Author | Liu Bingyi

Korean directors have a fixed style and heavy traces of authors. No one is above Hong Shangxiu.

The eternal topic of gender, awkward aesthetics, disenchantment of intellectuals, the disruption and reorganization of time structure, keeping at arm's length with the audience, and digging deep into human nature in repeated daily conversations while emphasizing the presence of cameras. Hong Shangxiu often puts the morality and lust of intellectuals on the dining table full of beer bottles and ashtrays, disturbing time and space, which is more like a game than a trial.

Stills of "Here and then"

Wine and cigarettes

Hong Shangxiu loves wine, and he probably heard about it from the intellectuals invited home by his mother when he was in middle school. So you will see many scenes of drinking and smoking in Hong's works.

In Coffee and Cigarettes, an experimental film composed of 1 1, Jia shows almost all kinds of embarrassing postures of human beings. You will find that coffee and cigarettes can have so many topics and situations here, and also breed differences between people: the exchange of experience about quitting smoking, the discussion about whether it is appropriate to eat cigarettes and coffee together, and a pair of cousins from cigarettes and coffee.

Cate Cate Blanchett plays two roles in Coffee and Cigarettes. The lives and personalities of the two sisters are totally different.

Similarly, in daily conversation, Jia prefers to design humorous and ingenious ideas to present the eternal alienation of human beings.

In Hong Shangxiu's films, coffee was replaced by wine. They can also be regarded as symbols of rationality and sensibility respectively. Compared with refreshing coffee, alcohol has become a catalyst for these intellectuals to shed their identity coats.

In Hong Shangxiu's films, smoke plays an even greater role, because it can serve as a bridge to communicate with strangers, while wine can open the valve of emotion. This can also be regarded as the free play of tobacco, alcohol, tea and sugar as human lubricants in eastern culture. In addition, the embellishment of smoke is sometimes just a gesture of literary youth.

The actress's attempt to befriend the director in Right Now is Wrong, the stranger's praise of Ryo Kase in Freedom Mountain, and the action of waking up in the morning after a hangover and handing out a cigarette are all confrontation and embarrassment in daily life.

Stills of Freedom Mountain

male and female

In fact, in Hong Shangxiu's films, these directors, writers, painters and so-called intellectuals are different from the pioneers who advocated social reform and ideological emancipation in the west in the last century, or the intellectuals who were persecuted in the political whirlpool. Contemporary intellectuals are more inclined to urban careers, and aiming the camera at their daily conversations is the first step to disenchantment.

Stills of "We are Good at Xi"

Moreover, the intellectuals in Hong's films are not the cynical self-mockery of Woody Allen or the psychological state of Hou Mai, but more like Kundera's exploration of human nature, which is not bright but understandable. At the same time, it is similar in structure to polyphonic novels that disrupt the time order.

We Be Kind to Xi presents a very interesting and euphemistic irony from the perspective of three men. Three men fell in love with the same woman for shallow and blind reasons, and repeated the same evaluation of the mountain. Until the last three men met, they were still at a loss. Among them, untimely music also sounded in cafes, becoming an embarrassing and funny part.

Stills of "We are Good at Xi"

We will see that women are mostly in the position of the object of desire in movies, which is also the general cognition of the patriarchal society. Hong Shangxiu regards women as objects of desire in many of his films, but this reflects the stupidity of men. In fact, on the other hand, the relationship between Shan and the professor is not pure, which also stems from the exchange motivation of women pursuing practical interests in love.

In the new film "Yourself and Yourself", Hong Shangxiu once again puts the two sexes on the opposite side, and women are also the objects, but what he sees is the anxiety of men.

You and all your photos.

The host's release show had a dream of "scaring herself" because she heard rumors from her friends that her girlfriend Mingzhen had violated the abstinence agreement and had a fight with others. Girlfriend quarreled with her and left, and she dated another man (also Min Zhen's ex-boyfriend). Yingxiu herself constantly reflected and repented, and finally struggled to get Mei Zhen back.

This dream probably started with an old score between a man and his girlfriend. Because of her distrust of her girlfriend, Min Zhen was a disloyal image from the beginning in Yingxiu's dream.

If Hong Shangxiu takes what we usually do in love this time, men as hunters and women as objects of desire, and through the exchange of these two roles, as a counterattack against the cancer of straight men, then there is no need to put this film into a feminist framework.

