{"id":1604,"date":"2013-06-10T03:39:20","date_gmt":"2013-06-10T10:39:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=1604"},"modified":"2013-06-10T03:39:20","modified_gmt":"2013-06-10T10:39:20","slug":"the-films-of-sangsoo-hong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=1604","title":{"rendered":"The Films of Sangsoo Hong"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" title=\"Hong\" src=\"http:\/\/quarterlyconversation.com\/images\/sangsoo.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"494\" height=\"346\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Say you watch Korean movies. Often, outside the peninsula itself, this means you\u2019ve gotten into the murderous grotesquerie of Chan-wook Park\u2019s \u201cVengeance Trilogy,\u201d or Joon-ho Bong\u2019s simultaneously goofy and solemn political allegory of a monster mash<em>The Host<\/em>, or any amount of Ki-duk Kim\u2019s vast, high-profile (and as some fans admit, uneven) output. But mention the name of Sangsoo Hong to cinephiles themselves from Korea, and they\u2019ll react like you\u2019ve uttered the secret codeword of Korean film enthusiasm. \u201cHow have you seen Sangsoo Hong\u2019s movies?\u201d they might ask, expressing more than faint disbelief. \u201cYou\u00a0<em>really\u00a0<\/em>like them?\u201d I\u2019ve made friends instantly by dropping Hong\u2019s name, and won free semesters of Korean language classes by writing about him for essay contests. Even the Koreans ambivalent to Hong\u2019s work I\u2019ve met still seem at least casually conversant in it, only one of several reasons critics so often describe the director as South Korea\u2019s Woody Allen.<\/p>\n<p>Interviewed by a reporter for a Korean-language newspaper here in Los Angeles, I cited Hong\u2019s movies as my entr\u00e9e into Korean culture. The\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.koreadaily.com\/news\/read.asp?art_id=1389714\">published article<\/a>\u00a0portrayed me as having followed my fascination down such a cinematic, literary, and culinary rabbit hole that I have, at this point, attained \u201cquasi-Koreanness.\u201d 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\u2019s at odds with the content of Hong\u2019s 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\u00a0<em>The Day the Pig Fell Into the Well<\/em>\u00a0up to this year\u2019s\u00a0<em>Nobody\u2019s Daughter Haewon<\/em>, the Hong\u2019s large filmography\u2014his Allen-like pace of production also partially accounting for the comparison\u2014he hardly stands as an advertisement for Koreanness.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Read the whole thing at <a href=\"http:\/\/quarterlyconversation.com\/the-films-of-sangsoo-hong\">The Quarterly Conversation<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Say you watch Korean movies. Often, outside the peninsula itself, this means you\u2019ve gotten into the murderous grotesquerie of Chan-wook Park\u2019s \u201cVengeance Trilogy,\u201d or Joon-ho Bong\u2019s simultaneously goofy and solemn political allegory of a monster mashThe Host, or any amount of Ki-duk Kim\u2019s vast, high-profile (and as some fans admit, uneven) output. But mention the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1604","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film","category-korea"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1604","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1604"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1604\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1606,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1604\/revisions\/1606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}