In 2012, the prolific and idiosyncratic South Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo submitted an unranked list of his ten favorite films of all time. Many such lists were collected and released by Sight and Sound as part of their once-a-decade greatest films of all time poll, which surveys hundreds of critics and directors. The individual selections, though, are uniformly interesting looks into the tastes and inspirations of the participating directors, and while imperfect as complete accounts, each inclusion brings with it intrigue as to why exactly it found a place among a list of ten, picked from the entire spectrum of cinematic history.
Describing Hong’s work without the accompaniment of the work itself is a fool’s errand: it’s recursive in nature, reliant on variations in style, constantly building on itself. He shoots in long takes, depicts film directors wandering around Korean locales drinking and getting into arguments, makes use of his trademark zoom. There’s not a lot to be written about the surface ins and outs of his style and fascinations that hasn’t been written already. Many have compared his filmography to an ever-expanding novel. Many have accused him of making the same movie over and over again, which is both an unfair allegation and a misunderstanding of the importance of repeated motifs and structures throughout his work. A lot of people don’t really know what to do with him. And he comes by that honestly, churning out work that doesn’t quite resemble anyone else’s. His choices are uniquely his own; as much as he can be discussed to death, both on the surface and in depth, there will always be some mystery to him. So his Sight and Sound selections, while not by any means a perfect view into his cinematic subconscious, offer some intriguing nuggets. A lot of it makes obvious sense: Rohmer’s The Green Ray is a clear touchstone, Rohmer being the go-to point of comparison when discussing Hong. Films by Ozu and Bresson suggest traces of the naturalistic observatory style he’s become known for. You can see him digging Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante, less something one would guess but still recognizable in influence, if for no other reasons than its scope (89 minutes of human interaction) and its fascinations (relationships, wandering around in search of meaning). But the entry on his list that starts to baffle is a minute-long 1895 film from cinematic pioneers the Lumière brothers, Boat Leaving the Port. And here’s where it gets difficult to make justifications. If you’re unfamiliar with the Lumières, and their more iconic work such as The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, you should know that these titles are accurate, and also complete plot synopses. Theirs was an infant age of the cinematic art, when innovation consisted simply of pointing a camera at any movement at all. A director including Arrival of a Train on their ballot of ten essential films may be trying to make a point about significance in cinematic history. A director including a lesser-known work, such as Boat Leaving the Port, might be playing a joke.
But they also might not. In Hong’s case, the inclusion of something like Boat Leaving the Port reads as genuine. Watching the film, you start to see it. It’s relaxing, evoking an immersive atmosphere unlike Arrival of a Train. You get the sense that it’s different from that film, that there’s something alluring to it that’s almost jarringly watchable. There’s the element of the waves that the Lumières capture that’s inherently cinematic, their undulating movement a reflexively hypnotic nuance. There’s the actual journey of the central boat: It leaves, as we were promised, but it drifts around in the frame, leaving aimlessly, on its own schedule. It’s a beautiful visual, one that feels like it could go on for much longer. Hong listing it as one of the ten greatest films ever made resonates with this quality, the ease of watching it. It also hints at a key to Hong’s style: his framing of conversations and use of largely static long takes is, on a visual level, very basic and uncomplicated. It’s cinematic language cribbed from the very inception of cinematic language, back when they didn’t have the tools to do anything else. What Hong sees in the Lumière film is the potential of that style to facilitate watching. Hong has always used his camera as a watcher rather than an active participant, even when he makes films that seem aimed at his own flaws (which is frequently). In his 2018 film Grass, the central character has no real arc but instead sits in a cafe watching the drama of a few groups of people play out. It’s maybe the quintessential Hong indulgence in people-watching, and as such something of a rosetta stone for the rest of his work. In 2005’s Tale of Cinema, the first half of the film is revealed to be a film itself, which the characters in the second half of the film have just watched. This is a constant theme with Hong, the act of watching and how film blurs lines between involvement and pure viewership. In his films, we are watching him watch, but we are also watching ourselves, a layer of twisted multiple perspectives that Hong’s work actively cultivates. So why Boat Leaving the Port, a film that resists this twisted structure? Because Hong recognizes that our relationship to the departing vessel is a complex one, made all the more so by the simplicity of the visual. Viewership in this unchanging form is passive, in a way that alters the typical viewer-subject relationship. Hong plays on this stripped-down format to emphasize the absurdities and recurrences of this new relationship, but he also trades on the quick ability to change it by adding his own elements to the visual style. Which is where the zoom comes in.
