{"id":10477,"date":"2010-10-11T23:57:15","date_gmt":"2010-10-12T04:57:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/?p=10477"},"modified":"2017-12-08T22:29:34","modified_gmt":"2017-12-09T04:29:34","slug":"seduced-by-structure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/2010\/10\/11\/seduced-by-structure\/","title":{"rendered":"Seduced by structure"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Mysteries-A-500.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-10499\" title=\"Mysteries A 500\" src=\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Mysteries-A-500.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"268\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Mysteries-A-500.jpg 500w, https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Mysteries-A-500-150x80.jpg 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><em>Mysteries of Lisbon<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>DB here:<\/p>\n<p>If you\u2019re hungry to learn about the ways films can tell stories, a festival provides a feast.\u00a0 A huge array of narrative strategies is spread out for your delectation. You won\u2019t like every movie you see, but thinking about the mechanics of each one can deepen your experience of it, as well as your appreciation for just how wide cinema\u2019s resources can be. You also get to see how more unusual approaches to storytelling are often imaginative revisions of more traditional strategies.<\/p>\n<p>We can usefully think about narrative from three angles. We can study the <em>story world<\/em> that a film conjures up: the characters, places, and actions we encounter. We can analyze <em>plot structure<\/em>, the distinct parts that are put together sequentially. They might be scenes or sequences or larger-scale parts, like the Hollywood screenwriters\u2019 \u201cacts.\u201d We can also analyze <em>narration<\/em>, the patterned, moment-by-moment process of presenting the story world and the plot structure. Think of a narrative as like a building.\u00a0 The building\u2019s furnishings correspond to the story world, and the architectural design of the building, plan and elevation, is like plot structure. Our real-time pathway through the building, from the front doorway into its depths, corresponds to narration.<\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.viff.org\/festival\/films-schedule\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Vancouver International Film Festival<\/a> that Kristin and I have been visiting offers a banquet of storytelling devices\u2014some quite traditional, some fairly fresh. I\u2019ll just survey some aspects of structure that I found intriguing.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>The longest distance between points<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Aftershock.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-10493\" title=\"Aftershock\" src=\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Aftershock.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"172\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Aftershock.jpg 400w, https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Aftershock-150x64.jpg 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The Chinese blockbuster <em><strong>Aftershock<\/strong><\/em>, centering on the 1976 earthquake that struck Tangshan, has earned some complaints about weepiness and jokes about &#8220;Afterschlock.&#8221; Perhaps melodrama makes many critics uncomfortable. They seem more at home with comedy and noirish crime stories, perhaps because the emotions stirred by these are bracketed by a degree of intellectual distance. But tell a story about a happy family split apart by a catastrophe; show a mother forced to choose between saving her son and saving her daughter; show that the girl miraculously escapes death; present her raised by a pair of new parents; and dwell on the fact that her mother, living elsewhere, expects never to see her again\u2014do all this, and you court mockery.<\/p>\n<p>Well, mockery from everybody except the hundreds of thousands of people who have always enjoyed these situations. <em>Aftershock<\/em> is now the biggest box-office success in Chinese film history (presumably using today\u2019s currency standards). Whatever the film owes to Chinese traditions, it is easily understandable in a Western context. Stories based on pseudo-orphans, separated siblings, and parents forced to give up children have long been sure-fire. <em>Les Deux orphelines<\/em>, an 1874 play, is one strong prototype. This pathetic tale of two sisters torn apart in post-revolutionary Paris was adapted by many directors, including Griffith (<em>Orphans of the Storm<\/em>, 1921). Feuillade developed similar motifs in <em>Les Deux gamines<\/em> (1921), <em>L\u2019Orpheline<\/em> (1921), and <em>Parisette<\/em> (1922). A mother\u2019s loss of her children through accident or social oppression is another stock situation, seen in sublime form in Mizoguchi\u2019s <em>Sansho the Bailiff<\/em>. The obligation to pick a child to save is at the core of <em>Sophie\u2019s Choice<\/em>, a more highbrow melodrama. Likewise, the discovery of unexpected kinship forms the climax of many stories, from <em>Oedipus Rex<\/em> to <em>Twelfth Night<\/em> and beyond.<\/p>\n<p>You may call these conventions hackneyed, but it would be better to call them tried and true\u2014proven effective by centuries of deployment, counting on emotions aroused by ties of love and blood. Such situations would be good candidates for narrative universals, which can be reshaped by local cultural pressures.<\/p>\n<p>The premise of a fragmented family bears chiefly on the story world. The filmmaker still must choose how to structure the plot. For <em>Aftershock<\/em>, director Feng Xiaogang and his collaborators settled on the time-honored route: parallel stories across the years, shown by means of crosscutting.