Often when encountering an esteemed work of art, one accepts some initial friction, an incomplete understanding. This prudence pairs well with the faith that more time, exposure, reflection, knowledge, or refinement of taste eventually results in a clearer appreciation of the work at hand—unless the work you’re talking about is a movie. Then humility is in short supply; impatience and irritability come rushing in to take its place. As Charlie Kaufman once observed, “‘That’s two hours I’ll never get back’ [is] a favorite thing for an angry person to say about a movie he hates. But the thing is, every two hours are two hours he’ll never get back. You cannot hoard your two hours-es.”
These remarks came to mind as I tried to process my solitary encounters with the filmmaker Hong Sang-soo against the phenomenon of their odd public and critical reception. Many of his films are available on Kanopy, a streaming service that frequently hosts releases by small arthouse distributors like Kino Lorber, Oscilloscope, Grasshopper, and Zipporah Films (Frederick Wiseman’s production company). It is an unassuming platform, made widely accessible via public library accounts—likewise, a place where passionate, low-budget, socially-conscious films get put out to pasture.
While perusing the platform one day, I noticed a common poster design in the international film menu: cursive titles over stills of the actress Kim Min-hee: Grass (2018), On A Beach at Night Alone (2017), and Right Now, Wrong Then (2015). They all had the same director in common: Hong Sang-soo. After consulting a BFI feature on the filmmaker, I decided to begin with Right Now, Wrong Then, which I would later learn is more famous for the controversial relationship it sparked between Hong and Kim.
The film follows a director who arrives in a small town the day before a screening for one of his films. To kill time, he goes to a temple where he meets an artist, Yoon Hee-jeong (Min-hee). The two spend the day talking about art, getting drunk, and flirting with one another. When they part ways, the film begins again, only this time the same setup leads to different outcomes. This move, I would later learn, is typical of Hong’s work. A specific structural device creating room for the rest of the film to breathe.
I’m sure this summary makes the film sound quite dry—a high-concept approach to stories in which nothing much happens according to common expectation. The truth is, there was nothing particularly revelatory about this first viewing. I found the film underwhelming and puzzling, yet oddly comforting in its demeanor. It lingered in my mind like a pleasant exchange with a neighbor. Its rhythm reminded me of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow—that focused state of mind one enters when engaged in an intrinsically rewarding act, a state in which self-conscious thoughts fade into the background and one loses track of time.
Over the next few months, I found myself turning to one of the 20 Hong titles available on Kanopy anytime I had my apartment to myself. Even though the films often left me more befuddled than amused, their radical low-budget aesthetic cast a spell on me. Studio spectacles at any scale or budget began to seem fussy and over-produced by comparison.
For the most part, my relationship to Hong’s work remained private, as I suspect it does for most devotees, given the sparse coverage his films receive. His films are rarely reviewed by major publications, and when they are, they tend to take the form of clinical four-paragraph reports. So when I saw his latest U.S. release, By the Stream (2024), was having a brief run at the Los Feliz 3 in Los Angeles, I drove across town for a midday screening.
The film opens on Jeonim (Kim Min-hee), a lecturer at a local college. She sits by a river bed and paints with watercolors in her notebook. When she finishes a piece, she walks to meet her uncle (Kwon Hae-hyo) on a bridge nearby. He has come to replace a drama instructor who was fired after his relationships with three students in the same class came to light. As in his other films, Hong is content to deal with the aftermath of this event rather than confronting it head on. He lets major dramas occur off camera, leaving audiences to piece together the way such incidences refract through everyday life.
At times, the audience I saw the film with seemed to struggle with this seemingly lackadaisical approach to an otherwise salacious premise. When Jeonim introduces her uncle to the head of the department—Jeong (Cho Yun-hee), an admirer of his work—the three exchange polite small talk for a moment at the table in her office before agreeing to head to dinner together. The catch is that Jeong has to take care of some work before they depart. She says it will only take a few minutes, but once she takes a seat at her desk the time begins to drag. Jeonim sits patiently, while her uncle paces around the room making forgettable remarks about the various books, trinkets, and paintings placed about Jeong’s office.
