The reflexive nature of Hong’s formalism, in which stylistic decisions call attention to themselves and point to the mediating presence of the man behind the camera, makes it problematic to discuss Hong’s work as “realist” or “naturalistic.” Although many elements of his style may seem, on the surface, to belong to the tradition of cinematic realism – especially his penchant for capturing uninterrupted action in long wide shots and his cultivation of naturalistic, semi-improvised performances – the emphasis he increasingly places on the constructed nature of his own image encourages the spectator to think critically about the nature of representation itself.
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Hong Sang-soo has developed such a consistent, recognisable set of thematic and aesthetic preoccupations that it can be easy for critics to overlook the substantial variety that runs across his entire oeuvre. Almost all of Hong’s films feature several – or all – of the following: lengthy communal drinking sessions; central characters who work as filmmakers, writers or academics; reunions; chance meetings; backpacks and puffy jackets; zoom shots; love affairs placed in jeopardy by insatiable male egos; ambling walks; soju. This has led many commentators to accuse Hong of repeating himself, producing films that are merely half-formed and tossed-off sketches of ideas. In a middling review of Oki’s Movie (2010), for example, Nick Schager argues that the film “features so many elements that have calcified into the director’s trademarks (solipsistic student and/or director protagonists, boozy escapades, clumsy romantic entanglements, divergent points of view, and segmented narratives) that it feels trifling at best” (2010). In his review of In Another Country (2012), Mike D’Angelo expresses frustration over Hong’s perceived lack of evolution when he argues that even though the introduction of Isabelle Huppert into Hong’s universe produces an initial sense of novelty, the film as a whole proves that “Hong Sang-soo can make a Hong Sang-soo movie under any conceivable circumstance.” D’Angelo ultimately concludes that although In Another Country “makes an ideal introduction” for those unfamiliar with Hong’s body of work, anybody who has already seen a Hong film “should know almost exactly what to expect” (2012). Even the critics who are more sympathetic to Hong’s artistic project have a habit of discussing his work in terms of continuity rather than difference. Charles Mudede, for instance, writes in his positive review of In Front of Your Face (2021) that Hong’s penchant for “mak[ing] the same movie over and over and over” lends his work a sense of comfortable familiarity, and that the joy of watching a new film by him lies in the sensation of returning to a cinematic universe one already knows inside out.
This tendency to write Hong off as a maker of minor works is largely due, no doubt, to his notorious prolificity: since releasing his debut feature in 1996, Hong has directed a staggering 30 features, and currently averages 2-3 new releases a year. Although he started his career following a relatively traditional production model, since On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate (2002), Hong has embraced a more spontaneous, experimental filmmaking process. Instead of writing a full script and shot list/storyboard ahead of time, Hong begins production with only a rough outline of the film’s narrative premise and core themes. He then books actors and scouts for locations. Once the shoot has begun, he writes the individual scenes on the morning they are to be shot, giving his performers only a few hours to learn the material. Hong typically shoots around 3-4 scenes in a day, and because he uses almost all the coverage he captures, he has been known to edit an entire feature in as short a time as a week. Hong’s predilection for shooting quickly, cheaply, and with a minimal cast and crew was greatly enhanced by his decision to embrace digital technology with 2008’s Night and Day. Since then, he has refined and pared down his process, and now performs almost all duties (aside from acting) himself. As a case in point, his latest film In Water (2023), was reportedly shot in a single week on a shoestring budget, with Hong serving as writer, director, cinematographer, producer, editor, sound designer, and composer. On average, his films have a budget under $100,000 USD, and he typically completes a film within three weeks of shooting, with preproduction typically running only one month. The speed at which Hong works and the sheer number of films he produces may create the impression that there is a lack of thought put into each project. It’s unfortunate that his craft is so often discussed in such dismissive terms, considering that the artist’s commitment to formal experimentation and self-reflexivity has made him one of the most consistently exciting and adventurous auteurs on the contemporary arthouse circuit. It is certainly true that Hong returns time and time again to certain themes, formal principles, and philosophical concepts, but his style is constantly evolving. Perhaps more than any other living filmmaker, he exemplifies Alexandre Astruc’s concept of “la caméra-stylo”: that is, a filmmaker who operates the camera as a fluid tool of personal expression with the freedom of a writer using a pen; a cinematic artist who chronicles his thoughts and ideas through audiovisual language and works unencumbered by large crews, expensive budgets, and unwieldy technical setups (see Astruc 2005 [1948]).
