From LACMA FILM:

“EXHIBITION SERIES
Cigarettes & Alcohol: Eight Films by Hong Sang-soo
September 11–19

In conjunction with Your Bright Future: 12 Contemporary Artists from Korea, LACMA will screen eight feature films from contemporary, award-winning Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo. His consistent oeuvre eschews the genre tropes beloved by his contemporaries in Korean cinema and instead focuses on the human-scale drama of intimate relationships. His plots have the precision and sly wit of Rohmer, the attentive gaze of Ozu, the pervasive alienation of Antonioni, and mordant flourishes worthy of Buñuel. Set among hauntingly deserted vacation spots, anonymous smoky restaurants, and sparse apartments, his intricately constructed, indelibly frank seriocomedies float by on a current of amply-flowing Soju and romantic complications. His impulsive men and resilient women, characters whose bonds are never as simple as they seem, engage in love triangles and verbal jousts teeming with flirtation, evasion, misunderstanding and self-revelation. Always pining to revisit and revise the past, Hong’s melancholy intellectuals—filmmakers, artists, professors, actors—drift through the present moment lost somewhere between their art and real life.



We begin the series with a preview screening of Hong’s latest work, Like You Know it All, a comical portrait of an “art-house film director,” not entirely dissimilar from Hong himself, as he serves on the jury of a provincial Korean film festival and gets embroiled in a series of picaresque mishaps. We will also present the Los Angeles premiere of 2008’s Night and Day, Hong’s first film predominantly set outside Korea, which finds a painter on the lam in Paris spending evenings on the phone with his wife back home in Seoul and his bleary waking hours wading through drolly maladroit encounters with fellow expats.



This series is presented with the support of the Korean Film Council (KOFIC).



Like You Know it All (Jal aljido mothamyeonseo)
September 11 | 7:30 pm | Preview Screening
Rivalries, sexual indiscretions, and communal drinking abound as arthouse filmmaker Ku is drawn into assorted awkward social and romantic configurations: first in the small town of Jecheon where he is officiating as juror of a film festival, rendered with puckish delight by Hong, and later when Ku turns up to address a class of film students on Jeju Island at the invitation of an old college friend. Hong’s newest film, another work of minimally adorned and sharply perceptive behavioral comedy was world-premiered at the 2009 Cannes film festival. “Wryly perceptive in its deconstruction of artistic egos, sending up pretensions while at the same time making what sound like first-person declarations about creativity…Hong’s funniest film.”—Lee Marshall, Screen International.
2009/color/126 min. | Scr/dir: Hong Sang-soo; w/ Kim Tae-woo, Ko Hyun-jung, Uhm Ji-won.



The Day a Pig Fell into the Well (Daijiga umule pajinnal)
September 12 | 5 pm | Free admission
Against a backdrop of urban desolation, four seemingly disconnected lives become intertwined in Hong’s debut film, winner of the prestigious Dragons and Tigers Award at the Vancouver International Film Festival. “Almost a sociological report on what it is like to be living in Seoul in 1996… an unsettling vision of everyday life as the familiar and routine take on an increasingly unfamiliar and terrifying edge.”—Tony Rayns.
1996/color/115 min. | Scr: Hyo-seo Ko; dir: Hong Sang-soo; w/ Kim Eui-sung, Cho Eun-suk, Lee Eung-kyung, Park Jin-song.



Woman on the Beach (Haebyonui yoin)
September 12 | 7:30 pm
Hong concluded his first decade of feature filmmaking with this summation of his central preoccupations: “karmic irony, self-deceived desire, squandered second chances, and unforeseen abandonment” (J. Hoberman, Village Voice). A filmmaker struggling with a new screenplay sets off on a wintry retreat to a desolate seaside town in search of inspiration…or perhaps just to procrastinate. Either way, he winds up wooing his production designer’s girlfriend and even a local girl who looks just like her. Selected as the best undistributed film of 2006 in critic’s polls by both indieWIRE and the Village Voice. “One of recent cinema’s deepest portraits of an artist.”—Richard Brody, The New Yorker.
2006/color/127 min. | Scr/dir: Hong Sang-soo; w/ Kim Seung-woo, Ko Hyeon-jeong, Song Seon-mi.