If you’ve never seen a Hong film, you may imagine this blocking through the more familiar language of close-ups, reverse-shots, medium shots, inserts, and so on. But Hong’s camera makes no attempts to elevate the action; his camera remains completely static throughout the scene, even when the uncle remarks on a painting obscured from the camera’s view.
I realized such a moment, typical of everyday life, could feel completely alien when witnessed alongside other moviegoers. Had I watched the film alone, I suspect I wouldn’t have made much of the moment. But the longer the characters idled, the more the audience sought to fill the silence with uncomfortable laughter. As a collective, it felt like we were embarrassed for the characters. It was like they didn’t realize they were performing for us.
Like the rest of Hong’s body of work, By the Stream is packed with awkward moments like this—exchanges of dialogue that wouldn’t make the second draft of a studio script, let alone survive the cutting room floor. But that is the nature of Hong’s method.
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In appraisals of Hong’s work, more attention is often paid to this method than to the films themselves. Dennis Lim detailed the radical low-budget approach in a profile of Hong for the New Yorker:
“He funds each movie with the proceeds of his previous films, and he makes his films as he goes. After selecting actors and locations, he enters production without a script; every morning, he writes the scenes on the docket for that day or the next. Since he uses much of what he shoots, he can edit an entire feature in as little as a day or two.”
Lim—who served as the Director of Programming for Film at Lincoln Center until 2022, and currently acts as the artistic director of the New York Film Festival and moderates numerous Hong panels—has become something of an authority on the filmmaker’s oeuvre. His 2022 book, Tale of Cinema, is a comprehensive survey of Hong’s filmography through the lens of Tale of Cinema (2005), the first film in which Hong deploys his signature zoom technique (an uninterrupted long take that flows from wide angle shots to close-ups on individual characters). While working on the book, Lim also programmed a retrospective of Hong’s work titled “The Hong Sangsoo Multiverse.”
Watching the Q&As for this retrospective and his various NYFF screenings can be quite amusing. The audience members often have trouble wrapping their minds around Hong’s process. Comparing it to commercial film production, his former cinematographer Hyung-koo Kim said, “I don’t think I can even say it’s a completely different method. I think it would be more accurate to say maybe it is even the reverse of what the typical process is.”
This is probably the most straightforward way one could put it. Yet the questions asked of Hong frequently concern the details of his method, as if it were too hard to believe such a process could yield films of a quality recognized by prestige festivals year after year. Hong’s answers, coated in bathos, never fail to propel waves of laughter throughout the room.
When asked whether he has advice for a younger generation of filmmakers, he responds nonchalantly, “No. I wouldn’t.” When asked whether he’s satisfied after writing a scene, without skipping a beat he insists, “You know, I did my best, so…[yes].” When asked about the potential peril of writer’s block on the morning before a shoot, he assures them “If you keep doing it then maybe after thirty minutes… something comes to you. But you have to keep smoking.”
Hong’s answers to these questions haven’t changed over the years, yet he always exercises the utmost patience in answering despite the hostile tone that occasionally accompanies them. What has changed is the films themselves. Across his oeuvre, this consistency of process should never be mistaken for a homogeneity of content, nor should the repetition of familiar characters or themes.
Lim’s book covers a lot of the patterns that marked Hong’s work up to The Novelist’s Film (2022), a movie about a disenchanted writer (Lee Hye-young) who meets a famous actress (Kim Min-hee) then sets her mind to making a short film with the actress and a local film student. This setup revisits many elements of Hong’s past work—solitary artists navigating personal histories, failed relationships, or internal strife through a present marked by artistic reflection, practice, or renewal—but it’s the way Hong rearranges these familiar conflicts and archetypal characters that keeps them fresh.
Hong has released five features since The Novelist’s Film—Walk Up (2022), In Water (2023), In Our Day (2023), A Traveler’s Needs (2024), By the Stream (2024)—each of which invents a totally novel experience despite arising from the same voice and method. Walk Up follows a filmmaker (Kwon Hae-hyo) as his life unfolds through four separate floors of an apartment building owned by a friend (Lee Hye-young). The building’s architecture provides a structure for the film’s progression, setting several distinct periods in the filmmaker’s life on particular floors.
