I remember reading an essay by Stan Brakhage, where he describes projecting Sergei Eisenstein's films for his students out of focus. The idea was that, in reducing the pictorial field to only light and dark shapes, you would appreciate what's communicated by composition and juxtaposition alone. I think he said he got the idea from a friend, who'd declared that in order to understand poetry, you must listen to it read aloud in an unfamiliar language, because only then do you respond to it as sound. There's something attractive about the idea of an essential truth that weaves its way through human expression, and becomes more visible when we ignore the semantic layer. This essential force would be something like Walter Benjamin's "pure language," which transcends the word. In pure language there is no longer anything that needs to be expressed, so primordial is its operation, is its place of residence, in that time before Babel and the confusion of tongues. We write to recover this language, Benjamin argues, but only God can remember it. We know it then by the void our communication orbits, and by which it must always fail. Failure characterises our relationship to the void of pure language, but it also ensures our work is productive, and enjoyable. Had a pure language of cinema been discovered in those classes, there would no longer be a reason to make films.

I remembered Brakhage's essay, and the productive role of failure, while watching In Water, which has been shot out of focus. Unlike Introduction there's no mention of weakening eyesight here, and so it almost seems like any Hong film from the past ten years, only projected out of focus. The characters are pointedly oblivious to the theme of blindness, and to the blurriness of the recording, meaning this is something the viewer alone must bear. It's important, I think, that Hong's work does not need to be shot or projected out of focus to distil the visual field into a few components, for the clarity of his approach already renders things in these terms. Plenty could be added, but nothing could be taken away, other than the signs of social error that animate his work. In other words, Hong renders in meticulous clarity, the diverse faces of linguistic failure. He communicates through linguistic failure, articulating in one go the symptom of our unease and the only cure: more words, more error. To return to the idea we can remove a work's semantic layer to expose the traces of pure language, for Hong the semantic layer is all there is. The medium only works in service of communication, and all communication is bound by the repetition of its own failure to overcome the need to communicate, which would be the advent of pure language. Behind our failed attempts to communicate, there is nothing, and this nothingness is why we continue to try. Hong's work is already the result of a radical reduction, and what's left is not eternal clarity but the dynamism of miscommunication.

Effacing the visual field in In Water reduces the field of miscommunication. This is a new issue: it allows the film to communicate too easily. Seoung-mo wants to direct his film, Sang-guk wants to shoot it, and Nam-hee wants to act in it. They eat, drink, talk, and begin to shoot it. The film opens with this intention and it closes with the intention met. Distilled to its essence, if such a thing exists, there is less than nothing here, if nothing designates the void in which something may appear. This less-than-nothing prohibits arrival and departure, for these are the domain of uncertainty. In Water uses its visual uncertainty to usher an empty certainty, where we can take people at their word, accept them as the selves they pretend to be, and accept that what is said is all there is to know. This is worrying. Hong's films are devoted to capturing how, where words appear, frowns, flinches, verbal and physical hesitations will always follow. These responses indicate a variety of meanings the words lack, and Hong knows it's the words' lack that gives rise to these responses. The restlessness of his approach as a filmmaker mirrors the restless communicativeness of his characters: words are deployed to close some initial lack or distance, and on arrival they produce new uncertainties, repeating the need for words. Words without uncertainty can't communicate the breadth of communication, which is defined by the misunderstandings that provoke meaning. In the absence of meaning a person is reduced to what can be said, which for Hong is like death.

Of course In Water is both an experiment in reduction, and something personally felt. Hong's eyes are failing. I've already said how technique here doesn't expose the ecstasy of pure language, but the cold elimination of meaning. This loss of information, even or particularly when information is frustrating and misleading, is now a fact of life. Because life in these films is defined by miscommunication, In Water puts us in the position of ghosts, watching the living from a distance, longing for their confusion. The location scouting scene is particularly heartbreaking. Seoung-mo finds a perfectly nondescript path in which to stage a scene, and then Sang-guk and Nam-hee start to identify the objects that make up this perfectly nondescript site. They discuss the different rocks, and the flower of the rapeseed, before touching the stone wall. Rather than pointing us to these details and creating a haptic connection to the site, all of this emphasises distance. Another scene with Seoung-mo and a neighbour achieves a kind of beauty, only to show us again how our senses have been betrayed. The sun has coloured the stones in the garden a warm peach, and so it feels as though we can sense temperature through colour, even if the details are unclear. When Sang-guk and Nam-hee return, however, they complain about the cold, that they need to layer more jackets, that this is, of course, off-season. Scenes on the cliffs transform the ocean into solids. The human figures on the beach below are given eerie gravitas, with long silhouettes, as still as sculptures. We then find ourselves down on the beach. Our protagonists are both the sculptures we saw below and the observers above. They're layering and repeating themselves across the film's landscape, an uncanny miniature they will leave but we never can.

Written 9 April 2026