Notes on Hong Sang-soo, Philosopher and Piss-Taker: Dennis Lim’s Tale of Cinema

Critics tend to reduce Hong Sang-soo, given the South Korean filmmaker’s prolific output, to a frivolous sketch artist, or they endow him with so much highbrow importance as to shortchange the glorious aliveness of his work. Admittedly, it’s difficult to capture the texture of Hong’s films, which are both loose and highly structured, earnest and wonderfully impudent. Writer and curator Dennis Lim’s new book, Tale of Cinema, is concerned with these and other contradictions of sensibility in Hong’s work. As he displayed in David Lynch: The Man from Another Place, Lim is peerless at juggling multiple forms of analysis without ever quite landing on a singular approach. He refuses to reduce the artists under his lens to a handful of easy signifiers, honoring the multiplicity of their art and humanity.

Lim’s book is an installment of Fireflies Press’s Decadent Series, one of 10 books about 10 milestone films, one per year, of the first decade of the 2000s. As the book’s title suggests, the primary item of concern is Hong’s 2005 film of the same name. And befitting a filmmaker prone to bifurcating and nesting narratives, and who generally blurs the line between reality and fiction, Lim himself fashions a kind of Russian-doll structure in which a broad analysis of Hong’s filmography nests within a close reading of Hong’s Tale of Cinema. Or maybe it’s that the discussion of Tale of Cinema exists within a larger appraisal of the South Korean auteur. The effect is beguiling in a fashion similar to that of Joseph McBride’s Billy Wilder: Dancing on the Edge, as each book allows readers to feel as if they’re grooving to the authors’ thoughts as they arise, without feeling nailed down to a chronological structure.

Lim shares with Hong an exacting imagination that’s both erudite and tactile. Philosophical underpinnings course through Hong’s cinema, just as Lim references a vast number of critics, philosophers, and artists whom he feels deepen and complement Hong’s work. Here we get an elaborate discussion of the zoom, which Hong first adopted in his Tale of Cinema and which he has often used since, much of the time to suggest shifts in personal consciousness and power between individuals, usually men and women who’re romantically entangled.

Lim quotes the scholar Mary Anne Doane, who in her book Bigger Than Life calls the zoom “the attempt to capture all cinematic scales” in a single shot. Other pros and cons of the zoom are offered, from likening it to a kind of formalistic rape to celebrating the technique as a consideration of humankind’s relationship to the world. Regarding Hong’s use of the zoom, one could easily argue that all of these qualities are true at once.

The wide-ranging discussion of the zoom is indicative of Lim’s approach at large in Tale of Cinema. He’s a burrower, perhaps taking a cue from Manny Farber’s famous evocation of termite art, which is also discussed in the book. Lim has the rare gift to make, say, a riff on two-shots exhilarating, just as Hong has the ability to make formal sophistication look to lazy eyes like a tossed-off bullshit session between him and his actor friends.

Rather than likening Hong to Woody Allen or other more obvious signposts, Lim establishes an intimate link between the artist and filmmakers like Robert Bresson, John Cassavetes, and, yes, David Lynch, as well as painters such as Cézanne. Stated broadly, these artists all share an interest in the ecstasy and tedium of the little details of day-to-day life. For Hong, a stain on a blouse can become a symbol for emotional baggage and panic, and the entire spectrum of a relationship can be revealed over a long soju-drinking session.

This critic has thought about Hong in terms of Cassavetes before, for being real-life drinkers with a profound interest in alcohol’s effects on people. Here, Lim suggests inebriation as one of the many thresholds that obsess Hong, who also shares with Cassavetes a grasp of minute gestures that can send shock waves rippling throughout the screen. But it’s the Bresson comparison that may knock even fans of Hong for a loop: for how both filmmakers are after the poetry of “ordinary” shots, and how both whittle their means of production down to the bare necessities to limit the distance between director and the production at large, realizing Alexandre Astruc’s dream of the camera as pen. Utilizing previous Hong interviews, Lim reveals that Hong was preoccupied with Bresson’s 1975 book Notes on the Cinematographer.

Hong’s work in regard to Lynch’s has occurred to me also, as their mutual fashioning of temporal loops and corresponding interest in art’s influence on reality is difficult to miss. But where Lynch foregrounds surrealism, Hong’s metafiction pretzels initially seem ordinary, as if supernatural multiverses existed plainly between the bar and the hotel. The ultimate multiverse is the disjunction between our perspectives, as well as the faultiness of our memories and the ease with which outside forces—such as cinema in Hong’s Tale of Cinema—imprint and shape us. Hong’s effortless-looking-on-the-outside, intensely-considered-on-the-inside narrative structures formally express these personal gulfs.

Yet the unruly comedy of Hong’s sensibility is never tampered down by plot, theme, or structure. To utilize one of Lim’s more memorable turns of phrase in his Tale of Cinema, the filmmaker is a philosopher and a piss-taker, a man who produces at an astonishing clip trenchantly funny and unruly movies that can also be broken down into elaborate existential diagrams. Lim’s discussion on repetition in Hong’s movies is worth the price of this book alone. Devices of repetition, most startlingly in the 2018 film Grass, contain all of Hong’s other preoccupations, suggesting life to be both a painful and glorious trap.

Dennis Lim’s Tale of Cinema is available in August from Fireflies Press.