\u00a0 After the quake, scenes of the mother and son alternate with scenes showing the girl\u2019s rescue and her life with her adopted parents, both soldiers in the People\u2019s Liberation Army. For about the first sixty minutes, the segments are rather long, but after that shorter scenes from each plot line are intercut. The son moves off to a separate life, but his success as an entrepreneur is given short shrift. The plot concentrates on the daughter\u2019s college career, her sometimes stormy relation with her foster parents, and her unexpected pregnancy. In the meantime, the mother survives, turning aside a kindly suitor in order to preserve her faithfulness to the husband who saved her life.<\/p>\n<p>Narrationally, the alternation between the separated characters gives us superior knowledge. We know, as the mother and brother do not, that the daughter survives; we also know that she nurses a bitter memory of hearing her mother choose the rescue of her brother.\u00a0 Likewise, we know that the mother has tormented herself for decades over her forced choice. Thus the recriminations that will burst out after they rediscover one another will require some healing, which is provided in the plot\u2019s last phase. Melodrama depends on mistakes, and they must be corrected. In a telling image of two sets of schoolbooks (not previously shown to us), we and the daughter realize that over the years the mother has been thinking of her as if she were still alive.<\/p>\n<p>The dual structure can also tease us with suspense. At the hour mark, we learn that both the brother and the daughter are in Hangzhou, without each other\u2019s knowledge. The brother even encounters the foster father. It\u2019s the sort of coincidence that leads us to expect a reunion. Coincidences, I mentioned <a href=\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/?p=9752\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">in an earlier entry<\/a>, are fascinating narrative devices, and here the fortuitous convergence doesn\u2019t actually pay off. But it does prepare us for the genuine reunion that will take place an hour or so later, when an earthquake hits Sichuan in 2008.<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s a lot more to be said about <em>Aftershock<\/em>; I was struck by the fact that the children are left in the collapsing apartment because the parents have sneaked off to have sex in the husband\u2019s truck. (So is the whole arc of suffering the punishment for a little carnality?) But just sticking with structure, we find that a cluster of ancient plot devices, fed into the established technique of crosscutting, can still find purchase in a contemporary film. In films like <em>Aftershock<\/em>, as in Hollywood\u2019s romantic comedies and horror films and historical adventures, very old narrative conventions live on. Suitably spruced up with CGI, they still provide pleasure.<\/p>\n<p>Sometimes, however, you get the sense that filmmakers in other cultures are borrowing conventions of recent Western films. This seems the case in <em><strong>City of Life<\/strong><\/em> from the United Arab Emirates. Faisal is a spoiled playboy who spends his nights with his pal Khalfan, a fistfight-prone club-hopper. Natalia is a Romanian flight attendant who gets romantically involved with an advertising man. Basu is a taxidriver with an uncanny resemblance to a Bollywood star, and so he tries to supplement his earnings by appearing in a nightclub. As all of them move through Dubai, their lives intertwine.<\/p>\n<p>We have, in short, what I\u2019ve called a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/?p=237\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">network narrative<\/a>. Mostly the plot lines are juxtaposed through crosscutting, but sometimes the characters in one line of action encounter those in another. Faisal is at a club on the same night as Natalia is there, with her boyfriend and her roommate. Objects circulate as well. Natalia pays Basu for a cab ride, and Basu preserves her \u20ac20 note until he has hit rock bottom. At the midpoint, an ad campaign links Natalia\u2019s boyfriend, Faisal\u2019s father, and Basu\u2019s job. Many of the conventions of the \u201csmall world\u201d network format are included, with one character remarking that Dubai is a small city. Our old friend the traffic accident (shot and cut with exceptional vividness) plays a crucial role. A refuse collector threads through the plot, turning up at unexpected times and providing an ironic coda.<\/p>\n<p>Director Ali F. Mostafa mobilizes a lot of contemporary techniques, including fast motion and rapid cutting (3.6 seconds average shot length). The editing sometimes extends the crosscutting principle by flipping back and forth between two successive scenes, creating little flashforwards. For instance, when the adman Guy phones Natalia to introduce himself, we cut to them talking in a bar and then back to her listening to his sweet talk.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/City-1-300.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-10479 alignnone\" title=\"City 1 300\" src=\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/City-1-300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"162\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/City-1-300.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/City-1-300-150x81.jpg 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/City-2-300.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-10480\" title=\"City 2 300\" src=\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/City-2-300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"162\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/City-2-300.