Buckland-Warren-Puzzle-Films-Complex-Storytelling-Contemporary-Cinema

Hong Sangsoo’s The Day a Pig Fell into a Well 215The revelation of Minsu’s murders of Hyosup and Minjae reveals to viewerswhat has been impossible for them to discern up to that point: thoughMinsu has seemed to be merely a fleeting presence, he has actually been ahidden force driving the narrative in unperceived ways. His presence hasbeen so hidden that his first appearance as another prisoner at the end ofthe film’s first section will never register on first-time viewers since he isnot formally identified until the film’s third section. Those who recognizeMinsu’s early appearance on a second viewing may well wonder what interactionhe will have had with Hyosup during the five days they were in jail.Whatever it may have been is as impossible to know as is what happenedbetween the end of Minjae’s section and the end of Bokyung’s section thatdrove him to kill Minjae and Hyosup.The certainty that first-time viewers will be unable to recognize Minsuat the end of the film’s first section, or, for that matter, to recognize thealso as yet unidentified Dongwoo when he and Hyosup stand side by sidein an elevator earlier that day, defines how Hong has fashioned the film’snarrative structure and visual style to continually force viewers to struggleto construe the uncertainties of motivation. Unlike Crash, in which the motivationsand experiences of the film’s characters are reduced to the easilyunderstood consequences of racial discrimination and suspicion, TheDay a Pig Fell into a Well revels in a complexity created though narrativegaps and nontraditional editing that suggests conversely how difficult it canbe to interpret motivation or understand experience. Quite the oppositeof traditional, mainstream narrative films, as well as of the films of the KoreanNew Wave which preceded it, The Day a Pig Fell into a Well demands thatits viewers engage in an exercise in epistemological realism that asks themto ponder the nature of knowledge, it presuppositions, the extent of itsvalidity, as well as its inevitable uncertainties. To reduce the film, as somecritics have done, to nothing more than a reflection of sociological malaiseis to miss the experiential richness that it offers those willing to perceiveits possibilities with heightened attention.BibliographyCheever, J. 1978. “The day the pig fell into the well,” in The Stories of John Cheever.New York: Knopf, pp. 219–35.Kim, J. 2002. “Cinephilic nation, minimal film: South Korea’s Sangsu Hong andhis The Power of Kangwon Province.” Utah Foreign Language Review, 11, 1: 10–24.