Sightlines · how to watch

How to watch Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring

2003 · Kim Ki-duk · Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring on Sightlines

5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 2 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.

On a first viewing

1. Watch the temple centered exactly in the middle of the lake. (camera)

   Kim composes frontal, symmetrical tableaux with the temple fixed at the center of the water and the mountains held in long, still or slowly drifting shots.

   Payoff: The reading calls this movement of world: the temple stays still while the seasons and the water move around it. In the reading: movement of world. The stillness at the center is what lets everything else read as change.

2. Watch characters walk through doorways that have no walls. (staging)

   Freestanding gates and interior doors stand on the temple deck enclosing nothing, and the characters honor them as boundaries anyway.

   Payoff: The reading calls this a lectosign, an image that asks to be read rather than simply looked at. In the reading: the readable image. The unwalled door reads as the film's whole idea: discipline you impose on yourself, not one built for you.

3. Listen for water, wind, and birds instead of dialogue. (sound)

   The soundtrack leans on ambient natural sound, water, wind, birds, the creak of the rowboat, with strikingly little spoken dialogue throughout.

   Payoff: With so little talk, meaning gets pushed onto what you can hear and see instead of what anyone says.

4. Notice how many animals share the temple with the monks. (setting)

   A fish, frog, snake, dog, cat, and rooster move through the temple across the film, present as literal inhabitants and as figures in its moral scheme.

   Payoff: The animals are not decoration. Watch what happens to them and you are watching the film's argument about consequence.

5. Notice title cards marking the passing seasons. (structure)

   Kim divides the film into five movements named for the seasons, each separated by years, using the title cards as the main markers of passing time.

   Payoff: The reading calls this a chronosign: time shown directly, through the seasons themselves, rather than through a ticking plot. In the reading: chronosign. The calendar does the work a conventional story would give to incident and event.

Once you have seen it

1. Track how the closing scene rhymes with the opening one. (structure)

   The final Spring returns to a structurally identical situation, an old master and a small cruel child, closing the cycle rather than resolving it.

   Payoff: The film ends by starting over, refusing you the comfort of an ending that fixes anything.

2. Watch the penitent drag a millstone up the frozen mountain. (performance)

   In Winter, the grown apprentice ties a heavy millstone to his body and climbs a frozen slope carrying a small Buddha statue, an act of penance made entirely physical.

   Payoff: His body does what confession would do in another film: it carries the weight of what he has done.

Carry this in: Watch what returns each season: the same lake, the same temple, a different weight to carry.

A Deleuzian reading of Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring →

How Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring was received →