May 3: What Does That Nature Say to You (Hong Sangsoo) + City of Nature (Kota Ezawa)
Launching Vital Signs at Shapeshifters Cinema with a springtime Sunday matinee
2pm Sunday, May 3
Shapeshifters Cinema
567 5th Street, Oakland, CA
$15: tickets
What Does That Nature Say to You, Hong Sangsoo, 2025, 111 minutes
“Hong’s method is akin to drypoint: a sort of Impressionism of spontaneity, intricacy, and solidity, in which the rapid gesture gains in weight as it’s extended in time.... As the title suggests, nature—the joy and inspiration it provides, its force, and the emotional and material price of efforts to transform and master it—plays a major role in the story.” —The New Yorker
City of Nature, Kota Ezawa, 2011, 4 minutes
“Featuring seventy clips excerpted from twenty feature films, digitally redrawn and animated, the piece focuses in on the interstitial: those ubiquitous nature shots, set to music, that filmmakers use as transition, as metaphor, and as emotional catalyst.” —Artforum
What Does That Nature Say to You
One idea of Vital Signs is to share friendly motion-picture reminders to keep being alive. I tend to find these in contemporary independent and international films made by artists interested in how humans relate to each other, to the natural world, and to the pursuit of creativity.
So I’m thrilled to launch the series with a new feature from Hong Sangsoo, whose casually abundant work has given me lots of solace and inspiration along those lines for many years. To make films for barely any money with barely any crew in barely any time seems theoretically simple enough; to make them consistently, and consistently interesting, strikes me as a kind of poetic magic. That’s how it is with Hong.
Described by our distributor friends at Cinema Guild as “a bitterly comic fable on the trials of living simply and righteously in our world,” What Does That Nature Say to You shows us what happens when an idealistic young poet meets, and has some drinks with, his girlfriend’s family. (A rule of thumb in Hong-world: beware of the drinks.) Characteristically cheeky yet sincere, it’s a work of lightly worn philosophy, and as such perfectly Hong-ish.
City of Nature
Kota Ezawa is another artist who inspires me a lot. With sly humor, deceptive simplicity, and a somehow easygoing rigor, his short collage City of Nature makes for a fascinating companion piece to Hong’s film. Kota, too, has a great way of summoning deep feeling with a light touch, and a great way of seeing the world. He showed me around his Oakland studio once, and going in I thought oh sweet here comes a peek inside the genius machine, but the space itself was almost comically featureless, like an architectural shrug. In that environment, the one wall Kota had turned into a painted outdoor scene was all the more beautiful for being somewhat contextually unnatural.
Well, what do we even mean when we call something natural? How do we expect it to look and sound and feel, in art and in life? I look forward to sharing gentle interrogations such as these in a cozy room with a handful of old and new friends on a forthcoming springtime Sunday afternoon, presumably before and after also spending some time outside.