Throughout his near-thirty year career, South Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo has developed a singular, process-based mode of production. Gathering locations prior to conceptualising a story, Hong typically writes a script on the morning of filming, using impressions of his chosen location as the basis of stories that favour narrative abstraction over more traditional verisimilitude in order to communicate a subjective truth. This approach can be seen as a type of impressionism, and while his films don’t always share aesthetic similarities with impressionist paintings, Paul Cėzanne is an often noted influence on Hong’s work. Thinking in terms of art as a means for communication, there exist poignant similarities in the practice of using broad emotional strokes to create emotional clarity within formal abstraction, which in Hong’s work includes shifts in time, space, and the mise en abyme of the film-within-a-film. That said, it’s interesting to note that in recent years, the knotted narrative structures that often communicate the subjectivity of characters in Hong’s films have been phased out, though this does not seem to undermine Hong’s impressionistic process. Instead, he uses increasingly linear narratives to better juxtapose and further investigate film form as an apparatus for the question of communication between individuals.
Before analysing his most recent films, it is useful to chart the trajectory of narrative complication throughout Hong’s œuvre. Tale of Cinema (2005) is the first of Hong’s films to blur fictive and “real” timelines. It contains a film-within-a-film that mirrors the experiences of the characters, as life choices are made due to the allure of arranging one’s life to the beats of its narrative. While lacking the clarity offered by a linear structure, Hong’s impressionist process results in a film that draws out the emotions and motivations of the characters more than any rigid structure could. Similarly, The Day He Arrives (2011) repeats a day in the life of Sung-joo over and over and over, but not in an iterative, Groundhog Day (1993)-esque way that is meant to instruct the protagonist. Instead, its fractured structure explores how a different encounter, interpretation, or reaction can yield a multitude of seemingly coincidental results. In this sense, we see how the emotional life of these characters is always shifting, influenced by changes in structure and experience in unexpected ways. As things go awry for the characters in both films, the narrative structure breaks down, formally mirroring the complicated and self-absorbed interior lives of the male leads with an anxiously out of order organisation of filmic time and space.
The inverse of this technique occurs in other Hong films of the 2010s, which accordingly demonstrate the problem of truth that arises when one attempts to apply rigid forms toward emotions: that of verbal language in Right Now, Wrong Then (2015) and film language in Oki’s Movie (2010). Right Now, Wrong Then splits its story into two alternate timelines of the same romantic encounter between Chun-su and Hee-jung. Their first encounter plays out as a demonstration of dishonest compliments and misused words, leaving the relationship middlingly unsuccessful and Chun-su distrusting of language. When the encounter repeats and the two start to speak with honesty, slight variations occur. Chun-su labels Hee-jung’s painting as amateurish after praising it in the first section. Their relationship inevitably collapses as a drunken Chun-su self-pityingly strips down in total reveal of his own image, once again abandoning language. The real feelings, like a dialectic, are likely located between these two manifestations. Oki’s Movie cinematically translates a complex love triangle through a fractured narrative structure of four “separate” short films. Similar to Right Now, Wrong Then and The Day He Arrives, the film further explores variations in the repetition of encounters, though what varies among the four short films are not words and actions, but the representation of the trio’s relationship, thus using the film form to interrogate itself. Oki makes her short film as an attempt to represent things “the way they happened,” yet self-admittedly, her film doesn’t capture the impact of the core of the relationship. It is only in contrast and parallel to the other shorts that the film comes close to reaching any “truth,” creating clarity through the cumulative narrative form. This is what makes the experience of viewing Hong’s impressionist portraits a singular one: to mobilise the narrative to best represent the emotionally complex portrait of these characters is to abandon linearity — to layer scene atop scene, word upon word, in order to feel the poetic in the mosaic whole, rather than the individual parts.
