Hong Sangsoo’s Codes Of Parallelism

Korean filmmaker Hong Sangsoo’s films are remarkable in their similarity to one another not only in subject matter but also in their formalism. His minimalist oeuvre is highly self-reflexive. Hong’s unique approach to parallelism utilizes different forms of repetition that re-position the audience from seeing his films to reading them. Through the act of apperception, ‘the echo effect’ and other cinematic strategies he problematizes the traditional construction of parallelism in which the same cinematic signifiers refer to the same concrete reference. His films boldly embrace reception theory by making the audience the bearer of connotative meaning in how it perceives parallelism to be indeed parallel and significant.