In “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” André Bazin famously argued that depth-of-field marked a dialectical leap forward in the development of the artform. His argument involved two principal points. On the one hand, there was a “psychological” point: the use of depth of field, as in the films of Welles and Wyler, created a relationship between the viewer and the image, which was purportedly closer to “reality.” Unlike the “analytical editing” of a prior era, in which isolated fragments of a scene are ordered for the viewer, the “meaning” of a depth-of-field shot in Citizen Kane (1941), say, depends in part on the viewer’s active distribution of attention. On the other hand, there was also a “metaphysical” point: depth of field at least potentially reintroduces “ambiguity” into the structure of the image, whose significance can no longer be marked out beforehand. What depth of field showed, in Bazin’s view, was that the significance of any given sequence could no longer be given in advance. Watching a film could no longer just be a matter of discerning the order and connection of events: henceforth, what even counts as an event is at issue. Whatever objections one might raise about the psychological portion of his argument, the so-called “metaphysical” one retains its force. Indeed, with some decades of distance from Bazin, we can see that its ramifications are not strictly tied to depth of field at all, and can be discerned in any method of construction.
Case in point: By the Stream, Hong Sang-soo’s latest feature. Unlike Gregg Toland’s seminal collaborations with Wyler and Welles, the film decidedly does not push the envelope of cinema’s technical capabilities. Some might even consider its approach to cinematography a regression of sorts. What it does offer, in contrast to much of Hong’s recent output, is an unusual plethora of dramatic incident. Jeonim (Kim Min-hee), an artist and lecturer, invites her uncle Chu Sieon (Kwon Hae-hyo), an actor-director, to direct a skit at her university for an upcoming festival. Early on, we learn that the two have not seen each other for a long time, due to family complications that will only later be clarified; that he has been blacklisted from the industry for some unspecified scandal; and that the previous skit director, a student, derailed the production by pursuing relationships with three (of the four) female actors. We even learn that Chu Sieon had directed a skit in his youth many years ago, for this same festival, meaning that this is a homecoming of sorts. And the dramatic details only pile up from there, with each scene introducing yet other narrative complications: repeated visits by the student director who had been kicked out of the school; a budding relationship between Chu Sieon and a colleague of Jeonim’s, which she clearly disapproves of; the scandal that results from the eventual performance of the skit, which the university’s president takes issue with.
What distinguishes By the Stream, though, is not the mere presence of recognizable dramatic encounters, but how difficult it is to assimilate this material into a coherent, organizing pattern. It is a mark of the film’s eerie, unusual flow that by the end, one would be hard-pressed to summarize it — not because of any modernist manipulation in the manner of Resnais, say, but simply because of the unstable significance of any given scene. Throughout the film, Hong marks the passage of days by including sequences that cut from a shot of the moon at nighttime to the morning of the following day, where Jeonim is seen painting in a sketchbook by a local river. But more than once, this transitional sequence intrudes at what are ostensibly dramatic climaxes. The effect is that by the end, it is unclear that the preceding scenes can be said to offer us anything in the way of drama at all.
By the Stream exemplifies aspects of Bazin’s metaphysical thesis, then, by showing how our grasp of the overall narrative is always unstable, how it can be potentially re-described by the emergent salience of a heretofore unnoticed event. Like so much of Hong’s work, the film involves numerous scenes of characters eating and drinking around a table — to the point that the compositional aspects of such scenes do not stand out. But when the skit being staged by Chu Sieon involves four women around a table, with one of the actors turned conspicuously away from the audience, and when a similar arrangement is repeated following the performance, with Kim Min-hee turned away from the camera for the entirety of the scene, we are prompted to reconsider the significance of the film’s various table arrangements. To use the metaphor suggested by the film’s title, we can thus see By the Stream as presenting a steady flow of narrative detail, whose eddies and swirls we initially construct into a pattern of significance, but where the addition of any new element does not merely extend the overall pattern, but also changes what even qualifies as being a part of it. Such retrospective redescription has, of course, been a consistent feature of Hong’s recent work. The meta-fictional play of The Novelist’s Film (2022), the out-of-focus compositions of in water (2023), the alternating stories of In Our Day (2023): the relatively stable “content” of Hong’s stories has thrown these broadly formal elements into sharp relief. In By the Stream, though, Hong demonstrates that such procedures need not forgo the more charged dramatic turns that detractors and partisans alike may have found increasingly absent from his cinema.
In addition to her involvement with the production of the skit, Jeon-im, we learn, is a textile artist working on a series of pieces inspired by the Han River. She is, she says, “going backwards” — that is, moving upstream, against the flow. By the Stream, along with Bazin’s metaphysical thesis, thus raises a further question, about how we are to think of the “source” of this creative invention. If we accept that our sense of a flowing narrative is unstable, in that it can always potentially be redescribed, how should we conceive of the conditions that make such redescriptions possible? Are we to think of the past as a kind of vast reservoir that continually divides itself into new patterns of experience? These questions are not ones that this, or any individual film, should be responsible for answering. Still, the fact that they are raised here confirms Hong’s status as the contemporary filmmaker arguably most concerned with probing the cinema’s conditions of narrative possibility. If, despite all that, there’s a hesitance to declare the film the start of a new phase in Hong’s oeuvre, it’s because his cinema has shown us that such things are, perhaps, only really knowable in retrospect.
Published as part of Locarno Film Festival 2024 — Dispatch 3.
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