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/City-2-300-150x81.jpg 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/City-3-300.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-10481\" title=\"City 3 300\" src=\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/City-3-300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"162\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/City-3-300.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/City-3-300-150x81.jpg 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The anticipatory cuts lead us to expect that Guy is calling to ask her out, and Natalia will accept. This sort of cross-stitching can be found in <em>The Godfather<\/em> and other films of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and it has shown up sporadically since, but it\u2019s rare enough to still look modern.<\/p>\n<p>In cinema, network narratives can occasionally be found before the 1990s, but they\u2019ve become far more common. I count nearly 150 films of the last twenty years employing the structure. In literature, of course, such plots go back quite far, and they formed the basis of nineteenth-century novels by the likes of Balzac, Dickens, Zola, and George Eliot. Television soap operas and ensemble series like <em>Hill Street Blues<\/em> showed that modern media\u2019s long-form formats fit well with network storytelling. So cinema has caught up, adjusting the template to feature-length plots. <em>City of Life<\/em> shows that artists from emerging filmmaking nations can use this structure to enter a festival circuit dominated by Western norms of construction. At the same time, those artists can tailor this structure to their own ends\u2014in this case, it seems to me, presenting Dubai as a city of emigrants ruled by a feckless leisure class.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>The theatre of memory<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Mysteries-1-400.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-10482\" title=\"Mysteries 1 400\" src=\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Mysteries-1-400.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"395\" height=\"208\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Mysteries-1-400.jpg 395w, https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Mysteries-1-400-150x78.jpg 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 395px) 100vw, 395px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>What happens, though, when conventions of sprawling nineteenth-century novels aren\u2019t squeezed so drastically into the usual feature length? I had a chance to find out from Vancouver\u2019s screening of Raul Ruiz\u2019s four-and-a-half-hour <em><strong>Mysteries of Lisbon<\/strong><\/em>. Based on an 1854 novel by <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Camilo_Castelo_Branco\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Camilo Castelo Branco<\/a>, a fictioneer as prolific as Ruiz himself, the film doesn\u2019t trim off the exfoliating plot lines that we enjoy in three-deckers from the period. This being a Ruiz film, there is as well a tangible pleasure in the artifice of storytelling. The film acknowledges that all the handy coincidences, buried pasts, multiple identities, and revelations of kinship are there for our delectation.<\/p>\n<p>Orphans again: Jo\u00e3o is being raised in a church school, but he has no idea of his parentage. Early on, kindly Father Dimis tells him that his mother is Angela, the countess of Santa Barbara, but her brutal husband is not his father. We are soon embarked on the extended flashback that traces the doomed love affair that results in the birth of the young hero, now named Pedro. In the course of that tale, we meet two more suspicious characters, the gypsy Salino Cabra and the hired assassin Heliodoros.<\/p>\n<p>This recounted history is only the first of a cascade of flashbacks, issuing from several characters, and these gradually show deep connections among persons tied to Pedro\u2019s past. Secondary characters in one story become protagonists of another. The young hero is gradually displaced as the center of the action by war, secret romances, rivalries, duels, and infidelities. Like Pasolini in his <em>Trilogy of Life<\/em>, Ruiz is happiest when opening up a plot detour that will eventually become a new main road.<\/p>\n<p>By the end, our young hero has become something of a nullity, an empty center around which aristocratic ecstasies and follies have swirled. He\u2019s something like the Dubai of <em>City of Hope<\/em>: a point of intersection of many fates. He\u2019s also a passive observer of scale-model dramas played out on his toy theatre stage. His voice-over narration has enwrapped the whole film, and our last glimpse of him is as merely a narrator. Pedro seems finally to realize that his entire existence has served simply to gather other people in a tangle of doomed passions.<\/p>\n<p><em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Mysteries-low-angle-300-alt.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-10483\" title=\"Mysteries low angle 300 alt\" src=\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Mysteries-low-angle-300-alt.