Oki’s Movie by Hong Sang-Soo

*DISCLAIMER* I want to preface this section by saying that it seems, based on things he has said, Hong Sang-Soo’s movies should not be considered in terms of theme, but instead interacted with viscerally on a more basic, personal, language-less level. However I feel that his movies can be appropriately discussed in terms of theme—after an amount of time and contemplation and with a large degree of skepticism—as a means of better understanding how and why we are able to relate to them viscerally. *DISCLAIMER*

I think that the reason Hong Sang-Soo makes movies is because he is sensitive to the [something… maybe “mysteriousness”] of life and the way it affects us, as humans, and he wants to convey his views about this type of feeling.

Here is how I perceive the process that Hong Sang-Soo employs in order to make a movie:

He feels something serious and vague within himself and wants to express it to others. He interacts with his environment, his friends and family, and thinks about the interaction with intense scrutiny, trying to understand why he is experiencing this feeling. He decides to make a movie, thinking it will help resolve the feeling. He goes with his actors to a place. He interacts with his actors and other people—friends, coworkers, strangers—and writes down whichever transpired events seem important, each morning—doing so not with the intention of making a record of events, but with the intention of capturing the feeling he is experiencing through narrative. He films the things he writes each day for enough days for him to capture the feeling well. He looks at all of the footage and edits it together in a manner that will facilitate expression of the feeling he experienced.

Derrida said that “traces” [of things] are themselves above scrutiny, but contingently allow us to ask, “What is?” about larger, more incomprehensible things. Hong Sang-Soo, I think, is aware of this idea [1] and applies it as a tool in his films so that the larger “artistic whole” of the movie is more readily accessible to interaction with the viewer. His current style of making a movie [2], which began with this one, Oki’s Movie, by nature of being directionless and open to the “broken fragments” of life that “pass through” him while he is filming, naturally allows for “traces” to appear and reappear throughout the movie, which itself facilitates an ontological relationship between the viewer and the movie.

When Hong Sang-Soo made Oki’s Movie he seems to have been focused on these things [3]: greed, authenticity, and how to express yourself through art as directly as possible and without “pomp and circumstance,” loneliness, the destructive and redeeming capabilities of relationships, the ineffectiveness of language, the inscrutability of life.

When Hong Sang-Soo was editing this movie it seems as if he was cinematically trying to create a work of art that could be approached and interacted with as one would with another human, which seems interesting to me. The segmented structure and recursive/overlapping/incongruent narratives seem to replicate, in the movie, how one [4] experience’s life. Hong, through a different movie [5], explains something about how most people tend to view life [6]. He says that when you are alive, your perception of everything is like that of an object with a constantly changing form or shape, and that most people will focus on certain points on the outline of the object, with their connecting segments forming a familiar shape, viewing only these points, this simple shape, and not seeing the object’s true form but believing they do. But the object’s form is always changing, so there is probably no true form, and if there is one it is most likely a sphere made up of infinite points [7]. Hong’s advice, it seems, considering that it would be impossible to understand “true” form, is to try not to focus on only certain familiar points, but to focus on as many points on the outline of the shape as possible, so as to ascertain the most certain and correct idea of the object that it is possible to have [8]. It can be seen, I think, through the structure of Oki’s Movie how Hong applies this idea to filmmaking. For example, how “Jingu” is shown many times from many perspectives and with different relationships to “Oki”. First as the professor who had a destructive affair with his student, then as the classmate whose relationship with Oki is overshadowed by her relationship with an older professor, then as just a classmate to Oki, then from Oki’s own perspective, looking back after both relationships have ended [9]. Hong describes Oki, or the idea of Oki as expressed through the events of two tautologically connected relationships [10], from a different angle and degree in each segment of the movie. This type of portrayal is representative of the idea that one should view people—or objects or anything that life presents, corporeal or incorporeal—from as many perspectives as possible, with a large amount of considerateness.

I made a chart explaining, visually, part of the above paragraph.

Hong Sang-Soo has said that he began making movies when he was 21, after having been doing “nothing,” and that he liked making movies and has done it ever since. Based on other things he has said [11] or expressed through movies, it seems he was “doing nothing” because he did not have an effective way to, figuratively, “get outside” of himself and, in doing so, interact with “life” directly or through other mediums, but when he began making films he discovered a way of replicating and exploring life through his own specific language [12], which allowed him to “get outside” of himself and live. After considering this notion and the actual material produced by Hong Sang-Soo, I feel very affected and, like, “boosted” by him and his movies, particularly this one. The efforts at truth and benevolence and maybe, like, celebration of life that he has been able to articulate at, to what I perceive to be, a large degree of a/effectiveness gives me hope that there is some form through which each person can express themselves wholly, to the degree that their expression takes on a form and life of its own with which we can all interact and learn.