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Two-Shots and Group Shots

Hong Sang-soo's Mannerist and Classical Mise-en-Scène


Author(s): Marc Raymond
Source: Style, Vol. 49, No. 2 (2015), pp. 196-217
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/style.49.2.0196
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Two-Shots and Group Shots
Hong Sang-soo’s Mannerist and Classical
Mise-en-Scène

Marc Raymond
Kwangwoon University

Abstract: This essay systematically quantifies and explains how South Korean director
Hong Sang-soo has constructed his mise-en-scène (the art of cinematic staging) over
the course of his career, analyzing the meanings of Hong’s approaches to style. In par-
ticular, two variations of Hong’s shots are examined: the two-shot and the group shot,
and how each respectively provides examples of mannerist and classical approaches
to ­mise-en-scène. In order to describe and understand Hong’s style in more concrete
detail, the essay combines two approaches: mise-en-scène criticism and statistical style
analysis, drawing on the work of Thomas Elsaesser and Warren Buckland. The goal is to
increase the rigor of traditional approaches to mise-en-scène while also injecting some
subjectivity back into more formal stylometry by using the insights of mise-en-scène
critics such as V.F. Perkins and Adrian Martin, especially the notions of mannerist and
classical mise-en-scène and how these terms apply to Hong’s approach to the two-shot
and the group shot, respectively. This is illustrated through specific and detailed scene
analysis from Hong’s films as well as statistical data on Hong and his stylistic patterns.

Like most auteurs, there are certain familiar and clichéd phrases used to dis-
cuss the work of Hong Sang-soo, the most common of these being a variation
on the idea, “all his films are the same.” For instance, critic Mike D’Angelo
begins his review of In Another Country (2012) by declaring: “Hong Sang-soo
tends to make the same movie over and over: a multi-part story in which
heavily inebriated males—usually academics or filmmakers—­awkwardly
woo one or more bewildered females.” Similarly, in his review of Oki’s Movie
(2010), Nick Schager states, “it features so many elements that have calcified
into the director's trademarks (solipsistic student and/or director protago-
nists, boozy escapades, clumsy romantic entanglements, divergent points of

Style, Vol. 49, No. 2, 2015. Copyright © 2015 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

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Marc Raymond 197

view, and segmented narratives) that it feels trifling at best.” These statements
are at once understandable and even accurate on a certain level, given the
large number of repetitions of narrative and character that occur in Hong’s
films, while also being demonstrably false, especially in terms of visual style.
While Hong’s visual style is both recognizable and seemingly familiar from
film to film, it is constantly evolving and rather difficult to define. As a result,
more attention is often given to Hong’s narrative experimentation and/or
thematic concerns and less to his work as a cinematic stylist (for example,
Deutelbaum, “The Deceptive Design,” “The Structure of Hang Sangsoo’s,”
“The Pragmatic Poetics,” and “A Closer Look at Structure”; Diffrient, “South
Korean Film Genres”; Chung and Diffrient; Kim, The Remasculinazation,
Virtual Hallyu; Quandt). This essay aims at ­systematically quantifying and
explaining how Hong has constructed his mise-en-scène over the course of
his career and analyzes the meanings of Hong’s visual approach. While the
term mise-en-scène has a long and varied history of multiple definitions
and meanings, this essay will focus on mise-en-scène as the art of cinematic
staging, further defined by Adrian Martin as “the art of arranging, choreo-
graphing and displaying” (Mise-en-Scène and Film Style 15). The concentra-
tion will be on two variations of Hongian shots, the two-shot and the group
shot, and how each respectively provides examples of mannerist and classi-
cal approaches to mise-en-scène.
There have been various attempts to label recent contemporary interna-
tional art film style and how these films differ from the classical art cinema of
the past. For example, Ira Jaffe’s Slow Movies: Countering the Cinema of Action
(2014) outlines an international trend toward long takes, long shots, austere
mise-en-scène, and the lack of emotion and affect, a cinema where “nothing
happens,” which includes such diverse filmmakers as Jim Jarmusch (United
States), Alexander Sokurov (Russia), Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Turkey), Cristian
Mungiu (Romania), Lisandro Alonso (Argentina), Pedro Costa ­(Portugal),
Abbas Kiarostami (Iran), Jia Zhang-ke (China), and Béla Tarr (Hungary)
(among others) (Jaffe 1–3). Matthew Flanagan, in his PhD thesis on “slow
cinema,” lists many of the same filmmakers, along with art cinema veterans
such as Chantal Akerman and Theo Angelopoulos and experimental direc-
tors like James Benning and Straub/Huillet (Flanagan 8–9). Flanagan also
quotes Tiago Magalhães de Luca in stressing “the hyperbolic application
of the long take” as the key formal component of the field of slow cinema
­(Magalhães de Luca 21; quoted in Flanagan 9). However, Hong Sang-soo is

