BRUNO MARRA DE MELO

This dissertation aims to analyze, taking Oki's Movie (2010) as its main object, the expressive effects ofrepetition – understood here as an aesthetic resource and as a structuring phenomenon – throughout the first two decades of the filmography of South Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-Soo. In order to do so, by drawing on concepts developed by Sigmund Freud – such as deferred action (Nachträglichkeit), symptom (Symptom) and the uncanny (Unheimliche) –, it will set forward the hypothesis that repetition in Hong Sang-Soo's work opens the way to a fruitful critical reading of its socio-historical context, highlighting – in ways perhaps not even intended by the filmmaker himself – the inherent temporal inconsistencies of commodity consumption made perceivable through the paradox of several chronological anticipations and mnemic re-inscriptions of past, present and future tenses. This investigation is structured in four parts added to the introduction and the closing remarks (each one of them titled according to the four segments encompassed by Oki's Movie), reaching the conclusion that such cinematic work, rather than reaffirming the prevailing postmodern ethos of a self-centered neoliberal identity, would rather allow us to spot some critical fissures that – in the socio-political and historical context of the early 21st century – could grant us the envisioning of alternative horizons to come.