As Marc Raymond argues, as Hong’s career has developed, he has increasingly stripped his filmmaking practice of the tenets of classical filmmaking and blurred the line between narrative cinema, the avant-garde, and autofiction: “Hong’s formalism has gradually turned from the subjectivity of his characters to the place of Hong himself in relation to both his films and his audience” (2014: 23). Although Hong himself never appears as a physical or an aural presence in his own work, it is increasingly difficult to watch one of his films without thinking about his extra-textual persona. His artistic subjectivity is inscribed through a number of strategies: the frequent appearances of characters who bear similarities, to varying degrees, to Hong (usually filmmakers or film professors); the open discussion of issues that reflect directly on Hong’s own career and/or artistic practice; self-reflexive formal techniques; and intertextual references to other films by him.
The reflexive nature of Hong’s formalism, in which stylistic decisions call attention to themselves and point to the mediating presence of the man behind the camera, makes it problematic to discuss Hong’s work as “realist” or “naturalistic.” Although many elements of his style may seem, on the surface, to belong to the tradition of cinematic realism – especially his penchant for capturing uninterrupted action in long wide shots and his cultivation of naturalistic, semi-improvised performances – the emphasis he increasingly places on the constructed nature of his own image encourages the spectator to think critically about the nature of representation itself.
Hong’s films, therefore, use the language of cinema to think critically about cinema. This has always been a core aspect of his artistic project, but the metacritical impulse of his work is becoming more pronounced as his investment in traditional narrative forms is receding. Raymond identifies Tale of Cinema as being a turning point for Hong in this respect. The film is split into two parts: the first follows Sang-won (Lee Ki-woo), a college student who encounters a former girlfriend, Young-sil (Uhm Ji-won), during a school vacation, and tentatively rekindles the relationship. The second part abruptly reveals that the first was a film-within-the-film, opening as several new characters watch the intradiegetic short at a screening. The remainder of the film follows Dong-soo (Kim Sang-kyung), a member of the audience who, it is revealed, is a film student and a classmate of the director of the short film that constituted the first half, as he develops an obsession with the actress who played Young-sil (portrayed by the same actress, and going by the same name, as her fictional counterpart) and sparks a flirtation with her, utilising behaviours enacted by the fictional Sang-won in an attempt to seduce her.
Even though the “film-within-the-film” is presented as the work of an inexperienced student of questionable talent, there is no substantial difference in formal quality between the two halves of the film. Indeed, the fact that it is only revealed halfway into the narrative that the first half is a fictional construct within the diegetic “reality” of Tale of Cinema means that the viewer initially perceives it as just another Hong film. When the characters depicted in the second half, therefore, critically reflect on it, their thoughts are implicitly presented as a springboard for our own ruminations on Hong’s body of work. The most confrontational moment in the film occurs during its final scene, when Young-sil challenges the idealistic image he has developed of her by stating, bluntly, “I don’t think you really understood the film.” Considering that the spectator has been plunged into the viewpoint of a hapless, lovesick male protagonist in both parts of the feature, this moment undercuts any sense of romanticism that the viewer may project onto either of these male protagonists. The latter half, therefore, critically reframes the first, prompting the viewer to consider the similarities in the behaviour of the seemingly benign Sang-won and the more overtly predatory Dong-soo, revealing both to be toxic and manipulative. That Dong-soo has perceived Sang-won as a role model is an indictment of a type of arthouse cinema that glamourises destructive male behaviour, while also opening up – in a brazenly honest and self-implicating fashion – vital questions surrounding the representation of gender, the gaze, and power in Hong’s own work.
The reflexive experimentation at the core of Hong’s practice takes a multitude of different forms across his oeuvre. In many of his films, the narrative is split into two or more sections in which elements are repeated with significant symphonic variations – as in On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate, Woman on the Beach (2006), and Like You Know It All (2009). At other times, the characters themselves discuss properties of filmmaking and shot composition in a manner that clearly reflects outwards on the construction of the film itself (and Hong’s work more generally). Sometimes a formal technique such as a zoom or a pan calls attention to itself; at others, there are multiple levels of reality within the film text, for example, with one part of the narrative being framed as a film-within-a-film (as in Tale of Cinema and Oki’s Movie).