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198 Style

not included within this classification, despite sharing many of the ­stylistic
traits, ­particularly the use of the long take. I would argue that this is the
result of the extreme amount of dialogue in Hong’s films, c­ ombined with
the generally comic tone the majority of his films employ (see ­Diffrient,
“The Unbearable Lightness” for an extended analysis of Hong’s use of
­comedy). As a result, the comparison made is usually to Eric Rohmer, a simi-
larly dialogue-centric director of comedies of manners who, despite being
part of the French New Wave, is often seen as something of a cinematic
­outlier (this tendency to compare Hong and Rohmer can be seen directly
in ­Grosoli and is also discussed and critiqued by Deutelbaum, “Approach-
ing Hong Sang-soo” 2–3). Thus, the experimental nature of Hong’s cine-
matic style is often overlooked and de-emphasized. Even those like David
­Bordwell, who includes Hong in the “Asian Minimalism” school, see him as
“(a)ccepting the visual premises of the style” and working instead at develop-
ing a “strikingly original approach to narrative architecture” (“Beyond Asian
Minimalism” 22).
In order to describe and understand Hong’s style in more concrete detail,
I will combine two approaches: Mise-en-scène criticism and statistical style
analysis. This combination was introduced by Thomas Elsaesser and ­Warren
Buckland in their book Studying Contemporary American Film: A Guide to
Movie Analysis (2002), using The English Patient (1996) as an example. They
state their goal in using this hybrid analysis as follows: “The outcome, we
hope to show, is a clear, systematic, and rigorous analysis of style that goes
beyond the mise-en scène critics’ tendency to be selective and subjective”
(Elsaesser and Buckland 81). I certainly share Elsaesser and Buckland’s desire
to make mise-en-scène analysis more concrete. However, while Elsaesser
and Buckland focus on correcting the excesses of mise-en-scène subjectiv-
ity, my approach is to try to inject some subjectivity back into more formal
stylometry by using the insights of mise-en-scène critics such as V.F. Perkins
and Adrian Martin, especially the notions of mannerist and classical mise-
en-scène. In general, the slow cinema movement, of which I would include
Hong from a stylistic viewpoint, is primarily concerned with mise-en-scène,
and particularly with the tension between a classical approach, exemplified
in such Hollywood long take directors as Otto Preminger, and a manner-
ist approach in which the long take style is stretched to the point where it
becomes self-conscious and reflexive, the extreme example being the one-
take film Russian Ark (Alexander Sokurov, 2002). What Hong generally

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avoids, as do most slow film directors, is an “expressive” style (as common


today in contemporary mainstream cinema as classical style was in the past),
what Adrian Martin has described as a “broad fit” approach, “(f )ilms whose
textual economy is pitched more at the level of a broad fit between ele-
ments of style and elements of subject” (“Mise-en-Scène is Dead” 90). Hong
typically bypasses any type of expressive cinema, and instead explores the
tension between the classical and mannerist, stylistic restrain and stylistic
excess (or what we might term meta-style). The two-shots and group shots of
his films are where we see these respective approaches most clearly.
The overwhelming amount of mise-en-scène criticism has focused on
Classical Hollywood cinema, usually with a focus on showing how a tal-
ented auteur (Hitchcock, Hawks, Preminger, etc.) can transform his mate-
rial through the use of style. As John Gibbs argues, the goal of much
­mise-en-scène criticism is to show that, “the director, rather than the script-
writer, should be considered the artist responsible for a film” (55). As Martin
elaborates, there was a “need to combat the idea that a film is essentially its
screenplay” (Mise-en-Scène and Film Style 4). With writer-directors like Hong
Sang-soo, this is seemingly less an immediate concern. However, I believe
that approaches to Hong do tend toward the work he does as a screenwriter
and constructor of narrative forms and focus less on his work as a visual
stylist. The formalist critic Marshall Deutelbaum has written extensively on
Hong’s work, but almost exclusively on his complex narratives, with much
less attention to the cinematic dimensions of the work (see “The Deceptive
Design,” “The Structure of Hang Sangsoo’s,” “The Pragmatic Poetics,” and
“A Closer Look at Structure”). Even the scholarship that has been stylistically
focused tends to be narrowly so and still driven by comparisons set up by
the narrative form, such as Robert W. Davis and Tim Maloney’s excellent dis-
section of the two-part structure of A Tale of Cinema (2005). By focusing on
mise-en-scène and the statistical specifics of Hong’s entire cinematic output,
we can begin to better understand Hong Sang-soo more as a film director
rather than as a creator of elaborate narratives.
To begin, some broader points about Hong’s style are required. First of
all, an examination of Hong’s overall career reveals vast changes in his edit-
ing. His first film, The Day a Pig Fell in the Well, contains an average shot
length (ASL) of 24.8 seconds. Less than 10 percent of the shots are longer
than 60 seconds, and only 35 percent of the film’s running time consists
of these minute-plus long takes (for the purpose of simplicity and clarity,

