In Hong Sang-soo’s In Water, the blurred focus symbolizes cliché and invites multiple interpretations, emphasizing the importance of the audience’s subjective interpretation, which is the essence of art. In doing so, the film creates an artistic moment that communicates with the viewer.
The semiotic approach does not work well in analyzing Hong Sang-soo’s films. This is because many of the objects in the film are disguised as symbols that carry certain metaphors. These objects recur repeatedly in the movie, forming a cinematic rhyme. Hong’s form of rhyme is not limited to the use of physical objects. In his films, it is easy to see cinematic tools such as screen composition, music, and panning and zooming function as alliteration. In Hong’s films, they appear and disappear at unannounced points, forming a strange rhythm.
It should come as no surprise that the camera focus in In Water is a key to analyzing the film. ‘In Water’ is shot out of focus for most of its shots. The appearance of the in-focus shots correlates with the appearance of the music. From the time it appears at the beginning of the movie until it reappears, all shots shot outdoors are out of focus, and all shots shot indoors are in focus. This rule, which applies to the movie for a limited time, is reversed for the second time in the movie, relative to the previous shot before the music begins. However, in the second half of the movie, the rule is broken again, and the screen is out of focus until the end.
Assuming that focus is a symbol, we can think of the following interpretations The blur represents the clichés that exist in the world. Seung-mo has an epiphany when he sees the carp swimming perfectly in the blur. This short indirectly represents this realization that he finally gets. Afterward, Seung-mo, reborn as a carp, is able to see Sang-guk and Nam-hee “in the water.” Hong Sang-soo shows this through the opaque porthole window that exists between Seung-mo, Sang-guk, and Nam-hee. The realization, however, is fleeting and fleeting, and eventually, it is subsumed by the banality of the world again. This interpretation does not contradict the overall flow of the movie. It is also consistent with the values that Hong Sang-soo has consistently expressed in his films, and it seems like a reasonable development. However, I’m a little skeptical that this interpretation can be claimed as rational. This is because I can think of other interpretations that are just as logical, if not more so. For example, the camera’s focus could be seen as the distance between the camera and the viewer’s reality, or as the artist’s gaze looking toward an uncertain future in a turbulent world. The perspective of viewing the focus of In Water as the director’s intention implies an uncertainty similar to the pedantic rhetoric attached to the simplest contemporary art.
This uncertainty also creates moments when the viewer’s interpretation goes beyond the director’s intentions. Hong’s films do not impose a fixed interpretation, but rather invite the viewer to draw various interpretations based on their own experiences and knowledge. For example, the out-of-focus scenes in In Water can be interpreted differently by different viewers. Some may interpret them as a reflection of the chaos of the world, while others may symbolize the instability of the artist’s creative process. In this way, Hong’s films have an open structure in that the viewer’s subjective interpretation is what completes the movie.
This freedom of interpretation is one of the most important characteristics of contemporary art, and it is especially evident in Hong’s films. Rather than a movie conveying a specific message, the process of creating new meanings through the viewer’s interpretation can be considered a form of art in itself. In this respect, ‘In Water’ plays an important role in making the audience actively communicate with the movie.
The process of interpreting In Water is akin to describing the shape of a constellation consisting of a small number of stars. If Ursa Minor looks like a small bear, it’s a small bear, and if it looks like a scoop, it’s a scoop. A minimalist movie, consisting of a small number of elements to begin with, can be cut with text that varies enough in shape. In affirming this analogy, it’s hard to see the focus of In Water as “any symbol” that exists as a metaphor. In Water is a movie made of a few stars, a structure that functions as a structure itself. The focal point functions as the structural center of the film’s skeleton, but also as a symbol that blinds the viewer. This is probably why it’s questionable to interpret In Water as a single text of focus.
So in what way should we discuss the focus of In Water? If the camera’s focus is a pseudo-symbol, like the zoom that Hong Sang-soo always uses (and sometimes seems to use gratuitously), is the blurry screen of In Water nothing more than the grumpiness that Hong Sang-soo, who is losing his eyesight, puts into his work? Focus feels different from zoom in that it evokes a tangible cinematic emotion. In Hong Sang-soo’s films, the zoom is more of a free-for-all, except in a few special cases. It operates purely by association.
The focus in In Water, on the other hand, is more than a mnemonic. After looking at the carp in the water and watching the defocused shots, I felt like I was watching someone who had realized something, and after watching the shots with the rules of focus reversed, I felt like I was watching someone who had transcended the world. It’s hard to call it a symbol or device, but paradoxically, it fulfills its role in the movie. The focus is less on the abrupt zoom and more on the woman tying her shoelaces or the Marlboro Red cigarette in the “pre-theater” scene. They don’t read as text, but rather as emotions, creating artistic moments in the movie that remain emotions themselves.
Hong succeeds in creating cinematic moments with just a few simple tricks. To borrow the metaphor of a constellation, Hong rejects the form of a movie in which many stars are densely packed together and appear to have a specific shape, in favor of a movie that is composed of a few stars separated in the space of a constellation, whose shape is hard to recognize at first glance. At the same time, however, the structure of the movie is fully three-dimensional, allowing for insights beyond the flat screen. In Water, in particular, reminds me of Cézanne, a painter he openly adored. Cézanne’s minimalist still-life paintings of simple apples are reminiscent of the artist’s work, and his use of multiple focal points to reveal the nature of apples in the material world. It’s as if “cubism” appeared in the movie version.
“In Water” ends with a long take shot of Seung-mo walking into the sea and being submerged up to his head. The distant objects seen through the out-of-focus camera fade as they get farther away, making it difficult to tell how far they are submerged. It’s impossible to know for sure why Seung-mo went into the sea or what the meaning of the final shot is. However, it seems self-evident that this unclear shot could represent the director, Hong Sang-soo.
