Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors: the Blog-a-Thon directory

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You've come to the right place. This post is the hub of the Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors Blog-a-Thon being held all day today, March 21st, 2007. It will be updated with links to other blog entries on Hong Sang-soo's 2000 film, also known as Oh! Soo-jung, as they come in. If you have written (or drawn, podcasted, etc.) something about this film today, please leave a comment below or e-mail me with an alert.

The contributions are already coming in, starting with Squish's review at the Film Vituperatem, presented in his usual segmented reviewing style- only moreso, as befitting this divisive film.

Oggs Cruz in his write-up of the film at his Oggs' Movie Thoughts talks about his "metaphorical devirginization, into Hong Sang-soo's cinema" and then of Soo-jung's devirginization.

David Gray starts a piece that he e-mailed me for publication here that begins with the "image of a tram halted in mid-air", and works out from that crucial point in the film.

Adam Hartzell has posted an essay using a Chuck Stephens line as a jumping-off point to a much larger discussion of "doubt" at Notes Inspired By the Film, his new blog adjunct to Koreanfilm.org.

And my own first piece, a reflection on my original experience with the film, and why I selected it for this Blog-a-Thon, is now up as well. I've also written what amounts to a "dog ate my homework" note. Hopefully my kind (and smart! and extremely good-looking, all of you!) readers are more understanding than Mr. Holmes, Social Studies, 7th Grade.

Philip of London Korean Links has posted a delightful contribution that assesses the access to Hong's films in the UK and contemplates Rashomon, kissing, and his own mixed feelings about Hong. Sometimes "rambling" (his word) can be a hell of a lot of fun to read.

UPDATE 3/22/07:

Michael Guillen, proprietor of the Evening Class, brought his trusty digital recorder to the q-and-a following last night's screening of Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors at the Pacific Film Archive, as part of the SF International Asian American Film Festival. However, Director Hong is soft-spoken enough that Michael felt the recording would be better represented by this reconstruction than an attempt at a literal transcription. It was cross-posted at Twitch. I can't think of a more fitting way to present a discussion of a film that, as Michael puts it, "says so much about the limitations if not the fabrications of memory".

UPDATE 3/23/07:

Jennifer Young sent me her transcription of the greater portion of Hong's q-and-a from the previous night's screening of Woman on the Beach. Though he doesn't speak specifically on Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors here, most of his comments lean enough toward the general, encompassing and illuminating all his films, that I think it's well worth including them.

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Those are the "official" entries so far. I'm expecting a few more after-the-official-deadline pieces to come in, so continue to look back in the next day or so.

A hearty thanks to Andy, Atom, David, Girish, Philip, Samuel, Thom and the sf360 staff for helping me spread the word about this event, as well as anyone else I'm overlooking.

Here are a few links to other articles on the film, which were published long before I even thought of, much less announced this Blog-a-Thon (let me know if I’ve left any out):

acquarello at Strictly Film School.

Michael Atkinson at the Village Voice.

Marshall Deutelbaum has indicated that his essay, "The Deceptive Design of Hong Sangsoo’s Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors," which appeared in the November, 2005 issue of New Review of Film and Television Studies, is available at in its entirety on line here.

Darcy Paquet and Adam Hartzell at Koreanfilm.org.

Cable Car Suspended

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I'm very pleased with the way this Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors Blog-a-Thon has gone. And it's still going: comments sections are starting to sprout discussions, and I'm expecting at least three late entries to arrive in the next couple days, so keep your eye on this site. I'm a little embarrassed to reveal that one of the late entries is my own. I'm happy with the reflection I was able to complete, but I haven't been able to finish my essay yet. This is what I get when I mix one part over-ambitiousness, two parts procrastination, two parts delightful distraction (including unexpected houseguests among other things), one part disorganization, and one part having all my notes swept by a gust of underground wind out of my satchel and onto the third rail of the BART train as I was about to head over to the Pacific Film Archive to hear Hong's q-and-a (I'm not joking, and you should have seen the look on my face when I realized what had just happened), and stir.

The thing about notes, though, is that the act of writing them down is almost as helpful a memory aid as looking at them afterward. I'm pretty sure I still have most if not all my ideas up there in my head, clamoring to get out onto an essay. And perhaps it's for the best; viewing the film once again and hearing some of Hong's answers in the q-and-a helped clarify some of the issues around his working method in general and Virgin Stripped bare By Her Bachelors in particular.

Thanks for your patience.

Intention, Perhaps

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The first Korean-made films I ever saw were actually in-flight videos on a trans-Pacific Korean Air jetliner. I don’t remember much about these videos; only that they were promoting historical sites to visitors to the country, and I wasn't even visiting the country. I was only stopping over in the Seoul airport on my way to Thailand, where I was planning to try my hand at teaching English as a Foreign Language, eating lots of vegetarian Thai food and living in a semi-tropical climate for as long as I could stand. All of which I did. (It turned out to be exactly 500 days.)

