-character Ku into a sexual volcano. Possibly. Another way of
interpretation, more underground, more Korean as well, seems more urgent: this volcanic stone is not just any stone; it
is a stone of Jeju, the big island in the South of the country with its sunny climate, a tourist and holiday island, where the
hero coincidentally goes to next and which will be the place of his second pitiful conquest. These stones are famous;
they are sold to visitors, and we see them after we are led there. They are everywhere, including in the form of
traditional statues, and at a certain moment the hero lies down on a bed of volcanic tuff. When he goes to another
‘friend’ for the first time, whose wife he is going to seduce, he sees the exact double of the first stone among other
stones. The metaphor seems to maliciously insist: lava stone = desire for adultery. Both appearances, however, are given
as a pure whim of the movie, plunging the character into the depths of silent perplexity. This hesitation of the movie, the
story and the spectator in their wake, is what I mean by idiocy.

The status of detail in the images is ambiguous. Cinema, and photography before that, has captured these accidents of
reality, these little pieces of raw reality that have insinuated themselves without ever being asked, and it has quickly
learned to domesticate them. Barthes once theorized this, through the studium/punctum couple, but his theory
univocally took the side of the spectator, of one spectator even: himself. As a result, the interesting detail, the punctum,
depended on everyone individually (what grabbed him, he didn’t care if it grabbed me too); and the detail willed by the
photographer, the studium, was relegated to the realm of mastered meaning, interesting for sociologists or historians,
but not for him, Roland Barthes.

Barthes’s intuition, however, remains suggestive, including in cinema. The studium is very simple, and there are enough
movies that are quick to elevate details into clear signs by emphasizing them, by indexing them, the way silent film did
by necessity and the way a family of filmmakers, with Hitchcock as its patriarch, did by inclination. On the side of the
punctum, things are less clear. It’s up to me to identify a certain detail and turn it into a clue for interpreting the movie.
Oeuvres like Lynch’s or Kubrick’s have been a goldmine for researchers of this type of detail – I need only remind you of
the thousands of pages of more or less delusional interpretations of 2001, of The Shining or of Lost Highway. Or, to stay
closer to Barthes’s lesson, it’s up to me to look for ‘poignant’ details that make no particular sense, but will silently
report through a certain presence, through a certain incongruity as well, without ever really engaging in a systematic
reading: in other words, little events of the visible.

If the Hongian details of which I speak seem particular to me, it is because they are a bit of both. Details of the author,
because they are willed by the mise en scène and there for a reason; and nevertheless also event detail, in the
fluctuating sense, giving a feeling of accidental presence. Hong doesn’t index anything; the details are there, few of
them emphasized. The goldfish in The Power of Kangwon Province (1980) and the pumice stone in Like You Know It All
(2009) are not hidden, they cannot escape any minimally attentive perception; but they can, and that is their subtlety,
escape what I would call narrative attention: even when we have perfectly seen them, we can right away assign them a
status of total unimportance, the status of that which “does not mean anything”. These details, precisely, don’t mean
anything; but it is up to me (as a spectator) to decide if they nevertheless say something or not, knowing very well that
whatever they say will possibly not have any impact whatsoever on the narrative or the story, that it will only be – but
it’s not nothing – a small vibration to be felt.
The list of these details in most of Hong’s movies is endless. Hahaha (2010) is full of picturesque notes, carefully chosen
– starting with the fact of focusing everything on the port, which is only a small part of the city of Tongyeong. The
structure of the story, which expertly intertwines two points of view on the same history, as is often the case with Hong,
creates more or less discernable little chains with the object-details. At his second meeting with Seong-ok, the young
woman who earns a living as a tourist guide of a historic monument, one of the boys offers her a cheap bracelet, a
worthless piece of jewellery (in the interior monologue, he admits it was the only thing he had with him). Nothing more
is said, and we wouldn’t think of it anymore, if it wouldn’t rhyme with another gift, given by the girl to her lover, the
young unscrupulous poet: a flower pot, which he refuses – and which we can fleetingly spot on her terrace later in the
movie, among other similar things. We then understand that she has done the same thing to him as what the hero did to
her, offering what she had, something without any value. Likewise, we could ‘concatenate’ the girl’s little dog with the
orange ears and the dog of the second protagonist’s uncle, both seen only once, not playing any role, not even barking.
And, even more idiotic, pure hapax legomena, like the bunch of grass used by the young woman, without ever seeing it
coming, to hit the boy she suspects has bad intentions. Or, in Nobody’s Daughter Haewon (2013), it would be the detail
of the cigarette: the first time, a thin white cylinder, rolling by itself until it coincides with a white parking line; but there
will be at least three other cigarettes, two of which are intentionally stubbed out, and that way we see a detail softly
pass from punctum to studium...

A persistent commonplace, in France at least, calls Hong the ‘Korean Rohmer’ – a beautiful alliteration, though pretty far
from the critical truth. What’s Rohmerian in Hong is easily identifiable and has to do with two thematic features, both
indeed connected, just like in his supposed model: the love for young girls and the love for sweet-talking speech; and a
narrative feature – the passion to confuse the spectator. “We are always deceived, that could be the proverb that covers
all of the movies by...”:3 it suffices to replace Rohmer with Hong in this excellent short description by Pascal Bonitzer to
have the key to the rapprochement.

No sooner said than questioned: the differences are abundantly clear, starting with sex, which is performed all over in
Hong’s work, especially in his first movies (they all included pretty raw bed scenes); continuing with booze, almost
always a pretext for the national sport of systematic inebriation; concluding with language. While Rohmer, at least in the
Contes moraux and also in the Comédies et proverbes, committed himself to a very written way of talking, Hong’s
dialogues are pure talking, in an ornate vocabulary, willingly offensive, with a loose syntax in an uncontrolled flow,
sometimes too fast, sometimes hesitant. In other words, if there is any Rohmer in there, he has decided to let it all slide.

Let’s forget Rohmer and return to the folding and unfolding of Hong’s cinematographic narrative and to his emerging
points – which is my subject. The folding and unfolding is another commonplace about Hong, but with reason. From his
early movies onward, he has developed a narrative framework, loose enough to be strongly varied from one film to the
other, strict enough, however, not to go unnoticed: the framework of the double. The majority of his movies tell a story
from two points of view – either literally the same story, seen by the eyes or the mind of two characters (Virgin Stripped
Bare by Her Bachelors, Hahaha, Right Now, Wrong Then [2015], already The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well) or two
connected or parallel adventures, with identical structures (The Power of Kangwon Province, Like You Know it All,
Woman on the Beach [2006], Tale of Cinema [2005]...). A framework which enables mistakes, misunderstanding,
surprises, the unspoken – in other words, all the ways to mislead the protagonists and the spectator. I shall not go back
over this, as this has often been described, commented on and Rohmerized.

It is, however, worth taking a closer look at how these surprises are produced, the unspoken and the misunderstandings.
There is, obviously, the work by the screenwriter, which consists of making lines cross or not cross, rhyme or silently
respond to each other. But there is also, and more interestingly for the aesthetics of idiocy that I try to discern,
everything that has to do with appearance. Cinema in general is potentially an art of appearance, an art of emergence,
this is known to us at least since Astruc.4 That is the whole problem in Hong’s cinema: the capacity the image has to
make me see something, and to make me see it in a singular mode, that of appearance.

Appearance, the incongruous details, the opaque and idiotic ‘points’ of representation. Appearance, in another sense, a
variety of the ellipsis loved by Hong, which consists of starting almost anew a new storyline, possibly prepared by what
precedes it, but always throwing the spectator a curveball. He has not invented this abrupt style of editing, but he has
practised it from his first feature film onward. In The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well, the husband, who we knew existed
without having seen him, without knowing anything about him, appears on the edge of a cut, without any commentary
or indication. It’s up to me to figure out and conclude that it had to be that character who so far only existed as a series
of allusions, as a virtuality.

A sudden change of the storyline is everything but an ‘idiotic’ event in the meaning I proposed in the beginning. It is, on
the contrary, a deliberate gesture, which we attribute in narratological terms to the enunciator of the movie and in
terms of origin to the authors of the script and to the director (Hong combines both roles). It is about showing his
control when manipulating the spectators, who are forced to follow the detours and jumps imposed on them whether
they like it or not. But here we need to return to my descriptions of singular ‘idiotic’ events, because they are clearly also
planned, accepted or authorized, included in the story by its author. It is even what distinguishes them from the pure
and simple coincidence, which happens all the time in movies because it is impossible to control everything, but which
does not have a significance – except for the ambiguous one of the real. For example, while the young unfaithful wife in
The Day the Pig Fell Into the Well waits for the bus to go to her lover, we see behind her a swarm of pigeons that seem
to follow a passerby; but this vague appearance remains a distant background; it does not get the status of an event on
the basis of one simple criterion: no one looks at them. On the contrary, the goldfish and the pumice stone were looked
upon by a character, then by us, and if I may say so, by the story – the way the little black insect at the beginning of The
Day the Pig Fell Into the Well trying to escape from a pot is looked at, or the way, later on in the no-tell motel, the cherry
tomatoes are carefully washed in close-up...