Furthermore, the points of connection between all of Hong’s films constitute a level of intra-textual continuity so pronounced that the attentive viewer cannot help but compare each work to the ones that preceded it. This does not mean, however, that Hong “makes the same film over and over” as the aforementioned detractors claim, but, rather, that Hong’s style makes the spectator particularly attuned to the patterns and connections that emerge in his entire body of work. As Michael A. Unger argues, “Hong uses a unique type of parallelism that makes the audience compare the common traits shared in a film and in his work as a whole […] The films can stand alone as a viewing experience, but their connections with one another and that awareness on the part of the audience who has seen more than one Hong film, positions the audience more as a reader than as a viewer as it recalls, compares, and makes the connections outside of the viewing” (2012: 148).
In recent years, Hong’s deconstructive impulses and sense of formal play have become increasingly intricate, confrontational, and bold. This brings us to In Water, Hong’s most experimental, audacious, and – in this writer’s opinion – accomplished work. The plot is very simple, even by Hong’s standards: Seoung-mo (Shin Seok-ho) is a young actor-turned-director who travels to Jeju Island to direct his first short film. Accompanying him are the actress Nam-Hee (Kim Seung-yun) and cinematographer Sang-guk (Ha Seong-guk), a friend of Seoung-mo’s with a more extensive background in filmmaking. Seoung-mo rents a vacation home for the three to stay in for a week, though he has no script and only a rough idea of what he wants the film to be about. Instead of following a more traditional method of writing, preproduction, shooting, and editing, Seoung-mo takes a more intuitive approach, conjuring a narrative through his direct immersion in the landscape of the island and through his interactions with his two crew members. Most of the film is dedicated to tracking these characters as they scout locations, discuss ideas for potential narrative threads, and design compositions. The film lacks any conventional cause-and-effect shape, being orchestrated into fragments of action rather than scenes that follow a traditional dramatic pattern. It begins in media res, giving us little contextual information about the characters, their histories, or the nature of the project they’re working on, and it ends with little sense of concrete finality, with the film shoot still ongoing and no indication of whether or not the project will turn out successfully. Tensions and fractures between characters are hinted at through passing references and inferences, rather than being explicated or turned into overt dramatic beats. Hong sketches the vague contours of a love triangle, with the implication that the reserved Seoung-mo has organised the film shoot as a means of getting closer to Nam-Hee, who remains polite but guarded around him. While Seoung-mo increasingly becomes consumed by his creative process, Nam-Hee and Sang-guk – who are left in each other’s company with nothing to do – spark a connection. All of this remains under the surface, however. No character makes an open romantic gesture toward another, and although Seoung-mo aims a few passive-aggressive barbs at Sang-guk, this friction never blows up into a fight. The flattening of the action through the eschewal of external conflict directs the viewer’s attention through the diegetic action; instead, the primary point of focus lies in the artistic process that is visualised through the prism of Seoung-mo and that reflects back on Hong’s own craft.
As Raymond has argued, Hong’s work exhibits many traits associated with essay filmmaking, including a strong focus on inscribing his personal authorial viewpoint, a desire to blur the line between fiction and non-fiction, and a resistance to suture (2014). Montaigne used the French term “essai” not to designate a new genre but to describe his artistic process – a process that was tentative, self-questioning, and, by its very nature, refused tidy synthesis. At one point, Montaigne writes: “If my soul [âme] could only find a firm footing, I would not be assaying myself but resolving myself” (1993 [1580]: 908). Throughout his Essais, he strives to reach a heightened level of communication with the reader by foregrounding his own subjective thought process, positioning himself not as an authoritative expert on the subjects that he addresses but as a curious party struggling to weigh various different ideas, arguments, and perspectives. Hence, he uses the term “essai,” which has connotations, in its original Latin form, of both the act of apprenticeship and the act of weighing. As Rascaroli notes, Montaigne’s literary approach is distinguished by its “sceptical evaluation […] of the subject matter, which self-reflexively includes the evaluation of the author’s same conclusions” (2010: 21).
