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Almost Like It Never Happened: Violence Contained By Film (Jin)

The moment we capture an event or person on film, they become unreal to us. They’ve become possessable objects, something to be replayed and thus controlled. Through this ownership, the spectator retains the power to watch without being held accountable for what is taking place on the screen. When the film is that of a real act of violence, the power dynamic becomes particularly apparent: though the spectator may sympathize with the people on the screen, he or she typically feels no sense of direct responsibility. What is happening on the screen remains on the screen. The film is a separate world altogether, one which can be turned off and forgotten, or even replayed again and again until it has lost its ability to shock. How many times have we watched bleeding victims and decimated cities on the news? It may be an evocative sight but not a lasting one.

Benny, the fourteen year old protagonist in Michael Haneke’s Benny’s Video, is the archetype of someone lost in an illusionary, dream-world of the seen and the controlled. Born into a wealthy family obsessed with career and social reputation, he himself is lost in delusion, albeit one composed of television screens. Just as his parents’ are trapped in their fear of losing face to their coworkers and friends, Benny is trapped in a self-imposed, psychological landscape of his bedroom which feeds his obsession with videos. There is a video constantly playing in the background while he quietly works at his desk, along with a second television screen showing a live feed of his apartment building’s exterior and his own bedroom’s interior. It is a life of relentless observation, one in which Benny plays the role of stoic, cold spectator.

 

The extent of his psychotic containment reaches its peak when Benny invites a girl over to his home to watch a video he’d recorded of a pig being slaughtered at a relative’s farm. Their sparse dialogue alone reveals a sort of naivety and a disconnect between violence in reality and on film. When asked by the girl, “have you ever seen a dead person – a real one, I mean,” Benny replies, “No. I once saw a TV program about the tricks they use in action films. It’s all ketchup and plastic.” He remains unaware that actions in reality, unlike on video, have real consequences, and when he eventually discharges a slaughtering gun, the same one used in the pig video, on the girl’s chest, he is taken aback by the girl’s agonizing screams.

Proceeding the girl’s death, the greatest moment of horror is when we realize that, despite having murdered a human being, Benny still remains locked in his internal world. The real physical action of violence fail to raise any real emotional response from Benny, and like how the murder scene is shown solely on his television screen rather than being shown in real time, Benny has internalized the incident as an “unreal” event isolated within the video tape. Even when Benny’s parents discover his son’s crime, they show a similar lack of emotive response and immediately begin strategizing how to save their reputation. It becomes increasingly apparent that the absence of consequence is more noticeable than the absence of a life itself. The dead girl remains a stranger, and though she mentioned having a large family, nothing is to be known about the impact of her death. In fact, it is as though Benny’s murder tape carries a higher value than the girl herself and is almost more “real” due to its ability to prove the murder had occurred. Later on, the video tape is the only object capable of bearing any real consequence, by acting as legal evidence and resulting in the family’s arrest. Preceding this, however, the family remain in a strange limbo, spending a whole week vacationing in Egypt.

The loss of a human life could hardly be felt as “real,” when there are absolutely no repercussions against the murderer: how is it possible to dictate one’s actions as being real, if they hold no visible effect? The emotionless psychological vacuum of Benny’s mind is therefore all the more terrifying than any real physical damage he can cause. Ultimately, it is this lack of emotional and social consequence that is felt as being “more violent” than the actual murder itself.

Bresson's L'argent: A New Form of Passion (Jin)

When watching films, we are so often told exactly how to feel through the orchestral score and close-ups of waving hands and facial expressions, that we scarcely have space to perceive the characters’ emotions for ourselves. Bresson, in L’argent, creates this space for his audience in the form of distancing; we are no longer relayed the characters’ exact internal dialogue, nor are we obliged to witness any form of direct emotional outburst. Instead, there is a palpable distance between us and the film, bestowing us with the responsibility of interpreting the characters’ feelings through their actions. It is a retreat into the action of observation, a retreat away from theatricality and clichéd emotional symbols, and it is this retreat that allows L’argent to become an even keener portrayal of human passion.