I therefore seek, in Hong’s style (of story, mise en scène), that which makes an event, by being obviously included in the
story, but without having any meaning or functionality, and therefore creating a disruption, less of the story itself than
of its ontological status. All of these accessories (goldfish, lava stones, insects, tomatoes, and others) are included in the
diegesis they have invented and fabricated, but they stand out by their inutility and their fundamental strangeness. This
is how, in my eyes, they are part of the same system of story disorder as the sudden connections, and more specifically,
those connections that indicate (or rather, don’t indicate) dreams.

There is a lot of dreaming in Hong’s movies, usually without warning and with quite a heavy content. In Like You Know it
All, the director Ku is invited by a friend, drinks too much, and falls asleep on a bed embracing a huge white stuffed
animal. Suddenly, crying and moaning in the next room wakes him up; intrigued, he gets up, opens the door and
discovers the young wife crying that her husband has unexpectedly died. She lashes out at Ku, accusing him of having
murdered his friend by making him drink too much; then, thanks to his consoling reassurance, she changes her mind and
falls into his arms. They throw themselves on the bed of the guest room to embrace... And cut, Ku wakes up hugging the
white stuffed animal, teaching us (or confirming to us) that it was a dream, which is corroborated by the friend’s snoring
off screen. (It is right after this dream that Ku will see the fatal Jeju stone.) In The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well, we are
suddenly and unexpectedly transported to the married couple: the husband, wearing the traditional white cap of Korean
mourning, receives the guests who come and pay tribute to the deceased, whose portrait is barred in black and is sitting
on the table; she is in another room, lying on her futon. The guests comment on her sudden death – until the shot in
which she suddenly moves, wakes up, and puts an end to the whole macabre mise en scène: it was a dream.

There will be plenty of other dreams. The one of the simpleton hero in Hahaha, in which he is, unexpectedly, without
even the smallest indication of a system change, on Hansan Island, close to Tongyeong, and meets the famous hero who
is commemorated all over Hansan, admiral Lee Shun-shin, and who prevented the Japanese from invading the country
at the end of the 16th century through his genius strategy. And what does this great figure do? He offers the hero some
advice on life: to see through appearance, and to see the good sides of things and people; he then drags him along
towards the sea and they look at it in unison – and then the boy wakes up. The admiral’s theatre costume had not left
any doubt, but the shock remains: I, the spectator, also wake up at this point of connection. That is to say: I need to
change my view and tell myself explicitly that it was indeed a dream. In Nobody’s Daughter Haewon it is the dream with
Jane Birkin at the beginning of the movie (wishful thinking, obviously) and most of all the structure of the end, in which
we never really know where the dream begins. Or, in Woman Is the Future of Man (2004), the more down-to-earth
dream of a professor who stumbles upon his pupils playing soccer and, because he is tired and does not feel like seeing
them again, constructs a typical dream of satisfaction where he is fondled, caressed, honoured and praised in the middle
of the small group – until he wakes up, abandoned by all.
(2) Hahaha (Hong Sang-soo 2010)

The whole of cinema has often been compared to a dream, from the 1920s onward, on the basis of superficial
equivalencies: both mobilize images, both put the images in a sequence without interference from the receiving subject,
both have the capacity to abruptly pass from one thing to the next. We know where this comparison went in the 1970s,
with the heavy intervention of psychoanalysis. Nonetheless, I do not dream at the cinema; and, if a movie wants to drag
me into oneirism, it needs to put the forms into it, and to find the overall form. There are roughly two varieties: either to
construct unrealistic scenes, or ‘surrealist’ ones, as they used to call it (of which the paradigm is still the Daliesque
dream in Spellbound), or to accentuate the arbitrariness of the story and the succession of the images. Superimposition
and dissolves have long been the privileged approach, but a more recent approach, simpler and more expedient really, is
the jump cut: passing from one shot to the other by creating a difference between the two – if possible, making sure
that this difference stays undecided for a while, that the oneiric status is not immediately clear, but almost conquered
by the spectator (or conquered by the movie in the mind of the spectator). One filmmaker has become the specialist of
this system, the late Buñuel, especially in Belle de jour or Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie. In the dream, there is only
one feature that remains, but a remarkable one: the suddenness and arbitrariness of the transitions.

I am not slowly replacing the Rohmerian Hong with a Buñuelian Hong, and I am even less suggesting that Hong’s realism
should be mitigated by a dose of ‘surrealism’. It is about identifying, as well as I can, the impression of a very specific
strangeness in films that contain rigorously elaborated documentary details and at the same time cultivate the
arbitrariness of events. Above all, it is about finding a formal anchoring for this feeling of strangeness and this game of
arbitrariness. The detail, the switch to the dream, but just as well the sophisticated and vaguely perverse game of
double stories, with their contradictions between versions and their irony (look at, in Virgin Stripped Bare by Her
Bachelors, the very different account by him and then by her of the young girl’s first visit to the young man), are all ways
of saying one and the same thing: we live in the imaginary, passing our time by replacing an unknowable real by our own
scenarios and desires. The stories Hong’s characters tell each other, the stories they tell themselves, are all ways to
avoid the real.

What remains if the story the characters tell themselves, if the story that drives the movie, is constantly failing to
account for the real? Affect is what remains. Hong’s cinema is a cinema of the shot: a shot lasts; a new one is only
produced when the first one has been exhausted. But ‘exhausted’ according to which criterion? Emotional above all.
There is no logic in the development of Hong’s storylines, they are on the contrary happy to emphasize their
inconsistency, their ‘idiocy’. The most important function of the shot is not to advance the storyline, but to produce an
emotion of infinitely varying quality (the emotion in the scenes of encounter is not the same as the one in the sensual
scenes). When to cut? When the emotion has been produced (but not necessarily at the moment of production). But it
comes at a price: the price of a little idiocy.

There are two ways for a filmmaker to inhabit (or even haunt) his movies: as an actor or as a screenwriter. The Clint
Eastwood way, whose recent oeuvre seems to be chiefly intended to reassure the fan club on the health of the hero.
The Bergman way, with his famous motto: “My movies are the explanation of my images”, I am present, but you will not
see me, you will see the content of my fantasies, dumped on the screen by me. And then there are those who alternate
between the two, like Fassbinder or Allen, or those who combine them, like Bene. Hong is, I believe, part of the second
category, with one small difference: he refuses to push the indiscretion as far as showing us his bare fantasies.

There is a sort of composite of the protagonist of Hong’s movies. He is a man who is still young, about thirty in his first
movies, about forty later on; he is a filmmaker, screenwriter or professor (of cinema), sometimes an unknown stranger,
sometimes a vague celebrity; he always seems a little lost, a little dorky, although he really is very clever, seemingly
determined to fail, comparing himself to old friends who have made it; at the end of the film staying exactly where he
was. This clumsy boy, who tried to find success in America and didn’t find it, struggles to find his place in his own
country; he is full of vague projects and always seems on hold, never recognized, never satisfied. An unrepentant chaser
of skirts, he is ready to fall in love with the first beautiful girl he meets; strangely enough, though he is generally not very
charming, the girls love him. This slightly flattering portrait of an eternal outsider, who is determined to work in cinema,
is too close to known biographical information for us not to see a self-portrait. Today, Hong has become an international
celebrity, abroad more than in his own country, where his movies do not get mass distribution (a couple of tens of
thousands of spectators). He remains, like the director Ku, an admired artist, famous even in certain circles, but without
a big audience.

Why do all of Hong’s movies have this ‘same’ hero, who so closely resembles the filmmaker? One basic reason, which
cannot altogether be ignored, is the convenience of the autobiographical script. “Promise me you will not turn it into a
movie,” Yu-mi asks director Gosun, who doesn’t get why he wouldn’t. Another plausible reason is the equal convenience
of metafiction: a movie that talks of cinema cannot fail its purpose; a hero dreaming of doing what the director of the
movie has accomplished is convincing. But there is also a third reason: these bewildered, marginalized, wilfully asocial
heroes are out of touch with their environment and with what happens to them; they are fully in touch, however, with
the proliferation of the incongruous – from the idiotic detail to the oneiric idiom, from the arbitrary zig-zag of the stories
to the unpredictability of the other’s reaction – in other words, with the elusiveness of the real. The idiocy this style of
film exalts, through its play of details and connections and, more in general, through its play with sudden emergence, is
then a way to avoid indiscretion, to dress it in a light garment of irony, mystery and drollery, by referring to the real -
always to the real - the responsibility of the errors of the imaginary.

1.Clément Rosset, Le Réel. Traité de l’idiotie (Paris: Minuit, 1977), 48.

2.Raúl Ruiz, Poétique du cinéma (1994), trad. fr., (Paris: Dis Voir, 1995). Charles S. Peirce, “Le pragmatisme comme
logique de l’abduction” (1903), trad. fr., Œuvres, tome 1, Pragmatisme et pragmaticisme, (Paris: Éd. du Cerf, 2002).
3.Pascal Bonitzer, Éric Rohmer, (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 1991), 25.
4.« L’art de la mise en scène est un art de surgissement. Il fait apparaître […], regarder ailleurs, au delà. […] Un style
cinématographique n’est pas un style pictural. C’est une certaine façon de faire apparaître les choses. C’est la création
d’un univers. » Alexandre Astruc, “Notes sur la mise en scène (1950),” Du stylo à la caméra et de la caméra au stylo.
Écrits (1942-1984) (Paris: L’Archipel, 1992), 348-349.

