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[REVIEW] “The Critic’s Notebook: On Dennis Lim’s Tale of Cinema” by Nirris Nagendrarajah
Click HERE to read all entries in Cha on Hong Sang-soo.
Dennis Lim, Tale of Cinema, Fireflies Press, 2022. 216 pgs.
In February, during the awards ceremony for the 74th Berlin International Film Festival, the South Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo, who had won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize for the second time, for A Traveller’s Needs, stood before the podium looking humbly bewildered.
“I don’t know what you saw in the film,” he said turning to address the jury, who, like the audience, broke out into a fit of laughter: “But I’m curious.”
This sort of dry deadpan humour is a trademark of Hong’s, who, when publicly asked about his creative process and the meanings behind the simple images and charming structures, is known to head down the path less travelled: flout an auteur’s so-called authority and deflect.
Any advice for young filmmakers? “No,” he said, “I wouldn’t.”
Writer’s block? “I’ve heard about it.”
What kind of films do you make? “I film ordinary people, everyday life.”
This is typical not only of Hong, the person, but, crucially, it is also part of his unique body of work which—at the time of writing—includes 31 feature films and continues to grow at a steady rate. As the curator and critic Dennis Lim writes, what Hong seeks is “to grasp something more fundamental about hardwired patterns of behaviour and thought” and “nudges so many of his scenes towards comic embarrassment not only for laughs but out of a conviction that humankind reveals itself most vividly on the unpredictable fringes of social acceptability”. The declaration of his curiosity in Berlin, like his films, is a subversion of normative expectations, despite the fact that the deviation is mundane, or, one could say, minor.
Whether or not you like Hong’s films—and he has his critics—depends on your willingness to take on what he considers to be an event worth filming: long conversations at a dinner table, doublings and dreams that leave you wondering, snow falling as you leave the movie theatre, eating melons in bed with your lover, finding a lost umbrella, a woman walking away. It depends on your tolerance for enduring watching middle-class artist-types go through existential crises during transitional periods. It depends on what you consider is worth paying attention to.
A Traveller’s Needs (2024)
Lim published Tale of Cinema—bright orange, pocket-sized, less than 200 pages, with flaps—in 2022, a book-length essay that uses the titular 2005 film as a through-line to survey the cinematic universe Hong has created, making a point to the reader early on that, when it comes to Hong that “knowing that similarities are a given, we look for differences”. And who better to take on this expedition if not Lim—who, through the years, has interviewed Hong and programmed a career-spanning retrospective—who passes every “memory test” before him so that, from time to time, he delivers an impressive, breathtaking associative paragraph like this:
The morose critic Yoo Jun-snag plays in Hahaha pops up in Nobody’s Daughter Haewon, still unhappily married and talking about antidepressants. The bookstore owner in the Hamburg section of On the Beach at Night Alone who plays himself—he teaches piano and composes music for children—died not long after the shoot. In Claire’s Camera, Isabelle Huppert’s character tells Kim Min-hee’s character about her late husband who ran a bookstore and taught piano. In Grass one of the stories overhead by Areum, a writer played by Kim, involves a woman, played by Hong regular Seo Young-hwa, who has moved to a house in the outskirts of with a mountain view—Seo’s character in The Woman Who Ran would seem to be this very woman, although Kim, playing a friend who visits her in that very house, is an entirely different person in that film.
To the uninitiated, this list—a form which Hong explored in his 2011 short film List—is overwhelming and, without context, does not make much sense. And yet to a fan, this is a dream: to see the way that an artist—working in real-time—is creating a world where characters appears in different guises across films, that, in having devised his own system, we might glean a method to his madness, which is not a madness in the slightest, but in fact very controlled and deliberate.
Referencing Barthes’s 1975 essay “Leaving the Movie Theatre”, Lim writes, “he describes the altered state of the moviegoer newly emerged from the dark, ‘a little dazed, wrapped up in himself,’ his body gone ‘soft, limp’: ‘In other words, obviously, he’s coming out of hypnosis.’” Lim’s book produces a similar hypnotic effect: weeks later, and I find myself still awakening from its indelible spell. At first, though, despite my enthusiasm, to my embarrassment, my progress with the book was slow-going.
