This piece was written for a Somai Shinji retrospective at the 2005 Jeongju Film Festival and originally published in Korean (the Korean version is included). It attempts to understand Somai’s cinema through a phenomenological analysis of his film form. Contrasting his long takes both to those of Mizoguchi Kenji and of recent filmmakers such as Hashiguchi Ryosuke and Aoyama Shinji, I argue that Somai’s aesthetics explore the tensions between the frame and off-screen space, between conscious staging and unbridled pre-lingual adolescent drives, between the concrete and the mythic, and ultimately between life and death.