On the surface, L’argent poses a relatively simple story. Yvon, a working-class man with a wife and young daughter, is wrongfully accused of producing counterfeit cash when he unknowingly uses counterfeit cash to pay his restaurant tab. He is exempt from jail time but loses his job, prompting him to agree in assisting a bank heist. When he is again caught, he is sentenced to prison, leading to a chain of increasingly tragic events. Yvon’s suffering is particularly tragic, because all his grievances can be traced back to the foolishness of two teenage boys, who decided to pay at a photo shop using a forged 500-franc note.

 

Because of the narrative simplicity and Bresson’s use of impassive dialogue and faces, it is easy to mistake the film for being emotionally detached. The actors themselves show incredible restraint, and Bresson’s use of perfect framing and very precise composition give a calculative impression. Both are particularly evident during the scene in which Elise discovers her husband, Yvon, is in jail. Given their scant living conditions and dependent child, we expect Yvon’s wife to feel a great degree of loss and display a look of shock or, at the least, a few sobs of grief. Instead, we are shown her sitting on a plain wooden bench, with her hands demurely folded on her lap and her face quietly bowed. Even when Yvon is sentenced to three years in prison, the only reaction shot that we see of Elise is of her similarly sitting on a bench at court, framed by the stark empty benches around her.

Within this short sequence, Elise’s emotional turmoil, deprived of any dialogue and accompanied only by diegetic sound, is thereby bound within her actions. It is this passive, silent action of sitting, followed only by the simple action of rising to leave the court room, that speaks louder than any verbalized language of grief. This is perhaps because we are invited to discover her emotion through her actions, much like the way we are obliged to do so in real life. Our intimate experiences of others’ intense traumas are never wholly spelt out for us via explanatory narration nor melancholy strings playing in the background. Rather, we are left to piece together their internal despair by quietly observing their actions and interpreting them as emotional symbols. Similarly, when watching Elise sitting down, we experience her grief the same way we experience others’ grievances in reality, constrained to using our imagination to fill in for absent information. Bresson gives us the space to discover her despair for ourselves, and her despair, then, becomes real to us.  

This personalized discovery of emotion is used throughout the entire film, creating an even stronger connection between the audience and the story. When Yvon murders the entire household towards the end of the film, we are informed of the murder through the actions of the dog, as the camera pans along his frenzied movement, up and down, past the corpses. By using the dog as an agent of information, we are given the chance to “discover” the murder, rather than being forthright informed of it, further allowing us to actively participate in the film’s emotional environment.

This discovery-type experience is also paired with an omission of the actual moment of violence. Bresson purposefully cuts straight from the building of tension to the consequences of the act of violence that the preceding shots had been building towards. For example, when Yvon attempts suicide, we see him hiding a mound of pills behind his prison bed before the film cuts immediately to an ambulance pulling away. Later, when Yvon murders the hotel keepers, we are again spared the details of the actual murder and see, instead, blood swirling down a bathroom sink. By sparing us these moments of climax, Bresson also spares us the risk of finding such moments unbelievable. Furthermore, the omissions isolate human action so that we become aware of their limitations: one simple scene of an ambulance driving away is forced to contain the full emotional significance of Yvon’s attempted suicide, just as the Elise’s mute sitting must contain her whole despair. Instead of limiting our emotional experience of the film, these tightly contained expressions heighten the film’s emotional impact. After all, the most difficult form of grief is one in which we are left to our imagination, forced to re-create scenes of death which we’ve never witnessed nor were fully informed of, compelled to guess the exact details as to how a loved one may have perished.

Redefining the First-Person Perspective in Film (Jin)

Film calls for a new definition of the first-person perspective. In literature, it is easier to define; the words are arranged so that they mimic the running verbal narratives in our head, and the first-person perspective can therefore be defined as our internal narrator whose role is to identify the visual world via names and labels. Using this internal narration, we attempt to contain and identify our world within one language, our verbal language. However, film carries an ability to transcend from this verbal language into the visual one, thereby also transcending from an absorption of a simple verbal narrative to the experience of a sensory narrative. Therefore, when creating a film in the first-person perspective, we arrive at the question: how does one experience the world?  

The most common way of describing one’s perception of the world is through the consciousness of time. We are, in fact, so conscious of time that it has become a given. We automatically assume that we live in the present by building on the past, looking into the future, and so forth, as though our existence can be carefully partitioned into “the before,” “the now,” and “the later.” When examining the way in which our memories are stored, however, the division of time is not at all central to our stream of consciousness. We do not store our memories as though looking back on certain events from time to time, via some mental filing system. Instead, our perception of the now is wholly interwoven with the past, to the point in which the two are inseparable. We may give labels to our memories (“these are from the far past,” “these are from the recent past”), but our memories, regardless of when they were created, are still inherently in the present.