A Cigarette with Hong Sang-soo

ANNE-CHRISTINE LORANGER 2017
DOSSIER HONG SANG-SOO
Korean cinema is on a roll. Since 2000, a new generation of filmmakers, such as Bong Joon-ho, Park Chan-wook, and
Hong Sang-soo, has produced internationally acclaimed masterpieces. This Korean “new wave” offers a fresh look at this
emerging country on the cinematic map. I met Hong Sang-soo in Berlin the day after the screening of On the Beach at
Night Alone at the 2017 Berlinale. A few days later, his actress Kim Min-hee would win the Silver Bear for Best Actress.

To prepare for the interview with Hong Sang-soo, I chose to adopt his method. Avoiding note-taking during the press
conference following the screening, I simply sat, observed, and listened to him. Then, on the day of the interview, I woke
up around four o’clock in the morning and prepared my questions very quickly, following our intuition. With the
conversation having had to move to the smoking-room of the Hyatt Hotel at his request, I spontaneously chose to smoke
a cigarette with him (from his pack). Since the wires and headphones in the interview room of the Berlinale Palast had
become tangled in the transition to the Hyatt, I found myself having to untangle everything in front of one of the
masters of Asian cinema. Small goatee, thin face, mischievous eyes, and a voice of astonishing gravity, Hong Sang-soo
has the slowness of those Zen masters who serve you tea in small porcelain bowls before slicing you with a simple
sentence. Except that he has the reputation of smoking like a chimney, drinking like a sailor, and systematically having
adventures with his actresses. The scenarios of his films pretty much follow the same framework.

Bamui haebyun-eoseo honja [On the Beach at Night Alone] (Hong Sang-soo, 2017)

Anne-Christine Loranger: Hong Sang-soo, I smoke one cigarette a year and decided to smoke it with you.

Hong Sang-soo: Oh! That’s great! This way, it’ll be something special.

Before that, I need to take a minute to rearrange my equipment. I’m sorry.

Please do. You’re Canadian, but you’re staying here, I take it? What brought you to Berlin?
It was love.

Ah! Love... Is your friend German?

He is now my husband. We’ve been together for a long time. OK, the equipment is ready, let’s do this! When I get an
idea for a novel, a poem, or a short film, it comes to me crystal clear, with laser precision. I only have to follow it. You
said that you function differently. Still, you have been producing about one film a year for the last two decades. How
does the inspiration come to you?

It’s not so strong. You kind of know it is the right thing when it comes. It’s quiet. You see small lights, and they look cute.
And you almost instantly know that you have found something. Then, usually, I know that it is the right thing I need, for
the film or the dialogue, and arrangement of scenes, how I progress from here to there. It’s small things… The light, for
example. I instantly know whether it is the right one or the wrong one.

What is the feeling of “right”?

When it fills all of the requirements.

Which are?

It depends. If there is a dialogue problem and then it feels right. It satisfies all the requirements I initially felt. You have
to, you know, feel it with your heart. The right thing comes, and I know that this is it. It has the right feeling to it.
Sometimes I don’t exactly know the requirements because there are too many, or they are too vague, but you do it
because it just feels right. And later, you realize that this was the right thing to do. Every time I find something like that, I
feel lucky, and I make a wish that the luck will go on. (laughter)

Typically, art-house and independent films have a lot of silent scenes, such as characters that evolve without talking
much. Your characters are very chatty, and people talk a lot. What is the role of silence for you? How do you work with
silence?

It does not matter if the characters are chatty at the surface or silent at the surface, what’s important is “is it new?”, “is
it fresh?” for me. I can make a silent scene, where people don’t talk. It does not matter on the surface whether they are
chatty or just walking around.

There is this bench scene in the park in Hamburg, where the two women talk. It is a very long, single-shot scene. It takes
very precise actresses to work with a scene like that. What did you tell your actresses so that they could be able to
deliver their dialogues with such freshness?

Almost nothing. (laughter) For me, the directions on the spot don’t need much explanation. What matters is to have the
right cast, the correct perception of what they are, and the right dialogue that I wrote that morning. When it all fits
together, you don’t have to say much.

Do you tell them “you have this kind of feeling, this kind of relationship with this person”?

Sometimes I do. The actors may have misunderstood the intention when they read the script. If the contents of some of
the dialogues are sometimes too abstract, then I give explanations. I try to minimize the direction because it usually
doesn’t help. You have to tell the actors the only things you know because everything else is wrong for them. What
counts is to do the right casting, which means that, intuitively, you choose the right people for that moment in your life.
You have to have the right perception of the actor, which means that you observe all the things you need to understand
the feeling of that person, who happens to be an actor or an actress. Action and dialogue must be right; that is, when I
write the script of the day in the morning, how the actors speak, what they say, must be right. When all this is present,
you hardly need to say anything. They know what they have to do.
You give them a lot of freedom?

Freedom, I don’t know. They memorize their texts, usually in 30 minutes. When it’s longer texts, maybe 45 minutes. We
don’t have much time because we have to finish three or four scenes a day. So, they memorize their texts while walking,
or in the car. Still, they don’t need to think, analyse, bring their perception, and dramatize the story. They learn their
lines, and if the dialogue is the right one for them, then they do it very well. I’ve heard actors tell me many times that
the character they’ve just created is strange to them, that they don’t know how they created it. They don’t know if they
can ever play such a character again in other films. For me, that means that the dialogue and the action in the script –
and that’s the most important thing – must fit the person playing them. It’s not just the skill of the actor, but the content
of the script must fit.

So, you always write for specific actors?

Yes, of course, I do. I always choose the locations first and then the actors. I try to talk to them, to drink with them... Just
talking to them, something comes into my system, and when I have to write on the morning of the shoot, I start at 4:00,
5:00, sometimes 3:00. It’s always intuitive, there’s no preparation, just places and actors and something in my head. And
then it comes to me. I try to arrange them in a particular way, to bring out something too. Every word, every line of the
scripts is given to me. When you’re more open, more things come to you. It may seem irresponsible to work that way,
but that’s how I do it. As someone who grew up in this culture, I have seen so many stories, so much drama. The first
thing I see when I tell a story are the clichés. We are trained to see life in a particular narrative form. Clichés are
pleasant. When I work with fragments of dialogue, I don’t try to achieve something pleasant. I try to find a balance
between fragments. I know how another person would feel if I put fragments together in a certain way, but I try not to
get overwhelmed by that pleasure.

You have to keep your mind very wide opened and very calm.

That’s well said. I love this way of working. It’s in my temperament. At the very beginning of my career, I had to write a
complete script to get funding and had to write everything, where we would be at what time, and what would be said. I
don't like that process. I feel more like a painter, using the mountains, the sun, the wind, and working from what’s there.
It’s curious what happens to me when I’m there, and I have a canvas. It’s a joy to see what happens. For example, during
the shooting in Germany, we were short of actors, and we were doing tests. I asked my cinematographer Pak Hyong-
yeol to move towards the two women. And after using this take twice, I had to be consistent with the character I had
created and make sense of it in the end.

In my opinion, great filmmakers never make just one film over and over again, different aspects of the same thing, like
the painter Cézanne, endlessly painting Mount Sainte-Victoire. Michael Haneke, for example, explores violence. For you,
it would be uncertainty.

Mmm. Good word!

Do you think that that’s a good word?

Yes. Because the moment you realize what you don’t know, something happens. It’s the premise of something alive. For
that, you need to know how ignorant you are. People say: “I know nothing.” But they act as if they know everything, all
the time, all day, all their lives. We don't know the extent of everything we don’t know. It's very difficult to know how
ignorant we are.

With that kind of approach, how do you get funding for your films?

I make very low-budget films: a few actors and a few production steps. They don’t ask me for a lot of money. They say
that working with me is like taking three weeks’ vacation. (laughs) Yes! Yes! That’s what they tell me! I give them very
little money, so our budget is reduced. I don’t make a lot of profit; but out of that profit, I can make a new film. That
way, I can do whatever I want.
You have a very particular way of shooting: fairly quick zooms, conversations filmed from the side, few close-ups from
the front, why do you opt for this way of doing things?

For practical reasons: I don’t want to cut and shoot again from different angles. When the scene is over, if the actors are
happy and I’m happy, I want it to be the end. I don’t want them to have to redo the scene from a different angle. So,
when I shoot like this, each scene can create things that we didn’t anticipate. Every take is very different. I like it when I
look at what’s going to happen in the next take. So, when it’s 80% good for me, then it’s the right take. So, if we do very
long takes, 10 minutes long, you can’t expect it to be 100% good in all that time, with only one hour to memorize the
lines. I don’t expect that. It would be unrealistic. Already, if it’s 70% good, that’s fine. And after that, I don’t want them
to do it again, and they can’t do it the same way. Between the texts, the actions, some pauses are impossible to repeat
in the next take because they are tiny. So, when the scene is finished, it’s finished. For the rest, these are practical
necessities. The only way to shoot two people talking is sideways. I don’t care so much about not showing their faces
from the front because even when you frame a profile, you show a lot of things. You don’t need to show the whole face
to show what he’s thinking, what she’s feeling. Sometimes you look at a person from your car 50 meters away, a woman
over there doing something, and you know what she’s doing. Human beings are all the same. You don’t have to show
her whole face, all her expressions, to understand what she’s thinking. So, I don’t mind filming people in profile.