Woman is the Future of Man (Yeojaneun namjaui miraeda)
September 12 | 9:40 pm
The drunken reminiscences and one-upmanship of two friends on a snowy afternoon that lands them on the doorstep of a mutual acquaintance—the woman they both loved and lost—who is hardly charmed by the impromptu reunion. Titled after a Louis Aragon quote which caught Hong’s eye on a French postcard, Hong’s film detects that the present can be as filled with unanswerable longings as the past. “Memory, desire and raw self-interest clash against one another with startling poignancy… intellectually stimulating, aesthetically bold.”—Manohla Dargis, The New York Times.
2004/color/88 min. | Scr/dir: Hong Sang-soo; w/ Yu Ji-tae, Kim Tae-woo.



Turning Gate (Saenghwalui balgyeon)
September 18 | 7:30 pm
In Hong’s biggest Korean box-office hit, an out-of-work actor embarks on two consecutively turbulent relationships. The film takes its title from an ancient legend about a commoner executed for courting the King’s daughter and reincarnated as a snake, which then kidnaps her, only to be washed away in a storm before the eponymous temple entrance. “You never know where it’s going from scene to scene…a surprising cinema of understatement and psychological richness.”—Phillip Lopate, Film Comment.
2002/color/115 min. | Scr/dir: Hong Sang-soo; w/ Kim Sang-kyung, Yeh Ji-won, Choo Sang-mi.



Tale of Cinema (Geuk jang jeon)
September 18 | 9:40 pm
Art and life are intertwined in Hong’s most mind-bending twice-told tale. A former film student not only believes that his hapless love life is the source material for a tragic short film by a classmate; he also becomes obsessed with its leading lady and sets about pursuing her off-screen. Hong playfully intertwines filmgoing and lovemaking, zooms and ellipses, as the male psyche is bared in all its doggedness and uncertainty.
2005/color/89 min. | Scr/dir: Hong Sang-soo; w/ Kim Sang-kyung, Uhm Ji-won, Lee Ki-woo.



The Power of Kangwon Province (Kangwon-do ui him)
September 19 | 5 pm | Free admission
Over the same weekend, a professor of literature and his former student make separate pilgrimages to the film’s namesake holiday destination—a wooded, craggily mountainous region that overflows into North Korea—as Hong gradually reveals how their lives are interconnected. Reminiscent of Kieslowski in its contemplation of missed connections, chance and synchronicity, Hong’s sophomore film is the first of his twice-told tales.
1998/color/110 min. | Scr/dir: Hong Sang-soo; w/ Oh Youn-hong, Paik Jong-hak.



Night and Day (Bam guan nat)
September 19 | 7:30 pm | Los Angeles Premiere | In person: Hong Sang-soo
In self-imposed exile from his native Seoul, a married, photorealist painter wanders the streets of Paris. But a roundelay of chance meetings in the City of Lights entangles him in the emotional lives of two Korean women. Hong lucidly observes this chronicle of one man’s confused attempt to savor a rootless year. “One of Hong’s lightest and most easily digestible metaphysical meals to date.”—Derek Elley, Variety.
2008/color/145 min. | Scr/dir: Hong Sang-soo; w/ Kim Young-ho, Kim You-jin, Seo Min-jeong, Park Eun-hye.”






TICKETS/INFORMATION
Tickets are $10; $7 for LACMA members, seniors (62+), and students with valid ID. Price includes both films in a double bill except where noted. Tickets to only the second film on a double bill are $5. Tickets may be purchased at the museum box office, by phone at 323 857-6010 or online at lacma.org. Subscribe to the Film Department’s e-newsletter by emailing film@lacma.org.



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