Therefore, when creating a narrative that is entirely from an internalized perspective of one character, it would not make much sense to have a linear progression of time and a singular building of events. Rather, the narrative becomes a mix of the perception of the present moment via sight and hearing, and the memories that are inherently linked, brought forth by sensory stimuli. Furthermore, the coherence of the plot becomes less significant than the creation of a system of logic specific to the simulated world. It is just as how, when we think, our own thoughts may make perfect sense to us while being entirely nonsensical to others; each of us creates an isolated, internalized system of logic through which we individually interpret our world. Similarly, a film narrative can be created so that, when logically pried apart, the plot may not make much sense, but the viewers, in the moment of viewing it, can make sense of it, because they experiencing from the protagonist’s perspective.

A first-person film could thereby be defined as a combination of this internalized system of logic with the visceral processing of the present, and ultimately, the visual and audial expression of this combination as a cinematic experience. Most films, whether or not attempting to create this first-person perspective, only succeed in accomplishing one of the two components. They can therefore be separated into two categories: films that sustain themselves on an internalized system of logic and films that mimic our visceral processing of the world.

Alma & Elisabet in Bergman's Persona

Bergman’s Persona is an example of a film suspended within the very specific system of logic created by two protagonists, Elisabet and Alma. Elisabet, the mentally ill patient and actress, is under the care of Alma, a nurse, and their two personalities begin to fuse in a series of surreal interactions. These interactions are expressed via specific instants in which the two characters’ physical and mental realities overlap: Alma takes the place of Elisabet when suddenly shown making love to Elisabet’s husband, and Alma’s and Elisabet’s bodies seem to meld when standing side by side or their ghostly faces overlaid over each other. The film is not driven by a chronological progression of events but by an extreme psychological violence expressed within a very systematic exchange of emotional energy. One cannot describe the characters’ twisting relationship as logically comprehensible, but they form their own logic through an association of images: of Elisabet drawing away from Alma in fear, of Alma breathing across the neck of Elisabet who is asleep and subdued, of the two women constantly exchanging roles of the dominant and submissive. The viewers cannot escape from this visual logic that suspends the two characters, and the extent to which the film is imbued with their psychotic internal presence is near suffocating.

The second category of first-person film, the film which mimic our visceral processing, is best observable in experimental films like those of Stan Brakhage. Brakhage most heavily relies on the metaphor of the “untutored eye,” his idea of seeing the world primarily through pure perception. He employs flashing images, repetitive movements, and an intent focus on singular details such as swirling leaves or a swaying cat’s paw to evoke a sensory experience. By isolating physical elements within a tightly woven rhythm of cuts, he awakens a new consciousness of our physical reality without turning it into an incomprehensible abstract. The trembling close-ups of human flesh, the reoccurrence of blurred lights and wavering reflections, are not dense symbols but keen details of the real; they provoke an awareness rather than an obtuse contemplation of what is symbolic. Each of these details are innately tied to a certain sensory feeling, whether it be taste, touch, or sight, and each elicits our own memories that echo such sensations. Brakhage leaves room for us to perceive our own world via his, and his films are like visualized memories inviting us to accept them as our own. 

If Bergman's and Brakhage's works represent two forms of a first-person film, what would it mean to combine the two styles to make one whole? Could one successfully create a film that both sustains the viewers in an internalized system of logic, while also mimicking the sensual perception of the physical world? For us, this reconciliation of two parts is innate; our perception of the present moment and our self-sustained logical interpretation of it are the only true constituents of our consciousness. To have these two parts simultaneously work together within a film would be to create a pure first-person experience and to truly grant the film a real human consciousness.  

Cinema as a Medium for Obsession (Jin)

Cinema distinguishes itself by simultaneously being an experience and an object. The combination of these two states of being allows cinema to become the best medium for expressing the psyche and our obsessions. By employing images as a vehicle for memory, film is an experience of other peoples’ obsessions, and by acting as an object to be possessed, film is the obsession turned external. Therefore, cinema is inherently an object of obsession, an experience turned into a tangible expression of our internal world.

