Kogonada: A Way of Looking

“First making his name as a keen-eyed and nimble-minded video-essayist, South Korea-born, Midwest-raised filmmaker Kogonada made a splash in 2017 with his feature directorial debut, Columbus, an idiosyncratic and wholly original approach to the city symphony film. To accompany our run of his new feature, zi, an opaque and mesmerizing work of unfettered inventiveness that reunites him with actress Haley Lu Richardson, Metrograph will be screening Columbus, a selection of Kogonada’s essay-film shorts, and a selection of movies picked by the filmmaker as key influences on his latest, an intriguing trio to say the least, consisting of Lou Ye’s Suzhou River, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Asako I & II, and Alain Resnais’s Je t’aime, je t’aime.

“The idea of echoes in cinema has always captivated me—especially the different forms and implications of this phenomenon. Film is able to play with repetitions, imitations, and doublings in a way that is particular to the medium itself. But for me, the idea of echoes is more than a technical interest. It is deeply existential. We carry the traces of time and being with us, and the fragmentation of our modern world amplifies this temporal phenomenon. Je t’aime, je t’aime, Asako I & II, and Suzhou River are films that each engage the echoes of existence in different ways.” —Kogonada”