You and all your photos.

Because Min Zhen is a very vague image in her dream. She is either a woman who has lost her mind or memory, or a dabbler who is too busy to control herself. Even in the dream, it seems that she is no longer Min Zhen, or a twin, or just bumped into her face. This is probably the origin of another name of this film, "It's not you who love you".

And finally, when Min Zhen escaped from the embarrassing scene, curled up in the shadow and sobbed, and faced the confession that her lover was "not as good as starting over", her almost amnesia-like performance and naive reconciliation proved the male consciousness's imagination of the lack of female intelligence.

Projecting such a crazy female image from a man's dream, or constantly dabbling in it, actually exposes a man's anxiety about lovelorn, which is greater than the suspicion of cheating on his lover.

It's like drowning the bad news with a worse one. So it became an overcorrected introspection.

You and all your photos.

On the other hand, this kind of introspection is quite straight male cancer. Yingxiu reflected and repented not because of her trust in Min Rong, but because of her naive imagination, which portrayed her boyfriend as a low-level conversation and awkward conversation, so as to rebuild the preciousness of love between herself and Min Rong.

We like to watch Hong Shangxiu's movies, not because of his ambiguous behavior between men and women, nor because it is exactly what the tagger wants; Instead, I like all kinds of decoding and interpretation in movies, as well as the constant revision of feelings in gender dialogue. Finally, Qian Fan passed away and returned to the bright light.

You and all your photos.

Dream and time

Hong Shangxiu's experiment on dreams or nonlinear narratives is also the disenchantment process of the eternal problem of love.

In Yourself and Everything You Have, the words of psychoanalyst Fromm are really appropriate in this film-the role of dreams is to explore the interpersonal relationship of dreamers and help them find the answers to these questions.

What's interesting is not straight cancer, nor flirting on the wine table; It is interesting to tell the story of complexity itself with a simple structure.

You and all your photos.

Hong Shangxiu has the strength to face and psychological needs of men and women in love. These little thoughts are not so glorious, catching shadows, often passing by ethics, and you will find them so real.

Mountain of Freedom is my favorite movie of Hong. Ryo Kase's Japanese should have met his old lover, but he also met a stranger while waiting.

"Freedom Mountain" stills

In this film, the time is completely disrupted, and the charm of the lines is more prominent. What is interesting about Hong Shangxiu's lines here is that at first glance, these dialogues are boring and everyday, but they are full of hints about time and gender interpretation. This complex space-time leaves an impression and connects the plots together. This kind of game is very rewarding. It confronts the old moral wall with the true feelings of strangers' communication, which is fresh, lovely and helpless.

In addition to dialogue and exploration, the protagonists in Hong's films often talk to themselves in the form of diaries.

Night and Day is to show a man's self-pulling between lust and morality. The shield of "overcoming temptation" in Christianity helped him stop his ex-girlfriend who had had six abortions for him, but he couldn't stop the beautiful woman played by Eun-hye Park, so a married man kept dreaming a guilty dream.

Still life of night and day

In the second half of the film, the above scenes clearly show the contradiction of the protagonist. The last shot was attracted by the lady playing the piano, the next shot looked down, and then there was a picture of the suffering of San Francesco cathedral glass.

Many times, moral sense and guilt are rooted in the same root. Intellectuals are not sages, just like Tayu Lo sang "We all commit crimes during the day and repent at night".

The characters in Hong Shangxiu's movies eat, drink, smoke and walk, but their moral anxiety is beyond words. In addition, the soundtrack in the movie is often the sound in the scene, which also makes the movie closer to life.

Stills of The Day When a Pig Fell into a Well

Speaking of Hong Shangxiu, we often talk about the author's theory, and a director's style may be his expression. Compared with Li Cangdong and Jin Jide, who also hold the titles of author and director, Hong Shangxiu's style and theme are more fixed, but each time there are new subtleties in theme and structure.

Hong Shangxiu, as the first independent film director in Korea, has been 20 years since his first film The Day the Pig Fell into the Well. Up to now, he still maintains the efficiency of one or two films a year, and his works are rarely influenced by commercial factors. He can continue his experimental spirit and even be active in the entertainment sector. So it seems that he himself is not as anxious as the protagonists in the film.

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