The Seoul airport was the first ground I ever touched in Asia, and the only place I ever went to in Korea. Any traveler will tell you it doesn’t really "count"- I never got my passport stamped or left the duty-free zone. But I still have extremely vivid memories of my brief time in that airport without any family or friends – traveling outside the United States without them being another first for me.

When I came back to live in this country after those five hundred days I still had a hunger to connect to the world outside of it, especially to the countries I'd visited, however briefly, in East Asia. So when the spring 2001 film festival season in Frisco rolled around, I determined to see films chosen from those countries: Iron Ladies, which I’d somehow missed while in Thailand, Land of Wandering Souls from Cambodia, and Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, my first Korean-made feature film. At the time I was unconditionally blown away by Land of Wandering Souls, a documentary about the laying of fiber-optic cables under one of the poorest countries on Earth, but my response to Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, while very positive, was more qualified. I loved the glimpses into daily life in a city I never saw for myself except through the window of an airplane, but was just starting to fumble my way around true "film festival" cinema. I still hadn't seen very many films more structurally experimental than Mystery Train or Memento yet, and though I loved the conceit of recounting the same events from differing perspectives a la Rashomon, I wasn't certain that Hong's approach, difficult if not impossible to fully synthesize on a single viewing of this film, was the correct one.

After the passage of time I came to feel that it was. Not only had many of Hong's images and lines of dialogue stuck in my memory, but reading other discussion of the film, usually on the internet, had helped to make its clear virtues stand out and any questions or doubts I might have originally had recede. I eventually started trying to catch up with Hong’s other films on DVD (up through Turning Gate), and though they all impressed me, especially the latter, none seemed to match up to what I was now considering to be the formal brilliance of Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors. The structural complexity of the film and its parallel but asymmetrical repetitions, I now felt, stressed the importance as well as limitations of human perception and perspective on defining our reality, or realities.

But, though I now owned it on DVD and had checked out a scene or two, I still hadn't rewatched the film in full. And I knew that my memory of the actual film was becoming incomplete and distorted. So when I got it in my head to run a Blog-a-Thon on a single film, it was one of the first to come to mind: a film I knew I'd liked and would want to share with others, one I wanted to see again and had easy access to, and as a bonus, one that deals directly with something I greatly enjoy about internet discussions of film but don’t feel I see much of on my own blog: the friction and reconciliation between (slightly or greatly) differing viewpoints.

Seeing the film again last Friday, and subsequently studying it carefully on DVD in the past few days, I finally realized just how much I’d misremembered it. I'd completely forgotten whole scenes and even characters like Soo-jung's brother and Jae-hoon's other love interest. I'd forgotten major aspects of even the lead characters, such as Jae-hoon's wealth (in each of the Hong films I've seen this week, morally weak but sexually successful male characters all have a trait that lets them trump more "average" guys: fame, fortune, beauty, a position of authority, or a combination thereof). I'd even gotten the basics of the structure I so admired wrong: I’d only remembered a telling and a retelling and in my post announcing the Blog-a-Thon had referred to the structure as simply "bifurcated", overlooking the fact that the parallel scenes were nested in a flashback structure and were temporally fragmented in a much more complex way.

However, as you can probably guess, I don't feel weird or bad or anything but fascinated by the distorted mirror through which I've been recalling my first experience with this film. It only provides further evidence, though it might be overly "neat" for me to say it out loud, of the "limitations of human perception and perspective on defining our reality, or realities."

This reflection was a part of a day-long Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors Blog-a-Thon. My second piece on the film will be published here later today.

David Gray on Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors

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David Gray doesn't have a blog ("as of yet", he says) but that hasn't prevented him from contributing to this Blog-a-Thon. I'm extremely glad he took me up on my offer to publish e-mail submissions for the event here at Hell On Frisco Bay! An offer that still stands, if any other blogless readers out there aren't wholly satisfied by leaving comments on others' pieces.

In Hong Sang-soo's Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors the image of a tram halted in mid-air during its ascent by a power outage and swaying back and forth is literally central, occurring at the halfway point of this carefully structured film. And this tram contains the titular virgin, Soo-Jung who is deciding on her way whether to meet her boyfriend Jae-Hoon at a hotel for a prearranged deflowering. As Soo-Jung stands in the interrupted tram, waiting for its stillness to break either up or down, she assists a mother by holding her screaming baby, in a beautifully constructed metaphor of her stuck life. Each of the three men in her life, all after her in their different fashions yet for the same reason, behave in childish, demanding ways toward her, and she is content to hold them as they scream.

Until this small intermediary scene we have been following the narrative of Soo-Jung’s suitor Jae-Hoon, in his soju-soaked courtship of Soo-Jung. It is the very screams of this baby that carry the viewer back to the beginnings of the same courtship, which we will see all over again, this time from Soo-Jung’s perspective.

