KJCKorea
Journal Central

Hong Sang Soo is an auteurist film director who built up his firm world in Korean film community and secured the thick support layer after he published fourteen long films in total from <The Day a Pig Fell into the Well> in 1996 to <Nobody's Dauther Haewon> in 2013. Through consistently concentrating on relation, he is tenaciously searching for one world, elucidating a human being and bringing his works to completion. His flims, as arranged into 'man, woman, bed, alcohol', dubbed as 'the theory of four elements of desire', have stereotypical frames and are raising reference examples on his prior works, the more his works added. In other words, his works are ones that fall into ingwanderung, between the definate frame and theme lying ahead. For instance, enhencing the weight of in-a-dream-sequence in <Nobody's Daughter Haewon> reinforces the subjectivity of narrative and that, after returning to <The Power of Kangwondo Province>, embodies the sufferings of heroine Jisook. Haewon is wandering in searching for the flag which materializes her love but troubled with the unseizable substance. Feeling a death impulse, she flees into a dream and falls into ringwanderung. In a dream, she removes her lamentation after she meets a climber who knows of her love, but the possibility she can escape out of the veinly persuing desire gets away. The moment the flag becomes desire, the flag serves as the visualization of desire, not the materialization of love. Hong Sang Soo, who firmly established the world of his works, and audiences are the flag relation to each other. But if he persues the flag beyond her lamentation-removing, not Haewon beyond the flag, the relation would assume stereotypicality. He desires Haewon and finds out a new flag by trying to twist with strengthening in-a-dream-sequence. That is, though Hong Sang Soo's works handles the same theme and returns repeatedly, the places are not those of the same. Accordingly, the flag acquiring is impossible, and amid her flag-persuit continues, the flag becomes the signifier of ringwanderung. The solitude of nearby Haewon who goes onto the secluded death would come back with confirmed features when Haewon stands up as an independent main body, and the flag turn into the another name of solitude leading forward at the moment it hangs in the air. The spirally repeating ringwanderung goes to shape the main body amid the desire moves infinitely over again.

flag, nostalgia, lamentation-removing, ringwanderung, dream, death, solitude, immorality, intertextuality, Hong Sang Soo