How do you work with the cinematographer? Here, for example (i.e., the smoking-room of the Hyatt in Berlin). We are
conversing while smoking a cigarette. How would you film this scene?

Then I would probably put the camera there (near the wall) and move the table where we are a little bit to get greater
field depth. When I get to the location, it takes me very little time, two to five minutes, to decide where I’m going to put
the camera, the actors, and that the movements will be from here to there. Then we do the first rehearsal, and then I
decide when we’re going to zoom in and out the panoramic shots. I give all my instructions to the cinematographer. And
that’s it! It doesn't take a lot of time.

And how do you work with light? Always in natural light?

No, it’s a mixture of natural light and present light. Here, because we’re indoors and there are no windows, we’d have to
use my equipment for back-up lighting. I try to minimize as much as possible. You know, making things look good
visually doesn’t add value to a scene. What's important is that visually things are right. That's what I’m trying to achieve,
a truth, a rightness in the scene that’s being shot.

In this film, I noticed many conversations between women about their need to be pretty. That comes back a lot. It seems
to be a major concern of the women in this film – a need to be always reassured by their entourage about their
appearance.

Mmm... Men tell women that they are pretty. When I say something like “you're beautiful,” “you’re pretty,” “you’re
good looking,” “you’re cute….” I try to avoid tact, to be as direct as possible. I don’t want to beat around the bush.

Is that the way you are in life?

Yes. And I like to see someone say that. I like that honesty, that transparency. You know, it’s difficult to write a scene
where people express their affection without becoming superficial. So, I choose to be direct. Well, now you know he
likes you! We can take the next step. Why worry, make people wait, and all that. Get him to tell you how he feels, and
get him to tell you that he loves you. And what’s the next line, the next step? Well, that’s the question.

The female characters in this film have conversations that I’m 100% certain I’d never had with my best friend. This
scene, for example, on the balcony in Hamburg, where Younghee is talking to Jeeyoung and Jeeyoung says, “I don’t have
much desire," and Younghee says, “Yes, I certainly have more than you do,” is a very intimate revelation. I might have a
conversation like that with my mother. Where did this come from?
These are things that came up during the writing of the dialogue because that’s how I see them as people. I chose these
two people as the director, and I see them in a certain way, and this dialogue emerges in my mind as a character. I see
this woman, and I see this woman, and I imagine they would say that kind of thing.

Isn’t that something you’ve observed in discussions between women?

Sometimes the dialogue comes to me from direct experience, from memory. But these lines you’re talking about have
emerged from the characters, from the way I perceive them. In the collision between these characters, it's this dialogue
that came to me.

I felt that it “stuck'” to this actress, who is very androgynous; she is halfway between the feminine and the masculine. At
the same time, even if that were true, I know that I could never reveal something so intimate.

But you can’t deny that people can say it!

I don't know. When I replay your film in my head, the conversations in a restaurant in the middle of a group of friends,
and these intimate revelations by Younghee and Myungsoo about their personal feelings in the couple they were in, I
find things I haven’t seen in my Western world. I have been around a lot of Germans in recent years who are of great
sentimental modesty. But I wonder if it’s typically Korean, that kind of thing? Or is it Hong Sang-soo?

I think your appreciation is a mixture of two things. On the one hand, your limited experience as a human being, because
you haven’t known characters fundamentally different from your quintessence. But the other thing is that I make these
two characters collide, and then in my mind something happens, which you never knew, which doesn’t correspond to
your experience. It's a mixture of these two things that make you think, ‘how can they do this?’ But that’s right. As long
as you feel that the scene is realistic enough, you can accept to abandon your landmarks, choose to believe in what’s
happening on the screen, and enjoy the story. The script doesn't have to be realistic because there is no “real reality.”

Younghee always seems to drift, like a ship lost at sea looking for a home port, an anchor. What was the initial
inspiration for this character who is uncertain about everything in his life? In a way, this film is very you because there is
nothing certain about him from beginning to end.

I don’t know. Maybe there are several reasons why I wrote this movie. Perhaps it has to do with my state of mind during
the time I wrote this film. All directors use their own lives as inspiration: my interests, my main questionings, my
interrogations. You need an intimate distance with the subject you are dealing with. But I’m not trying to make
autobiographical films. I try to get as close to me as possible, and to get away from it just before the plane touches the
ground. Maybe if you compare me to other filmmakers, my films seem autobiographical to you, but that’s not my
intention.

At one point, Younghee kneels in front of a bridge in Hamburg. I love that scene where you can feel that she is
experiencing something important, that she is going to go through something. She prays for the strength to cross to the
other side, but in the end, she never crosses over.

Ah! Who knows when she’ll cross? When she sees the bridge, because she’s so desperate, so silently desperate, she
clings to that kind of symbolism – crossing the bridge, like going through this ordeal of our lives. It’s a desperate
approach, a desperate attempt. As she bows down in front of the bridge, she prays that some concrete action will help
her. She is looking for a miracle. A miracle obtained a little too easily. But, of course, she is sincere. I can understand her.
I can understand why she’s doing this. But the miracle doesn’t come by leaning over a bridge. It takes more than that.

It takes what?

A miracle is a miracle because you don’t know how you get it. It’s something that comes to you when you don’t expect
it.
Is that what you’re looking for?

If you know how to get it, it’s not a miracle.

But it happens a lot to you to get miracles. Doesn’t it?

Yes, but especially when I’m making a movie. There are other parameters in my life. And that’s why I like shooting films!
(laughter)

The Hong Sang-soo Method

ROMAIN LEFEBVRE 2018
TRANSLATED BY
GERARD-JAN CLAES, ANTON JÄGER
DOSSIER HONG SANG-SOO
Several weeks before the start of Cannes 2016 – where she was due to present Elle by Paul Verhoeven – Isabelle
Huppert was contacted by director Hong San-soo, who asked her whether she had any free time to film with him. The
actress agreed. And although the festival lasts a “fortnight [quinzaine]”, it would only take nine days for a small team,
gathered around the director, to wrap up a new film, and one day to edit. The genesis of Claire’s Camera offers a fresh
example of the rapidity with which Hong Sang-soo shoots (Grass, his next film, apparently only took three days to
shoot); a rapidity which does not cease to amaze, evoking jealousy in colleagues or serving as fuel for detractors. It
makes sense to use the upset of the release of Claire’s Camera to better understand the production process of a director
which can, as we shall see, be structured into three indispensable stages: (1) the preparation or the conceptual base; (2)
the intuitive decision or chance; (3) the composition or the structure. Along the way we shall see in what way this
process, even when disdainful of any notion of “intention,” responds to a permanent project of the director: to combat
ready-made images.

It’s a notorious fact: Hong Sang-soo does not write screenplays. Or, rather, the practice of scriptwriting melted away as
time passed: meticulously drafted for his first three films, scripts were subsequently reduced to mere treatments or
increasingly scattered notes – from about thirty pages for Turning Gate to an estimate of five for Hahaha1 to nearly
nothing for Claire’s Camera. The act of writing, if it takes place at all, is worth little more than as an initial impetus:

“I do not want a scenario in which 95 percent of the elements are fixed in advance since, in the end, the rest of the
creative process would be about working on details, the remaining 5%. What I do want is to find an approximate 30 to
40 percent of the elements in the treatment, 30 percent in the casting and dialogues, and the rest during the shoot.
During the editing process as well, where I sometimes end up cutting out thirty minutes of the film.”2

This evaporation of the screenplay corresponds to the privilege granted to the fragmentary and to discovery. Indeed,
Hong Sang-soo distinguishes himself by a way of thinking about his films in a mode of fragmentation. For him, making a
film is not the same as unrolling a narrative thread, but rather organizing “surfaces” or putting “fragments” to use within
a given structure:

“Organizing surfaces? By that I mean my desire to show that everything, every event, even the most insignificant
episodes in our lives, contains everything inside of it. Something very concrete, with a banal appearance, always
harbours more. A little episode of our lives can obscure an ensemble of symbols and meanings which pile up as layers, a
series of superimposed surfaces. Afterwards they form into a block, a structure, which gives the impression of an entity.
But this entity never contains just one idea!”3

“I believe that my films are not made to express a story, but to feature some fragments. I don’t think I have any other
option. I take those so-called fragments and, with them, derive a whole structure centred on everyday situations. And
within that structure, I select an appropriate rhetoric. And when I go into the shoot, a new process of discovery
begins.”4
These declarations raise several remarkable points. Firstly, that structure for Hong Sang-soo is always derivative; it is
secondary to the units which make up that very structure. Subsequently, that the point is not to achieve an unexpected
structure by organizing parts which are determined in advance, but rather a process of discovery which comprises both
the parts and the totality. The director expressively puts an emphasis on the necessity for each stage of the process to
be a creative stage, as well as his interest in events that go beyond it.5 These various disclosures of Hong Sang-soo allow
us to grasp the principal traits of the process during which fragments are discovered, determined and organised – even if
it might seem paradoxical to define such a process, given the degree of fixity this would presuppose.

