Hong Sangsoo's cinema of dissonance

Abstract

South Korea’s Hong Sangsoo is one of the most idiosyncratic, prolific, and critically renowned directors working today. This thesis argues that the core structuring principle that informs both the narratives of Hong’s films and his practice as an auteur is a juxtaposition of oppositions, contradictions, and inconsistencies that do not progress dialectically but rather constitute enduring disjunctions that resist reconciliation and closure. On the level of authorship, Hong’s practice is centered on the contradiction that exists between the filmic assertion and extratextual negation of his status as an auteur, which constitutes a self-reflexive correspondence with the discourses, conventions, and institutions of art cinema. Hong’s practice in this context is conceptualized as an alternative form of auteurial agency that simultaneously conforms to and contradicts the discourses and conventions that it is enabled by. On the level of narrative, Hong’s Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (2000) presents multiple, inherently contradictory narrative trajectories. The film’s narrative mode is engendered by parallel repetitions and the juxtaposition of subjective experiences, which are presented through character focalization, and the concept of a “multi-subjective narrative” is developed in order to provide a theoretical foundation for analyzing the film’s narrative representations of subjectivity. Continuing with the study of narrative, the contradictory transgressions that occur between formally indicated narrative levels, voice-overs, and visual representation in Nobody’s Daughter Haewon (2013) are identified as producing an unconventional meditation on the narrative device of establishing a character-narrator as a figurative instrument of narrative mediation. This strategy generates a contradictory and multi-level filmic representation of mediated subjectivity. By explicating how Hong’s filmmaking practice and film narratives formalize, particularize, and objectify contradictions, this thesis emphasizes the significance of such incongruities in Hong’s cinema, and delineates his distinctive vision of quotidian life as characterized by an inherent dissonance of experience. Analyzing how this disposition is constituted within his films and filmmaking practice elucidates how Hong self-reflexively engages with, and incorporates into his films and practice the conventions and discourses of art cinema and auteurism, in order to objectify and contradict them. This strategy enables Hong to embrace the conditions of contemporary art cinema, while simultaneously positioning his films as a subversive counterpoint to these discourses and conventions, in a destabilizing and dissonant engagement with the institutions of art cinema that enables him to establish an alternative position of auteurial agency within this system. Hong’s works thereby transcend the traditional realm of art cinema, and signal a profound response to the changes and challenges that are intrinsic to auteurism in the twenty-first century.