A woman and a man face each other across a cafe table.
“You look older,” the woman says.
“Really?”
The man laughs but the woman doesn’t. She seems annoyed by his laughter. His eyes are weary; his shoulders slump. Obviously, the two used to date. The man appears to own the cafe. The woman has just returned from abroad. Still laughing, the man suggests that she marry and have a kid.
“I’ve got no man,” she replies. Before he sat down, she was doing something nervous with her hands. Now her stare is bold, and he can’t meet it.
“Are you going to get married?” she asks. “That woman over there, she looks like your wife.” The “woman over there,” the other owner of the cafe, stands just off-screen. We can hear her working behind the counter. The man turns to look, but stops halfway. He makes a show of choosing his words carefully, studies his tea. “She’s not my wife.” A pause. “We’re just close.”
“So you’re just friends?”
“We’re friends. It’s been a while.” It’s unclear—to the viewer, to the women, probably to the man himself—what “it” refers to.
“So we’re friends?” asks the co-owner of the café from offscreen. Now it’s the woman’s turn to laugh.
The narrative premises of Hong Sangsoo’s films tend to be simple. A chance encounter on the street. A quick trip to a nearby town. A man walks into a bar. Where the films of a director like, say, his countryman Bong Joon-Ho unfold through the exposition of a concept, Hong’s films are not built around ideas. The plot is not contained in the premise. Instead, he presents you with a place, an actor, a situation. From there the movie proceeds with an aleatory nimbleness, noticing details—a repeated gesture, a revealing bit of dialogue—that accumulate to reveal the characters and story. The director’s camera technique is likewise simple: extraordinarily long, single-shot, carefully composed scenes of people, often drunk at a table and trending toward conflict; roving zooms and pans, more likely to settle on a listener than a speaker; opening or concluding camera drifts that call attention to some stray object, animal, or landscape feature.
The 64-year-old South Korean director—who to date has made thirty-four films—is probably most famed for his lightweight production methods. He writes scripts the morning of filming, shoots a few scenes a day, and edits quickly; in his later work he employs no more than one or two other people, actors excepted. Hong’s themes are no less consistent: drinking, sexism, hierarchy, exile, romantic affairs, artistic milieus and the frustrated ambition that pervades them, and more often of late, generational conflict. But as Dennis Lim observes in his recent monograph on Hong, Tale of Cinema, it’s not clear there’s anything surprising to say about these depictions. OK, men are pigs. So what?
Lim is the artistic director of the New York Film Festival, which shows two new Hong movies every year. Tale of Cinema is the first book-length treatment of the director in English, and comprehensive enough to be the last. The chapters cycle through interpretive lenses without quite endorsing any, repeatedly concluding that any single one fails to capture the effect of Hong’s films. Lim draws from many sources to express the appeal and difficulty of Hong’s films: Jean-Luc Nancy on sleep, Wayne Koestenbaum on hotels, Walter Benjamin on “thresholds,” Gilles Deleuze on drinking, Roland Barthes on everything, and something called “puzzle theory.” As a survey of critical work the book is exhaustive; as a document of one critic’s decades-long engagement with a director, it is felt, well-turned, and informative. But it leaves hovering the question of why a writer would want to write—or a reader to read—about films that Lim, in the book’s very first pages, describes as resistant to interpretation. Why do people respond to these movies? It took me years of watching Hong’s films, trying to piece together their puzzles, to acknowledge an embarrassingly simple truth: the response I felt was one of identification. I recognized the expressions on these actors’ faces. I felt the characters’ pains as if they were my own, because they were.
Hong’s earliestfilms stand out for their comparative reliance on narrative conceit. The run times are divided into independent storylines, whose fatal intersections are finally revealed with a curtain-pulling flourish. Both The Day the Pig Fell into the Well, from 1996, and The Power of Kangwon Province, from 1998, evoke an off-screen murder at their end, as if to confirm the ugliness of the brutalized existences depicted earlier: depressed salarymen, broke young women, disgruntled policemen, affection-starved wives. Unlike in later films, Hong also depicts sex directly, in scenes of humorously depressing misfires at best, near-assaults at worst. Visually, the movies’ bludgeoning cynicism manifests in a pervasive drabness—Hong sometimes employs overhead CCTV-style shots reminiscent of a criminal interrogation—though still punctuated by moments of beauty.
