Few contemporary filmmakers have been as prolific as the Korean director Hong Sangsoo, who has produced an average of one film per year for the past 26 years, since his volcanic debut, The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well, in 1996. On their surface, Hong’s films appear like chamber plays, centering on the cultural class of South Korea and skewering the whims, hypocrisies, desires, and anxieties of urbane artists and intellectuals as they frequent cafés, bars, restaurants, and hotels. Yet in Hong’s peculiar and distinctive treatment, these mundane-seeming dramas are continuously bifurcated and atomized, often stopping and starting up again with only the slightest variations between sequences: a spoon instead of a fork dropped at a restaurant, or even a repeated gesture or tone uttered with slight differences. Episodic and elliptical, Hong’s films more closely resemble paper cuttings, whereby an image comes into shape only through the removal of interstitial space.