Initially I was hindered by the fact that despite being familiar with Hong’s prolific body of work, I had never gotten around to seeing Tale of Cinema or his earlier films. Whenever Lim mentioned a film of Hong’s that I hadn’t seen I found I paid attention to the text differently, I was suddenly excluded from full immersion; but Lim knows that this may be the case, and he never lingers long at this or that stop on his way towards the end, cross-cutting his various threads with such a fine balance and serving all his masters to satisfaction. This is not to say that the book is only for completists: for those who are interested in enhancing the way they read and think about films—in the art of stylish, literary, astute criticism—you will be privy to the way a critic’s mind effortlessly moves from subject to subject, enhancing our collective vocabulary of pleasure.
The Novelist’s Film (2022)
In Hong’s fashion, Tale of Cinema, the film, is made up of two parts that both mirror and distort each other, creating sensations that are, by turns, scathing, hilarious, and downright tragic. The first section—we learn half-way through—turns out to be a short film by a filmmaker who is on his deathbed in the second section: the film-within-the-film is about a troubled student who encounters an old flame with whom he spends the evening quarrelling, in the end failing to sustain an erection. He then decides to make a suicide pact with her, which they prepare for and try to execute but both fail; in his youth, as Lim notes, Hong tried to commit suicide. The second section of the film begins outside the screening room, where a former student of the director of the film—who will later claim that it was in fact based on his own life—ends up running into the actress who played the old flame. He will spend the evening recreating the scenes from the film with her but, pointedly, he is denied the suicide pact and visits the director’s deathbed.
The film ends with Dong-soo lighting a cigarette and thinking to himself: “I need to think now. Thinking is necessary. With thought, I can sort everything out. And even stop smoking. I have to think. To get out of all this. To live a long time.” On this scene Lim writes: “Was Dong-soo previously not thinking, or was he thinking the wrong thoughts? Is thinking, in this formulation, opposed to action? To experience? Could staying inside your head—thinking—be an obstacle to seeing in front of your face?” Here Lim is referencing Hong’s 2021 feature In Front of Your Face and the monologue where Sang-ok—played by the brilliantly caustic Lee Hye-yeong—a newer, and most welcome, addition to Hong’s rotating cast—proposes a way of perceiving the world that allows her to come to terms with her terminal prognosis: “If I can just properly see what’s before my face, I’m not afraid of anything. Truly. Everything is before me. All complete. Nothing to add or take away. Perfectly complete. It’s just grace.” But this, it itself, is a reference to the final lines of Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest, which Hong has cited as a film that was influential to his way of thinking about making films: “He then said, very distinctly, if extremely slowly, these exact words: ‘What does it matter? All is grace.’”
I have to stop myself from making associations here—see how infectious this book can be, ushering you into new ways of thinking—and return to the tone of regular programming.
I am of the belief that Tale of Cinema is not the best of Hong’s films, nor do I think it is a good place to begin. Lim received pushback about choosing this film among the 27 possible options—since the publication of the book, Hong, ever prolific, has made four more films, with a new one, By the Stream, set to premiere at Locarno in August—and he makes a case for it by identifying the elements that mark a distinctive transformation in Hong’s approach to cinema: “It was Hong’s first self-produced film. It introduces two devices previously absent in his work: the zoom and the voiceover, both of which he has continued to deploy, often in counterintuitive ways. It is his last film with an explicit sex scene, and as such, a window into his evolving attitudes toward gender relations.” Self-financing; the zoom; narration; sex, death and hotels; gender relations; these are the subjects that Lim expands upon across the book’s pithy chapters.
Tale of Cinema is not a difficult book to read, in fact Lim has a very clear and accessible but no less astute way of narrating. He reaches back to the past to use film theory to situate Hong’s position in the history of cinema—David Bordwell, Manny Farber, Robert Bresson, Eve Sedgwick, Deleuze and Guattari, Gaston Bachelard and Marc Raymond make appearances—which is all quite illuminating. But then he also, occasionally, chooses to include current topics—this ranges from the art curator Helen Molesworth’s firing from LA MOCA; the auto-fiction trend as practised by Rachel Cusk; and the momentarily viral “Bad Art Friend” piece in the Times—that, by trying to situate an Asian filmmaker within a specific North American context, is more instructive than it is productive, bringing us further away from receiving insights like this: “It is not so much a matter of knowing and accepting one’s place on the margins, but of seeing the margins as a position of ferment and opportunity.”