These first films are easily interpreted as social critique. Born in 1960, part of the so-called 386 Generation that was the first to be born during South Korea’s long economic boom, Hong grew up with the breakneck expansion that followed postwar devastation, was 20 during the suppressed student uprising of 1980, and was in his thirties when Kim Young-sam became the first opposition leader to take power. Early on, critics saw Hong’s meandering films as emblematic of the period’s “post-political” malaise. But Hong’s personal political disillusionment is hard to analyze. It would have been difficult for someone his age in Seoul to avoid the leftist student underground of the 1980s, yet his films betray more familiarity with poetry and painting than revolutionary politics. If he was a young radical, he was more Bolaño than Chernyshevsky. At 18, Hong was too depressed to take college entrance exams. After a suicide attempt, he enrolled at Chung-San University to study theater before he switched to film, then moved to the U.S. During the successful June Uprising of 1987, he was enrolled in an MFA at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago—and, according to Lim, obsessively re-reading André Gide.
In the 2000s, the careful scripting of the early films gave way to shorter and shorter treatments. (Film festival clout and critical acclaim would eventually allow Hong to finance his productions without even that.) A visual sensibility replaced a literary one. The relationship between a film’s component parts was increasingly left unclear, narratives often reduced to scenes that might not be wholly continuous. In these films, characters’ gestures and phrases tend to echo or contradict earlier ones; Lim distinguishes between moments when these repetitions are “naturalized” (as when a man uses the same lines on multiple women), and those circulating more freely, like a “virus, when characters behave as if ventriloquized.” The distinction is apt, but feels like a theoretical imposition. In either case, the result is the same, the closely observed realism of Hong’s earliest films repurposed in the service of something stranger, more fable-like.
Then, in the 2010s, Hong began a Cambrian explosion of productivity that has yet to let up. Structuring devices like conversations, diaries, multiple drafts, and—carried over from 2004’s Tale of Cinema—movies within movies propose multiple iterations of events, but without any orienting differentiation between particular characters’ viewpoints or attitudes. Sometimes there is no frame narrative at all, and even when there is, it doesn’t frame so much as blankly juxtapose, rendering the typical questions one might ask—who was really telling the truth?—void. Instead, the iterations shift the viewer’s interest away from narrative puzzles onto what’s simply there on the screen: actors, objects, setting.
The rhythms of repetition and difference in Hong’s twice- or thrice-told tales invite heightened attention by the viewer, but not the kind of blank watchfulness commonly associated with “slow cinema.” Hong is more John Ford than Tsai Ming-Liang. His tautly held shots emphasize the turbulent vectors of actorly expression rather than invite contemplation of time’s passage. The focus that Hong’s films require is of an everyday kind: attention to other people. You don’t have to like arthouse films to like his movies, because you already know how to watch them; the knowing groans and awkward laughter that often accompany screenings speak to this. But in real life, say at a dinner party, you’re caught up in your own concerns, fragmenting what’s happening in front of you into discrete, self-interested signals, into information. In Hong’s films, the long takes and repetitions short-circuit that process, forcing you to look at what’s really there.
Right Now, Wrong Then, from 2015, caps Hong’s first period of great productivity. In both halves of the film, a director (played by Jeong Jae-yeong) arrives a day early for a provincial film festival on the outer edges of the Seoul region. Both times he meets a woman, played by Kim Minhee. (This was Kim’s first performance for Hong; she would go on to become his partner and regular collaborator.) It’s unclear, in either version, whether the meeting is really by chance. Earlier the director saw her through a hotel window, and probably he ventured out daydreaming of finding her. This opacity of intention is carried over into their awkward small talk, characteristically shot from the side in a single long take.
Hong’s long takes are most effective in such scenes of chance encounters. They are dynamic because they are socially unstructured, without guidelines beyond everyday politesse, which Hong films as an awkward dance of half-assed bows and sheepish grins. Kim’s character is a seemingly isolated young painter who lives nearby, and we’re left to guess what she thinks of the director (whose movies, she says, she has heard of but not seen). As the shot continues, the microtonal movement of potential flirtation lends urgency to the humdrum dialogue. It seems like he’s hitting on her. Isn’t he? She seems put off. Is she? Why is she offering to share her yogurt drink with him? Who’s leaning toward or away from whom? The longer the shot, the greater the charge in the field of action, as our gaze darts between the two speakers. This opening creates a momentum, a drive toward revelation, that Hong’s films often incite only to frustrate, or else to fulfill in surprising, slanted ways.
When, without warning, the film restarts and the same meeting happens again, our attention is heightened by having seen a version of it before. This ghostly superimposition is reinforced by the actors themselves, who were shown a cut of the film’s first half before shooting the second. The subsequent differences in script are noticeable. Visiting the artist’s studio, the director critiques her paintings rather than praising them, as in the first version. At dinner, he admits to having a wife. But we are drawn in less by these variations than by the chance to reassess the same questions. What’s really going on with them? Do they know? And will the outcome be any different this time?