(1) Ji-geum-eun-mat-go-geu-ddae-neun-teul-li-da [Right Now, Wrong Then] (Hong Sang-soo, 2015)

First, there would thus be – pitted against “the intention” or “the message” – the privilege granted to “the situation.”
The projects are truly launched from the moment when Hong Sang-soo runs into a certain “incentive,” which could be a
formal idea as much as a narrative situation – in a sense, this will be the nodal point around which other elements will
be clustered and distributed.6 Some examples are in order here. In the case of Woman on the Beach, the incentive is the
fortuitous encounter of a woman on a beach who happens to resemble one of her acquaintances, an encounter which
drove a curiousness in Hong Sango-soo on the possible relation between physical and inner resemblance. For Tale of
Cinema, it concerned the state experienced when leaving a film screening, when we are still under the influence of what
we have just seen.7 For Yourself and Yours, it was about the conflictual relationship between the love we feel for
someone and the evil others can speak of that person. These situations-slash-incentives, particular in their relatively
ordinary nature and “encountered” by the director in his own experience, can serve as a concrete starting point: Hong
Sang-soo does not seek to develop them on a conceptual or abstract level, but rather to deploy these incentives and to
embody them in other derivative situations which imply a group of characters and their actions.8 In this way, intentions
do not regain the upper hand once the first situation has been put in place, but rather its primacy is reaffirmed with the
arrival of each new narrative situation. The first question the director asks himself is never “what do I want to say?” but
always “what is going to happen?” And the answer is never given in advance, since it will be decided in accordance with
a given place.

Indeed, Hong Sang-soo does not look for locations to shoot what he has already written out, but he rather imagines his
scenes, whether at the time of preparing his treatment or during a shoot, based on these places. Situations are thus
located, and the films incorporate some traces of this method, if one judges them by his instruction plans or the signs
which intersperse them, delineate the sequences and indicate where the characters are to be found: the sequential
unity often rhymes with the unity of a place.

Starting from places can “help us make the right decision, to avoid artifice,” however those places only have the
possibility of orientating the writing process through a process of impregnation and observation on behalf of the
director, in which he discerns certain elements and undergoes certain sensations. And if the writing process can be seen
as the “concretisation” of observations, observation and impregnation stretch far beyond the limits of the shooting
locations and cover the creative process in its entirety.9 Hong Sang-soo and his collaborators frequently invoke his
attentiveness and openness to detail; this is to say, the important role taken by circumstances, chance or coincidence. It
seems that each element encountered in course of the process is likely to find itself integrated at a given moment or
later.

“Everything that I encounter during the film shoot can stimulate me. For example, I could remember a past event while
listening to a conversation between crew members the night before, or the weather at the location that day could
stimulate me somehow. Everything that surrounds me could potentially inspire me as the starting point for the details of
what I need to film that day.”10

Much of the filmmaker’s work consists of collecting certain elements (which are those “fragments” or “surfaces”
mentioned here above) and then summoning them at the appropriate time. This relativizes the importance of place:
certain ideas appear on location, but others enter from elsewhere, drawn for instance from the director’s memory more
than from what he sees in the present. The unity of a given place opens itself up to all the fragments or surfaces which
make up a scene. The closing sequence of Woman on the Beach, where we see Mun-suk, whose car has been covered in
sand on the beach, being rescued by two strangers, offers a nice example of this logic, since Hong Sang-soo says that it is
a mixture of two experiences: the first, about ten years ago, when Hong Sang-soo, depressed, was hit on the arm by an
unknown woman before understanding this was a benevolent reflex on her part to crush a mosquito; the second was
more recent, when Hong Sang-soo’s car was covered in sand during a film shoot.11

(2) Haebyeonui yeoin [Woman on the Beach] (Hong Sang-soo, 2006)

The filmmaker often invokes the way in which certain fragments find themselves integrated into his films and are
wedded to other fragments drawn from the past or the more immediate present, harbouring possible consequences for
the entirety of the film to a lesser (writing a scene) or to a greater degree (orientating the structure). If memories were
mobilised on the shoot of Woman on the Beach, the set, although chosen in advance, continued to influence the
decisions until the very last moment: it is the platitude of the beach which suggested to Hong Sang-soo to make his
characters run in one scene, and Jung-rae will kneel down, in another scene, in front of three isolated trees that the
director did not notice when scouting.12 Even though the film had a script, an entire scene in Virgin Stripped Bare by
Her Bachelors has been rewritten around the discovery of a chewing gum packet stuck in the icy crust of a lake, while
several other fragments came directly from the actors: one scene was modified because the actress playing Soo-jung
knew how to play the piano, and an observation made by the character of Yeong-soo on the long boxer shorts he wears
is directly inspired by the actor’s outfit. The actor is indeed, as much as the set and the filmmaker himself, an important
purveyor of fragments,13 leading Hong Sang-soo to declare the following about In Another Country:

“I saw the light, its beams on the floor. I did not yet know what I was going to do with them, but I knew these elements
would be at the heart of the film. The same goes for the place where Isabelle Huppert sees the goats. Precision or rather
a sense of detail is essential for me. It had to be that place and no other. When I choose the actors, the first time I see
them, I identify a number of facts about them. Concerning the actors, it is this mixture of feeling and intuition, and the
details gathered at the locations, which make it so that I have to shoot here and nowhere else. It’s a rather strange and
indefinable alchemy that inspires me. What’s beautiful is that everything starts from chance. The chance to meet these
places, these actors. I never know what drives me to love a place. This road with this arrow, it’s banal, you might not
even notice it. Yet I remember that it immediately caught my eye. As if it was something waiting to be revealed by
someone.”14

(3) Da-reun na-ra-e-seo [In Another Country] (Hong Sang-soo, 2013)

(4) Claire’s Camera (Hong Sang-soo, 2017)

This citation – while highlighting the importance given to details, places and actors – brings out another problem. If the
situation prevails over the intention, if fragments appear and are collected during a process of observation, ending up
finding their place in a scene which can be seen as a “reservoir that is gradually filled,”15 it is indispensable that a
selection is made, since not everything that is observed is retained or integrated. Yet the selection made by Hong Sang-
soo does not seem to correspond to any criteria open to conceptualisation: he senses an immediate attraction to certain
elements, knows right away that they will be used, without knowing why he is attracted to them and how he will use
them. Put differently, the decisions are not rational and conscious, but they are based on an intuition rooted in place
and time.16 A Hong Sang-soo film is put in place both on the spot and on the spur, a quality that responds to the fact
that he writes the content of the sequences on the morning of the shoot, with no choice but to decide here and now
what will happen a couple of hours later.

Significantly, Hong Sang-soo describes filming as a physical experience, not in the common-sense way of it requiring an
effort, but rather in it modifying his way of seeing and feeling things and his own body, turning the shoot into his
favourite moment, a way of life and a physical state in its own right.17 It is also essential for him that little time passes
between the moment an idea emerges and the moment of its realization, so that everything in fact submits itself to an
initial incentive. The time between the starting idea and the setting up of the shoot is short. As Isabelle Huppert
remarked, on the way he organises the shoot, Hong Sang-soo “mainly takes into account his desires, his needs and his
availability. The script arrives when he has decided it should arrive,” with the consequence that the film crew must be
ready to respond to the improvised requests of the filmmaker, at whatever hour.18
Hong Sang-soo himself voices what allows for this condensation of decisions within a single moment: it is a question of
managing “to concentrate without thinking,” and it is understandable then that Robert Bresson’s Notes on
Cinematography – in which the question is repeatedly raised of the place to be given to chance and his sensations on a
shoot – could have served as a viaticum for the South Korean director. “To place the public opposite beings and things,
not as some people place it arbitrarily by acquired habits (clichés), but as you place yourself according to your
unforeseeable impressions and sensations. Never decide anything in advance.” Or: “Prefer what intuition whispers in
your ear to what you have done and redone ten times in your head.” Or: “‘That’s it’ or ‘that’s not it’, at the first glance.
Reasoning comes afterwards (to approve our first glance).”19 Achieved by the reduction of delays, this “concentration
without thinking” refers to a state in which conscious thought – with its set reflexes and circuits, as Deleuze would say –
is taken by surprise, superseded by what escapes it. The shooting method thus entails a specific mode of selection, a
curious mixture in which thought (or reasoning) is relegated but not excluded. This curious mixture is nonetheless of key
importance and indispensable to the films themselves, to their particular style, as for the overall project of the
filmmaker. In order to understand it, we have to insist on two complementary points.

On the one hand, the whole method outlined so far stems from a desire: that the shoot forms a moment where the
unexpected emerges, and not the simple occasion of reconstructing a pre-existing image, which would be the result of a
cliché or reflex thought.20 A shooting method which privileges the unforeseeable and the intuitive, testifying to a great
openness to the real, is the means which the filmmaker gives himself in his battle against the cliché. But with this
openness we only have established the two axes on which this oeuvre moves, and we have to slightly wrongfoot
ourselves from what we have been describing.