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I will designate shots in excess of a minute as long takes through the rest of
the essay). His second film, The Power of Kangwon Province, is similar, with
only 13 percent long takes taking up only 39 percent of the film’s running
time. These are the only films in Hong’s career in which over 60 ­percent
of the film’s length does not consist of long take shots. His third film, The
Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, contains an ASL of 52.9 seconds,
with 32 ­percent of the shots being long takes and these long takes taking
up 65 percent of the overall running time. By his fifth feature, Woman is the
Future of Man, Hong’s style had become even more minimal, with an ASL
of 98.7 seconds and 64 percent of the shots consisting of long takes, taking
up 88 percent of the movie. This extreme would not be reached again until
his 2013 films, Nobody’s Daughter Haewon and Our Sunhi, in which 84 and
91 percent of the films respectively consist of long takes. In between, all of
the films have between 60 and 82 percent of their total time consisting of
long takes, making Hong one of the most minimal editors amongst even art
cinema and film festival directors and making mise-en-scène the key ele-
ment in his cinematic style (see Appendix 1).
In addition to his minimal use of editing, the most obvious feature of
Hong’s visual approach is the zoom lens, which has been employed in
every Hong film since A Tale of Cinema in 2005. The addition of the zoom
to Hong’s style is significant because of both its frequency and the diffi-
culty of determining its meaning. A Tale of Cinema contains 82 individual
shots, of which 45 contain at least a single zoom and 14 shots that feature
­multiple zooms. Hong’s subsequent films continue to use the zoom as a
regular ­stylistic component, with no film having less than 28 percent of the
total shots containing zooms. However, the technique reached its peak in
2009’s Like You Know It All, which contains 61 shots with a zoom, out of
a total of 95. By comparison, 2013’s Our Sunhi has only 12 zooms out of
42 shots, and also contains two notable long takes without the zoom tech-
nique (see  ­Appendix 2). More importantly, the use of the zoom is unusual in
lacking any clear function and is often an obtrusive and noticeable intrusion
of style into the shot. The typical Hong zoom is not slow enough to be unno-
ticed and also not the fast zooming that one may see in action sequences.
Rather, the technique allows Hong to vary his shot scale while avoiding the
conventions of the classical continuity style, an approach Hong does use
occasionally in his first feature, The Day a Pig Fell in the Well. Following the
increasing minimalism of his films after his debut, from the lack of camera

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movement in The Power of Kangwon Province to the (almost) complete lack


of scene penetration in Woman is the Future of Man, Hong reintroduces
movement into and out of a scene through the zoom.
Thus, the zoom in Hong is primarily an experimental technique and,
I would argue, a mannerist approach to mise-en-scène. Referencing Adrian
Martin, Elsaesser and Buckland describe mannerist mise-en-scène as follows:
“Style performs out of its own trajectories, no longer working unobtrusively at
the behest of the fiction and its demands of meaningfulness” (85). This is not
to argue that the zooms in Hong are necessarily indecipherable and purely for-
mal. For example, David Scott Diffrient convincingly interprets the use of the
zoom in Hahaha (2010), seeing the technique as not only ­self-referential but
also expressive of Hong’s awkward comedic mode ­(Diffrient, “The ­Unbearable
Lightness” 50–55). And there are isolated sequences in which the zoom does
seem a very obvious commentary on the action, fi ­ tting into the “broad fit”
expressive style discussed by Martin. In Woman on the Beach (2006), there
is an extended discussion in which the lead female character, Mun-suk,
describes having relationships with foreign men while staying abroad in
­Germany, with the use of zoom expressing the male character’s attraction and
repulsion to her story (Raymond, “Woman on the Beach”). But nevertheless,
the technique is no longer masking or effacing itself, and likewise it does not
have any immediate or visceral expressive function. And most examples of
the zoom in Hong’s cinema lack any real expressive function other than to
change the shot perspective without the classical technique of the cut, which
Hong seems to have outlawed from his cinematic repertoire. In other words,
there is a deliberately mannerist desire on Hong’s part to keep the audience at
a distance, denying the suturing c­ omfort of classical fi­ lmmaking (Raymond,
“Hong Sang-soo and the Film Essay” 25).
However, the use of the zoom is not the only or even the most dominant
use of mannerist mise-en-scène in Hong’s cinema. I would argue that it is
the familiar two-shot, often with the two characters seated around a table,
in which Hong’s cinema had already achieved a very mannered form even
before the introduction of the zoom. These shots are a clear example of
what Bordwell has labeled the “planimetric two-shot,” as noted by Flanagan
(see Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light 167–168; and Flanagan 79). There are,
by my count, 96 of these types of shots in Hong’s work, in which we can also
witness a certain stylistic evolution. For instance, The Day a Pig Fell in the Well
only features two of these shots (both relatively brief, at 64 and 40 seconds).

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All of his subsequent films have at least six, which also are ­frequently
­disrupted by the Hongian zoom. This culminates in Hong’s most recent
film, Our Sunhi, which features 2 two-shots lasting over 11 minutes in length
(and without any zooms). This film was one of the subjects of Bordwell’s
October 7, 2013 blog post, “Where Did the Two-Shot Go? Here,” found on
Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s blog Observations on Film Art. Bordwell
praises Hong for breaking with current stylistic convention in his focus on
mise-en-scène as an alternative to rapid cutting. He concludes his discussion
with the following:

In the very last scene, when she (Sunhi) goes off to the toilet, Hong gives us a
tiny joke. All three of the men finally meet, waiting for her, and at last a two-shot
becomes a three-shot. This sheerly formal gag is pretty esoteric, I grant you, but
it’s typical of Hong’s urge to tweak the simplest materials. In his hands, the lowly
two-shot becomes a structuring constraint, a way of deliberately limiting his choices
to show us what he can do with it–not least, comic variation. (Bordwell, Where Did the
Two-Shot Go?)