One could leave the first half thinking this was a simple story about a caddish director failing to get laid. On that reading, the second iteration improves on the first, as the director and the artist come to a mutual understanding that was missing before: the second version is “right now,” while the first was “wrong then.” But scattered through both halves are moments of beauty and frustration that indicate the difference is one of circumstances, not character. The first night ends with the director trying repeatedly to rouse the painter, slumped in a drunken sleep, until she finally wakes up and stumbles home. In the second version, as he walks her home, she begins laughing when her baffled friend calls to complain that the director drunkenly stripped naked while she was out of the room. In both versions they remain the same people with the same flaws, but the slight differences in script allow the actors to surface different aspects of their characters.
For me, watching Hong’s repeated tales most resembles the vagaries of retrospection. Thinking back on a drunken night, sometimes you remember the good; other times, more often, the bad. You wonder what you should have said or done differently. But the concrete reality of the actors’ precisely turned performances—as Lim notes, an amateur would not fare well in a Hong film—resists that urge for diagnosis and remedy, even as the bifurcated structure of Right Now, Wrong Then invites it. In Hong’s films, basically accidental changes in attitude or incident have greater power to alter events than, say, the solemn vows one makes during a hangover.
Near the end of the first half the director, himself visibly hungover, is subjected to the indignity of a Q&A.
Moderator: “Director, I will ask you a short question and I expect your answer to be equally short. Director, what is film to you?”
[ . . . ]
Director: “I started not knowing anything. By doing so, I started to discover other types of things. . . . A lot of sounds are running through my head right now. And if I utter those sounds, they become words. . . . But at the end of the day, words will remain just words. The films, myself, my experiences, your lives . . . all these things have nothing to do with words! The power of words?! What a joke!”
The reason you might feel tendentious when trying to describe a Hong film—and why it’s so tempting to elevate its simplicity into theory—is that his subject is often the gap between what we can say and what we know to be true. Like a crowbar, like drink, the film’s repetitions enter this gap to pry open a space for meanings otherwise inexpressible. Words? What a joke!
As Lim notes, Hong’s unabashed camera zooms stem from an equally unaffected impulse. Earlier, Hong wanted “distance” from the actors (think of those CCTV shots). Then, while making Tale of Cinema in 2005, he wanted to get closer, so he did. Overt camera manipulations are often the idiom of directorial expression, the auteur’s stamp of subjectivity. By reserving these zooms for observation, Hong marks himself as a classicist, someone more interested in looking than saying. More than other auteurs, Hong follows his actors as much as he directs them. In his day-by-day writing, he shapes plots around the exigencies of their performances—but with the camera itself remaining aloof while filming. The zoom gets closer but stays outside, eliding—to borrow a phrase from W. G. Sebald—“sympathy and indifference.”
In this sense of watchful detachment, Hong inevitably recalls Éric Rohmer, particularly the later, looser films that were inspired by the director’s close observation of his actors. Their shared restraint puts an unusual pressure on performance. Yet the scenarios that each director gives to his actors differ in subtle but decisive ways. Like a Hong character, the Rohmer protagonist may feel they’re constantly fucking up—may in fact be a fuckup—but lurking in the background is providence. The Catholic director’s films frequently dramatize the moment of decision on which a life’s course depends. Hong’s films instead dramatize aftermath and exile, not as temporary conditions but as permanent states. If anything makes Hong’s films feel uniquely “contemporary,” this would be it: the enduring sense of living in the wake of something, forced forever to make do.
The wintry, monochromatic Seoul of Hong’s films often seems oddly insubstantial, more like a variegated fog than a city. In The Day He Arrives, from 2011, a bleached gray scale removes markers of time’s passage. A director’s day in Seoul thus becomes several days—at least apparently. Characters sometimes remember seeing one another, sometimes not; sometimes it’s unclear. Three times, a night out ends with a voiceover saying, “We went to a bar called Novel,” as if always for the first time.
Some of the resultant dysphoria arises not just from the script or the black-and-white camera work, but from the city itself. After being all but leveled during the Korean War, most of modern Seoul was constructed between 1960 and 2000, resembling Tokyo in its surprising placement of enormous, anonymous megablocks amid dense single-family housing. Roughly half the Korean population lives in the Seoul region, which is connected by a system of trains, subways, and high-speed roads that enable the apparition-like comings and goings of Hong’s characters from bar to bar, city to city, scene to scene. Homogeny creates a placelessness, a confusion heightened by the monochromatic visuals; in later films Hong sometimes turns up the exposure until the sky is nothing but a glaring white expanse.