(5) Jal al-ji-do mot-ha-myeon-seo [Like You Know it All] (Hong Sang-soo, 2009)

Even when valuing the unforeseeable, Hong Sang-soo also invokes the necessity of a “conceptual base” or a formal
consistency which allow the various elements of a film to be tied together.21 We have argued before that the structures
of the filmmaker were derived from the assemblage of fragments, but this is in no way opposed to the importance of
structure in his work, an importance which he gladly declares: “I’m often told I make films about reality. People are
mistaken. I make films according to the structures I’ve thought out.”22 This structure is in fact both secondary (derived
from the joining of fragments themselves, produced in the course of a process) and primary (what accompanies the
elements, a given). The same kind of logic holds for the conceptual base or the conscious thought: always superseded by
the shooting process, and always primary. The portrait of a filmmaker open to all winds of the unexpected does not
conform to reality, and one evidently cannot neglect the part of the will or the calculated dimension by which his films
are marked, according to which they are both oriented in the making (the filmmaker makes choices) and orienting once
completed (the spectator has a specific experience).

In fact, next to those who evoke openness, there is indeed no shortage of testimonies that evoke the importance of
control. The actors sometimes emphasise the precision with which Sang-soo gives directions for the mise en scène and
the great number of repetitions that they must perform, and the cinematographer Park Hong-yeol can speak of a sense
that each filmed scene exists first of all as an “inner tableau” in the head of the filmmaker, where the fortuitous
elements come to be integrated.23 The frame, the set and the gestures are each time arranged by Hong-Sang-soo, in a
relationship to the present but also to the future, with the aim of producing a certain effect on the spectator who will
come to see the image.24

But Hong Sang-soo’s rigour and the calculated part of his cinema becomes clearest when one looks at his “writing”: not
at the isolated fragments or elements that make up each sequence, but rather at the way in which these are related
across the films. The tales of Hong-Sang-soo, which both give off a sense of “naturalness” or of life, can also broadly
appear as artificial, in the precise sense that they repeatedly imply writing choices which are tangible and visible in the
films themselves. Although in Hong Sang-soo’s cinema people always run into each other accidentally, for instance, we
are rather talking about the point of view of creating “premeditated chance,” and the tales are composed most of the
time by following an art of combination in which the characters and elements matter above all as pieces in a global
dispositif.25 Our Sunhi offers us a beautiful example of condensing these two dimensions, since chance encounters join
voluntary encounters here: of the encounters of the female character with the three men, two are due to chance, while
the men meet in turn in pairs and by their own volition (always in the same fashion: a character – first Moon-soo, then
Donghun – comes to call on Jaehak at his place), before finding themselves in a park in the absence of the young girl,
who then appears structurally as being both what reunites them, their shared perspective, and what eludes them. What
holds for the characters and their interrelation also holds for the places, which keep reappearing to the same extent that
characters return to them, to the extent that the world of film is seemingly reduced to a “game board” composed of
box-spaces.26

(6) & (7) U ri Sunhi [Our Shunhi] (Hong Sang-soo, 2013)

The return of the same place and these chance encounters also make up a large part of The Day He Arrives, where the
main character, Sungjoon, runs into a former student three times in a row, before successively crossing three
acquaintances in a single sequence at the end of the film. In this case, the character himself claims that the series of
encounters do not obey any hidden logic but are purely coincidental. But these encounters, which for Sungjoon refer to
chance within the fiction, also refer to a will of the filmmaker, arranging within his tale a series of elements in order to
better acknowledge its gratuity. The result is an evident paradox: the chance encounters are completely fortuitous and
absolutely necessary as part of a structure designed to outsmart causal interpretation. In other words: Hong Sang-soo
knows perfectly well what he’s doing when he opts for an integration of this series of encounters here, and the place of
elements in the structure refers directly to a conceptual base.

By concentrating too heavily on the situations or the narrative content of his oeuvre, it is sometimes overlooked that
Hong Sang-soo is currently one of the greatest contemporary inventors of cinema structures. While each of his films
offers a fresh case in point, each structure always remains oriented in a way to outsmarting the attempts at
rationalisation on behalf of the spectators, to counter the interpretation or schemas established which are read into the
intrigues. The construction of films such as Right Now, Wrong Then, Yourself and Yours and Hill of Freedom are, in a
sense, completely controlled, to the degree that they both aim to elude every moral interpretation of the two parties in
question and to prevent the spectator from fixing a given identity to a given character, or to reconstruct a temporal
continuity or to distinguish between past and present, dream and reality (and one must be astonished, knowing that
Hong Sang-soo scripts his films from day to day, by his capacity to create structures with such strong coherence and
complexity).

Since his first films, the filmmaker has warned us that his use of repetition should not be seen as a “formal game”, but
rather as a way of mobilising and obstructing thought:27 repetition for him corresponds to a certain way of seeing and
thinking of life, suitable to his suspension of conventions. In addition, if the shooting method, by granting a role to
chance, takes part in a fight against clichés, the control of certain parameters and the rigour of his structures are not at
odds with it, quite the contrary: the destruction of ready-made images, in fact, presupposes both the sudden
appearance of the unforeseeable and the permanence of a conceptual base which marks an orientation to the activity of
the filmmaker. One could put it this way: the unexpected is implied during the shoot, but the welcoming of chance alone
does not permit him to banish clichés and certain thought reflexes; on the other hand, the structural composition or the
game of combinations as a pure intellectual calculus would not suffice either to create an opening or an indeterminacy
on the level of events (not only carrying the status of a sequence within the tale, but the very unfolding of the actions).
Hence the necessity of walking on both legs, chance and control, intuition and calculus.28

We are now in a position to better understand the curious mixture mentioned earlier, in which conscious thought, which
has been relegated, is not excluded, including the idea that the conceptual base is both transcended and primary. It is
the coherence or the guarded orientation of Hong Sang-soo’s work which leads us to formulate the idea that there is,
indeed, at the level of his creation process, a base both forgotten and present, present as forgotten, as if it had become
inseparable from the physical state experienced during the shoot, equally inseparable from intuition. Since certain
choices are made and considered as the right ones, not only in the moment itself but also with regards to the process as
a whole, it is in fact necessary that something akin to an orientation would maintain itself – the conceptual base which
was superseded is, thus, what continues to determine the orientation in whose function each choice, though explicable,
is nonetheless “the right one”, then according to which an adapted structure, or “a solution (...) ends up appearing”.29

(8) Ok-hui-ui yeonghwa [Oki's Movie] (Hong Sang-soo, 2010)

Near the end of our journey, it seems that Hong Sang-soo’s creative process is situated beyond the opposition of chance
and control, reality and artifice: the process which gives coherence to his oeuvre flourished precisely at the point where
the opposites are reconciled. It requires chance and confusion to get rid of the “already-given” or the cliché, but Hong
Sang-soo’s practice does not consist of integrating the surprise into the method, in the same way chance is not in itself
expected chance. The important thing, however, is that in order to be expected at all, chance always occurs under the
guise of the unforeseeable and the undetermined: each element, from the moment that it appears, is considered in and
of itself and external to every project, before being considered “right” by the filmmaker, meaning that it is selected and
likely to redirect the whole.30 The selection of a fragment, in this process, merges with a determination, in the double
sense where an element is judged “right” at the moment when it is determined itself (it could not be done beforehand,
since it is unforeseen) and that its integration into a whole potentially determines the global form of a given film.31

One should, nonetheless, insist on two points. Firstly, the expected coincidence answers to an intuitive decision which
determines the selection while shooting and the composition during the edit, guaranteeing that any redirection is made
within the framework of an orientation: the opening to the undetermined does not stand for the betrayal of the
filmmaker’s project. Secondly, the unforeseen – what is given or what happens in the moment – intervenes in this
process as an antidote to the arbitrary and the cliché, the arbitrary here conceived, as Bresson pointed out, as the effect
of habits of thought which do not find any support in the things themselves or in the outside world. To work against the
arbitrary, Hong Sang-soo requires a process in which fragments are considered as “right” to the film which show
themselves only through a series of selections: it requires this open system, in which the end only agrees with the
premises by producing the unexpected.

(9) Photo of the shooting of Bamui haebyun-eoseo honja [On the Beach at Night Alone] (Hong Sang-soo, 2017) by Mark
Peranson

Behold a possible synthesis of this creative process, made up of three broad indispensable stages: 1/ the conceptual
base or the preparation; 2/the intuitive decision or chance; 3/the composition, total organisation in which each element
determined finds itself taken up, or the structure. Following such a scheme, a result can even be considered both
wanted and unexpected.

The starting ideas and images have to pass through this second stage in order for chance and the unexplainable to be
integrated in this way, but the other two stages are equally necessary to guarantee the absence of the arbitrary, so
chance is taken over by a will and finds its place in a project, so that it is the object of a choice; so that the inexplicable
suddenly becomes necessary. The third stage is a moment of synthesis, since it is the one where the elements which
escaped the initial base – expected for this very reason – are reintegrated into a whole which, after having undergone a
deviation or a deformation, finds an active principle of orientation and re-joins the initial base. The third stage indeed
becomes that of a reactivation of the base past its own oblivion, of a re-totalisation of the elements starting from
deviations and fragmentation that are inseparable from the process.