In essayistic fashion, Hong’s insert character in In Water is not presented as a great or powerful filmmaker, but rather as an inexperienced, self-questioning artist. His youth, his lack of prior filmmaking knowledge (he is primarily an actor who impulsively made the choice to turn to directing because he felt that it would gain him greater respect), and his indecisiveness during the production frame him as an apprentice learning his craft through trial and error. Thus, Hong invites the audience to view his own process through a lens of critical remove. Just as Montaigne places emphasis on the process rather than the conclusion, Hong does not ask the viewer to evaluate the value of the final images produced by Seoung-mo so much as he invites us to reflect on the methods through which he crafts his vision.
Because such little detail is given about Seoung-mo or his project, it becomes impossible not to perceive him as an extension of Hong’s artistic persona. Like Hong, Seoung-mo favours a stripped-back production and a minimalist shooting style; he does not try to impose a preconceived script onto the environment, but instead uses the location as the inspiration for the scenes. Seoung-mo also shares Hong’s penchant for waking up in the early hours of the morning to write the scenes that are to be filmed later that day, giving his other crew members little time to prepare. Furthermore, Seoung-mo crafts his characters through active collaboration with his performers, rather than writing characters and then casting actors to fit these roles. In Water only actually depicts two scenes being filmed – we pointedly never see the final short itself – but the considerable amount of screen time Hong devotes to illustrating these scenes as they are painstakingly conceived, shaped, and revised is a window into just how much intricate preparation goes into the creation of Hong’s own images. For example, when the three characters explore an alleyway composed of stone walls and ponder the ways they can make use of its curvature for maximum emotional effect, the potential composition they sketch mirrors the one that the action itself is staged in. It is notable that Hong’s camera is never directly aligned with the viewpoint of Seoung-mo’s own. When the characters are shooting, their camera is in the frame, positioned in such a way as to capture the landscape at a different angle from the one that Hong has chosen. This disjunct between the composition being discussed by the characters and the one that frames the diegetic action produces a distancing effect that gives rise to active, essayistic thought. If the characters were simply discussing the design of Hong’s own compositions, their words would guide the viewer’s understanding in a direct and straightforward manner uncharacteristic of the filmmaker. Instead, the viewer must actively think about the connection between the image presented and the image described; they are encouraged to contemplate how the artistic principles verbally espoused by the characters relate to those that informed the construction of the film itself.
Of course, it would be remiss to discuss In Water without mentioning its most striking aesthetic conceit: its use out-of-focus images. There is some variety in the depth-of-field from shot to shot. For example, an early sequence in which the three lead characters eat pizza in the living room of their rented house uses the technique subtly, with Seoung-mo’s face in sharp focus and those of Nam-Hee and Sang-guk only slightly out of focus. The effect here is less obvious but still discombobulating; at first, the viewer may be forgiven for not noticing Hong’s manipulation of focal length, but as the characters engage in a lengthy dialogue within a static frame over the course of several minutes, it becomes increasingly clear that the faces of two of the participants are rendered hazy. In other sequences, the effect is more pronounced. In the very next sequence, for example, Hong similarly frames all three characters in a static wide shot as they discuss an idea for a shot, but every element of the composition appears out of focus – the performers, the environment, the objects in the frame.
According to the tenets of classical continuity editing, the faces of the speakers in such a dialogue scene should be treated as the primary locus of audience attention – the filmmaker should use the formal techniques at their disposal to make their expressions clear and easy to read so that the viewer may easily comprehend their shifting emotional states as the conversation unfolds. We would expect, therefore, for a sequence of this kind to be divided into multiple close-ups, with soft focus used to draw the viewer’s eye to the face of whoever is speaking (or reacting, if the reaction has narrative significance). Hong has never subscribed to the conventions of continuity editing, preferring to let dialogues play out in lengthy, static wide shots which show all characters simultaneously and grant the viewer the freedom to scan whatever aspect of the frame draws their attention. Here, though, Hong goes further, taking the elements of the image that would, in a conventional drama, be treated as the primary visual components and rendering them difficult to discern. At some points, the focus is so shallow that it is difficult to tell what we’re looking at; at others, the image is discernible, but the contours are slightly blurred. In some shots, Hong combines his experimentation with focal length with foreground-background motion to produce striking aesthetic effects. For instance, the aforementioned sequence with the three characters talking in the alley ends with them walking toward the background of the shot; as they recede, they become more and more out of focus, until they appear less as recognisable humans than semi-abstract washes of light and colour.
