Right Now, Wrong Then

My new album Jeremiah XVII drops 10/16; preorder it here and listen to the first track below.

I just put out a record in February but my life is a sea of tumult and I’m trying to document those moments through art. For Barthes, any release of a work to the public is a totalizing moment which risks allowing an artist’s form to become convention as it is subsumed by the public. Thus the only valid creativity is a perpetual cycle of reinvention and reaction. Certainly Barthes’s own career as a prolific essayist and critic allowed him countless opportunities to reinvent and refine his thought, working at a creative clip matched by few artists in any medium. One who comes close is Hong Sang-soo, who’s released some 35 feature films in the last three decades, each of which has winnowed down a style that was spare to begin with into something truly austere.

Hong’s Right Now, Wrong Then centers on the relationship between a filmmaker, Ham Cheon-soo, and Yoon Hee-jeong, a painter.

“I can see that it has quality,” Cheon-soo tells Hee-jeong at one point, “but it strikes me as a kind of self-serving project. As if you are trying to console yourself. I sense self-pity, when you should be plowing ahead. It’s not necessarily bad. It’s got quality. But it’s a little too conventional. When we want something comforting, we tend to go for something conventional. Do you understand?”

Hee-jeong finds herself taken aback by his brutally frank judgment and yeah, the guy’s kind of a dick. Hong makes movies about himself and about himself making movies. Maybe no other filmmaker outside of, I dunno, Caveh Zahedi or Ross McElwee has gone so far to close the distance between his art and his self, and like the films of Zahedi and McElwee the results are sometimes difficult to take, but unlike, say, a Woody Allen, Hong never allows his ruthless self-criticism to lapse into the self-pity for which his director stand-in chides the painter. Hong himself refers to the closing of that distance as the “energy” at the core of his films. Husserl called it “that which is given,” the act of perception which ceases judgment on “what is not given.” Husserl’s phenomenology speaks to the fact we cannot perceive beyond what is present here and now, though we still find ourselves making baseless assumptions as though they are self-evident because we’ve been taught to think or express ourselves in certain modes. “That which is given” always takes the form of “that which is present,” the here and now. Hong’s “energy” centers his films around the here and now by writing his scripts the morning of shooting and arriving on location without any set plan or rehearsal time for his actors.

In Right Now, Wrong Then, a critic asks Cheon-soo, “What does a movie mean to you? After all your experience, how would you define the genre of cinema? What would be the right word?”

With growing conviction, Cheon-soo voices what might as well be Hong’s directorial manifesto:

“If we were to give voice to such words, I guess it can mean something or other, but they’re just words. Nothing more. Movies, who I am, what I’ve experienced, your lives, have nothing to do with words. The power of words? What’s so great about them? I just can’t understand all the fuss about this ‘search for the words.’ For me, words of such importance don’t exist. They are just distractions!”

For Hong, the effort spent looking for the right words to reify a time already passed can never be more important than staying true to what is here and now. That search is a futile investigation into “what is not given,” and reduces the living to the dead by objectifying them into something expressible through sterile language. By avoiding rehearsal or overplanning before shooting, Hong finds the closest possible language to the energy of Being, which he places as the most important component in both his art and his life.

At another point in the story, a poet gives Cheon-soo a copy of her book, which she has inscribed, “The only way to overcome our fears is to discover what lies behind the surface of our lives.” The surface of life is what is given, while simultaneously concealed from us. Our willingness to dig into phenomena intelligible only intuitively is the only route to overcoming our fears.

“Try to discover something every second of every day, from everything around you,” Cheon-soo says in the film, or as Thoreau puts it, “You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.”