Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Christmas in August
1998 · Hur Jin-ho · Christmas in August on Sightlines
A young woman in a parking-enforcement uniform comes in out of the heat. She has a roll of film to develop: photographs of ticketed cars, evidence for her job. The man behind the counter takes it. Outside, the cicadas keep going. The camera doesn't move.
Hur Jin-ho's first feature is built out of errands like this one. Jung-won (Han Suk-kyu) runs a small neighborhood portrait studio and lives with his father. He is dying of an illness the film never names. Da-rim (Shim Eun-ha) keeps coming back to the shop, and something grows between them that neither of them says out loud. She doesn't know he is ill. We do. Everything in the film runs on that gap, and Hur almost never touches it directly.
Think about what a story like this usually does. In the classical cinema that the philosopher Gilles Deleuze called the "movement-image," a character sees a situation and acts to change it. In that kind of film a dying man confesses, collapses, makes a grand gesture or races to put things right, and the illness becomes a plot. Jung-won does none of it. He seems to have decided to meet what is coming with courtesy and an ordinary, kind smile. Nothing he could do would change his situation, and the film doesn't pretend otherwise. What's left is looking and listening: flat summer light on a counter, traffic, a meal, a drink poured for someone. Deleuze calls these "pure optical and sound situations," moments where a character can't act on what he perceives and can only take it in. His word for such a character is "the seer." It's worth having the term, because it names something the film does all the time. When action loosens its grip, something else comes into view, and that something is time.
You can see it in how Yoo Young-gil frames things. The camera is mounted and still, kept at a respectful distance. People walk out of the shot and the shot doesn't follow them. It stays on the doorway, the chair, the shop seen from across the street. Most films would cut the second the person leaves. Here that leftover stretch is the material. Deleuze's term is temps mort, dead time: stretches where nothing moves the story forward and the everyday is just held. A sense of the space beside the frame, where the person has gone, hangs over the empty part of the picture. Feeling lands in what's absent.
Deleuze found the purest form of this in Ozu, the director this film owes the most. In Late Spring (1949) Ozu cuts to a vase in a dim room while a woman lies awake, caught between feelings she can't settle. The vase doesn't stand for anything. It just stays, and by staying it shows what doesn't change while a person changes. Deleuze reads such still lifes as time made visible directly, not measured by movement. Yoo's low, frontal setups and his cutaways to unpeopled rooms come straight from Ozu. And Hur picks out the sharpest possible place to put them: a man with very little time left, in rooms that will go on without him.
Then there is the studio itself. A portrait studio is a machine for stopping time. Every picture taken there is a present moment that turns into a keepsake as the shutter closes, something someone will hold later. Deleuze has an image for this doubling, the "crystal-image": every moment splits as it happens into a present that passes and a past that is kept, and some films let us see both sides at once. Jung-won's trade makes that split his daily work. His illness makes it his life. He moves through the summer knowing, as Da-rim doesn't, how these days will look from afterward. That's the dramatic irony, and it's also how time is built in this film. We watch the present with him, and we can't stop seeing it as a memory already forming.
The editing keeps all this from going soft. Things happen in the gaps: the illness gets worse, the season moves on, the bond deepens, mostly between scenes rather than inside them. The film skips the usual signposts of the terminal-illness picture, the collapse and the diagnosis played as spectacle. In Deleuze's terms the links between events are slack. Cause doesn't push effect along. Things pile up quietly, the way they do in life.
André Bazin, the French critic who argued that cinema's gift is recording real duration without chopping it up, would have known what he was looking at. So would Hou Hsiao-hsien. In Dust in the Wind and A Time to Live and a Time to Die Hou held scenes after the "action" was over, used the sound of the place instead of a score, and let the passing seasons carry the weight of coming loss. Hur borrows all of it. The cicadas do the work an orchestra does in other films. From Ozu's Tokyo Story comes the idea that loss can be absorbed into ordinary routine rather than built up to a peak. From Kurosawa's Ikiru comes the plot engine: a man who hides his diagnosis and keeps going to work. And just three years earlier, Kore-eda's Maborosi had shown what distant fixed frames, natural light and grief told through ellipsis could do. Christmas in August takes these debts into a neighborhood photo shop full of ordinary clutter.
What it did with them mattered. Korean melodrama, on screen and on television, had long traded on illness and tears. Hur kept the raw materials and took out the hysteria. Released a year before Shiri raised the commercial ceiling for Korean film, it showed the other road: a small, single-location drama could carry real critical weight. It stands at the head of the quieter strand of Korean art cinema that followed, a strand that trusts structure and absence to do what speeches used to do.
The title tells you how to watch it: Christmas inside August, a winter carried through the heat. So watch the doorways. Watch the frame for a second after someone leaves it. The film is quietly asking a question it never answers out loud: what does a moment weigh when you know it is one of the last? Your answer will form in those empty seconds, the way a photograph comes up in the tray.
Concepts in play
- pure optical & sound situations — Jung-won cannot act on his terminal situation; scenes come down to ambient sound (cicadas, traffic, small noises of the shop), summer light, meals and poured drinks, and music is used only sparingly
- the seer (voyant) — Han Suk-kyu plays Jung-won as a man who meets his death with equanimity and courtesy, takes in his last summer and rarely dramatizes his suffering
- dead time (temps mort) — Characters leave the frame while the static camera holds on the empty space; scenes run to their natural rhythm, and silence and intervals where nothing happens are treated as dramatic material
- relative out-of-field — Figures leave a fixed frame and the shot lingers on the doorway, the empty chair or the shop seen from across the street, so the space beside the frame carries the feeling
- direct image of time (the Ozu still life) — Ozu-derived cutaways to unpeopled rooms and objects (pillow shots) let feeling register through what stays the same, inherited from Late Spring, whose vase Deleuze read as a direct image of time
- crystal-image — The portrait studio as a machine for fixing time: each photograph is a present that turns into a kept past, which the dramatic irony of Jung-won's hidden illness extends to every scene
- weak links — Elliptical editing: the illness advances, the seasons change and the relationship deepens between scenes, with the usual collapse and diagnosis scenes left out
- crisis of the action-image — The film takes the terminal-illness melodrama, a premise built on action and disclosure, and refuses its payoffs: no grand confession, and the romance runs on things left unsaid