I am interested here in Bordwell’s comment on the “sheerly formal” quality


of Hong’s use of style, since this brings up larger questions about Hong’s
approach to mise-en-scène. What Bordwell is essentially arguing is that
Hong is fundamentally a formally playful director who exhibits a manner-
ist mise-en-scène, connected to Bordwell’s larger argument about parametric
style (see Narration in the Fiction Film 274–310). This is certainly a valid
approach to Hong’s work, but I believe this formal analysis needs to be sup-
plemented with interpretation, which more thematic mise-en-scène analysis
can provide.
The symmetrically framed Hong two-shot, set around a table, is his signa-
ture, the type of shot that can be found in all of his films and helps to define
his style. Along with the zoom, it is the shot that is the most mannered in
all of his work; in that the mise-en-scène is flat and unexpressive, serving
no meaningful purpose other than to call attention to the framing. Instead
of using cutting to convey the meaning of his long conversation scenes,
the long shot of the two characters on opposite sides of the table creates a
minimalist tableau in which the style does not comment on the film’s story.
Rather, “style is not motivated or justified by the subject matter, but is its own
justification” (Elsaesser and Buckland, 85). This is especially true when this

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two-shot becomes a recurring stylistic motif, both within individual films


and over the course of Hong’s career. Tracing the history of this shot is illu-
minating. As previously mentioned, there are only two such shots in The Day
a Pig Fell in the Well, which is by far the most expressive and least mannered
of all of Hong’s films. The Power of Kangwon Province features five of these
compositions, forming a recurring stylistic pattern. The Power of Kangwon
Province is a much more mannered film in general, beginning with Hong’s
seemingly Yasujiro Ozu-inspired decision to include no camera movement
in the entire film (Ozu’s final five films also contain no camera movement).
These two-shots continue in Virgin Stripped Bare by Her ­Bachelors, although
here they are divided between shots in which the couple are on the same
side of the table, usually kissing (four shots), and shots where the two char-
acters are separate (seven shots). By Turning Gate, the pattern of two charac-
ters divided by the table becomes firmly established, reaching its peak with
Woman is the Future of Man, the first half of which is structured around two
long takes (one over 6 minutes, a second over 5 minutes) using this long
two-shot form. The first of these two-shots in A Tale of Cinema is one of
the most minimal of all, set against a blank brick wall, an almost literal
dead-end for the technique (Figure 1). It is at this point where the zoom
lens is ­introduced into this two-shot. Subsequently, the zoom would often
­supplement this signature Hong shot and become another marker of his
style, the ­mannered style of the two-shot varied with the equally mannerist
use of the zoom.
The Hongian two-shot reaches its zenith with Our Sunhi, which contains
the most mannerist use of the technique thus far. But, paradoxically, I will
argue, the second of these shots also suggests how variation can create an
almost classical style of meaning. Although Adrian Martin defined these
three approaches to mise-en-scène (classical, expressive, and mannerist), he
has also noted how, when pushed further in one direction, the styles can
almost become their opposites. As Martin argues in relation to expression-
ism and mannerism:

We can think of expressionism as mannerism at its most extreme: a total stylisa-


tion of all filmic parameters (camerawork, soundtrack, lighting, set design, acting)
to express emotional states, such as panic, hysteria, fear, horror, ecstasy . . . But rather
than beginning, historically, as an efflorescence of postmodern culture, this contem-
porary style has its roots in a noble (if also frequently maligned)tradition: German

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204 Style

expressionism, derided in its time as ‘Caligarism’, after Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet
of Dr Caligari (1920). (Martin, Mise-en-Scène and Film Style 101)

I think Martin’s point here, about how one approach to mise-en-scène (in this
case the expressive), can, if pushed to its extreme, become another approach
(mannerism), can be extended to other approaches to mise-en-scène. In this
example Martin is discussing contemporary popular filmmaking and how
its expressive approach to mise-en-scène leads back to the mannerism of the
silent era. With Hong Sang-soo and the slow cinema contemporary style, the
tension is between a mannerist approach pushed to its extreme, which in
this case merges back into classical mise-en-scène, which can be illustrated
in the following analysis.
Our Sunhi is structured around two particular two-shots, one featuring the
characters of Jae-hak and Mun-su, the second Jae-hak and Sunhi (Figures 2
and 3). The shots are nearly identical in terms of mise-en-scène, with Jae-hak
positioned on the right side of the table opposite Mun-su and Sunhi respec-
tively (there is also a third female character, a friend of Jae-hak, who also
appears in both shots for a short amount of time). In between the characters
is a table full of food and liquor bottles, with the same posters seen on the
wall in the background. Each shot lasts over eleven minutes, making them
the two longest takes of Hong’s career, and overall these two-shots take up
over 25 percent of the total film. The length of the shots as well as their rep-
etition and their stillness (no camera movement or zooming) make the shots
mannerist in the extreme, with Hong testing the limits of his long take, long
shot construction. Hong is also returning to his earlier style of filmmaking,
eschewing the zoom technique, but taking that long take style even further.
Indeed, Our Sunhi exceeds the ASL of Woman is the Future of Man (the last
pre-zoom film), with each shot lasting an average of over two minutes. The
formalism of the two-shots and their mirroring is evident, and can be read
(as Bordwell does) as something completely formal, of style acting purely
on its own accord and without any relationship to the content of the scene.
The two scenes are in fact very different in terms of narrative. The first is
between two men, Jae-hak and Mun-ho, old friends who have not spoken in
a long time. While Mun-ho is friendly and wanting to discuss his personal
life (especially his relationship with Sunhi), Jae-hak is clearly annoyed and
does not want to be there. The second scene is very different, as Jae-hak is
clearly very interested in Sunhi and there is a genuine affection between the

