Outwardly this film revolves around the relationship between a younger monk and an older monk, but inwardly it aspires to say something about human nature, something that sums up, or at least touches, what it means to be a human being. Director Kim Ki-duk has commented that he wanted Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter ... and Spring to reflect "the meaning of maturity, the cruelty of innocence, the obsession in desires". The meaning of the maturity of awareness could be one way to sum up Kim Ki-duk’s film. The narrative consists of five segments. Each segment corresponds to one of the year’s seasons, each deals with some aspect of human life, passion, jealousy, violence, despair and ultimately, growing awareness. And each segment shows us the younger monk at a different stage of his own life. In the first story he is a boy, then a young man, then a middle-aged man, and finally an old man capable of taking the place and fulfilling the role that his teacher had fulfilled. The film constructs the cycle of the seasons, of life, and of awareness, as a wheel that turns and comes back to its own beginning. The Buddhistic overtones in this are clear, but Kim Ki-duk’s film is not simply reproducing conventional Buddhist wisdom. He represents the need for each person, for each generation, to relearn what those who have gone before them have learnt. This re-learning, however, is not represented simply as a process of absorbing the knowledge gathered by earlier generations, but of re-experiencing the process by which they shed their own shortsightedness and limitations. It is not a film about tradition as much as about the need for an older generation to teach the younger the way in which human beings arrive at a deeper, broader communication and communion with the world in which they find themselves. And an essential part of this process of learning is time and quietness. Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter ... and Spring is set around a vast lake circled by mist-shrouded mountains in whose midst floats the monks’ hermitage. The filming style is slowly paced -- time slows down -- and the smallest details become intensified. In the first narrative segment we see the younger monk as a small boy sitting in front of a hut with his teacher and sorting through the herbs they have just gathered from the surrounding forests. The older monk holds up two herbs and says, "This herb can save lives, but this one will kill you." The herbs look identical until the master points out a tiny difference in the markings of their leaves. The rest of that day the boy spends in silence. There is a minimalistic feel, not only because of the sparsity of characters, the simplicity of the natural surroundings, and the quiet cinematic style, but also because Kim Ki-duk only communicates what is absolutely necessary. Or more accurately, he seems to avoid spoiling what he wishes to communicate by over-representing it. He avoids, if you want, the cinematic equivalent of ‘wordiness’. In the second last story, the boy we met at the beginning of the film returns to the hermitage after having run away, married, and been imprisoned. He finds his old master’s clothes folded up on the mat next to his shoes, just as the master had left them before he died. It’s the middle of winter. The lake is frozen solid. A woman brings her baby to the hermitage and leaves it. In the final, very brief segment of the film, we see the baby as a young boy tormenting a turtle just as the now-old monk had once tormented similar helpless creatures in his own youth. Such cyclicity is nothing new from the perspective of filmic form. Kubrick used it often and well. But whereas Kubrick’s narrative cyclicity characteristically expresses that human beings will never be able to completely escape the more negative aspects of their own natures, Kim Ki-duk’s cyclicity suggests an acceptance of human nature, an awareness that our own human imperfections are the unavoidable road we must traverse again and again in order to arrive at the truth of ourselves.