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Document Type

Article

Abstract

In Hong Sangsoo's second film, The Power of Kangwon Province (Gang-wondo-ui him, 1998), two former lovers, unbeknownst to one another, travel simultaneously from Seoul to the resort area of Kangwon, spending the week-end there without ever meeting. The film begins with the woman's visit to Kangwon Province by train, her return to Seoul, and her sudden return trip to Kangwon Province to see a man she met there during her earlier trip. At the end of her second visit—much to the surprise of first-time viewers--Hong disrupts the chronology that has been established to begin the events solely involving the woman's former lover. This portion of the narrative begins some time before his trip to Kangwon Province and leads to his decision to go there. When he begins his trip, Hong repeats the shot of the young woman in the train's passenger car on her way to Kangwon Province with which the film began to signal that the two trips coincide with one another during the same diegetic time despite how viewers experience them in the film as widely separated occurrences. In effect, Hong restructures diegetic time to keep the two characters apart. Visualizing the film's narrative as a single, chronological sequence suggests that Hong resorted to an achronological ordering of events to avoid having to present the two trips simultaneously. Curiously, however, the movement of characters in and out of the frame or into the depth of a shot in both visits present multiple cues within these two widely separated portions of the film that Hong actually staged and shot the two visits so they could be combined into a single, chronologically continuous sequence by simply alternating their shots and sequences. Following a visual explanation of the logic of intercutting two lines of action, I combine the two visits according to this logic to construct an extended passage of parallel editing comprised of more than one hundred shots. Though there are narrative reasons for presenting the two visits separately, in the context of his preceding and following films, shooting the two visits so they might be combined coherently into a single chronology, reflects Hong's interest in his first three feature films in finding ways to express chronological relationships without reference to specific clock time. In his first film, The Day a Pig Fell into a Well (Doejiga umul-e ppajin nal, 1996), Hong signals the temporal relationship of four lines of action solely by wall calendars. In his third film, Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (Oh!, Soojung!, 2000), Hong combines the strategies he used in his first two films to construct the chronology of a couples' romantic history. Just as he split a couples' single day in Kangwon Province into two strands of action, here he treats the course of a couple's much longer relationship in a similar manner. Unlike the hidden possibility revealed in this essay of intercutting the two visits in The Power of Kangwon Province into a single chronology, Hong challenges viewers in Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors to use cues in the film to combine the couple's separately presented lines of action into a single, coherent chronology.

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