Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A boy ties a small stone to a fish, then to a frog, then to a snake, and laughs at the way each creature staggers under the weight he has invented for it. That night the old monk ties a larger stone to the sleeping boy's back. When the child wakes bent double, the master sends him out to free the animals — and warns him that if any has died, he will carry the stone in his own heart for the rest of his life. One has died. The lesson is not a punishment that ends. It is a weight that never comes off.

Start there, because weight is the nearest thing this film has to a plot, and weight is exactly what Deleuze was after when he separated two kinds of cinema. In most movies a person perceives a problem and acts to solve it; the deed resolves the situation, and the editing chains cause to effect. Deleuze called that the movement-image — action discharging cleanly into the world. Kim Ki-duk withholds the circuit. The apprentice cannot act his way out of desire, out of the murder it leads to, or out of the grief that follows. He can only look, endure, and carry. When action stops resolving and time itself rises into view — felt as duration rather than as the measure of a chase — Deleuze calls it the time-image. This film is one of its purest religious instances.

Notice how little is said. There is almost no dialogue; meaning is pushed onto water, wind, birds, the creak of the rowboat and the temple boards. The characters, and we beside them, are reduced to seeing and hearing — what Deleuze names pure optical and sound situations, opsigns and sonsigns. The apprentice becomes a voyant, a seer: even his crimes arrive as things that happen to him, erupting from drives the camera refuses to dramatize, so that what the film actually holds is his face watching the consequences settle. He is never an agent who masters a situation. He is someone things are done to, and who must then sit inside the doing.

The long takes give this its texture. Within each season scenes run to their natural completion — temps mort, dead time, the everyday simply held rather than advanced. The carving of the Heart Sutra is the clearest case: the master dips a cat's tail in ink and writes the characters across the deck, and sets the murderer to gouging them out with the very knife he killed his wife with. We watch a whole night of labor as labor, time that exhausts a man rather than moving a plot. This is what Deleuze, late in his cinema books, called a cinema of the body — the gest, a posture that carries a social and spiritual relation in the flesh. The penitent dragging a millstone tied to his waist up a frozen slope, a small Buddha in his arms, is a gest in the strict sense: not a man telling us he repents, but a body bent into the shape of repentance.

And around that bent body, the world turns. The temple stays fixed at the dead center of the lake while the seasons revolve — green, rust, white, green again. Deleuze has a name for this too: movement of world, where the figure grows still and the cosmos moves through it, the way a dance can absorb its dancer. The film's title cards — Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and again Spring — and the rhyme that returns us at the end to a structurally identical scene, an old master and a small cruel child, present time not as a line one walks but as a wheel one is caught in. That is a chronosign: time shown in itself. The ending isn't resolution. It's resumption.

Watch the doors. Freestanding gates and interior doorways stand on the temple with no walls around them, enclosing nothing, and the figures honor them as if the boundaries were real. The image asks to be read rather than simply seen — a lectosign, the moment cinema stops being self-evident and turns legible. Here it reads as Kim's whole thesis: discipline is self-imposed, the wall is in you.

None of this is invented from nothing. The wordless mountain hermitage, the master–disciple bond carried by landscape, comes straight out of Korean Buddhist cinema — Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East? and Mandala are the direct precedents. The frontal, flattened, symmetrical tableaux that make those wall-less doors possible descend from Paradjanov's The Color of Pomegranates. Water staged as a reflective spiritual threshold is Mizoguchi's Ugetsu; a whole drama generated from one confined elemental place is Woman in the Dunes; and the long static gaze over still water, ambient sound treated as a metaphysical register, is Tarkovsky's Stalker. Kim, trained as a painter, fused these into a single floating set and shot it across a real calendar to catch genuine snow and genuine green — a Bazinian faith in the duration of the actual place, married to frank allegory.

That is the achievement, and the surprise. A director infamous for brutality made his most serene film, and it became the very door through which his difficult cinema reached the world. He showed that the time-image could carry karma — that you could build a movie not on what a man does but on what does not come off him. Rewatch it once knowing that. Stop waiting for the plot to resolve, and start watching for the weight.