During a recent visit to Brussels, where a retrospective was dedicated to him, Hong Sang-soo declared that he believes
there is a correlation between what takes place in films and a specific attitude. What we have termed the “conceptual
base” is two things at once: what determines the constant orientation of Hong Sang-soo’s work, his selection and
distribution of fragments inside structures, but also what guides the choices of the shooting method itself and stems in
the end from a certain way of perceiving the filmmaker’s own life: “I believe we are all conditioned to accept certain
ideas as coming from good intentions, and certain methods ready made to give them form. For me, however, it doesn’t
work. If I decide to work like that, I will have a sense of betrayal towards myself, which leads to abandonment. When I
have an idea, it has to be materialised in a form which is loyal to my way of seeing life.”32

That Hong Sang-soo’s films appear so lovable to us is undoubtedly due to the fact that they, once done, cherish the
attitude present at their creation, leaving us better equipped for existence itself. While he gives little psychological
directions to his actors, preferring to concentrate on concrete aspects, Hong Sang-soo nonetheless expects something of
them: that they be like children, as pure as they can possibly be. But this expectation already widens the choices of the
collaborators: “to make films is one of the things that counts most for me in my life. And when I do make them, I want to
be happy, surrounded by good people. My collaborators are everything to me. They don’t have to be extremely gifted or
well-known. They already grant me something just by not being bastards.”33 For those eager to make films in a couple
of days: here are some interesting avenues often neglected in manuals and user guides.

(10) Claire’s Camera (Hong Sang-soo, 2017)

(11) Claire’s Camera (Hong Sang-soo, 2017)