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"307\" height=\"158\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Mysteries-low-angle-300-alt.jpg 307w, https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Mysteries-low-angle-300-alt-150x77.jpg 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 307px) 100vw, 307px\" \/><\/a>Mysteries of Lisbon<\/em> has a rich, high-thread-count look, but it\u2019s not your usual prestige costume drama. The long takes cling to characters as they flirt their way across a ballroom, and the camera slips through walls in the manner of old-fashioned cinema. There are the usual Ruiz flourishes of hallucinatory deep focus (achieved through split-focus diopters), characters floating rather than walking, and the occasional peculiar angle. But the film remains calm and lustrous, culminating in a slow tread into pure light.<\/p>\n<p>Ruiz\u2019s appetite for narrative is almost gluttonous; he supposedly wrote over a hundred plays in six years, and he\u2019s made about as many films. He once told me that he thought that Postmodernism was simply a revival of the Baroque in modern dress. From <em>Mysteries of Lisbon<\/em>, it\u2019s clear that he sees in many older narrative traditions affinities with our tastes today. Network narratives? They\u2019ve been done, and maybe better, centuries ago. Follow the lacy tendrils of classic family-origins plots, and you\u2019ll find a pattern as intricate as anything in <em>Short Cuts<\/em> or <em>Pulp Fiction<\/em>. More story ahead: there&#8217;s a\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.misteriosdelisboa.com\/en\/series_episodes.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">six-hour television version<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Rumination on ruination<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Rumination-4001.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-10486\" title=\"Rumination 400\" src=\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Rumination-4001.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Rumination-4001.jpg 400w, https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Rumination-4001-150x112.jpg 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Ruiz understands that modernist narrative techniques, including unreliable narrators and fancy time-switches, depend upon a long tradition in at least two ways. First, very often the tradition got there first; scholars like Meir Sternberg and Robert Alter have demonstrated complex plays with chronology and point of view in the Bible and the Greek classics. Secondly, unusual plot structures may ring unexpected variations on more conventional ones. Case in point: reversed plot sequence.<\/p>\n<p>Again, this seems to be something of a modern trend. The <em>locus classicus<\/em> appears to be Harold Pinter\u2019s 1978 play <em>Betrayal<\/em>, in which, scene by scene, the plot proceeds in reverse chronology. This was filmed in 1983 and gave birth to a famous <em>Seinfeld<\/em> episode. As you know,\u00a0<em>Memento<\/em>,\u00a0<em>Irreversible<\/em>, and other recent films have taken up reverse-chronology plotting.\u00a0Actually, however, there are several earlier instances, notably the 1934 Kaufman and Hart play <em>Merrily We Roll Along<\/em> (turned into a musical by Stephen Sondheim) and W. R. Burnett\u2019s 1934 novel, <em>Goodbye to the Past<\/em>. Other examples, some going back quite far, are listed <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Reverse_chronology\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><em><strong>Rumination<\/strong><\/em>, a film by Xu Ruotao in the Dragons &amp; Tigers young directors competition at Vancouver, turns the structure to political ends.\u00a0Reduced to the bare bones, the film shows a teacher, his wife, and their son caught up in the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The father falls in with a gang of Red Guard youths rampaging through the countryside. The son trails the gang at a distance and occasionally interferes with their acts of violence. These story events are arranged in blocks, with each cluster of scenes associated with a specific year. The blocks proceed backward in time, from 1976 to 1966. After a prologue, the film shows scenes of the waning of the Revolution; before the epilogue, we get a stalwart young man announcing the Revolution&#8217;s birth.<\/p>\n<p>The scenes are fairly episodic and independent, so I didn\u2019t detect the backwards structure for quite a while. But my uncertainty had another source.\u00a0Xu introduces each year\u2019s scenes with a date that is, except for one instance, <em>not<\/em> the year of the actions shown. In fact, while the segments move in reverse order, the years\u2019 designations move in chronological order.<\/p>\n<p>The opening 1976 section is labeled 1966, the 1975 section is labeled 1967, and so on up to the end, with the 1966 action designated as 1976. So we see the father\u2019s reunion with his wife, a moment of clumsy embrace, long before he decides to leave home. As you\u2019d expect, there\u2019s one year in which the action and the tag coincide, 1971, and that is the only one built out of photos and film clips from the period. The year is privileged, Xu explains, because that was the year of the mysterious plane-crash death of <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Lin_Biao\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Lin Biao<\/a>, a military hero and Cultural Revolution leader who was accused of plotting Mao&#8217;s assassination.<\/p>\n<p>In my viewing, the misleading dates helped conceal the reverse chronology. Confronted with so many discrete episodes of unidentified characters sprinting through the countryside, beating passersby and stealing chickens, I took the default option and assumed that the segments were chronological. Moreover, the film\u2019s scenes play out almost entirely in overcast landscapes and decrepit factories, a landscape in which I couldn&#8217;t detect any indications of change from year to year. Watching <em>Ruination<\/em> a second time, I saw the reversal more clearly, but I also thought that some segments tease us into thinking along chronological lines. An early scene shows the father getting up in the morning (a conventional way to start a plot), saluting Chairman Mao\u2019s statue, and reading from the Little Red Book. Yet this scene is set in 1975, after the father has returned to his wife from his Red Guard period.