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Marc Raymond 205

two characters. To film the two scenes in the exact same way would seem
to be the ultimate mannerist gesture, of Hong filming his scenes according
to his own stylistic preference and without consideration for the characters
and their relationships. The fact that the shot echoes so many other Hong
two-shots that contain different narrative situations in other Hong films only
adds to this feeling that style is operating without concern for the story. But,
paradoxically, just as the style reaches its mannerist height in the second of
these shots, he offers a variation that can actually lead into a discussion of
classical mise-en-scène in Hong’s films.
As Martin argues, motif and rhyme, although seemingly taken to a
mannerist extreme in this example, are in fact key elements to classical
mise-en-scène:

(T)he centrality, within classical aesthetics, of the devices of motif and rhyme – those
patterning tropes which shape the articulation, modulation and development of a
thematic structure . . . (C)lassically structured work more often cannily systematises
into a meaningful pattern what are ordinary, everyday gestures and actions: walking,
eating, driving, and so on. In fact, one way of gauging a director’s skill and inventive-
ness is to see how they are able to illuminate such usually taken-for-granted activi-
ties. (Martin, Mise-en-Scène and Film Style 24)

This illumination is often achieved through variation, and in this case, the
variation is touch. Over eight minutes into this second long take, Sunhi
reaches across the table and begins to touch Jae-hak’s face. This continues for
almost two minutes, as a sentimental pop song begins to play, echoing the
first scene with Mun-ho but now taking on a different meaning. It is a strik-
ing moment, in which emotion and affect erupts within the most formal and
rigorous style. It is especially unusual for this to occur within this particular
two-shot table sequence, in which touching of any kind is mostly absent. The
only precedent in Hong’s oeuvre would be a scene in Hahaha (2010). Two
characters, Mun-kyeong and Seong-ok, are seated opposite one another in a
typical Hong shot (Figure 4) when, two minutes into the sequence, Seong-ok
takes out Mun-kyeong’s poem and begins to read it. As she does, she slides
out of her seated position and lies on her stomach on the floor, motivating the
camera to move downwards to reposition her. When Mun-kyeong joins her,
they are framed in medium close-up, side by side (Figure 5). Eventually, she
kisses him, after which they and the camera return to their original position.

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The moment is noticeable in its deviance from the Hong two-shot, but the
emotion is less strong, because we know the shallowness and falsity of the
two characters. The example from Our Sunhi is different in that touch con-
veys a deeper emotional feeling, less one of a flirtatious romance than of
a desperate attempt at connection. The scene concludes when the chicken
deliveryman arrives, at which point the camera tilts up slightly to reveal the
man as well as Jae-hak’s friend, who returns to prepare the meal. Sunhi and
Jae-hak remain holding each other’s hands as the scene concludes.
The meaning here is created through a variation on Hong’s general coun-
ter to the same shot heuristic, named by Bordwell and described by Elsaesser
and Buckland as follows: “if characters appear in the same frame (either a
static frame or linked by camera movement), they are united; but if they are
separated by cutting, then they are in conflict, or isolated from each other”
(90–91). One can take as a representative example two classical Hollywood
scenes from the detective films The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941) and
The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946). Each film features a sequence in which
a woman enters a detective’s office and hires him for a job, in each case lying
about her true intentions. In The Maltese Falcon, the editing isolates the two
characters from each other, signaling their antagonism throughout the film
and their eventual separation at the film’s conclusion. In The Big Sleep, the
two characters eventually come together in the same long take medium two-
shot, playing a practical joke over the telephone and discovering their shared
sensibility. At the conclusion, they are united and form a romantic couple.

Hong does not follow this classical heuristic, often using the two-shot to iso-
late his characters and indicate their separateness, especially thorough the
use of the table. Because of this, the eventual touching in this scene becomes
more significant, both for audiences of this particular film (through the
repetition of the earlier scene of emotional disconnection between J­ae-hak
and Mun-su) and especially for an audience familiar with Hong’s other
films. As John Gibbs argues, “we cannot simply identify one meaning with
one technique” (44) and, “it is not, ultimately, the individual elements of
­mise-en-scène that are significant, rather the relationship between elements,
their interaction within a shot and across the narrative” (41). Hong is able to
reverse the same shot heuristic and then, in Our Sunhi, have his characters
overcome this artificial formal structure and achieve a connection. The result
is a shot that is very mannered, in that the shot does not change in relation