That Soo-Jung should see Jae-Hoon as the most attractive of the men in her life is hardly surprising if her older brother is in any way a representative male. In his first appearance he comes into her room late at night and begs for a hand job until she wearily gives in. And then there is her boss Young-Soo, the man who has introduced her to Jae-Hoon. He hardly seems notice her at times, but then nearly rapes her, stopping short out of physical cowardice, not any moral compunction. Perversely and tragically, she comforts him in this brutal scene. It is after the mid-point of the film, this central metaphor, that we see both of these "sex scenes." Their placement into the narrative that Hong has been implanting in his audience’s mind through the first half of the film has a shocking effect. Scenes that seemed comic the first time through take on a much darker feel. Hong further complicates matters by giving us alternate versions of many of the scenes we have already witnessed.

Ultimately, Soo-Jung acquiesces to Jae-Hoon's pleas, and she ends the film no longer a virgin, after another disquieting scene in which Jae-Hoon repeatedly tells her that he will be gentle, while at the same time his body belies his words. Words and actions seem to constantly be at odds in Hong's film, as if the characters are constantly trying to persuade themselves that what they are saying is true. Jae-Hoon, in one of his most selfish moments, loudly berates Soo-Jung for not being interested enough in him. He raves that she has made him consider marriage, and does she realize what a monumental thing it is for him to consider marriage? Here Jae-Hoon really is nothing but a big baby.

In the final shot of the film, Jae-Hoon tells Soo-Jung that he has found his match, and she tells him she has too, but if we follow her gaze as they embrace we know this is not true. They see the world oppositely, which Hong highlights not only through their wildly different memories, but also, in a wonderful shorthand, by showing two separate point-of-view shots at critical points in the film as they each look out the window of the hotel room. Jae-Hoon sees the hotel chef walking from left to right, and later Soo-Jung sees the same chef walking back in the opposite direction. But Soo-Jung remains trapped on this motionless tram, and what can she do but wait for it to start moving again, and take her somewhere?

Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors is the first of Hong Sang-Soo's films I've seen, and over the past few days I’ve seen two more, The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well, and Woman on the Beach, all thanks to the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. They are all fresh and still flowering in my mind, but I am eager to see more. These hurried thoughts on Virgin don’t even touch on much of what I have loved about Hong’s films, like the little glances we get of Seoul, and the great funny drinking scenes that seem to be a fixture. I eagerly look forward to reading what everyone else has to say about the film.

Open Letter

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To the guy who decided it would be a good idea to loudly cough the word *boring* on his way out of the theatre in the middle of the Story of Marie and Julien Friday night:

It might please you to learn that, within a few minutes of your departure, the clarity of your critique had sunk in to each and every one of us in the audience. That, though we'd been too blinded by our allegiance to the ideal of "art cinema" to recognize it on our own, your analysis spurred us to realize that "the Emperor Had No Clothes", and to walk, one by one and two by two, out into the lobby of the Pacific Film Archive, where Susan Oxtoby herself reassured us all that never again would the PFA make the mistake of programming a film like it.

Well, I'm afraid that none of that actually happened. There were a few chuckles after your departing remark, and then we all remained in our seats, enjoying, or perhaps (as I didn't have the wherewithal to conduct a survey) being bored by the rest of the film. This does not make us more virtuous than the people who, in case you thought you were being terribly original, walked out of the film before you did. But it certainly doesn't make you any better or smarter or more "with it" or honest than us either.

To be sure, this is a challenging film, and I'm not all that surprised no Frisco Bay film programmer had wanted to bring it to us before. To be truthful, I'm not certain what I'd have made of its first hour or so if I hadn't seen its elder cousin Celine and Julie Go Boating last month. Both films are mysteries where the mystery is little more than hinted at during the first half of the film, which, on a single viewing apiece for me so far, I take as instead the terrain for helping us get to know the characters and the nature of their relationship. In each case the first half is the foundation for the truly astonishing material that comes in the second half. In the case of Celine and Julie Go Boating the title characters are so naturally appealing that I didn't care at all that I wasn't getting a sense of narrative driving the film. In the case of the Story of Marie and Julien that's slightly less the case, but I was no longer a Rivette virgin and it was probably my trust that the director would at some point take me into some extraordinary realm like the one I'd so loved in Celine and Julie Go Boating that prevented the sense that I might have been "missing something" (or that the director, or the rest of the audience might have been) from taking hold. It didn't even occur to me to look at my watch (though Rivette had placed all those clocks on the screen) or be bored; I was, as one character put it, "waiting." Which paid off in a big way, delivering a third act as emotional and suspenseful as a great Val Lewton film, while following Rivette's tradition of guiding his audience a step closer to an intellectual understanding of the nature and "rules" of character, drama and cinema. I'd be sorry you had to miss it, if only you hadn't been such an ass about it.

But most of all I'm confused as to how you could possibly choose a sex scene with Emmanuelle Béart to be the moment to walk out on. What's wrong with you, man?