Ithaca College

Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in Screen Studies, Sueyoung Park-Primiano, presented her paper, "The Awkward Truth: Failure to Romance and the Art of Decoupling in the Films of Hong Sangsoo," at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference on March 16th in Toronto, Canada.

In a departure from existing scholarship on Hong Sangsoo and his films, the paper approaches Hong's work as an update of the classic romantic comedy. It prioritizes Hong's candid look at human weaknesses and insecurities that dismantles any idealized vision of two perfect strangers coming together. By bracketing Hong's oeuvre as a deconstruction of the long-standing tradition of mythologizing true love, the paper identifies their dialogic relationship to the genre and interprets their idiosyncratic structure and style as explicitly gendered.