<\/p>\n<p>Moreover, there\u2019s some evidence that the son actually matures across the film, even though the scenes show him objectively getting younger. By the end of the plot (the earliest moment in story time) he seems to have transformed himself into a strapping young Red Guard. Supporting this construal is the fact that in the Q &amp; A after the showing, Xu mentioned that one influence on his film\u2019s design was <em>The Curious Case of Benjamin Button<\/em>!<\/p>\n<p>Xu explained that the tragedy of the Cultural Revolution could not be comprehended through normal storytelling techniques. I suspect that viewers familiar with the relevant events and the film\u2019s slogans, iconography, and oblique citations (even to Godard) could follow the backwards sequencing. But I suspect that those viewers would need a sense of the historical chronology to grasp the 3-2-1 order of the plot. It seems to me that Xu, known until now as a painter, has shown how an innovative approach to plot structure relies on conventional responses even as it thwarts them.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Hahaha indeed<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Hahaha-1.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-10497\" title=\"Hahaha 1\" src=\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Hahaha-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"226\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Hahaha-1.jpg 400w, https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Hahaha-1-150x84.jpg 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Hahaha-2.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-10498\" title=\"Hahaha 2\" src=\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Hahaha-2.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"226\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Hahaha-2.jpg 400w, https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Hahaha-2-150x84.jpg 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Hong Sangsoo has been one of the leading experimenters with narrative in today\u2019s Asian cinema. My two favorites, <em>The Power of Kangwon Province<\/em> (1998) and <em>The Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors<\/em> (2000) have engaged the viewer in playful puzzlement about how story lines can collide or slip sideways, how our memory of earlier scenes\u2019 action can be tested and found faulty. I haven\u2019t been deeply engaged by his recent forays into more straightforward drama\/comedy, such as <em>The Woman on the Beach<\/em> (2006), but his two latest features, both from this year and both on display in Vancouver, completely satisfied my hunger for intriguing plot structures.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s an unspoken convention of recounted-flashback tales that even though the events are told by A, B learns everything that we do\u2014everything, that is, that we can see or hear in the flashback. But <em><strong>Hahaha<\/strong><\/em> decouples the verbal recounting from the visual presentation. Here listener B definitely does not grasp what we witness happening onscreen in the tale as told.<\/p>\n<p><em>Hahaha<\/em> is a parallel-protagonist tale. Two pals meet for some drinking before one, Munkyung, leaves South Korea for Canada. Through a series of flashbacks, they regale each other with their recent adventures, mostly amorous. The plot is structured as two alternating streams, crosscutting one man\u2019s tale with the other\u2019s and usually returning to the framing situation of their drinking bout. But because we can see what each one recounts, we come to realize that both stories are populated by the same people, notably the tempting female tour guide Seongok. And those people have their own relationships, which we must piece together out of the glimpses we get in each man\u2019s tale.<\/p>\n<p>Neither Munkyung nor his pal Jungshik has a clue that they are part of a fairly tight circle. The result, as usual with Hong, is a comedy of ironic misunderstanding and the puncturing of male pretension. <em>Hahaha<\/em> can also be seen as his response to the rise of network narratives. Characters in such a film don\u2019t usually realize the larger mosaic they\u2019re part of; the intersecting lives in <em>City of Life<\/em> transform one another unwittingly. Normally that lack of awareness isn\u2019t the main point of the film. Here it is, and it\u2019s wrung for classic humor at the protagonists\u2019 expense.<\/p>\n<p>In <em><strong>Oki\u2019s Movie<\/strong><\/em>, Hong gives us another fractured plot, but now in the form of four short films. They center on three characters: Song, a film director turned professor; his student Jingu; and Oki, the woman both men are interested in. The raggedy credits of each short suggest handmade movies, but what we see in each one is the polished style familiar from Hong himself, including his current interest in abrupt zooms.<\/p>\n<p>The four-part structure is far from transparent. It might be taken as a series of episodes from the trio&#8217;s lives. The first film, &#8220;Specters of the New World,&#8221; which presents Jingu as a professor himself, would have to take \u00a0place in the present, and the following three would then be presenting flashbacks to the Jingu-Oki-Song triangle. In that case, the first segment would prove that Jingu did not wind up with Oki, as he&#8217;s married to another woman.