Later in the decade, Hong’s narratives and portrayal of character expand to include traces of himself. After the much talked about — and media-demonised — affair with his ever more frequent collaborator Kim Min-hee, his presence began to materialise in progressively obvious ways. In On the Beach at Night Alone (2017), Kim plays Young-hee, an actress who is caught in a messy and televised affair. She is distressed by the absence of her personal truth in what has been reported by the press, while also feeling remorseful towards those she has hurt. Meanwhile, the abstracted form can accommodate Hong’s feelings on the matter with an impressionist truth, leveraging his style of poetic narratives to achieve a personal clarity particularly in what it notably withholds. In an increasingly personal manner, the film centres on only one main character, taking questions about the convergence of life and art and adjusting them into questions about the exchange of artistic process with life experiences. The structure is simpler than the other films discussed, yet emotions and narrative remain abstracted through the appearance of a man in black who seems to rest outside of the film’s linear timeline, performing a series of intrusions like breaking into an apartment or whisking Yung-hee away from the beach. While it’s easy to expound on his presence as an apt metaphor, these events seem to stand for themselves as the encapsulation of both Hong and Young-hee’s desire to do away with the scandal — an impressionist flourish to the narrative that refines the emotive purpose of other films’ knotted structures into a physical presence within the story.
Hong has since continued to refine his singular method of production by stripping back the number of crew members and equipment, releasing two films every year since 2021. The resulting “cheap” digital aesthetic of these recent films brings us closer to the process from which they were made, bringing forth an increased sense of intimacy. Likewise, Hong’s films of the 2020s have become less concerned with a lack of emotional precision in language and forms, and instead follow individual artists in their search for the forms in which these emotions can be expressed whatsoever. The Novelist’s Film (2022) depicts an author creating her first film as a means to capture an emotional purity, and In Water (2023) follows a filmmaker who both literally and figuratively cannot see the ways his life connects to his art. Most recently in By The Stream (2024), Jeon-im’s art-making is in constant conversation with her life, gesturing towards the increasingly personal and solitary process of Hong himself.
Jeon-im’s presence in By The Stream is first and foremost as an artist. She is introduced while sitting by a river and painting on a pocket-sized canvas, and is later shown to be an acting teacher, a writer, and a weaver. Apart from these details, we do not learn much about her personal life. While the film does mainly focus on her, those who surround Jeon-im take up the majority of narrative space with their conflicts being the central conflicts of the film. One of her former students begs for re-admittance into Jeon-im’s class after being unable to balance filmmaking and his lust for three classmates, and her uncle, who Jeon-im invites to direct the class in the student’s place, sees this favour as an act of reconciliation from his forty-year-old failures at the university. The play he directs for them is ill-received and though Jeon-im coaches the students as a patient, empathetic, and almost motherly figure, her presence within the play’s development becomes overshadowed by her uncle’s complicated relationship with the university. Indeed, as her uncle’s romantic interest in her colleague Professor Jeong grows more legitimate throughout the film, the empty chair that sits next to Jeon-im at their after-school dinners becomes increasingly obvious. As a character, Jeon-im rests on the periphery of the narrative, either exhausting herself in defence of her mother against her uncle’s bitterness or to attack the former student-director who continues to pursue his ex-classmates in a delirious exercising of his ego. What seems to be a story about Jeon-im is actually one that orbits around her. That is not to say that there is no suggestion of Jeon-im’s trajectory as a character in By the Stream. While Jeon-im strays further from our sight in the narrative structure, a recurring image of the moon slowly comes closer to fullness. The moon acts as both a signifier for the passage of time and as a metaphor for the somewhat stagnant growth of Jeon-im, recognising that she remains the protagonist despite less narrative attention. Its presence gestures towards an unseen development of meaning, refusing to pinpoint what exactly she’s moving towards, but like the man in black of On the Beach, gesturing to her subjectivity nonetheless.