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Marc Raymond 207

to these new characters, but also classical in having the eruption of feeling
and emotion from the characters transform the distanced and detached style
and make it seem natural. For this moment, the cool, ordered and mannered
form gives way, and the audience is left with a direct emotional connection
to these two characters defying the convention of formal distance (which can
be seen anew as a social distance) and touch across the divide of the table.
Calling on Adrian Martin’s term, Elsaesser and Buckland state: “In clas-
sical mise-en-scène the film style is unobtrusive, for it is motivated by the
film’s themes and dramatic developments” (83). The best example of
­mise-en-scène analysis is the work of V.F. Perkins, who in his 1972 book Film
as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies, argued in favor of classical mise-
en-scène over the mannerist tendencies he observed in much contemporary
art cinema. He argues that a director should aim “to organize the world to
the point where it becomes most meaningful but to resist ordering it out of
all resemblance to the real world which it attempts to evoke” (Perkins 70;
quoted in Gibbs 42). By this definition, there is very little classical about
Hong’s style, but there is also very little classical about much contemporary
cinema, whether it is the “fast” cinema of popular culture or the “slow” exam-
ple of contemporary art cinema. If Hong’s more dominant stylistic trait is
mannerist, he nonetheless shows a greater interest in classical construction
than many of his contemporaries. Most of the examples of classical mise-
en-scène in Hong are contained in a subset of his style, what I will label as
the “group table shot.” Overall these types of group table shots are not very
common in Hong’s work, especially compared to the prevalent two-shot,
although they are still much more common than the average filmmaker, who
generally avoids these situations or handles these table scenes through cut-
ting and camera movement. There are 18 of these group table shots in Hong’s
films, roughly once per film, although there are a large number in Like You
Know It All (5, although most also feature zooms at some point, which turns
them into smaller groups or even singles) and only one (from Nobody’s
Daughter Haewon) in his last four films. These group table shots also mirror
the overall evolution of Hong’s style. For example, the first of these shots
in The Day a Pig Fell in the Well is quite different than the group table shot
in Hong’s second film, The Power of Kangwon Province (1998). In keeping
with the style of the film more generally, the shot in The Day A Pig Fell in
the Well is much more expressive, with the lead character enlarged in the
foreground of the wide angle shot, giving us the more subjective experience

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208 Style

of this character (Figure 6). In contrast, the style of the shot in The Power of
Kangwon Province is further back, less dynamic, and also longer in duration,
reflective of the differences in style between the films as a whole (Figure 7).
Later group table shots in Hong recreate these earlier scenes, but often with
a zoom lens to reduce the group shot down into fewer characters.
David Bordwell has observed this tendency in Hong, stating that, “he
relies on profiled two-shots and simple compositions . . . (a)t least once per
film, however, he displays a skill at intricate, in-depth staging reminiscent
of Hou (Hsaio-hsien) or Tsai Ming-liang)” (“Beyond Asian Minimalism” 22).
In his book Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging (2005), ­Bordwell
uses an example from Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors in his first
chapter, “Staging and Style.” Bordwell admires Hong’s use of the stationary
camera and long take to approach the technically difficult group table scene,
detailing the careful choreography involved in this 96 second shot. He also
provides a thematic analysis, showing how the style is serving the story in a
manner typical of the classical mise-en-scène critics:

Since the first part of the scene is about the two men’s disintegrating friendship,the
composition gives them the privileged position, with Jae-hoon in the center of the
frame and Yeong-su right beside him, facing us. Su-jeong becomes a secondary pres-
ence, her eyes lowered and her face shielded by strands of hair, but one can sense
some embarrassment in her posture. Jae-hoon lowers his eyes before ­Yeong-su’s
onslaught, leaving Yeong-su the most visible face at the table. He demands that
­Su-jeong serve him, as if flaunting his power over her, and Jae-hoon quietly rises and
leaves the table. (Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light 5)

What Bordwell admires about the sequence is very similar to what Perkins
admires about classical mise-en-scène: the ability of the filmmaker to create
meaning from composition and figure movement without breaking with the
scene’s reality. To paraphrase Perkins, the scene is organized for maximum
meaning without being ordered to the extent that the reality effect is bro-
ken. These group shots lack the mannered, “sheerly formal” nature of the
­Hongian two-shot.
To illustrate this idea of the group table shot as an example of Hong’s use
of classical mise-en-scène further, I want to discuss two sequences in detail.
The first scene is from 2004’s Woman is the Future of Man, and the second
is from 2013’s Nobody’s Daughter Haewon. These two sequences are chosen