In a more brazen manner than in any of his previous films, then, Hong consistently draws the spectator’s eye to the technique itself, encouraging us not so much to become absorbed in the diegetic drama but to scan the surface of the images. As the flow of images constantly undulates between different levels of focus, with no predictable pattern (i.e., it is not as though the film grows more and more abstract over its running time), it produces a form of perceptual intrigue connected to the feature’s textural qualities, as opposed to its narrative ones. It is jarring when a shot of comparatively sharper focus follows one of extreme soft focus. A viewer can become absorbed in the blurry texture of one image, devoting their attention to discerning the finer details of the objects within the frame, and then become unmoored by a sudden cut. Actions as minute as characters moving across the axis or the camera panning slightly create beautiful undulations in the texture, and we find ourselves marvelling at the interplay of light, colour, and shadow, rather than relating the diegetic movement to plot or character development.
The use of repetition and rhythmic variation, a characteristic element of Hong’s style, takes on a particularly self-reflective quality in In Water. Scenes and dialogues are revisited with slight alterations, inviting the audience to scrutinize the subtle shifts in character dynamics and narrative perspectives. This constant re-evaluation mirrors the way we reconsider and reinterpret our own stories, constantly reshaping our understanding of ourselves and others. In an early scene, Seoung-mo stumbles across a litter picker, whose selflessness intrigued him; toward the end of the film, we see a similar conversation recreated on film, with Seoung-mo playing an authorial stand-in and Nam-Hee playing the role of the litter picker. In the original scene, the conversation seemed loose and off-the-cuff, in the later we see the extreme concentration and effort that the two performers put into making their interaction seem naturalistic – this, of course, reconfigures our impression of the original sequence and causes us to reconsider the significant amount of labour that went into creating that seemingly mundane, offhand interaction. Hong does not make this connection overt – In Water is not explicitly a film about its own making. Instead, it exists as an open-ended, deconstructive exercise in audience perception, a reflection on the means through which we make sense of the world through art, and a meditation on strategies of cinematic representation. More than a mere formal exercise, In Water calls on the viewer to break out from their habitual mode of consuming images, addressing and unpacking the ways in which elements like composition, continuity, and focal length play in the organisation of reality into a digestible and easily contemplated cinematic narrative. Through deliberately disrupting suture, collapsing the boundary between diegetic and extra-diegetic elements, and creating compositions that challenge the viewer’s ability to make sense of narrative elements, Hong recalibrates the viewer’s perception, playfully encouraging an alternative mode of spectatorship stripped of the codes and conventions through which narrative information is typically conveyed. With In Water, the director continues to push his craft into bold, unexpected new places. This beguiling, innovative new work is a testament to his status as one of contemporary cinema’s most vital and visionary auteurs, and a compelling addition to his remarkable, ever-evolving body of work.
Works Cited
Astruc, A. (2005/1948). “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Camera-Stylo.” New Wave Film. Online. http://www.newwavefilm.com/about/camera-stylo-astruc.shtml. Accessed 22 March 2024.
D’Angelo, M. (2012). “Review: In Another Country.” Online. https://www.avclub.com/in-another-country-1798174911. Accessed 21 March 2024.
Montaigne, M. (1993/1580). The Essays: A Selection. Edited and translated by Screech, M. A. Penguin.
Rascaroli, L. (2010). The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film. Wallflower Press.
Raymond, M. (2014). “Hong Sang-soo and the Film Essay.” New Review of Film and Television Studies. 12 (1). pp. 22–36.
Schager, N. (2010). “Review: Oki’s Movie.” Slant. Online. https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/okis-movie/. Accessed 21 March 2024.
Unger, M.A. (2012). “Hong Sang-soo’s Codes of Parallelism.” Asian Cinema. 23(2). pp. 141-156.
