Around the circled word “attacks” there is a larger circle within which it reads: “the dream is real.”
I once read that there are multiple proofs of infinity, and I clearly remember only two things about the circumstances: that I read only some of the examples, and that I intended to come back to the rest. The two proofs I remember are that an object can be infinitely divided and that an object can infinitely disappear into the distance. I’ve never been able to find that text again, and every few months I type “proofs of infinity” into a search engine and browse a few links in disappointment.
In my favorite early film by Hong Sang-soo, The Day He Arrives, a version of the same scene is repeated three times, but a thin narrative thread moves forward through them. The film can’t be reduced either to repetition or chronology, and I think that this impossibility of resolution is a kind of infinity. A metal ring puzzle appeared at my grandparents’ house one Christmas when I was a child: a solid ring hooked into another solid ring, but supposedly they could come apart. I couldn’t solve the puzzle, so I took it with me and imagined that one day, at the right angle, the rings would slip loose. I think of that film like those rings in my pocket.
Two curved lines extend from “a person has a dream,” one toward “the dream is real” and another toward “attacks,” going out the other side, crossing the boundaries of both circles and leading to a scribble I can’t read.
In Fauna, by Pereda, playing siblings visiting their parents’ home, Gabino (Lázaro) returns from a long night with his shirt covered in the breakfast a waitress threw at him. Luisa comments that the waitress is the daughter of a missing miner, Rosendo Mendieta. Luisa asks Gabino to tell her about the book he’s reading, and the film shifts into the story of the book. This new story is made of the same town, with the same actors, and in it Gabino’s character is searching for a man who is ultimately revealed to be Rosendo Mendieta. Gabino’s shirt is stained with the breakfast thrown by the daughter of a character in his novel / the character in the novel has disappeared from the reality from which Gabino is narrating. In Fauna, the irresolvability of which fiction contains which is a kind of infinity. In the film’s final moments, Luisa and Gabino’s voices return to narrate the novel. When Gabino asks if he can tell her something and his character in the novel leans in to whisper in the woman’s ear, I felt a jolt, like finding a dreamed object in your pocket or suddenly recovering the sensation of being in love after believing it was lost.
Hong’s more recent films no longer feel like something you could keep in your pocket, but when I think of the scene near the end of By the Stream, where the students answer the question “what kind of person do you want to be?”, the scene emits a glow that communicates across the film. It’s not a merely textual relation, in which the exchanged words reflect on past action, but a relation of luminosity. It’s significant that Kim Min-hee’s character is not present; her solitude is aware of how she stands outside the story.
At the far left of the page, it reads “dream,” surrounded by scribbles. These same scribbles also surround the phrase “a person has a dream” and the exterior of the larger circle. In the bottom left corner of the map, there is something that might be a legend, where the scribbles are defined as “field of maybe.”
In her novel Indivisible, Fanny Howe writes: “There’s a kind of story, God, that slips under everything else that’s happening, and this kind of story only leaps into the light like a silver fish when it wants to see where it lives in relation to everything else.” Is she addressing God here, or is God a kind of story? In Lázaro at Night, Aladdin is the story that surrounds and appears at the end of the film. It emerges through a small crack: at Lázaro’s birthday dinner, the characters listen to a recording of a woman who gave them a literature workshop, in which Luisa rewrote the story of Aladdin. The characters sleep in different positions in the professor’s apartment, and through the window, they are seen turning in various directions at the intersection, like an enchanted path toward where Aladdin lives with his mother, high on a rock.
I remember Nicolás responding in Toronto to the question of why Aladdin wishes for food when he could ask for anything. If he asks for food, he experiences the desire to its last bite, extending it all the way through washing the dishes in the stream and selling them at the market, making time work for him. If he asked for something that would substantially change his situation, the desire would no longer be visible and he would want something else, losing all pleasure and meaning. Aladdin’s desire is the night of the film—it surrounds the story and sits beside Lázaro in his ineffective reach toward the role in Esquivel’s film and his relationship with Luisa, a desire that burns out in order to desire again.