Like most Hong movies, The Day He Arrives is filled with scenes of people drinking. Alcohol creates conflict in Hong’s films, amplifying buried desires and resentments until inner dramas claw to the surface with shouts, tears, and accusations. But the audience is never as captured by any one consciousness as the drunk characters are by their own. Reactions are foregrounded over actions. In group scenes, the camera generally sits to the side of the table, set back to take in everyone, and the viewer gets to choose whom or what to watch. An out-of-work actor glares at the director who dropped him from a project, while a reserved, slightly older man, recently separated from his wife, quietly notices his crush not reciprocating his interest. The actors act drunken, but the camera remains steady. (Sometimes the actors are drunk, but watching a Hong film drunk isn’t a good idea.)
Hong’s approach to filming drunkenness stands out for its restraint. In a film like John Cassavetes’ Love Streams, the camera seems to heave along with the drinker’s mind, form bending around content. Hong also confuses the viewer through his repetitions, elisions, and visual manipulations, but that confusion is never identical with the characters’ own. Instead the camera, with its zooms and pans, plays the role of an interested but removed spectator. It makes suggestions rather than dictates terms. What’s surprising is how that very remove can throw the characters’ inner lives into sudden relief. Paradoxically, the camera’s refusal to identify with the characters is exactly what allows the viewer to empathize with them. Closeness through distance. Sympathy through indifference.
The Day He Arrives is one of several films Hong has made about the aftermath of a director’s affair. We never learn why the affair ended, why it can’t resume, or even much about the woman he was seeing. The movie begins with a voiceover announcing the hero’s intentions in visiting Seoul from his home in the south:
Youngho’s phone is off. I should have called before coming. I’ll just wait nearby. I’ve nowhere to go. I’m not going to meet anyone besides him. I’ll go sight-seeing and eat some good food. Then back home . . . in a flash!
Who travels across the country to see a friend without calling first? This oddball laconism—only later identifiable as mendacity—creates a discomfiting, pervading groundlessness. As the director wanders around Seoul, he seems embarked on a hero’s journey, but one without any quest or way markers. Every interaction feels tentative, provisional. The uneasiness reflects and builds between characters as if in a hall of mirrors, the images shimmering with ambivalence.
After getting drunk (of course) and going to his ex’s apartment in one of those anonymous megablocks, the director sees her again three more times, as (we learn) he had always intended, or feared. Or rather, he sees a woman played by the same actress, the owner of the “bar called Novel.” Early on, the camera hovers to the side as the two sit crushed together, crying and smoking on her apartment floor. After leaving, the director immediately runs into a woman from the film’s first scene; they speak as if they had only just parted ways. Moments later he tells his friend Youngho that he’s “just been around here.” On his third visit to the bar, he sleeps with the owner; when he leaves, he makes the same demand he made of the first woman: that they never speak again. Combined with other temporal confusions and the film’s gray-on-gray tonality, these disjointed recursions make the character seem to oscillate not between remembering and forgetting, but between regret and anticipation.
From these two films, you might think Hong only writes about himself. As Lim argues, it would be more accurate to say Hong uses what he knows—and what he learns about his actors, bringing out plots latent in their person. His interest in women’s lives, for example, though evident throughout his career, became much more noticeable after he abandoned written treatments altogether, starting with Oki’s Movie in 2011. True, the recent films find characters speaking more often and more explicitly about “big” themes: mortality, aging, art. The films do feel more didactic. But I’m not sure that’s a flaw. The voiceovers don’t break the fourth wall; they’re internal monologues, which the viewer merely overhears. And like any good dialogue writer, Hong knows that, when we’re talking to other people, often we’re really talking to ourselves.
At the same time, outward conflict figures less in Hong’s work of the past eight years, reflecting his shifting demands of his actors, and perhaps generational differences too. The rampant antifeminism of right-wing Korean politics is hardly visible in the young men of Hong’s recent films. Rejecting the success cult of their elders, these characters tend to be weirdos and loners seeking some higher truth, like the poet in A Traveler’s Needs (2024), the student-director in In Water (2023), or the actor in Introduction (2021), who quits before his career even begins. Hong’s films have always featured dropouts—from the film industry, from romance, and generally from the hyper-competitive society produced by South Korea’s development. But in his earliest films, it is the women who are aimless and the men who strive for advancement in systems they don’t believe in, like the director in Kangwon Province who plies a professor with whiskey to get a university job. In a sense, the young men of Hong’s recent films have simply caught up to the women. Perhaps there’s a hope here: the shrinking of opportunity for young people in South Korea that has provoked sexist backlash is also an opportunity to reject aspirations that were never worthy to begin with. These young men have little chance of growing up to become the petty patriarchs that lord over their respective domains—a business, a film school, a production company—in Hong’s films. And it’s all well and good to declare you won’t be a phony. But now the characters—men and women, young and old—are forced ask themselves: So what do I want?