No other form of art is capable of matching cinema’s ability to express one’s psyche. Theatre is an experience, but unlike cinema, its live performance cannot be possessed by any one individual nor be replayed. Painting or any other two-dimensional art can be possessed, but it employs the action of observing rather than experiencing. The only form of art that may pose as a viable match is music–-it can be an experience, such as at a concert, or a possession, such as the music we store in our phones. However, music fails to employ the visual, and when it comes to the formation of obsession, the image plays a crucial role.

It is through image that cinema is capable of becoming a medium for obsession. This is because image itself is innately tied to the recollection of memory. Film is often mistaken for being an imitation of the way in which we perceive the world, because the camera is thought to be an “eye” objectively capturing our physical reality. However, though the camera may be objective in the formation of the image itself, the images that are produced and then connected together are extremely subjective. As Susan Sontag wrote, “the distinctive unit of films is not the image but the principle of connection between the images, the relation of a ‘shot’ to the one that receded it and the one that comes after.” This connection of images, and the resulting sequences of images that constitute the film, is much like the flickering of memories within our own mind. When we try to recollect a specific person or event, we see image after image of, perhaps, the person’s face, a certain chair, or some isolated action. Our memories are montages of specific images, and film also being a montage of images, speaks using the internal language of our consciousness. Film is not an imitation of how we see the world but rather of how we process the world internally.

To add to its effect, the filmic image is felt as being the most realistic when compared to the images of other arts. This is not just due to the camera’s ability to capture “life as is” but due to the way in which film characterizes its subjects. If we were to only focus on the realism of form, theatre would far surpass cinema due to its employment of live, physical subjects. However, because film is a psychological experience, the weight of its effects lie on the characterization of the subject, in the use of a technique called “off-centering.” When watching a character on screen, we are most drawn to the small details that creates the summation of a character. As an example, Sontag describes “the pingpong toy the schoolmaster toys with in Ivory’s Shakespeare Wallah" as being the most potent detail regarding the character. When briefly considered, the inclusion of such details may seem insignificant, but they provide a depth to the characters that, if missing, immediately cause the viewers to perceive the characters as “flat” or “poorly written.” Allardyce Nicoll wrote on the difference between theatre and film, saying, “Practically all effectively drawn stage characters are types [while] in cinema we demand individualization…and impute greater power of independent life to the figures on the screen.” Because theatre employs characters that act as archetypes, each given a specific role that must be fulfilled by the end of the play, the characters are perceived as self-contained “parts” of a larger story, rather than as people whom we can actively relate to. The characters of theatre live and die on the stage, but the characters of film do not. Instead, they remain preserved in the film, in an intimately real world of their own that exists as long as the film remains intact.

Given film’s effect of imitating human memory and its heightened realism, it is unsurprising that film best captures obsession and almost always involves some element of obsession, whether it be a repeated visual motif or a topic addressing the filmmaker's own personal obsession. Obsession is not an activity reserved for those with obsessive psychoses (because after all, aren’t most mental illnesses an over-exaggeration of the mental processes already present in a “healthy” mind?), but an activity that we partake daily, through the conscious or subconscious contemplation of certain reoccurring objects. Therefore, by turning the obsession into the external, an object that we can grasp and better understand, film may be one of our best sources of psychological catharsis or best defense mechanism. Michel Foucault wrote on madness that, "one can escape the present only by putting something in its place" and by the repetition of "the factitious, imaginary past of substitutions." What better substitute exists than film, an art which speaks directly to our inward mind? 

In some films, the presence of obsession is more obvious than in others: Yorgos Lanthimos, the director of the recent Killing of a Sacred Deer, creates in all of his films a specific set of rules which are inevitably broken by a character, who is then punished. For example, in his film The Lobster, a man is caught masturbating, which is strictly forbidden, and therefore punished by being forced to stick his hand in a toaster. In reduced terms, one could argue that this reoccurring theme of punishment is Lanthimos’s obsession brought to life on screen.