This pursuit toward the unknown is present in Hong’s other films from this decade. The author/filmmaker of The Novelist’s Film hurls herself into the world of filmmaking, hoping that a radical shift towards something new — a new medium, a new feeling, new people — will fulfil her desire to capture a sense of mundane beauty in art. The filmmaker character from In Water is unaware of what he’s making, searching for the emotion that will spark his film, eventually walking under the water and out of frame as a filmic materialisation of his unknown future. In By the Stream, Jeon-im is less hurried to figure things out; her main source of artistic inspiration comes as she sits next to the stream every day, painting whatever comes to her without much concern for the busy road above and behind her. She also weaves together textiles inspired by the river, transposing its lasting impressions into her work as she sits for as long as five hours a day working on a piece. It’s a slow and stoic process — these details being integrated as they appear to her. Like the moon, this connective relationship to art is always present, ever-changing in the simplest of ways. It appears to reflect on Hong’s own process-based filmmaking: what at first seems to be a willfully opaque representation of creation reveals itself to be something unknowably personal — a form of emotional expression that we witness him experiment with on each film, each time reflecting on his own evolution as an artist.
Thirty-three features into his career, one would expect Hong to have difficulty finding new ways to experiment with structure, yet the ellipses present in By the Stream’s narrative subvert audience expectations, forcing us to reexamine our relationship — and the camera’s relationship — to Jeon-im. After the failure of her uncle’s play, Jeon-im is called away from a celebration dinner to meet with the university administrators. One expects the film’s narrative to follow her to the meeting and learn whatever repercussions the play has had on her career, generating a closer sense of intimacy to her struggles as a character. Instead, the film lingers with the uncle and the students, the weight of Jeon-im’s absence felt by the audience, but not seeming to affect the characters in the scene, resulting in what is perhaps the most intimate moment of the film. The uncle asks the students, “Who do you want to be?” to which one answers: someone who is not a “freak,” and will “burn the smallest lamp in the corner and keep it warm, to remind myself I am human.” This response has such upfront honesty that the emotional interiors of the students begin to overshadow that of the missing Jeon-im. We next see her walking out of the meeting alongside Professor Jeong, with no words spoken, but the moon in full above. We’re still unaware of what’s happened in the meeting, but nonetheless aware that a change has taken place. By the end of the film, it feels as though we have learned more about the process of creating art than anything about Jeon-im; the moments of conflict throughout the film feel like contributions to her private process of creation that will happen some time off screen.
Formally, the attempts for expression in Hong’s 2020s films is represented by a drastic and sometimes radical experiment in image. If his formal experiments once existed as knotted narrative structures, they now materialise in the rendering of the image. The blown out black and white images of The Novelist’s Film often place a white canvas as the backdrop for its characters, emphasising a disconnect between subjective feeling and their ideologies of creation. In a climactic film-within-film the image changes to color, pivoting from cinematic to realist — the world breaks open with a cut. Meanwhile, In Water has an out of focus image that mirrors its protagonist’s inability to understand the art he is making, perpetually in search of the emotional anchor that ties it all together. By the Stream and its lo-fi cinematography of digital noise and soft colours feels less like a characterisation of Jeon-im’s push towards an emotional revenance, and instead closer to an approximation of the improvised process of her painting and Hong’s films. What appears to be cinematically “ugly” is a beautiful embrace of the convergence of the process and its cheap aesthetics. It is notable that the film opens with Jeon-im’s uncle chastising her for what he deems to be a less than adequate paint box, but for her the materials don’t impede the importance of the process — indeed, the lack better emphasises the emotion.
If the search for feeling hasn’t resulted in any narrative exactitude for the artists of Hong’s recent films, perhaps the artistic process and thus form is instead where observable emotion resides. While Right Now, Wrong Then and Oki’s Movie somewhat explored this concept with their fractured timelines and narratives that embody character’s complicated interiors, more recent films such as The Novelist’s Film and In Water ground their emotional experimentation in visually obvious formal techniques. This allows the films more opportunity to ruminate on the role of the artist, questioning how these emotions can be made visible to the viewer. In that sense, By the Stream drifts forward with a wonderfully gentle development of form, employing a narrative structure that is felt by the viewer long before it is noticed; our emotional understanding of Jeon-im exists within metaphor, structure, process and ellipsis. Emotions surface through a meditative form of viewing that requires the viewer to be as patient in the present moment as Hong has become with his process, looking for progress in no particular direction and instead quietly contemplating why one must ask for more from the narrative when there are so many small marvels along the way. ❏