In the first passage he brings his daughter to meet his friend and tour the building. In the second, he dines with his friend and a restaurateur (Song Seon-mi) on the second floor. In the third, he bickers with the restaurateur on the third-floor apartment they have apparently moved into together between parts two and three. In the fourth, he converses with a new romantic partner (Cho Yun-hee) on the building’s roof deck. In this final scene we find his relationship with his owner-friend has been reduced to the passive aggressive remarks and administrative scuffles that resemble familiar landlord-tenant relations.
Walk Up is my favorite of Hong’s recent films and likely the best entry point for newcomers—an ideal representation of how a casual, barebones method can yield moving works of stunning originality. His follow-up, In Water, tells a radically different story about the creation of a student film over the course of a week, but is similarly inspired in its aesthetic approach. When the filmmakers begin to work out their scenes around a seaside rental, the camera ventures out of focus, embracing a gentle blur that suggests both the inchoate artistry of the characters and Hong’s mature sensibilities as a seasoned filmmaker. (Notably, the film does not employ his trademark zooms, offering instead something like cinematic impressionism.)
His next film, In Our Day, suggests a link between youth and experience by juxtaposing the interactions between two trios of characters—one composed of an actress, her peer, and an aspiring young actress; the other of a poet, a young documentary filmmaker, and an aspiring actor—as they converse in one location over the course of an afternoon. Its climax ushers in one of the most assertive speeches in the history of Hong’s work. The aspiring actor asks the poet, “Does everything just exist with no meaning?” The poet responds:
“Can’t it all just exist?… What we should do is be thankful for the small things. To the best of our ability, to appreciate what’s in front of us, and be thankful. That’s all. Don’t look for meaning. That’s just cowardice… Just jump in the water. Don’t try to know it all before jumping…”
It’s as much a thesis statement for encountering Hong’s work as it is a justification for his method.
A Traveler’s Needs reunites Hong with Isabelle Huppert for a third feature together. Its premise offers one of the more novel and humorous character conceits of any Hong film thus far: a language instructor whose method involves extracting emotional confessions from her students, which she then translates into French for the students to memorize in the interim between meetings. It’s a repetition of his familiar student-instructor dynamic, but it plays out in an entirely different context. Huppert plays the outsider trying to adapt to a new culture by employing her authority over her native tongue as a means of connecting more deeply with the people she meets in Seoul.
As I’ve discussed already, By the Stream also features more student-instructor dynamics, but this time—as Jawni Han observes in her review for Brooklyn Rail—politics and censorship come to shape the story more than they ever have in previous works by Hong.
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These summary overviews offer a broad appreciation of the distinct works that have emerged in the past three years of Hong’s career, using the same write-what-you-know, fund-what-you-can-afford approach. But the details that compose these films matter just as much as these larger structural and aesthetic decisions that distinguish them. Apply yourself to the particulars and powerful revelations will come flooding forth.
Take the approach to teaching language that Huppert’s instructor employs. It seems impractical, even humorous at first, but the more time one spends inside her method, the more insight it seems to offer us as viewers—both in terms of understanding Huppert’s character and reflecting on the way attachments to foreign languages and cultures are formed. Additionally, the literal confessions she ushers out of her students are unusually honest and powerful, despite arising from completely mundane circumstances.
Reflecting on a quaint and confident guitar performance she gave moments ago, one of her students confesses that, not only did she not feel proud of her earlier performance, she felt annoyed with herself for not being good enough to show off yet. As this moment reveals, the method Huppert’s character employs allows her to get beneath the surface of the everyday and expose the tensions that betray otherwise inoffensive encounters.
Most of Hong’s films feature similarly powerful moments of confession or confrontation. These usually erupt suddenly, especially when the characters have had a few drinks, but without compromising the overall balance of the films. Lim refers to this even-keeled quality of Hong’s work as a “democracy of incident”—an “absence of hierarchy,” an “evenness of attention”—a trait which he associates with Hong’s admiration for Robert Bresson, whose filmmaking methods were similarly concrete, though more clinical and perfectionistic than Hong’s. This quality lends the films the feeling of a pleasant passing encounter without avoiding the intensity the characters face in confronting personal shortcomings, disappointments, and existential uncertainties.