However, in other films, the presence of obsession has been given more poignant roles. The most striking example is The Film of Her, a found footage short film made by Bill Morrison. A protagonist of the film is a Library of Congress clerk who, fixated on a specific woman he saw in a porn film as a young boy, is compelled to save a vault full of early cinema paper reels from the incinerator. The film is a montage of the paper reel films, thereby acting as a direct embodiment of the clerk's obsession, while also telling the story of his obsession. His obsession has become its own entity, the film, and even more strikingly, his obsession is with the beauty of images. The images are beautiful, not only because they are being reborn, but also because they are transient. We are reminded that, although film does not fade and revise itself as our memories do, it is a tangible vessel for memories (ours, the filmmakers', the subjects') that when breached, suffers a demise not much different from our own. 

 

Stop-Motion: We the Objects, the Film Our Stage (Jin)

We remain obsessed with dolls– as children, we’d learnt to create for ourselves plastic avatars of our play objects, and now, as adults, we remain trapped in this transference of self and the imagining of scenarios, albeit in a more subtle and subconscious form. Our innate desire to play god by exerting control over self-replicas, which had been so apparent in our childhood, is now forced to manifest itself through other means besides playing with plastic. We turn to the most malleable form of art: film.

Film has become our stage, our new avatar. It is our way of seeking liberation from the present, through both the role of filmmaker and of spectator. A filmmaker, by creating a new reality in film, has established himself as god, or a creator of truth, thereby also creating for us a stage on which we can imagine ourselves occupying via the actors on screen. For the duration of the film, we may briefly forget our own selves and revel in the illusionary power obtained through the observation of a contained, controlled world. Although this experience is applicable for all genres of film, stop-motion film is particularly well-suited in depicting this stage-spectator relationship.

The stop-motion genre is becoming increasingly abandoned, but two Surrealist films, Jabberwocky by Jan Svankmajer and Street of Crocodiles by the Quay brothers, successfully tapped into its potential. Stop-motion reveals its power through its direct and quite literal replacement of people with dolls and objects, all photographed in movement through the real world. There is no greater embodiment of a film acting as a stage upon which we can insert ourselves; the movements that we see are simultaneously real (because, despite their fantastical motions, they are still taking place in the real world, the source of its movements simply hidden in the ellipses of the film) while overtly illusionary (because the actions themselves, i.e. a still object coming to life and dancing, are undeniably impossible). It is this paradoxical juxtaposition of the real and the illusion that grants stop-motion an even greater power: despite the spectator’s constant awareness of its impossibility, the illusion still retains a degree of possibility, because its movements are so directly fixed in the real world.

 

Props from "Street of Crocodiles"

Both Svankmajer and the Quay brothers carefully create their world using everyday objects, and in doing so, construct a type of reality that is synchronously familiar and new. When watching their films, we are instantly familiar with the plastic doll heads, the classic wooden chair, the ordinary metal screw, the lightbulb– it is a new reality pieced together with fragments of our own, thereby reading as a rearrangement, rather than an entirely alien atmosphere, like those created via CGI in Marvel superhero movies. This is the primary way in which the film becomes a more immersive stage, by creating a setting that is strongly felt as a replica of our own, rather than a complete departure. It is the imminently real turned into a tangible unreal. To add on to the effect, the objects themselves are antiquated and gritty, as though pervaded with both the refuse of life and its sentimentality. They are not just objects but relics fingerprinted with the presence of an external world, our own.

Just as they attempt to close the boundary between our world and theirs, the filmmakers also attempt to erase the dichotomy between the real and the absurd, between life and death. Particularly in Jabberwocky, all extremities coexist in the sudden perversion of the childlike, as a cannibalistic doll daintily devours plastic body parts or is torn apart as smaller dolls scramble out of its body. Akin to the traditional Grimm’s fairy tales, there is a natural blending of children- storytelling and the grotesque; the cannibalistic, brute dolls are an embodiment of death merged with life, further highlighted by added scenes of fresh fruit giving way to worms and of a folding knife, when closed on itself, paradoxically stabs itself and gushes blood.