In Hong’s later films, young people have to figure out how to live in a world where all measures of success seem bankrupt, while the old have to figure out how to die without having resolved their regrets. In Hotel by the River, one of Hong’s best recent films, a poet reuniting with his estranged sons calmly gazes at a mountain view between drinking bouts. Partway through, the camera pulls back to reveal the snow-covered vista he’s been studying. The zoom out to a landscape reverses Hong’s typical zoom in onto a face: private pain swallowed, but not erased, by the world’s unclaimable expanse. While the shot does usefully represent a real shift in Hong’s interests and methods, these two poles of sympathy and indifference have always been present. Hong often concludes scenes by following a stray cat or some other animal for a moment, in a striking counterpoint to the preceding human drama. Neither pole would work without the other, nor are they really separate. The pain of a face isn’t private, because we can share it by looking. The landscape isn’t indifferent, because, as in the image of the poet framed by the mountains, we are a part of it.
By the end of the film, the poet will be dead. Hong’s older characters prepare for death by learning, or remembering, that the experiences they spent a lifetime sifting and sorting never really belonged to them alone. The returning émigré of In Front of Your Face (2021) continually reminds herself to look at what’s in front of her on her last visit to South Korea, before succumbing to cancer. A retired actress, she’s back in part to talk to a director who wants to make a film with her. After a drunken dinner, he leaves a note saying that they shouldn’t make a film together after all; afraid of his own emotion, he’s run away, much like the director from The Day He Arrives. She starts to laugh. She’s amused, I think, not only by his behavior but at her own pique, that she hasn’t detached herself from human drama as she keeps telling herself to do. To fully separate from that drama would mean viewing one’s life from the outside—that is, from a vantage occasionally glimpsed through irony, or through film, but not really possible, at least in this life.
Kim Minhee is the crucial figure in Hong’s late work, and the latter’s change in tone roughly maps onto their collaborations. Kim began her career as a famous teen model and actress, renowned for her beauty and viciously mocked for her performances. By the time of her first collaboration with Hong in 2015, she had laboriously remade herself into an acclaimed actor. Every subsequent film has featured Kim as crew member, more rarely as a performer. Rohmer once remarked he was comfortable working with so many beautiful actresses because of his “perfect chastity.” Hong and Kim had an affair while filming Right Now, Wrong Then in 2015, and have been together since. Kim wasn’t married, but Hong was—and still is, under South Korean law—and the ensuing tabloid frenzy culminated in a possibly incriminating press conference for On the Beach at Night Alone in 2017, their second collaboration.
On the Beach clearly draws from Kim’s experiences. The film begins with an actress visiting a friend in Hamburg after a similar scandal. But Hong most fruitfully and distinctively uses the life experiences of his actors through the actual traces left on their personality, comportment, and appearance. In Germany the actress takes one of the meandering, low-key journeys that threatens to fray into plotlessness in Hong’s later films, but the story is kept alive by Kim’s tired red eyes, her slowly uncoiling hurt, as if in respite from a lifetime of scrutiny. Unlike in real life, though, the scandal ends the relationship. What’s at stake isn’t the frisson of autofiction, but how the actors respond to the situation, and to one another.
The actress’s friend also first came to Hamburg to flee something: the end of her marriage. Despite the actress’s uncertainty about her future, neither of them is given to self-doubt or bitterness. The friend, skeptical of the actress’ suggestion that they move in together, says she’s happiest living alone. As for her marriage of ten years, it “was out of necessity,” she explains. “I thought I needed a husband. And he was nice enough.” Though the actress is waiting to see whether the director will come to her, it’s not clear she really wants him to. “I love him,” she says, “but if it’s too hard, what can you do?” The attitude is a relatively new one in Hong’s films: acceptance. But freedom, whether from marriage, men, and children, romantic entanglements or a career, presents its own challenges—for the director as well as the characters.
In Hong’s later work, Alice-in-Wonderland style encounters often replace the elaborate repetitions and divergences that he previously used to explore interpersonal dynamics; the breaks from a single, unified “reality” become less obvious. In On The Beach, the friends visit a bookstore and watch the proprietor play the piano; they have dinner with a married couple; they visit the salt flats. The effect is to make the film feel quieter, more interior, the camera’s lingering over stray wordless moments less motivated and more quizzical. While the second half in South Korea does find the actress, some indeterminate time later, caught back up in the social drama she left behind, conflict remains largely buried. It’s as if Hong is wondering what to make movies about.