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Marc Raymond 209

for a couple of reasons. First, Woman is the Future of Man is the last Hong
film before the introduction of the zoom lens. Thus, although Hong would
include group table scenes in his later films, the use of the zoom lens in
these shots changes their dynamic considerably. In A Tale of Cinema, there
is a group table scene in which the director, Dong-su, reunites with his for-
mer classmates. The shot begins with a large number of characters framed
in depth down a long table, but eventually zooms in to become a closer
two-shot. This is a general tendency in Hong’s later films, which is notably
broken in the group table shot in Nobody’s Daughter Haewon. Second, both
scenes feature a professor at a table having food and drinks with a large
group of students, although both the narrative context of the scene and its
composition and length differ significantly in the later film. As we will see,
these differences can be read as part of a larger shift in Hong’s work.
The sequence shot begins with two female characters in the foreground,
both unknown to the audience, even though this is toward the end of the
film (shot 45 of 51). There is a slight movement to the right as the attention
turns to one of the three main characters of the film, Munho, who is situated
slightly to the left of the circular composition (see Figure 8). After Munho
asks a rude and direct question about one of the female character’s last sex-
ual encounter, he is confronted by one of the male students, mirroring his
position on the right side of the frame. The shot is thus arranged and cho-
reographed to set up this battle between the two men, with the woman they
are fighting over turning away from the conversation in the left foreground.
It is also significant that she is positioned on the same side of the frame as
Munho, indicating her greater allegiance to him, which we will see in the
very next scene. The shot concludes with the woman’s action of putting on
her coat, signaling that she is about to leave and also giving her a certain
power and control that both of the men, in differ ways, have tried to remove
(Munho with his inappropriate question, the other man, Min-soo, by playing
her unwanted rescuer). Both of the men, in contrast, have their heads down.
Thus, I would argue here that Hong is working in a style of mise-en-scène in
which the importance of the individual shot is privileged and in which we
are encouraged to find meaning in the arrangement of characters and their
movement. This style is not arbitrary, and is among the least mannered of
Hong’s shots.
In Nobody’s Daughter Haewon, Hong returns to this same conflicted sce-
nario and same type of shot. This is the first group table shot (featuring more

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210 Style

than four characters) since a couple of brief examples in Oki’s Movie (2010),
and is also the only example since Woman is the Future of Man that does
not employ a zoom lens. It is a mostly static shot, running over nine min-
utes in length, the longest shot in any Hong film to that point (only to be
surpassed by his next film, Our Sunhi). By contrast, the shot from Woman
is the Future of Man is “only” 223 seconds. The shot begins as Haewon and
her former lover, Professor Lee, have just joined a group of fellow students.
They are seated across from each other, and all of the characters are notice-
ably uncomfortable (Figure 9). Because she is late, Haewon is encouraged
to drink several shots in a row. As a result she has to leave to go to the bath-
room. At this point, the other students start talking about Haewon, criticiz-
ing her for being rich, of being different because of her “mixed” blood, and
most importantly of cheating on one of the other students, Jae-hong (back
right of the frame), whom she had a relationship the previous year. The stu-
dents seem unaware that the person she had the affair with is Professor Lee.
Thus there is a potentially confrontational relationship between Professor
Lee and Jae-hong, like in Woman is the Future of Man, but this never devel-
ops, anticipated by the fact that they are positioned on the same side of the
table. Haewon eventually returns to the table, commenting that she drank
too fast.
Next, we hear the off-screen voice of the restaurant owner talking to
­Professor Lee, revealing that he and Haewon used to come together to the
restaurant the previous year, thus making it clear to the other students that
the two had an affair. In an attempt to break the tension, Professor Lee asks
for a drink. Haewon intercepts and the two have an awkward “cheers” across
the table, which plays more like a battle than a genuine show of affection or
togetherness. Haewon then takes control of the situation by rising to leave
and finally telling the truth to the other students and apologizing for lying.
The camera tilts up with her, and then pans to show her leaving. The shot
concludes with Professor Lee looking off-screen at the departed Haewon,
while the other students are silent. Curiously, even after this revelation, the
students do not protest or verbally attack the professor, not even Haewon’s
former lover, Jae-hong, in stark contrast to the similar scene in Woman is the
Future of Man. Instead, the perspective has shifted more to Haewon, which
is keeping with the overall evolution of Hong’s work, with Haewon as the
first feature film Hong tells through a female subject (complete with female
voiceover).

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Marc Raymond 211

After a number of films in which Hong was commenting, essay-like,


on the nature of his cinema (see Raymond, “Hong Sang-soo and the Film
Essay”), both Nobody’s Daughter Haewon and Our Sunhi are returns (with
differences) to the style of his earlier work. In returning to this long
take, static aesthetic, Hong is re-engaging with a more classical and less
­mannered approach to mise-en-scène that he had been previously down-
playing. As a statistical analysis reveals, these films return to the extreme
long take style of Woman is the Future of Man, exploring how meaning
can be ­created within the image and reducing the self-reflexive gestures.
There is also a return to the more static style of the earlier films, not reach-
ing the formal austerity of The Power of Kangwon Province, but with a
greater ­stillness within the long take compositions than films such as Like
You Know It All and Hahaha (see Appendix 3). In fact, Hong’s style, both
in these films and more generally has the character of what Adrian M ­ artin
has dubbed a ­dispositif. Although this term has been applied in many dif-
ferent manners and contexts, in relation to film style Martin describes
dispositif as follows:

Cinematic dispositifs are often generated (Perec-style) from exclusions –refusals to


play by this or that convention deemed corrupt or ossified by the filmmaker – and
these, to devotees, constitute the immediately recognisable stylistic traits of many
a modern director . . . But a dispositif is not a mechanistic or rigid formal system;
it is more like an aesthetic guide-track that is open to as much alteration, surprise
or artful contradiction as the filmmaker who sets it in motion decrees. (Martin,
­Mise-en-Scène and Film Style 192)

