The Price of Liberty

I watched this movie last night on DVD, and it was very good -- better than I expected, given Korean movies' increasing Hollywoodization. Which could mean that American audiences might like it! It's streaming on Amazon and Youtube and probably elsewhere, so chances are you can find it if you're interested. Korea has been in the US news more than usual lately, so Americans should take the opportunity to inform themselves. Besides, this is a good movie -- entertaining, well-made, and fairly accurate historically.

1987 is about the events that led to the fall of the military dictatorship in South Korea, set off by the murder by waterboarding of a student activist, Park Jong-chul.  A prosecutor blocked the coverup, the press ran with the story, and after huge protests all over the country, the government allowed open elections to take place. Still, it took several more years for something like democracy to be established, and as we saw with the recent plans by the military to save ex-President Park's regime by declaring martial law, it's still not safe. It never is, anywhere.

The film was directed by Jang Joon-hwan, whose Save the Green Planet! (2003) was a sort of science-fiction allegory of the persistence of South Korea's repressive past.  1987 is only his third feature. (I haven't yet seen his second, Hwayi: A Monster Boy [2013].)  It's a much more mainstream work than Green Planet, though still tricky in its structure -- not in ways that would confuse an audience, necessarily, but in the way the narrative keeps adding on characters who turn out to be surprisingly significant.  (According to Darcy Paquet of Koreanfilm.org, only one of the characters is entirely fictional.)  It's like watching a juggler keep adding objects to keep in the air.  For Korean audiences, it probably helped that numerous well-known actors played cameos; this was a prestige project, after all.  The screenwriter, Kim Kyung-chan, has one previous credit, Cart (2014), about a strike at a Korean big-box chain store, so he has experience handling political content involving a big cast of characters; I should watch Cart again to see how it compares.

The narrative circles back on itself, rhyming the killing of another student activist whose death galvanized the democracy movement even more, with Park Jong-chul's death, and culminates in a recreation of the huge protest marches that took place all over the country. This must have been a big budget production, given the thousands of extras who participated, the need to get costumes and hairstyles right, to find locations that looked like the 1980s in the 2010s. 1987 is a spectacular logistical achievement as well as good entertainment and a powerful history lesson.

My favorite scene, by the way, is when a young woman, played by Kim Tae-ri, gets caught up in a demonstration near her university, though she herself wasn't one of the activists. The police grab her, punch and club her, and start to drag her away -- but a handsome (of course) young activist rescues her. They run through the alleys trying to escape, and manage to frustrate the cops, one of whom is knocked out. The young woman starts to run, but then turns around to kick him in the head before she escapes with her new friend. (The cop she kicks is one of those who hit her earlier, by the way: he deserves it.)

Once again I'm impressed by the ability of South Korean filmmakers to make brave political movies about the recent past.  I can't think of any US films that come close, though I admit I've probably missed some, and I hear Rob Reiner's Shock and Awe, about the propaganda campaign legitimizing the US invasion of Iraq, is good.  The most famous US example might be Salt of the Earth, the 1954 independent film about striking miners that was suppressed by a McCarthyist campaign.  But could Hollywood make such a movie?  The usual Hollywood approach is to reduce political struggle to One Man (sometimes One Woman) who Makes a Stand, while ignoring the many people who actually make a movement.  It's a very American blind spot.  One reason I love South Korean cinema is that it shows that you can make exciting, entertaining movies and TV dramas that don't scant the importance of solidarity and collective action.  But you don't have to think about that when you watch 1987.  Just be shocked (by the brutality of the repression), awed (by the courage of the people who resisted it), and moved.

It's a Korean Thing, You Wouldn't Understand

Cecily. I don’t like novels that end happily. They depress me so much.

Miss Prism. The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.

Someday I should write a serious discussion of the Korean director Im Kwon-Taek's 1993 classic Sopyonje, but for now I'm interested in the way critics and audiences have tried to situate it as a Korean film - or as not-a-Korean film.  In doing so, I have to give away the ending, because it has been one of the most discussed aspects of the film.  So if you've put off watching Sopyonje for twenty years but want everything to be a surprise, stop reading now.  (The entire film, with English subtitles, appears to be on YouTube.)

Sopyonje, made on a small budget by a commercial director as a personal project (but also to cope with the "quota" system on Korean movies at the time), was enormously and unexpectedly successful, on the international film-festival circuit but especially in Korea. Without any promotion at first, it opened on one screen but quickly became a word-of-mouth phenomenon.  The soundtrack CD was a hit, and the film was credited with sparking a revival of interest in p'ansori.  A book (in Korean) on the making and significance of the film, edited by Im and released a few months after its release, was also successful.  It did not break through as an art-house success outside Korea, though it got a lot of critical attention.

