Moral Tales from Korea. Hong Sang-Soo and Eric Rohmer

• Published in: Acta Universitatis Sapientiae. Film and Media Studies no. 3; pp. 95 - 108
• Main Author: Grosoli , Marco
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Scientia Publishing House 2010; Scientia Kiadó
• Subjects: Theatre, Dance, Performing Arts; Eric Rohmer; Hong SangSoo; transparency
• ISSN: 2065-5924; 2066-7779

The films by the Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-Soo have always been recognized as “Nouvelle Vague-ish” as for narrative and style. His intimate minimalism, his low-budget filmmaking, his scarce use of editing, his extreme attention to space and mise en scène, and above all the serial practice of repeating the same patterns from film to film just to make but small variations, make him someone close to Eric Rohmer (as also often noticed by critics). Significantly, one of his movies was even called Conte de cinéma (Geuk jang jeon, 2005), as it were one of Rohmer’s Contes morales. Night and Day (Bam gua nat, 2008) especially deals with this very similarity. Actually, this Paris-based tale about a young Korean painter stuck in the French capital with no money and split between his wife and his would-be lover, not only is stylistically very close to the Contes morales, but also merges narratively all six of the Contes films (plus The Sign of Leo [Le signe du lion, 1961] and Rendezvous in Paris [Les rendez-vous de Paris, 1995]). The article closely analyzes this confrontation Hong-Rohmer revolving around Night and Day (but also all the rest of Hong’s filmography), and the peculiar relation of continuity on one side, but of discontinuity on the other, between these two members of different “new waves” in space and time.