Accepting such things in the register in which Hong conveys them can be difficult, given that he doesn’t attempt to satisfy his audience with profound answers. In conventional cinema, answers usually take the form of common narrative structures, like the hero’s journey, or clear moments of resolve: a return to the status quo, a sign of growth or change in the characters. In more challenging dramas and documentaries that tend towards ambiguity, answers instead come in the form of bold aesthetic choices or a stylistic unity that suggests a coherent, totalizing perspective behind the camera. However you look at it, these films are designed to deliver meaning.
By stripping away these conventions to such an extreme extent, Hong’s work can feel like it’s dodging its responsibility to convey events in a meaningful way. Of course, this isn’t actually the case. Great care is still taken to structure and write the films according to his knowledge of a specific milieu and according to his particular orientation to the world. The difference is he counts on limitations resulting from his tight budget—in addition to the selection of specific actors and locations—to generate meaning out of their own momentum. The result of his repetitious plots, meandering dialogues, and long takes is not a distillation of meaning so much as a multiplication of it.
As Hong said in response to an NYFF attendee’s question, “I believe in the given things. If I try to make something, I don’t like the result. The really precious thing is always something given to you.” His films can feel painfully casual and austere as a result. For many viewers, I’m sure the absence of a certain effort reads as maddeningly evasive. But I think this faith in the given things is where the real pleasure of viewing Hong’s films comes from. In embracing the given things, both he and his audience are free to make infinite use of finite resources.
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Films were once a prohibitively expensive medium. People paid good money to see movie stars, elaborate production design, and spectacular visual effects projected onto a big screen in a beautiful auditorium. Audiences expected immersive narrative experiences, meticulously crafted emotional arcs, an attraction to the faces captured on screen. For a time, this was all the cinema offered. But the 1930s were a long time ago.
Since then, audiovisual modes of production have become more accessible, and have entered the hands of amateurs and professionals alike. The technology has changed, the costs of production have declined, and the contexts in which such works are encountered have altered beyond recognition. The modes of expression have changed in response. Audience expectations have yet to catch up.
Unlike our encounters with the Cezannes hanging in museum galleries, we are conditioned to expect the films we encounter to make immediate sense, no matter where they come from. We expect every audiovisual experience to be immersive, entertaining, and unambiguous in its intentions. Suggest that films can vary in their forms of expression as much as the written word (from fiction to poetry to analytic philosophy to non-fiction, not to mention all the gradations within these categories) and expect the dismissiveness of words like ‘pretentious’ or ‘snobby.’ That is all well and good, but if the default is to turn away when a medium does not meet one’s expectations of form, one will inevitably miss out on all kinds of unique experiences.
Spend enough time in the minimalist aesthetics of Hong’s cinema and it can be difficult to leave the respite it provides. His films are slower than slow, quieter than quiet, blander than bland, yet completely absorbing once their rhythms take hold. They lull one into the kind of contemplative state that is increasingly difficult to occupy in a world overcrowded with artificial stimuli—headlines, hot takes, ads, subscription fees, computer generated graphics.
Next to these daily phenomena, Hong’s movies almost feel sacred; his writing, his characters, and his cinematography reveal how entire worlds can open up by doing less, not more. As Hong once explained to an interviewer, by way of a simple illustration:
“Just look at these two circles in the drawing as two independent worlds. If you believe there’s a clear reason for these two worlds to exist, once you find a clear meaning between them, then these worlds themselves disappear. Once we make clear sense out of these two worlds, they are just used up. It happens that it’s not easy to give them a clear meaning. So all the questions are kept alive if there’s an infinite possibility of worlds. It’s like a permanent reverberation.”
Process is an important aspect of Hong’s work, but harping on it can feel like a way of bypassing the “permanent reverberations” it produces. Accepting the stilted, nebulous nature of everyday experience instead can be difficult. But embracing the “given things” with the same patience Hong shows his questioners can lead one to new worlds. If you get lost along the way though, don’t worry: Hong has answers for all of your questions.