Martin includes Hong as an example of these dispositif directors


­(Mise-en-Scène and Film Style 180) and it is easy to understand why:
The Power of Kangwon Province systematically refuses camera movement;
Woman is the Future of Man refuses (with one exception) to cut or move in
on any scene; the next film, A Tale of Cinema, introduces the zoom in order
to break this rule against moving in, but does so in such a way as to con-
tinue to avoid the suturing comfort of the shot/reverse shot technique; the
following film, Woman on the Beach, eliminates nudity and sexuality, for-
merly a key ingredient in his films (see Hartzell), and never allows them to
return to subsequent features to date. Martin discusses how many of these
dispositif directors (Chantal Akerman, Harun Farocki, Agnes Varda, Pedro

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212 Style

Costa, Victor Erice, and Tasi Ming-liang) have migrated to the art gallery
(Mise-en-Scène and Film Style 183), and although this has not happened yet
with Hong, it would not be surprising to see this movement to the world of
installation art in the future.
But these experimental tendencies in Hong are in tension with a
­classical mise-en-scène, in which character interaction is still central,
“a chemistry of bodies and spaces, gestures and movements” (Martin,
­Mise-en-Scène and Film Style 45). By focusing on Hong’s two-shots and
group shots, I have attempted to best describe how his style depends on
this tension between extreme mannerism, bordering on an experimental
dispositif, and a classical mise-en-scène depending on a viewer’s interpre-
tation of a specific and elaborate staging. An oft-cited Hong quote claims:
“People tell me I make films about reality. They're wrong. I make films
based on structures that I have thought up” (originally from Woman is
the Future of Man press kit, subsequently quoted in Bordwell, “Memories
Are Unmade,” Stults, and Hartzell and Paquet, among others). While this
remark has proven useful in showing the highly structured, even experi-
mental nature of Hong’s approach, I think it also needlessly downplays
the more realistic elements of the films, the “omnipresent theatre of every-
day life” (Martin, Mise-en-Scène and Film Style 129) that give his work its
classical dimension. What remains elusive and fascinating, and perhaps
even most unique, about Hong’s style is precisely this mixture of manner-
ist and classical mise-en-scène.

Ap p e n d ix 1 : S hot s , A SL, Lon g Tak e P e r c e n tag e


(shot s a n d r u nn ing t im e)
Film Shots ASL LT% (shots) LT% (running time)
The Day a 274 24.8 9.4 35
Pig Fell in
the Well
The Power 193 33.3 13.5 39
of Kangwon
Province
Virgin 140 52.9 32 65
Stripped
Bare by Her
Bachelors

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Marc Raymond 213

Film Shots ASL LT% (shots) LT% (running time)


Turning Gate 117 57.4 33 69
Woman is 51 98.7 64 88
the Future
of Man
Tale of 82 63.9 39 70
Cinema
Woman on 103 72.8 45 79
the Beach
Night 172 49.1 30.5 72
and Day
Lost in the 43 42.7 26 60
Mountains
Like You 95 78.4 46 80
Know It All
Hahaha 127 53.9 32.5 80
Oki’s Movie 95 48.8 26 67
The Day He 65 70.9 46 82
Arrives
In Another 69 74.7 43 78
Country
Nobody’s 59 88.8 47 84
Daughter
Haewon

Our Sunhi 42 122.2 52 91

Ap p e n d ix 2 (Zoom s)
Film Zooms (%) Multiple Zooms (%)
Tale of Cinema 45 (54) 14 (17)
Woman on the Beach 35 (34) 8 (8)
Night and Day 48 (28) 9 (5)
Lost in the Mountains 12 (28) 1 (2)

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214 Style

Film Zooms (%) Multiple Zooms (%)


Like You Know It All 61 (64) 21 (22)
Hahaha 50 (39) 18 (14)
Oki’s Movie 35 (37) 8 (8)
The Day He Arrives 31 (48) 8 (12)
In Another Country 32 (45) 7 (10)
Nobody’s Daughter Haewon 26 (41) 6 (10)
Our Sunhi 12 (29) 3 (7)

Ap p e n d ix 3 (M obil e F r a m ing i n Lo n g Tak e s)


Film Long Takes Mobile Framing (%) Zooms (%)
The Day a Pig 27 10 (37) 0
Fell in the Well
The Power 26 0 0
of Kangwon
Province
Virgin Stripped 44 10 (23) 0
Bare by Her
Bachelors
Turning Gate 38 12 (32) 0
Woman is the 33 24 (73) 0
Future of Man
Tale of Cinema 32 31 (97) 24 (75)
Woman on the 46 37 (82) 26 (57)
Beach
Night and Day 54 44 (81) 22 (41)
Lost in the 11 10 (91) 6 (55)
Mountains
Like You Know 44 44 (100) 35 (80)
It All

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Marc Raymond 215

Film Long Takes Mobile Framing (%) Zooms (%)


Hahaha 41 41 (100) 37 (90)
Oki’s Movie 26 22 (85) 17 (65)
The Day He 30 29 (97) 22 (73)
Arrives
In Another 30 28 (93) 23 (77)
Country
Nobody’s 28 24 (86) 19 (68)
­Daughter
Haewon
Our Sunhi 22 16 (73) 12 (55)

note
Funding for this research was provided by the Kwangwoon University Research Fund
(2015).

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