Through Svankmajer’s and the Quay brothers’ ingenious use of stop motion, we find a caricature of both ourselves and our lives. The absurdity of juxtaposed life and death, of dolls rent apart to reveal gore, and of underworlds composed of human artifacts, is felt keenly as a subconscious stage for us to enter and as a replica reality directly born from our own. In the substitution of human actors with doll characters, the films rekindle our inherent affinity for playing god, and through it, hint at an even greater truth. Heinrich von Kleist once wrote on marionettes, insisting that, because they are not bound to the earth like we are, they exceed the grace of any human being, and that only through the self-consciousness of our own limitations, we can achieve a degree of that grace. Svankmajer and the Quay brothers give us the liberation that we need from our human limitations, by instilling in us the constant self-consciousness of their films' illusion, while simultaneously allowing for us to enter the illusion, to play on the stage as spectator-dolls. 

Finding a New God in Film (Jin)

 

 

The vampire movie genre has become so hopelessly imbued with the increasily cheesy image of Count Dracula and the overtly romanticized Twilight vampires, that it’d be a waste of time to argue that the film Let the Right One In could redeem the genre as a whole. When watching this film, it is best to forget the vampire context entirely and instead judge it with fresh expectations: not as a horror or romance movie, but as a film reframing human loneliness.

Oskar, the protagonist, with his elvish white hair and equally pale skin, is the perfect picture of adolescent frailty. Nothing conveys loneliness better than the spindly twelve-year old kid being viciously assaulted by school bullies. He is entirely defenseless against his tormentors, and when set against the stark landscape of Swedish winter, his despair is painfully palpable.

By the time his unlikely savior appears in the shape of a small scruffy girl, Eli, we’ve already grown a strong attachment to Oskar. Despite showing hints of nascent homicidal tendencies, such as collecting newspaper clippings of murder cases and habitually play-acting stabbing his bullies, Oskar and his alienation in his divorced home background and complete friendlessness stirs our own childhood memories of loneliness. He carries a deep-rooted longing for understanding that is seeded in each and every one of us, and watching Eli finally fulfilling Oskar’s aching need of a friend is nearly cathartic. The fact that she happens to be a centuries-old vampire and that she possesses a pedophilic, middle-aged caretaker, Håkan, fades away into the background when watching her and Oskar experience emotional intimacy for the first time. As they are lying in bed together, Eli playfully tapping her fingers along Oskar’s back, she is no longer a brutal murderer and he is no longer the troubled child. They are simply two children, bound by a keen longing for companionship.   

The film’s poignancy rises, not just from its ability to draw out our empathy, but on its contextual dissection of the human condition: isolation. Each character, such as the bullies, Håkan, and Oskar’s neighbors, are all marked by traces of loneliness, whether it be helplessly tormenting Oskar in fear of being bullied himself or living alone in a dim apartment broiling with cats. More importantly, each one has found themselves an object of worship: the schoolkid worships the bully leader, the isolated neighbor worships his cats, Håkan worships Eli, and more. Though the film does not rely heavily on religious references, Eli serves in clearly establishing the film’s existential worldview. Oskar, in his suffering, has created himself a religion. First, by poring over the murder-case newspaper clippings and recreating himself as a brutal avenger in his imagination, then by selecting Eli as his physical deity. Eli becomes his messiah, in a fitting reflection of her namesake, the Biblical prophet Eli.

Oskar’s obsessive reliance on this self-imposed religion, however, is not portrayed as a perversion, but rather, an innately human experience. It is a clear portrayal of carnal longing, the desire to fill an inner loneliness, that we, by nature, can fully identify with. Here, the real enemy is not violence nor the loss of morality, as many gore-ridden films are prone to depicting, but isolation. Isolation is the ultimate enemy that everyone fights individually, regardless of situation or social position. In other words, in the film (and perhaps in reality), isolation is humanity’s universal condition. Regardless of how much love one may receive or pour into another, the inner void can only be partially filled, and one is thereby forced to constantly seek objects of worship as temporary alleviation. Isolation is the greatest problem that remains unsolvable, and therefore, any attempt to solve it, no matter how destructive or morally ambiguous, is fully justifiable.

This worldview is further heightened by the film’s use of realism. Violence itself is presented as a natural act; it is an examination of human nature running its course, or rather, human nature given its chance to reveal itself. Stylistic choices, such as showing most of Eli’s attacks as long shots, having the massacre to take place off-screen, and avoiding the use of visual clichés such as jump-cuts and rapid cutting, allow for an objective consideration. Such assaults seem like a matter of survival: Eli finds no joy in killing her human victims, and when Håkan, her helper, murders for her sake, there’s an emphasis on his human clumsiness and horrifying matter-of-factness. Håkan is forced to drag a corpse on a red, plastic sleigh, comically grunting and slipping through the dense snow, and even shoos away a passerby’s poodle that starts lapping at a pool of blood. The violence becomes all the more understandable and relatable, because the film purposefully includes the messy, physical details that precedes or preludes the real killing of people.