Despite its straightforward approach to storytelling, an odd narrative device throws the film’s “realism” into question. Outlined against the gray Hamburg sky, a lanky, faceless, black-clad figure hails the two friends in Korean. The intermittent reappearances of this figure go largely unremarked upon. His legs pace across the background; he approaches from offscreen; his legs protrude on a closeup; he wipes vigorously at a window. In thinking about this figure, I was again reminded of what Sebald wrote about the “elision” of “sympathy and indifference” achieved by Johan Peter Hebel, the 19th-century German writer of fables that edify to no clear end. By “abandoning himself to pure contemplation and wonderment,” Sebald writes,
with subtle irony [Hebel] undermines his own proclaimed omniscience at every turn. . . . Despite his professional didactic inclinations, he never takes up a central role as preceptor, but always positions himself slightly to one side, in the same manner as ghosts . . . who are known for observing life from their marginal position in silent puzzlement and resignation.
With On the Beach, Hong matured into capturing subtler and more intractable forms of human conflict. Despite her quiet self-confidence, the friend (played by Seo Young-hwa) has a retiring, nervy affect; Seo literally, physically contracts in the face of Kim’s larger, more space-filling performance, wrapping her arms around herself as if from cold. The contrast between the characters is developed not thematically, like in a literary “foil,” but activated on screen by the latent aggression of Kim’s presence. Sometimes, that contrast is played for comedy, as when the friend is astonished by the actress’ ravenous appetite. At other times, like when the actress asks about moving in, one can practically feel the former straining to avoid being subsumed by the latter. (“I have no desire. You have more.” The actress agrees.) By placing his camera “slightly to one side”—like one of Hebel’s ghosts, or like the faceless figure itself—Hong films how people constantly respond to one another, the social distortions of beauty and charisma made visible, as in one of those gridded visualizations of gravity. The results are often painful. Back in Korea, we watch a woman’s rising distress as her partner flirts with Kim, his ex-lover. If these later films are less consistently exciting, the hurt runs deeper. You can leave a marriage; you can end an affair. But only in a theater, not in life, can you give equal attention to everyone who deserves it.
Seo’s character in Hamburg may have truly decided to exit the drama of desire and disappointment. But as she clearly recognizes, the actress hasn’t. Near the end of On the Beach comes a drunken shouting match straight out of Hong’s earlier films. The actress has dinner (which, in a Hong movie, means drinks) with the director and his acolytes, but then wakes up on the beach, suggesting she dreamed the whole encounter. Hong often begins scenes with someone waking up from an unexpected sleep. Thus bracketed as potential dreams, the preceding sequences sometimes strike me as wish fulfillment, other times not. But they’re not Inception-style rug-pulls, nor do I feel cheated by not knowing what was “real.” The effect is to emphasize a contingency that eludes control. Hong is neither a providential Catholic like Rohmer nor a committed doomer like Maurice Pialat. No one is saved or fucked. It’s just that the choices necessary to get what we want are rarely ours to make.
So what? Is the “message” of Hong’s films simply that life is unfair? Though I’ve warmed to the movie, I still don’t particularly like On the Beach. I prefer Hong’s funnier films like In Another Country or Hill of Freedom, where foreigners (the French actor Isabelle Huppert and the Japanese actor Ryo Kase, respectively) navigate South Korea in broken English. But I do think the answer to the so what? that Hong’s films invite resides in this film as much as any other. Not, however, in the actorly control of emotion, nor in Hong’s total control as writer-director-cinematographer-editor-scorer, but more humbly, in a close-up of coffee beans scattered across a table. The coffee shop is owned by the distressed woman I mentioned earlier, also the setting of the meeting between Kim’s actress and her former lover that begins this essay. (Opening a coffee shop or other small business is a popular way to exit the chaebol rat race in South Korea, perhaps explaining their preponderance in Hong’s films.) Kim has just left the shop; the woman’s partner is sorting the beans. As they bicker, the camera drifts down to his hands, tightening in on the work of sorting, as if to ask what it all adds up to.
The most memorable images in Hong’s films are like this, and they seem to owe little to director, actors, or script. Snowflakes fall, cats prowl, mountains stand, beans scatter. At such moments, distributed with rough generosity across the least and best of his films alike, we come to the secret of Hong’s films, which isn’t a secret at all. Zoom in, zoom out; repeat mantras or drink soju: our pains and hopes will continue to occlude our sight. We’re stuck on the inside. But neither can we stop trying to get a glimpse from without, to know why we suffer. If I’m comforted by Hong’s films, it’s because, in reworking the resulting wreckage, they insist on the dignity of this quest, one that no failure can erase.