And though he’s a fan and friend, Lim, towards the end of the book, doesn’t merely offer reams of praise and, notably, doesn’t let Hong off the hook for his shortcomings either: “But one problem with reading Hong’s films in terms of gender critique is that they are not especially illuminating in that regard. They have little to say about male privilege or toxic masculinity, besides demonstrating that they exist.” Every artist has their blind spots, their biases, their oversights; as Lim notes early on of Hong’s characters: “No one ever learns from their mistakes.”
Tale of Cinema (2005)
Similar to Tale of Cinema, A Traveller’s Needs, which takes place over the course over a day, tells of two tales: in one, In-guk, an uncertain poet played by Ha Seong-guk, is paid an unexpected visit by his mother; and in the other Iris, a foreign woman staying with him—played by the great Isabelle Huppert—teaches French to Korean women using a method of her own devising: asking people how they felt about an experience in English—the lingua franca—and translating their responses onto index cards to later be studied.
When a sceptic (Lee Hye-yeong) asks Iris why she thinks that this atypical method of learning a language is effective, she delivers a response that is the thesis for the film: “If you can find a sentence that hits you, emotionally, and recite that sentence in your room, in the darkness of the night, with true emotion, you’ll like it. And even though that sentence may be long and difficult, one morning you might realise that your heart has suddenly assimilated this foreign language.” Perhaps what the Berlin jury saw in A Traveller’s Needs was a film that gradually grew to investigate what can be gained in the loss in translation; the power of poetry and music to cause suppressed memories and feelings to resurface; the cruel juxtaposition of beauty and premature death; divisions between generations; and the splendours of makgeolli and friendship.
That profane sentiment—that the repetition of a foreign phrase can eventually cause one to familiarise oneself to the essence of language; can bring one past the threshold—reminded me of another line from Hong’s 2017 film Claire’s Camera—which also happens to be uttered by Huppert—when she is asked why she takes pictures: “Because the only way to change things is to look at everything again, very slowly.”
It all begins to sound very faith-based, devotional, without being woo-woo. When Lim writes that “Hong’s is a method that relies on a heightened attunement—to external and internal stimuli, to what is available and possible—and in that sense, it resembles a meditative practice”, I was reminded of this line from Simone Weil’s “Attention and Will”: “Prayer being only attention in its pure form and studies being a form of gymnastics of the attention, each school exercise should be a refraction of spiritual life. There must be method in it…not to try to interpret them, but to look at them till the light suddenly dawns.”
Hong’s enlightened, enchanted films are for people without a religion, for whom cinema is the last place where they can lose themselves and reach the divine, sung in a minor key that has the power to strike you like a bolt of lightning. They’re boring; they’re solipsistic; they’re cut from the same cloth, and yet they have the power to surprise you and reveal to you that there is more beneath the surface: an array of cinematic effects that arise from a creative force that is not pure per se (over the years, as death, ageing, legacy, and passing the baton to the next generation have crept into the films) but one that reaches for a state of transcendence every time, after which it ends, until, Lim notes, “it begins again”. Every film a sedulous sketch, a dazzling web, a prismatic gem to add to the continuum. Hong reminds us that everyday life is enough: is everything. In slowing down our minds, he gives our curious hearts a place to roam free.
How to cite: Nagendrarajah, Nirris. “The Critic’s Notebook: On Dennis Lim’s Tale of Cinema.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 11 Aug. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/08/11/tale-of-cinema.
Nirris Nagendrarajah (he/him) is a writer at the intersection of literature and film from Toronto, Canada. He holds a BA. in English Literature from York University and his work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in The Centifictionist, TamilCulture and paloma magazine. He runs Shortcuts, his weekly flash fiction substack, and is currently at work on a novel about the anxiety of waiting. [All contributions by Nirris Nagendrarajah.]
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