hong sangsoo is like ingmar bergman but for the digital age. his films are character-focused, the “plots” and “stories” all different permutations of a few basic dramatic elements that have evolved over his career. but his principle interest, like bergman, is drama and character. the major difference between the two is that the dour swede tends to have more “epic” and high-concept narratives. period films; films about priests reckoning with faith; films about dynastic turbulence, that sort of thing. bergman also has a strong modernist tendency towards formalism. it’s not always there, many of his best films (imo) are made in a “transparent” style, but i would be completely shocked to see hong direct a sequence as abstract as the opening of Persona, for example.
hong’s principle focus is drama, but i am very strongly drawn to the formal elements of his style. i am interested in the technological mediation of culture, and in mass culture generally. hong’s films are “mass” films, “proletarian” films in virtue of being deeply humanist. they represent a new approach to realism that is categorically different from 20th century cinematic realism.
when claire asks man-hee what her favourite things about korea are, she mentions food and friends. she could have added booze and it would have been a list of hong’s favourite things to show onscreen: universal cultural touchpoints. the minor dramas and the activities depicted onscreen are all universal, shot in the most universal style imaginable. it’s minimalist, but it comes from the opposite place of bergman’s modernism.
what are the key elements of hong’s visual style? most famously, the zoom; the long takes; and for me, the digital video. both are signififers of a vernacular (mass, proletariat, folkway) moving image culture. during the scene where the director is celebrating his 50th birthday by getting drunk with the boss, there is a moment where he leans forward over the table. the camera responds instantly by zooming in to give us a closer frame of the two. it’s as though the camera operator happened to be there to capture the drama, and is responding in the same ad hoc, impromptu way that amateur videographers do to a changing composition. hong is known for doing many takes; his shots are clearly very carefully composed in order to achieve the balance that his films have. that doesn’t happen by accident, but the zoom and the digital video, both signifiers of amateurism, make it seem as though they do.
that is why i say hong sangsoo is the ingmar bergman of the digital age. his films are about universal themes, universal dramas, just like bergman’s films. the difference is that hong developed a formal style that emerges out of a mass moving image culture that did not exist when bergman was making movies. that style only arose in the 90s (at the earliest), following the mass production of digital cameras. the zoom and the specific look of digital images are both associated with amateur (or mass, or folk, or proletarian) moving image cultures because the mass production of camcorders, and the development of distribution networks, are what allowed that culture to come into being.
it might be quite strange to say that hong is a proletarian filmmaker, since his characters and milieux tend to be bourgeois; it might be strange to emphasize the formal style of a director who is most associated with low-budget economism, but these are the elements of his oeuvre that grab me. hong is really on the cutting edge of something, pushing realism in a direction that is categorically different from anything achieved in the 20th century Euro arthouse canon (aside from outliers like godard). despite the innocuous nature of his films, he is doing quite a lot for the medium.