What can a would-be filmmaker or other artist learn from Hong? Despite some government support for the arts, and the university jobs and film festivals portrayed in his films, South Korea was not really hospitable to art house cinema when Hong began his career. The cinematic windows were too narrow for a word-of-mouth sleeper hit. The South Korean directors who have found global success have done so by making commercial films—as has Hong, but at the scale of small theaters and film festivals rather than Netflix deals or international blockbusters. Hong is neither a big-ticket studio director nor a penniless auteur reliant on public funding: each of his movies makes just enough money to finance the next one. Major studios, microbudget filmmaking, American-style “independent” cinema: all are capable of producing works both dismal and grand. The question is how an artist responds to their placement within them—or refuses that placement. The stress marks left behind by this friction are called style.
I think the ugliness and strife of Hong’s earliest films were in part birth pangs. A fuck you cynicism can be cleansing, even indispensable for a young artist. Maybe I most prefer his mid-career films of the early 2010s because in them, angst has not yet given way to serenity. Too often, the recent films seem like they would have benefited from a beefheaded producer like the one in The Novelist’s Film—if not for that producer’s advice to be heeded, then for Hong to react against it. Instead, with his crews of two or three, Kim included, Hong has cut out not only producers but anyone aside from his immediate collaborators. He can make any movie he wants. But as his recent portrayals of young filmmakers and actors seem to suggest—wasn’t that already true? What’s stopping you? Chasing freedom through success simply deposits you back where you started—and that’s if you’re lucky or strong or stubborn, if by imperceptible degrees (or perhaps in one fatal leap) success hasn’t overtaken freedom as the goal altogether. To me, Hong’s example is one of infinite optimism, but not easy to follow. The idea that great art is possible in any situation also implies that the primary barriers to making art are personal. Personal as in only rectifiable by you, even if economic and superstructural in origin. It has never been cheaper or easier to make and distribute a film than it is today. But to seize that freedom, you have to want it—which sooner or later requires a clear-eyed view of its costs.
One of Hong’s two films from 2024, By the Stream has Kim as another visual artist, now older and teaching at a university. Her department is putting on a play for a school event, and after the student-director gets fired—more on that soon—she invites her estranged uncle, a former actor and director, to stage the play instead. It quickly becomes clear that he’s been exiled from film and television due to a scandal. As she has aged, and especially here, Kim’s performances have taken on a subtlety that’s more responsive to other actors, less inward-facing, befitting her character’s dual role as protégé and guide. That allows Hong, without returning to his previous sturm und drang, to evoke a complex history of familial and institutional strife that in other recent films can feel merely gestured at—and that, in his earlier work, was often elided altogether. As a result, the film is Hong’s most trenchant investigation into the relationship between art and life: that is, into how one “becomes” an artist. Put another way, in what strikes me as the most personal movie he’s ever made, Hong has depicted the costs of freedom.
Kim’s artist lives a semi-secluded, peaceful life at a woman’s university, cosseted with her students and her mentor, a somewhat older artist who deeply admires her uncle. She makes fabric pieces that abstract patterns from nearby rivers at, she says to her uncle’s surprise, a rate of ten centimeters an hour. Like Hong himself, she wants total, personal control. But also like Hong, it “feels right that [the works] come from real objects,” because without that she keeps “having doubts.”
This brief discussion of aesthetics encapsulates a tension that both characters feel: the artist’s need for self-sufficiency—but also the ineluctable reliance on a world outside of one’s self. When Kim’s character describes the semi-mystical experience that inspired her to become an artist, the uncle focuses less on the alleged moment of transformation than its consequence: “Any experience that gives you certainty is good.” We’re never quite sure what the scandal was that destroyed his career. It seems he separated from his wife due to an affair (later we find out a judge has, after ten years, finally granted his divorce). A hint of political blackballing emerges when he complains to his niece that her mother called him a “commie,” an imprecation with far greater consequences in South Korea than America. He’s clearly been ruminating on his mistakes in life. When the play bombs, he begins doubting its quality. Certainty is what he admires because it’s what he, unwillingly shunted into the life of reflection his niece has embraced, lacks. A visual artist needs subjects; an actor needs an audience.
