Calling Again

Like You Know It All (Hong Sang-soo, 2009)

Further adventures in the depiction of phone conversations in cinema: in this typically Hongian (cell phone, ugly room, cigarette, unremarkable lighting) scene from Like You Know It All, the sound design goes against the conventions of depicting a phone call from one character's "aural point of view" by mixing the voices of both actors at more or less the same level. There's none of the cheesy "tinniness" that's used to simulate a phone receiver, nor are either of the actors talking directly into a microphone; we hear both voices as a person sitting in the room with them would hear, though the image only ever shows one of the characters (if I recall correctly, Hong uses a similar technique in Lost in the Mountains).

But Hong goes further: he mixes in voice-over narration at a similar volume, so, while the image shows the actions of one character as he wakes up and has a cigarette while answering a phone call, on the soundtrack we hear the interplay of three vocal parts (two from the same actor, but recorded differently -- dialogue on the set, monologue in a studio).

Hong Movies

"Lost in the Mountains," Hong Sang-soo's segment from Visitors (Hong Sang-soo / Naomi Kawase / Lav Diaz, 2009)

Every time Hong Sang-soo gets behind a camera, he sets out to make the same movie. That isn't to say every Hong movie is the same. Maybe every time he sets out, he fails. Maybe his career will become the story of a man who attempts to make the perfect autobiography and produces only beautiful fictions. Maybe Hong's self-critical aparatus is too strong, maybe he is too consciously attempting to make the same film over and over again to actually make the same film over and over again.

While countless writers and directors repeat themselves, thinking each repetition is an original, every one of Hong's copies boldly veers off in a new direction. The variations are not subtle: from the same basic material, he can produce a starkly schematic movie like The Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, a direct and fluid one like A Tale of Cinema or a dense and massive one like Night and Day. The elements remain the same: too much drinking leading to too much talking; surly filmmakers and artists, often educated in the United States; people who say too much when they should keep their mouths shut and keep silent when it's their turn to speak; friendships that exist more in theory or history (in Hong, the present is always the end of the past) than in practice; characters who are defined by whether they smoke, don't smoke or say they don't smoke but then bum cigarettes. A universe of puffy jackets (South Korea always looks so damn cold in Hong movies) and half-empty bottles. Hong's characters are always saved by their pettiness. If they were ever frank, it would destroy their lives.

Besides the subjects and techniques (lengthy takes that either frame a single person in the center, two people on opposite ends of the frame or three people forming a triangle, a camera that moves only to follow characters and, since around A Tale of Cinema, a distinctive and forceful use of the zoom), what all of Hong's films have in common is that they're all at least pretty good.

Recent Failures

From a post intended for Film of the Month Club:

"Who is this image by?"

"Hong Sang-soo, of course."

"How do you know?"

"Well, there's a line right down the middle." Which is true. There's a bit of physics to Hong; he can warp space. He can make a tabletop five miles wide. This is what he does as a director: he creates borders. This is true of his editing--nowhere has the word cut been more appropriate in describing the joining of two moving pictures--but even truer of his images. And they are images and never imagery, which is why frame captures tend to fail in capturing a Hong image. He's interested in the dramatics of a moving picture, not in its drama. There's no drama, or understandable emotion, to the image above; it's just two men sitting at a table eating and talking. Yet, within the actual take, within the film itself, there is a drama--something that only the viewer can see or feel. The viewer watches and thinks: "Never have two people sitting so close together sat so far apart."

This is Hong: when two people look each other in the face, there isn't a sense of connection; each is simply looking at the face of the other. This isn't a single action, but two actions that happen to be synchronous. A conversation is not one thing, but two people talking in turn.

From a plastic angle, a nearly identical image. It was taken in 1957 at the South Pole; the men in the photo are arctic scientists, characters more at home in a Zanussi film than one by Hong. There are other differences: the men are not engaging with each other--each is working at his separate task. And, yet, by placing themselves equally in the same framing (the photo, staged, was taken with the camera on a timer), they reinforce the idea that, though they're working on different things, they are working together. There's no dividing line; the lamp at the center seems to radiate a unity that imbues both of them.

Also:


From an abandoned post for Tisch Film Review:


There is, of course, the film, and then there’s the filmmaker. The Woman on the Beach presents us with a troubling case. We don’t know, for instance, how much of a “Jean Renoir film” it really is. The story goes, as it often does, that RKO had large portions of it re-shot and re-edited after some poor test screenings. Which in turn leads us to ask whether it’s Jean Renoir we admire or “the films of Jean Renoir.” Because at first glance an admiration for Renoir above all would compel us reject The Woman on the Beach. This is maybe the only time in Renoir’s career this question is seriously posed, though it pops up in almost all of the films of Orson Welles and Nicholas Ray: "What do we admire when we admire a movie’s director?" Because it’s when a director is at his or her most compromised that we often have our suspicions (whether positive or negative) about them validated (and The Woman on the Beach is a film of suspicions, both of the characters and the audience, who, as in Renoir’s La Nuit du Carrefour, are turned into detectives). The ”least exemplary” work usually provides a better understanding of a director than their best known one. I'm thinking of a hundred films: Yasujiro Ozu's Dragnet Girl, King Vidor's Metaphor, John Ford's Seven Women, Josef von Sternberg's Jet Pilot, Robert Bresson's Four Nights of a Dreamer, Alfred Hitchcock's Topaz, Richard Linklater's Bad News Bears, Arthur Penn's Mickey One, Francois Truffaut's A Gorgeous Kid Like Me, Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind, etc., etc., etc. Each one is a decoder ring that deciphers some previously invisible aspect of the director's other films.

[...]

The reason we said Renoir was great or Minnelli was a master was first and foremost because of the movies and what they suggested of their greatness. We didn't know right away that Renoir was "intelligent" (Hollywood is run by intelligent people); his movies suggested an intelligence. Renoir came first, but we discovered him last. So we don't admire Renoir as a deep-focus tracking shot, which is, after all, the result of the work of numerous technicians and actors. We admire the thinking. What attracted Renoir to the deep-focus tracking shot was the complexity of the drama it could give a moving image, the subtleties that could occur within a single take—the same reason directors from Mizoguchi to To have been attracted to it. But we should remember that what attracted these directors was not the shot itself—the fetishization of a certain framing—but the idea of a dynamic moving image, that when you pointed a camera at something, it wouldn’t just be a single idea (a door opening, a car pulling up), but several social and emotional forces playing out in a way they couldn’t in a still photo. The wide shot was simply the easiest way of achieving this dynamic. So, if the American Renoir includes more close-ups and medium shots than the French Renoir—imposed studio style—it does not make the images any less dynamic. What happens within a single shot of Charles Bickford’s face as Robert Ryan gives Joan Bennet a cigarette in The Woman on the Beach is as complicated as anything in Boudu Saved From Drowning. It’s an image that grows in ambiguity with every viewing of the film.