Before I go into further detail on the zoom, one of the most significant and distinguishable features of Hong’s style, I want to pivot back to the influence of Boat Leaving the Port. The other difficult-to-pin-down director the film reminds me of is Vittorio De Seta, an Italian director mostly active in the 1950s who is best known today for his anthropological documentaries. Many of these depict the life and work of coastal Italian fishermen, and his own focus on boats and the sea calls the Lumières’ work back into attention. De Seta’s short documentaries persist today as cinematic documents as well as historical ones. The imagery he was able to capture is astonishing, and the immersion he was able to create into tiny pockets of the lives of his subjects takes naturalistic observation to a more extreme level than anyone else ever has. When remarking upon the unique way that the sea is conducive to cinematic hypnosis, De Seta’s name must be mentioned. He captured it perfectly, as seen in films such as Sea Countrymen, and the way in which he did so echoes the Lumières so well yet departs from them almost entirely.
The footage De Seta captured of his fishing operations is shot so up-close and personal with the mariners that it makes you question whether or not it was staged. We are far from the passive observation of the late 19th century and thrust forcefully into the action. The effect De Seta produces is similar to that of Boat Leaving the Port, yet heightened to a degree where what we are feeling is the leaving of the port, not the watching. In both cases, the focus is on the almost indescribable feeling that the movement of the ocean evokes in us, but they split on the application of cinema to make us feel a specific aspect of that. The Lumières wanted to allow us to see something and feel our own feelings based on what they showed us, De Seta wanted to create imagery designed to provoke feelings. Both are recognizable documentary form, both are naturalistic and stick to a sheer objective presentation of events, but one takes the other’s emotional evocation and wrests emotional involvement from it.
So why is De Seta important to the point about Hong? First, to give an idea of Boat Leaving the Port as a more important touchstone in cinematic history than one might think. Second, to provide a counterpoint to the stylistic directions taken from it. And third, to give a sense of the depth Hong’s style allows. I mentioned the zoom, a seemingly jarring visual movement present in all of his films since Tale of Cinema. It breaks the static composition of his shots with a push-in, usually on his characters, that foregrounds a new emotional depth to the scene, or at least an exaggeration of the already present dynamics. This is not to say that he can’t pull investment from his regular setups and dialogue, he can, and does so with extreme frequency. But the use of the zoom gives him the ability to shift between evocation and involvement in much the same way that De Seta’s work parallels Boat Leaving the Port. What De Seta may have taken from the film, assuming he was familiar with it, is an aggressively involved film grammar that couldn’t be further from Hong’s docile presentation, yet the two seem to have reached similar conclusions about what they could make their films feel like.
The fact that this all stems from a minute-long Lumière brothers joint, itself not consciously innovating for any emotion other than the one produced by the moving image alone, suggests that at heart, the reason a director like Hong might find resonance within it is because of that shock of the new. The undeniable je ne sais quoi of Boat Leaving the Port comes from the fact that you can feel the giddiness of invention, and all in all, what’s being repurposed is that same giddiness. The fact that these images have echoed so frequently in corners of cinematic history speaks to a universal truth about film. It’s the same one that makes Hong so fascinating to look at, it’s the same one that makes De Seta’s films so stunning. In all of these things, areas off the beaten path and in their own worlds of creation, there’s an inability to fully capture their essence. And that’s an invaluable part of what makes them so great.
The Movie Files 