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps, though, all four films are free hypothetical variations on the central situation. I&#8217;m not sure that we can easily arrange the events in the second, third, and fourth episodes chronologically. The films could be presenting successive groups of events, or events scattered across a single time span and then selectively gathered around one of the central characters. The first episode is largely organized around Jingu&#8217;s range of knowledge; the second is confined to professor Song; and the third is explicitly presented as Oki&#8217;s own thoughts. Earlier Hong films have offered us contrasting, even incompatible plots built out of a core group of characters.\u00a0<em>Oki&#8217;s Movie<\/em> may be using the framing conceit of student films (none of which is plausible\u00a0<em>as<\/em> a student film) to give us a suite of variants on the love triangle.<\/p>\n<p>The idea of ambiguous variation is made explicit in the final mini-film, \u201cOki\u2019s Movie.&#8221; It&#8217;s\u00a0a sustained exercise in\u2014yes, again\u2014crosscutting. This episode alternates two excursions to Mount Acha, one with each man. Shot by shot, we see different courtship styles and we hear her differing reactions to her two lovers. Was she dating both men at once? When did the two excursions take place? Which one occurred first? As these questions are juggled, we get a rapid checklist of Oki\u2019s attitudes, in voice-over, toward both these minor-key losers.<\/p>\n<p>In both <em>Hahaha<\/em> and <em>Oki&#8217;s Movie<\/em>, Hong takes what\u2019s offered by tradition\u2014in this case, the romantic comedy and the conventions of flashbacks, crosscutting, and restricted narration\u2014and creates a fresh structure. The play of novelty and norm is engrossing in itself, apart from the vagaries of the drama. Our appetite for narrative will always be whetted when directors find ways to whip up something new out of familiar ingredients.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>For more on the three dimensions of film narrative, as well as discussion of the principles of network construction, see my <em>Poetics of Cinema<\/em>. There&#8217;s more discussion of flashbacks in film <a href=\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/?p=3253\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">in this entry<\/a>. On early narrative structure, see Meir Sternberg&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Poetics-Biblical-Narrative-Ideological-Literature\/dp\/0253204534\/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1286858090&amp;sr=1-1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Poetics of Biblical Narrative<\/em><\/a> and Robert Alter&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Art-Biblical-Narrative-Robert-Alter\/dp\/046500427X\/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1286857979&amp;sr=1-4\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Art of Biblical Narrative<\/em><\/a>, as well as Sternberg&#8217;s discussion of <em>The Odyssey<\/em> in <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Expositional-Modes-Temporal-Ordering-Fiction\/dp\/0253355524\/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction<\/a><\/em>.\u00a0For a sharp-eyed consideration of <em>Oki&#8217;s Movie<\/em>, see <a href=\"http:\/\/cinema-scope.com\/wordpress\/web-archive-2\/issue-44\/spotlight-oki\u2019s-movie-hong-sang-soo-south-korea\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Andrew Tracy&#8217;s review at <\/a><em><a href=\"http:\/\/cinema-scope.com\/wordpress\/web-archive-2\/issue-44\/spotlight-oki\u2019s-movie-hong-sang-soo-south-korea\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Cinema Scope<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Oki-1.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-10495\" title=\"Oki 1\" src=\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Oki-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Oki-1.jpg 500w, https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Oki-1-150x84.jpg 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" \/>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Oki-2.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-10496\" title=\"Oki 2\" src=\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Oki-2.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"282\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Oki-2.jpg 500w, https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Oki-2-150x84.jpg 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong><em>Oki&#8217;s Movie<\/em>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mysteries of Lisbon. DB here: If you\u2019re hungry to learn about the ways films can tell stories, a festival provides a feast.\u00a0 A huge array of narrative strategies is spread out for your delectation. You won\u2019t like every movie you see, but thinking about the mechanics of each one can deepen your experience of it, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[181,173,9,19,1,54,22,126,120],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-directors-hong-sangsoo","category-directors-ruiz","category-festivals","category-festivals-vancouver","category-film-comments","category-narrative-strategies","category-national-cinemas-china","category-national-cinemas-middle-east","category-national-cinemas-spain"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10477","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10477"}],"version-history":[{"count":30,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10477\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38498,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10477\/revisions\/38498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}