The film surpasses most standard depictions of deity worship by redefining what is the ideal god. Eli has spent centuries in alienation, receiving one-sided love from a series of human servants. This indicates that Eli, despite possessing the incredible strength that Oskar needs in defeating his bullies, has equal need of Oskar and his love. This is the exact god we want for ourselves: a god who, despite possessing the greater power we desire, loves us because it needs us. It is not a god that only demands worship, but rather, returns our worship. Perhaps this is why this film so effectively draws us in– it is the depiction of an equivalent exchange, like an ideal human relationship, and of a god figure stunningly made sympathetic. 

On the Beach at Night Alone: Are We Spectators or Participators? (Jin)

Hong Sang-soo’s On the Beach at Night Alone is strangely aloof and just as strangely piercing. At first glance, it is hard to grasp why the film strikes such an emotional chord; the story is clean and simple, lingering on scene after scene of leisurely smoking, drinking coffee, and clinking soju shot glasses. However, with each alcohol-heavy conversation, a strong poeticism takes shape that encapsulates more than plain loneliness.

The film explores the emotional aftermath of a forgotten love affair between an actress and a film director. The main character, the actress, speaks in a peculiarly straightforward manner, to the extent in which her words waver between poetic and sparse. The film, despite being executed in a similarly straightforward manner, also wavers between dream and reality, a tasteful performance and improvised outbursts. When examining the film background, the lack of clarity is understandable. The film is a metaphor for a real love affair that had occurred between Kim Min-hee, who plays the actress protagonist Young-hee, and the already married director of the film, Hong Sang-soo. The film was released shortly after their infamous scandal, and just as the film’s stylistic choices mingle the narrative and real fact, Young-hee seems to push the boundary between scripted acting and real revelation.

 

Director Hong Sang-soo with actress Kim Min-hee

To the South Korean audience, who violently condemned the adulterous love, the underlying question was glaring: how will Kim Min-hee and Hong Sang-soo justify their relationship? The film, surprisingly, leaves room for interpretation. It is far from being a gimmicky allegory or desperate plea for public sympathy. Instead, it is reminiscent of the primitive driving force behind all cinema: the expression of universal emotions. Cinema, at its core, is both an imitation of the real life and an imposed reduction of reality into something more understandable. By masking unavoidably real people in a metaphysical, semi-fictional setting, the film awakens the audience’s awareness of this intention.

The film invites the audience to become witnesses of an objective documentation of human emotion. Conspicuous zoom shots are a constant reminder that the actors are real human subjects shot on camera, and the blunt dialogue erects a barrier just thick enough to cast a slight emotional distance between the viewer and the film. We are obliged to take a step back and become observers, or perhaps judges, of a quiet cinematic argument. We have the warm satisfaction of having the power to clearly examine the whole situation; we can easily read the emotional context and motives behind the characters’ words and actions, whether it be repeatedly claiming that someone looks older than his age or hurriedly pouring another shot of soju.

Just as we are getting comfortable in this position of power, however, Hong Sang-soo throws in shockingly direct verbal confrontations between the protagonist and other characters. A drunk Young-hee lashes out, violently spitting words across the dining table at her equally drunk accompaniment, declaring, “You can’t love! You are not capable of love and you do not deserve to be loved!” With her outburst, we are abruptly dragged into the heat of the moment and forced to reckon with the full force of unbridled emotion. We are no longer spectators but participants guilty of playing the same messy game of love.

Overall, the film's quiet revelation of human thought suggests a sort of beauty born from conditional ignorance. We are beautiful because we are unaware; despite how the world may seem frightfully simple, we are hopelessly trapped in our inward distresses. It is only when this inner turmoil becomes mute and when one becomes a distant observer, that one is able to then notice a hushed poeticism hiding in daily conversations and actions. Through film, Hong Sang-soo grants us this privilege of lingering on others’ suffering as though we do not suffer from our own. We are, very briefly, gods.