By the Stream
[…] Hong’s keen excavation of the existential always has the potential to transform the prosaic into a sudden moment of unguarded poetry, and here even a surprising hint of the political.
Text: Cici Peng

Where previous Hong Sangsoo films are marked by formal play and trickery, By the Stream is marked by its structural looseness and haphazard narrative linearity. In previous works, Hong’s emblematic repetitive loops emerge in parallel narratives – such is In Our Day and Hotel by the River – or in bifurcated structures – such as in Right Now, Wrong Then or Hill of Freedom – whereas By the Stream’s repetitive force emerges in the accumulative build-up of the chronological; each day passes in a routine-like rhythm with returns to familiar restaurants for another order of grilled eel, to the university courtyard, and the perennial classroom – a world confined but expansive in the subtle ridges of its minor circumference. Hong has discarded his characteristic title cards that so carefully divided his early works. Here, each segment is partitioned by a repeated shot of a moon at night – at first a waxing crescent, finally becoming a full moon at the end of the film to mark the passage of time – followed by a daytime long shot of the eponymous stream where Hong’s recurrent protagonist and partner Kim Minhee sits, sketching by the waterways.
By the Stream shuffles his frequent collaborators’ into new roles: Kim Minhee plays Jeonim as an artist and University professor, who is fiercely protective of her younger students, markedly so in a scene where she berates an outcast theatre teacher-director (Ha Seongguk, often incarnating foolish young men in recent Hongs) who is fired after engaging in a relationship with three students. Chu Si-eon (another Hong favourite Kwon Haehyo) plays Jeonim’s uncle, who arrives as a replacement director for the student skit showcase. Chu Si-eon, a former actor and playwright, now owns a bookshop, his career shrouded in a mysterious fall-out, hinted to be linked to his leftist political standings. Mini everyday dramas ensue – the exiled director repeatedly returns to the campus to propose to one of his students; Chu Si-eon engages in a relationship with one of Jeonim’s colleagues and mentor of sorts, Professor Jeong; the student skit Chu-sion stages face backlash from the University’s President.
the political touch
Despite the mostly linear trajectory of the film, the student skit disrupts the timeline and the contemporary narrative with a surprisingly political Beckettian performance that gestures towards a period of political repression, suggestive of the Korean War. Hong frames four students hunched over a floor-table, cross-legged, eating instant ramen, discussing how many boxes they have left in their rations in a wide shot. One student remains obstructed, back turned away from the audience. They slurp, they talk about how lucky they are. A rumbling noise and a looming shadow of cage-like grates looms over the students with a tight sense of control. Notably, the following dinner sequence between Chu Si-eon, his student-actors, and Jeonim are configured in a similar staging – with Jeonim’s back to the camera, obstructing a clear view across the dining table. Such a set-up loosely parallels two generations of women across radically different time periods.
Hong’s film seems to question: what does it mean to shape one’s own future? Either under a politically repressive and threatening environment, or under the illusory freedom of an individualistic capitalist liberal democracy? With no material dearth, with free-flowing alcohol and food, Chu Si-eon asks his students during their dinner who they want to become, asking them to respond through poetry. Here, rather than propose a future structured by materialistic comforts, or commercial success, they propose something entirely more radical: forms of self-love, and a rich interior world. Each woman yearns for a form of sincerity, to live “an honest life” or to protect their own “light in the corner”. Hong’s keen excavation of the existential always has the potential to transform the prosaic into a sudden moment of unguarded poetry, and here even a surprising hint of the political.
the Bressonian touch
Such are the visual elements of the film too. Jeonim is summoned by the University President during the meal. When she departs, Hong lingers on a wide shot of Jeonim shuffling through the large, crackling autumnal foliage under a large tree. Jeonim picks up a leaf, waving it back and forth. Such a moment, narratively redundant yet lyrical, reminds us of Hong’s dedication to Bresson’s aphorisms in Notes on the Cinematograph (it is rumoured that he used to carry a copy with him everywhere): «Don’t go running after poetry. It penetrates unaided through the joins (ellipses).»
By The Stream, like all of Hong’ works, is concerned with form. Poetry aids the flow of the students’ vulnerable confessions, the staging of Chu’s rehearsals for the skit are more concerned with the body than “with dialogue”, and most notably Jeonim’s own art practice of the loom is framed as a play between representation, reproduction, and abstraction. When asked by her uncle about her process, Jeonim mentions how she is inspired by the stream: «First, I come up with a structure, then I use my body to complete it. At the end of the process, the pattern may look simple, but it will be quite different from something made up in my mind.» Such a statement, of course, bears parallels to Hong’s own methods. Weaving is an apt metaphor for his filmmaking, with multiple threads of possibility, like Hong’s philosophy of the “infinite worlds possible” in each narrative, where a single thread meets another in a tight construct of aleatoric encounters.
craftsmanship
By structuring the film against repeated shots of Jeonim sketching by the water, Hong returns to Jeonim’s dedication to her craft as the centrifugal hold of the film’s temporal logic. Kim Minhee plays an artist in both Right Now, Wrong Then (2014), and By the Stream. However, in the previous works, Kim Minhee’s character’s art is refracted under a male gaze, that of the mentor and more successful, older romantic interest. Here, Jeonim speaks to her own process, assured and peaceful, perhaps an image of what the younger students aspire to become. Markedly, since 2017, Hong has moved away from his interest in the see-sawing power dynamics between men and women in romantic courtships, and Jeonim is no longer behest to Hong’s frequent complimentary trappings, the ever grating quip, “You’re pretty” that seemed to confine his earlier female characters. Instead, Jeonim is now complimented on account of her craft and work as a teacher.
For Jeonim, art-making is a daily practice, at times banal and repetitive, yet diligent and rewarding. Such moments of diligence reflect perhaps on Hong’s own mode of working, consistently producing two films a year. However, in a Q&A at the film’s premiere in Locarno, Hong revealed that he no longer writes and shoots in the same day. Instead, a day now separates the two. With the extra time given to composition, Hong has also moved into new territory, into an almost episodic form of storytelling that veers asymptotically towards the real, reflective of the incidental poetry in the crooks and the ellipses of the everyday.
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Screenings at the festival Black Movie Genève 2025
Info
By the Stream - Suyoocheon | Film | Hong Sangsoo | KOR 2024 | 111’ | Locarno Film Festival 2024, Black Movie Genève 2025
First published: January 17, 2025