An actor, or a director, more obviously relies on other people to realize their ambitions than a visual artist. In this way, movies about actors, film sets, and plays can uniquely capture how art forms and occurs in the hair-thin fissures that delineate individual and society. Or films about universities: despite the saint-like origins of the artist’s drive, it’s the teaching job that actually allows her to make such laborious, time-intensive work. Her mentor got her the position, and it’s the female students who provide her only other social contact. The uncle who quickly couples with the mentor, the student-director who was fired because he dated three of the actresses in short order, and the university director who blows a gasket after he finds out about the disgraced actor on campus, are all male intruders into what one is tempted to call the “safe space” of the women’s university. The artist’s impulse to protect her students from the director—and her moralizing anger at her uncle after he sleeps with the mentor—reflects a latent, insecure awareness that self-mythologization and drive, while necessary, are never really sufficient for art.
Rather than the puff piece the audience presumably expected, the play is a five-minute scene of an impoverished family eating noodles—a foray into social realism that perhaps recalls what student theater was like during the actor’s (or Hong’s) youth, in a then-leftist collegiate milieu. After the disastrous opening, one actress says the audience “seemed to misread [the play] as political, or maybe it was a gender issue, since it’s a woman’s university.” As in many of Hong’s films about university-age people searching for meaning, such moments become more poignant when one recalls that, a few decades earlier, political struggle might well have provided collective rather than individual answers. Or maybe not: Hong and his characters seem as unlikely to submit to party discipline as to a two-bit patriarch. Swallowing his bitterness along with his soju, the uncle asks the actresses to speak about what they want from life. One wants “to be a person not like me at all”; another wants only to keep “ceaselessly moving forward”; a third wants love, “even if it’s just one [day]”; and a fourth declares herself a “freak” who is nonetheless intent on living “with some pride.” The internal struggle to resist conformity will always be more morally ambiguous than, say, a protest movement against authoritarianism. It’s harder to be certain you’re on the right side, that you’re not deluding yourself, especially because the war has two fronts: within and without, one against doubt, the other against a hostile world.
By the Stream takes a potential problem for Hong’s work—recycling material from his own youth, with much younger actors—and turns it into a dramatic premise. It’s a movie about students and teachers, about pedagogy, by a director who seems skeptical that anyone learns anything. (The plot is also the standard stuff of popular film: an estranged family member arrives into a woman’s settled life, and upsets everything. If one were to do an American remake, the generational conflict would run something like: Gen Z students, Millennial artist, Gen X mentor, and Boomer uncle.) While explicit advice is in short supply, the pedagogical thrust of the film comes from how it entertains two paths for the artist—of seclusion and engagement—before dissolving the distinction. Seclusion is never complete, and whether and how one engages with institutions or economic systems is often not up to you, either. The only straightforward instruction we do see comes during rehearsals, when the director has the actresses doing Lee Strasberg–style exercises, like carrying imaginary objects. An artist’s task is to create something genuinely new while living within the givens of the present. In this situation doubt and pain are inescapable. In response, an artist must develop the attitudes, techniques, and procedures by which they work—tools necessarily forged in failure, frustration, and creative crisis.
I began watching Hong’s movies during my own “creative crisis,” one that was—and remains—coterminous with my “writing career,” and which, I think now, was only a “crisis” because I was panicked about something called a career in the first place. At the time, I imagined success as a moment when all the painful things that seemed so important and urgent to me would become directly apprehensible to everyone else. There are many useful things I took from Hong—for example, the uses of gesture and tic. But what seems most useful today is the understanding that these pains of mine already were visible to everyone around me. Writing is embarrassing not because everyone is bad at expressing themselves, but because of what expressing one’s self in any artform reveals, easily and invariably—ambitions, fears, poses. To know someone, all you have to do is point a camera at them, or give them a pen. All you have to do is to look.
I’ll risk some advice, gleaned from Hong’s filmmaking and from my own artistic grasping, and addressed, like those voiceovers in Day He Arrives or In Front of Your Face, to myself. To start, remember that for what you gain by adhering to convention in the short term, you sacrifice creatively in the long, especially when that convention is self-imposed. Work cheaply and hard. Memorize poems or paragraphs. Cultivate a hatred for careerism sufficient to overmatch the fear of failure. Accept, or try to accept, that failure, however defined, is inevitable. Make use of it, by dramatizing both the appeal and the disappointment of that which has served you poorly. Don’t seek out suffering, but forgive yourself when you do. If you ever make a movie, put interesting things, like clouds, or leaves, in the background. Prefer rewriting to editing. Record interesting things people say. Vigorously pursue interests that have no clear connection to what you’re working on. Think about other people at least as much as you think about yourself. Remain an amateur at all costs. Know in advance the costs will be enormous.
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