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Presented by the Harvard Film Archive
THE HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE PRESENTS
TWO BY HONG SANG-SOO
January 11 - 21, 2013
About the filmmaker:
One of the luminary figures of contemporary South Korean cinema, Hong Sang-Soo (b. 1960) has flourished working within a mode of low budget independent art cinema ideally suited for the playfully modernist comedies of clumsy love and bad manners that have become his lasting signature. Impressively prolific, in 2011-12 Hong directed two richly complementary major works almost back to back, The Day He Arrives and In Another Country. Artfully structured tales of chance encounters and errant love, both use musical patterns of repetition and difference to give multiple and at times contradictory meanings to the awkward coincidence that is an engine of the low-key comedy shared by the two films. At the same time these films also offer subtle meditations on the cinema as an art of conjuring those eccentric, unpolished narratives deeply rooted in the imagination of both the audience and the stumbling filmmaker characters at the heart of each film.
Film schedule:
The Day He Arrives
Friday January 11 at 9pm
Saturday January 12 at 5pm
Friday January 18 at 7pm
Monday January 21 at 7pm
A melancholy filmmaker returns to the city to reunite with friends and a past only partially revealed in Hong's simultaneously wistful and witty double portrait of a frustrated artist and the charming Old World tangle of taverns and back alleys that makes up Seoul's Buchon Village neighborhood (a focus made clear by the film's Korean language title, "In Buchon Village"). Hong's use of crisp black and white beautifully captures both winter's fleeting light and the shadow of regret that accompanies even the film's happiest moments. A rumination on friendship and middle-age, The Day He Arrives follows a richly meandering course, unfolding a series of days and nights that become increasingly interchangeable, confused in the mind of both the hungover filmmaker-hero and the audience who thus come to inhabit the film's rich space-time of nostalgia, deja vu and reverie.
Directed by Hong Sang-soo. With Yu Junsang, Kim Sangjoong, Song Sunmi.
South Korea 2012, 35mm, color, 79 min. Korean with English subtitles.
http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2013janmar/sangsoo.html#day
In Another Country
Saturday January 12 at 7pm
Sunday January 13 at 5pm
Sunday January 13 at 7pm
Hong's fascination with the awkward performative dimensions of romance and the social contract in general finds its richest expression to date in this tour-de-force star vehicle for Isabelle Huppert. In three distinct roles, beginning first as a French filmmaker openly modeled on Claire Denis, Huppert subtly transforms herself across a trio of stories invented by a young aspiring filmmaker furiously writing as a distraction from an unnamed family trauma. Huppert's richly comic yet poignant encounters with strangers and lovers reveals Hong's narrative sophistication to lie beyond In Another Country’s film-within-a-film structure and instead within the careful intertwining of the three stories through a series of echoes that reveal the film's larger themes of loneliness, womanly charm and self-absorbed machismo.
Directed by Hong Sang-soo. With Isabelle Huppert, Yu Junsang, Jung Yumi.
South Korea 2011, 35mm, color, 89 min
http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2013janmar/sangsoo.html#in
General Admission Tickets $9, $7 Non-Harvard Students, Seniors, Harvard Faculty and Staff. Harvard students free.