The short film 'Unfocussed Image' takes a closer look at Hong Sang-soo’s 2023 film 'In Water', repeatedly revisiting two of its scenes: protagonist's genuine encounter with the woman on the beach as well as its reenactment – a moment of fictional reinterpretation. As the spectators of the film, we ourselves cannot see clearly. The focus plane of In Water is almost always located closer to the camera than the subjects, which ‘flattens’ an entire range of view to an ‘endless background’. This short essay-film develops an argument for the unfocussed image to become an instrument of reflexivity.

Hong insists on the role of the audience, by emphasizing his own POV as equal to the viewer. The technique of the unfocus is a property of time and a category of memory. It achieves the state of uncertainty about our spectatorial impulses at the very moment of watching.

The radical formal experiment in subjecting the whole mise en scene to the totality of the unfocussed image is not just a supplement to the visual style, but rather a device for reflecting upon cinema as such. The defocus shrinks the distance between the viewer and the filmic setting, as if positioning the audience into the scene, bypassing the cinematic dispositif altogether. Our perception is constantly destabilized through the unreachability of a complete picture. As if constantly inhabiting several temporalities, we encounter an image and try to remember it at the same time.

The unfocussed image treats cinema as visual thought in the constant process of its formation. One can argue that Hong’s unfocussed images do not require any ‘seeing’ – for it is all about looking.