1.See Jean-Sébastien Chauvin and Vincent Malausa, “‘Juste ce qu’il faut’. Entretien avec Hong Sang-soo,” Cahiers du Cinéma, 665
(2011), 41. As well as Huh Moonyung, “Interview,” in Hong Sang-soo. Korean Film Directors (Seoul: Korean Film Council, 2007), 41.
2.Matthieu Darras, “La théorie du paquet de cigarettes. Entretien avec Hong Sang-soo,” Positif, 520 (2004), 8-11.
3.Adrien Gombeaud, “‘Une forme très simple finit toujours par apparaître’,” Positif, 505 (2003), 33-37.
4.Huh Moonyung, “Interview,” op. cit., 47. In other interviews, Hong Sang-soo explains that the form of his films imposes itself
during the process or that he is not constantly aware of the totality of the film. See Adrien Gombeaud and Hubert Niogret, “‘J’essaie
d’accueillir ce qui vient vers moi’. Entretien avec Hong Sang-soo,” Positif, 571 (2008), 35-38. And Jean-Sébastien Chauvin, “‘Il suffit
de peu pour voir la vie sous un angle joyeux’. Entretien avec Hong Sang-soo,” Cahiers du Cinéma, 682 (2012), 28.
5.See Adrien Gombeaud, “‘Une forme très simple finit toujours par apparaître’,” art. cit., 33-37. Charles Tesson, “Le désir au
quotidien. Entretien avec Hong Sang-soo,” Cahiers du Cinéma, 537 (1999), 55-56.
6.See, on these points, the need for an “incentive”, the privilege given to the “situation” and the process that follows: Emmanuel
Burdeau, Jean-Philippe Tessé and Antoine Thirion, “Un film est bon pour moi s’il modifie ma manière de penser,” Cahiers du Cinéma,
590 (2004), 32-34. [See English translation “‘For me, a film is good if it modifies my way of thinking’,” translated by Sis Matthé,
published in Hong Sang-soo. Infinite Worlds Possible (Brussels: Sabzian, Courtisane and CINEMATEK, 2018). Published on Sabzian on
6 May 2020.] Adrien Gombeaud and Hubert Niogret, “J’essaie d’accueillir ce qui vient vers moi,” Positif, 571 (2008), 35-38; Daniel
Kasman and Christopher Small, “That Day the Snow Fell: Hong Sang-soo Discusses ‘Right Now, Wrong Then’,” MUBI. The distance
vis-à-vis the “message” is expressed in Adrien Gombeaud, “‘Une forme très simple finit toujours pas apparaître’,” art. cit., 33-37.
7.See Adrien Gombeaud and Hubert Niogret, “‘J’essaie d’accueillir ce qui vient vers moi’,” art. cit., 35-38. Hong Sang-soo also
recounts how the starting situation of Woman Is the Future of Man (2004) appeared to him in Huh Moonyung, “Interview,” op. cit.,
69; and the genesis of Our Sunhi (2013), based on a personal experience of editing a motivation letter for a student, in Nicholas
Elliott, “‘Faire des films, c’est amusant’. Entretien avec Hong Sang-soo,” Cahiers du Cinéma, 702 (2014), 40-41.
8.See the interview on the DVD-bonus of the boxset of his first three films, released in France by CTV International. Situations can be
“encountered”, but they are nevertheless selected or retained by the director who detects an interest in them as they potentially
open up certain problems. See Adrien Gombeaud and Hubert Niogret, “‘J’essaie d’accueillir ce qui vient vers moi’,” art. cit., 35-38: “It
can happen to anyone, and this ordinary situation interests me a lot. I feel like digging inside, where I risk touching certain
problems.” This has to be linked to what we will say later about the presence of a conceptual background that determines selection
– the sensitivity to certain problems depends on this background.
9.See Adrien Gombeaud, “‘Une forme très simple finit toujours par apparaître’,” art. cit., 33-37 and Adrien Gombeaud and Hubert
Niogret, ““J’essaie d’accueillir ce qui vient vers moi”,” art. cit., 35-38. Hong Sang-soo confides to observe as much as he can before
shooting in Daniel Kasman and Christopher Small, “That Day the Snow Fell: Hong Sang-soo Discusses ‘Right Now, Wrong Then’,” art.
cit.
10.Huh Moonyung, “Interview,” op. cit., 42. See also Emmanuel Burdeau, Jean-Philippe Tessé and Antoine Thirion, ““Un film est bon
pour moi s’il modifie ma manière de penser’,” art. cit., 32-34: “As soon as the situation has been identified, I wait and stay open and
attentive to what happens. Pieces come to me in a very independent and irregular way. It can be a dialogue, a psychological
movement between two persons in a bar, or a small motif like a red scarf. I write these life fragments on cards that I compile into a
small index. (…) Maybe it is the way I treat details which distinguishes my work from that of other filmmakers. Often, details come
and fill in a story that has already been sketched out at length. In my films, these details are already stacked. It is on a formal level
that the redistribution, connection and formation of the story happen.” [From the English translation ““For me, a film is good if it
modifies my way of thinking”,” translated by Sis Matthé, published in Hong Sang-soo. Infinite Worlds Possible (Brussels: Sabzian,
Courtisane and CINEMATEK, 2018). Published on Sabzian on 6 May 2020.]
11.] Huh Moonyung, “Interview,” op. cit., 85-87. This case of mixing things can be compared to the case of The Power of Kangwon
Province (1998), in which a story written by Hong Sang-soo and a story he had been told earlier were brought together: “The idea of
the connection, in fact, came to me after a story I heard from a young woman I was having a drink with in a bar. I remember her
telling me about the incident, which the policeman tells the girl in the film: the episode of the woman who was found dead in the
park, having fallen from a rock. When I got home that evening, I wrote down everything she had told me and I was very careful to
leave it as it was in my story. Later, when I read it again, I discovered the possibility of linking the two stories. The rest, the husband
of this missing woman, the appointment that the man made for her in the park, to which she did not come, all this was written very
quickly, in a single day.” Cited in Charles Tesson, “Le désir au quotidien. Entretien avec Hong Sang-soo” art. cit., 55-56.
12.See Adrien Gombeaud and Hubert Niogret, “‘J’essaie d’accueillir ce qui vient vers moi”’,” art. cit., 35-38.
13.On the shooting of Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (2000), see Huh Moonyung, “Interview,” op. cit., 64, as well as the
interview on the DVD-bonus of the CTV International boxset. The account of Isabelle Huppert, referring to the way Hong Sang-soo
“nourished” himself on her gestures and sentences on the shoot of In Another Country (2012), is particularly clear on this point.
Hong Sang-soo sometimes makes her redo what she did, sometimes do what he did himself, and in this case he even manages to use
what she did in his absence (the scene where Anne writes a vow on a stone in the temple is taken from a visit by Isabelle Huppert to
the temple, which other witnesses told her about). See Isabelle Huppert, “En terre étrangère,” Cahiers du Cinéma, 682 (2012), 30-
35.
14.Jean-Sébastien Chauvin, “‘Il suffit de peu pour voir la vie sous un angle joyeux’,” art. cit., 28.
15.Emmanuel Burdeau, Jean-Philippe Tessé and Antoine Thirion, “‘Un film est bon pour moi s’il modifie ma manière de penser’,” art.
cit., 32-34. [From English translation “‘For me, a film is good if it modifies my way of thinking’,” translated by Sis Matthé, published in
Hong Sang-soo. Infinite Worlds Possible (Brussels: Sabzian, Courtisane and CINEMATEK, 2018). Published on Sabzian on 6 May 2020.]
16.“I need concrete things for writing and filming: without these concrete things, you are floating in space and in the dark. When I
choose, when I write, I verify the power of the reality of things, what they can evoke for me, but it always remains intuitive.” Cited in
Vincent Malausa, “De jour en jour. Entretien avec Hong Sang-soo,” Cahiers du Cinéma, 734 (2017), 35.
17.See Jean-Sébastien Chauvin and Vincent Malausa, “‘Juste ce qu’il faut’,” art. cit., 41 (“When you film, you consume the energy of
your body and mind, you can concentrate without thinking. This is very healthy, even from a purely physical point of view.”);
Nicholas Elliott, “‘Faire des films, c’est amusant’,” Cahiers du Cinéma, 702 (2014), 40-41: “There are other things I enjoy in life, but
when I make a film I feel everything around me in a very different way. On a shooting day, I wake up at four in the morning, arrive at
my office or the location around four or six and start writing. From that moment until the end of the shooting day, everything that
happens to me seems to belong to another world, even if I am shooting in familiar places. I feel very different. (...) It allows me to
see things more clearly, like with a microscope. I have a different kind of concentration, I have more patience, more tolerance. It
makes me feel good.”
18.See Isabelle Huppert, “En terre étrangère,” art. cit., 34; And Nicholas Elliott, “‘Faire des films, c’est amusant’,” art. cit., 40-41: “I
shoot something and then maybe during the night this gives me an idea, so I call the actor back to shoot the next day. During this
shooting period of less than two weeks, everyone has to be ready. I can call them at any time.” Hong Sang-soo talks about how
difficult it was for him to shoot Woman Is the Future of Man, where it was necessary to wait several months for the change of
season. See Huh Moonyung, “Interview,” op. cit., 70-71.
19.Robert Bresson, Notes sur le cinématographe (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). From the English translation Notes on Cinematography,
translated by Jonathan Griffin (New York: Urizen Books, 1977), 45, 67 and 69. In addition: “Shooting. No part of the unexpected
which is not secretly expected by you” (10); and “Wonderful chances, those that act with precision. Way of putting aside the bad
ones, to attract the good ones. To reserve for them, in advance, a place in your composition” (17).
20.See also Huh Moonyung, “Interview,” op. cit., 75: “I am cautious about the strong image that I have decided upon in my head in
advance. They are mostly the result of a desire to reconstruct an image that I have seen from watching other people’s works.” And
Emmanuel Burdeau, Jean-Philippe Tessé and Antoine Thirion, “‘Un film est bon pour moi s’il modifie ma manière de penser’,”art.
cit., 32-34: “A filmmaker can be struck by something in life, a memory coming from other art forms, from a painting, a photograph,
theatre or television, and so on. He thinks he is seizing something tangible. But, really, this thing has already been filtered. It has
already passed a prior interpretation that has given it strength and clarity. By passing into film, this piece stays the same filtered,
deformed thing. Something strikes me and makes sense; but if I go back, there is always some art object. (…) For me, a film is good if
it provides me with new feelings and modifies my way of thinking. That is why form is so important for me. We all share the same
material. But the form we use leads to different feelings or new ways of questioning, to new desires.” [From the English translation
“‘For me, a film is good if it modifies my way of thinking’,” translated by Sis Matthé, published in Hong Sang-soo. Infinite Worlds
Possible (Brussels: Sabzian, Courtisane and CINEMATEK, 2018). Published on Sabzian on 6 May 2020.]
21.For the idea of a “conceptual background”, see Adrien Gombeaud, “‘Une forme très simple finit toujours par apparaître’.
Entretien avec Hong Sang-soo,” Positif, 505 (2003), 33-37; and Huh Moonyung, “Interview,” op.cit., 89: “I doubt that the film can
stand on its own if I give up formal consistency and the intensity in the form.”
22.See Sylvain Coumoul, “Vers l’invisibilité,” Cahiers du Cinéma, 590 (2004), 32-34.
23.See Vincent Malausa, “Une méthode Hong Sang-soo,” Cahiers du Cinéma, 682 (2012), 16-18. The actor Jun-sang Yu thus evokes
the shooting of a scene from The Day He Arrives (2011): “There is this sequence where the four of us are around the table, talking
about chance: we must have done more than sixty takes! At each new take, Hong would call us and tell us on the monitor everything
that was wrong: you had to move the glass in one way and not another, make such and such a gesture, such and such a movement,
everything was minuted... It was so rigorous that after thirty takes we found ourselves in an almost second-rate state.” However,
Hong Sang-soo now estimates that he does an average of seven takes for a sequence. He also frequently shows the takes to the
actors on a monitor so that he can better direct them for the next take.
24.See Adrien Gombeaud and Hubert Niogret, “‘J’essaie d’accueillir ce qui vient vers moi’,” art. cit., 35-38: “I have a realistic view of
the decor, and I don't want to embellish it with things that might distract the viewer’s attention. When I decide on a camera angle, I
already imagine how the spectators will see the action. I know they will see this and not that. What is around the character affects
the viewer. So I try to control everything around them as much as possible. But I can guess what will catch the viewer’s attention.”
And Adrien Gombeaud, “‘Une forme très simple finit toujours par apparaître’,” art. cit., 33-37: “I have to accept that I don’t control
everything, and I have to be able to rely on the knowledge and skills of others. So far, I have been fortunate to be surrounded by
very competent technicians. This allows me to not worry too much about this aspect, to focus on things that are more important to
me. (...) It’s only the choice of shooting angles that I can’t delegate. I compose almost 99% of the shots.” If the shots are composed
by Hong Sang-soo, it is also he who decides on the camera movements, panning or zooming. However, it is important to note the
importance of the relationship to the present and of an intuitive dimension. In order to be able to decide on the movements at the
very moment of shooting, Hong Sang-soo has set up a code between him and his cameraman: he stands behind him and touches his
body to determine the movement to be made. A press on the upper back causes a zoom in; on the lower back, a zoom out; a press
on the left side, a left pan; on the right side, a right pan.
25.Joachim Lepastier evokes the “premeditated chance” in his review of The Day He Arrives, “Les sentiments à la trace,” Cahiers du
Cinéma, (678) 2012, 50-51.
26.Florence Maillard, “Le jeu de l’oie,” Cahiers du Cinéma, (665) 2011, 40. In his review of Our Sunhi, Jean-Sébastien Chauvin evokes
the concentration of the story around a few places, which he links to an absence of real chance: “And, as in a play, everyone at the
end is brought together in the same place (...) by a strange configuration of destiny. But deep down, no one crosses paths by chance;
it is just the narrowness of the universe described that inevitably pushes the characters to come together.” Cited in “Soleil
d’automne,” Cahiers du Cinéma, 702 (2014), 46-47.
27.Charles Tesson, “Le désir au quotidien. Entretien avec Hong Sang-soo,” art. cit., 55-56.
28.“I do calculate, but a decision is made by the intuition. It is easy to calculate once the structure is set. It’s the intuition that
decided where to draw the line.” Cited in Huh Moonyung, “Interview,” op. cit., 59. Jean-Charles Villata evokes from Hill of Freedom
(2014) a “bias of chance” in Hong Sang-soo, wondering whether the editing is more or less voluntary or “decidedly random” (“La vie
est faite de morceaux qui ne se joignent pas,” Trafic, 96, winter 2015, 38-40).
29.Adrien Gombeaud, “‘Une forme très simple finit toujours par apparaître’,” art. cit., 33-37.
30.See also this statement in which Hong Sang-soo evokes the relationship between his creative process and infinite possibilities (an
idea that can be linked to that of indeterminacy): “It is the process that allows me to make films. By working like that, you get to
infinite possibilities. (...) All things are possible, everything depends on what comes to me every day, on what I believe on the
morning of the shoot. Every morning I check my ideas and I never say to myself “is it going to have that effect?” I just think, “does
this sound right, does this feel right to you?” I have 20 or 30 ideas that come to me; I don't know where they come from or why, and
I keep five.” Cited in Vincent Malausa, “De jour en jour. Entretien avec Hong Sang-soo,” Cahiers du Cinéma, 734 (2017), 35.
31.In addition to the examples cited above, and to emphasize that everything remains open until the end, we can mention here that
the end of Right Now, Wrong Then, showing Heejung coming out of a movie theatre alone, was rewritten after a snowfall. It was
originally the male character, Cheonsoo, who was supposed to come out of the movie theatre and walk away. If there was a
practical part to this choice – the importance of the snowfall would have made a connection problematic, as little time was
supposed to have elapsed between Cheonsoo’s entry and exit from the cinema – it did respond to an intuition and accentuated a
difference between the two parts of the film, the first ending on Cheonsoo and the second on Heejung. It should also be noted that
it was originally planned that The Day After was to end when Areum returned home: the sequence of the reunion between Areum
and Bangwon, which was a determining factor in the structure, was not planned and could be added because the crew still had one
day left to shoot.
32.Adrien Gombeaud, “‘Une forme très simple finit toujours par apparaître’,” art. cit., 33-37.
33.Julien Gester, “Hong Sang-soo : « Cela pourrait me ressembler, mais c’est une illusion »,” Libération, 16 February 2016. The wish
that the actors be like children was formulated during the master class given by Hong Sang-soo in Brussels (at the Korean Cultural
Centre) on 19 January 2018, led by Tom Paulus.