Say you watch Korean movies. Often, outside the peninsula itself, this means you’ve gotten into the murderous grotesquerie of Chan-wook Park’s “Vengeance Trilogy,” or Joon-ho Bong’s simultaneously goofy and solemn political allegory of a monster mashThe Host, or any amount of Ki-duk Kim’s vast, high-profile (and as some fans admit, uneven) output. But mention the name of Sangsoo Hong to cinephiles themselves from Korea, and they’ll react like you’ve uttered the secret codeword of Korean film enthusiasm. “How have you seen Sangsoo Hong’s movies?” they might ask, expressing more than faint disbelief. “You really like them?” I’ve made friends instantly by dropping Hong’s name, and won free semesters of Korean language classes by writing about him for essay contests. Even the Koreans ambivalent to Hong’s work I’ve met still seem at least casually conversant in it, only one of several reasons critics so often describe the director as South Korea’s Woody Allen.
Interviewed by a reporter for a Korean-language newspaper here in Los Angeles, I cited Hong’s movies as my entrée into Korean culture. The published article portrayed me as having followed my fascination down such a cinematic, literary, and culinary rabbit hole that I have, at this point, attained “quasi-Koreanness.” I should consider this an honor, and in terms of my interests not a wholly inaccurate one, but then my mind returns to the actual it’s at odds with the content of Hong’s movies. Read any book on the Korean people by a Western writer, and it will underscore, boldly and in metaphorical red, the centrality of racial and national pride to the experience of both the South Korean, (and, to strikingly different effect, the North Korean,) state and individual. But then why is the prolific Hong so popular among Koreans? From his 1996 debut The Day the Pig Fell Into the Well up to this year’s Nobody’s Daughter Haewon, the Hong’s large filmography—his Allen-like pace of production also partially accounting for the comparison—he hardly stands as an advertisement for Koreanness.
Read the whole thing at The Quarterly Conversation.
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