Sopyonje mostly takes part during the colonial period (1900-1945), when Korea was under Japanese occupation.  It's the story of an itinerant singer and his two adopted children.  The singer is an exponent of p'ansori, an old Korean musical form, involving one singer who tells a story to the accompaniment of one drum.  Partly because of Japanese cultural imperialism, which sought to wipe out Korean culture, and partly because of the Dread Pirate Modernity, which takes no prisoners, p'ansori and other traditional Korean arts are on the ropes.  (There's a funny scene where a little brass band walks through a village, trying to play Besame Mucho, a song which seems to have become popular in Korea over the years.)  Eventually the boy (the drummer) runs away, and the father feeds the girl singer a poisonous plant that renders her blind, both to keep her dependent and (he tells her) to make her a better artist by increasing her han, the supposedly essential Korean blend of bitterness and sorrow.  Years pass, the old man dies, and the two young people finally meet again in a small town.  They play together without acknowledging that they know each other, and separate again, probably forever.

It seems to me that a deliberately frustrating ending like this is no big deal, but numerous critics have felt it that it's a problem and have spent a fair amount of energy trying to figure out what it means.  In the collection Im Kwon-Taek: The Making of a Korean National Cinema, edited by David E. James and Kyung-Hyun Kim (Wayne State, 2002), no less than three of the papers devote space to the ending of Sopyonje.

In "Sopyonje and the Inner Domain of National Culture," Julian Stringer writes:

When we showed Sopyonje at Indiana University in the spring of 1996, the post-screening discussion raised an interesting problem of cross-cultural analysis ... [W]e -- most of whom were non-Koreans -- felt "cheated" by the film's climactic moment ... [158]

Halfway through the p'ansori recital in the reunion scene, there is a startling effect that indicates a curious stylistic decision.  Im chooses to shut off all diegetic sound, compelling his characters to be mute.  We see Song-hwa sing her song and we see Tong-ho bang his drum, but we no longer hear them.  A non-diegetic, "traditional" Korean piece -- performed on flute and synthesizer [!] -- is brought to the front of the mix, and the most climactic moment of this musical reunion is denied to the listening subject ... No wonder some of us felt cheated.  With all the fuss made up until now about the authenticity and beauty of p'ansori, why don't we get its full expression at this crucial juncture?

In short, what some of us felt at that screening in Bloomington in 1996 was that here is an example of a film not quite delivering all we had been led to expect from it.  Sure, we could rationalize our response, appreciate that there are perfectly good aesthetic reasons for blocking the soundtrack in this way.  Because we see the rapture of a blind woman experiencing an easing of her pain, doesn't the emphasis on sound manipulation approximate Song-hwa's own heightened sense of perception?  Yet we also couldn't help feeling that perhaps we just didn't "get it."  Given the narrative's overall reliance on the importance of Korean national culture, there seemed to be a level to Sopyonje that, as foreigners, we did not have access to.

This thought also came to me when I subsequently read some of the English-language critical reviews [160].

However, the "English-language critical reviews" Stringer goes on to quote are all by Korean critics, and none of them actually addresses the technical point that bothers him so much.  (I should perhaps mention that I wasn't at that screening, alas.  I might have heard about it from Korean friends, but I probably had to work.  I didn't see Sopyonje myself until it was released on DVD a decade later.  Nor, as far as I recall, have I ever met Julian Stringer.)

It seems to me that burying a diegetic (that is, within the film's world) performance under a non-diegetic (the viewer's perspective, unheard by the characters in the film) overdub is not unheard of in Western movies.  Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't express the character's inner world; it can be the filmmakers' comment on the action, or can be meant to manipulate the viewer.  To ascribe Im's decision to some mystic Korean cultural essence that "we, as foreigners, did not have access to" is to fall prey to the very Orientalism that post-colonial academics as supposed to avoid -- especially when it can hardly be a traditional Korean device, relying as it does on some pretty advanced technology.  (It happens that the diegetic performance in that scene was also a technological artifact: Stringer mentions later that the actress, though a p'ansori singer, didn't sing her part, which was overdubbed by another p'ansori singer.  The character's singing is in fact a composite of three different singers.)

Further, Stringer's remark about "the film's overall reliance on the importance of Korean national culture" overlooks the significance of the film's title.  "In pansori, there are Sopyonje and Dongpyonje," the critic Chung Sung-il writes in his monograph on Im (Korean Film Council, 2006).  "The former is the sound of the western side of Korea and the latter is the eastern."  Im was trying to recover not a national culture but a regional one, namely Im Kwon-taek's own.  Though Korea was a small country even before it was divided at the 38th parallel, it had numerous regional divisions that went back centuries and that persist to this day.  Chung writes, "Sopyonje isn't new in the perspective of aesthetics but it is the first film to declare IM's work in his sixties."

It seems to me that Stringer's reaction to his first viewing of Sopyonje was both naive and arrogant: if he didn't understand the reunion scene, it must have been because it involved some mystical Korean aesthetic which he, as a foreigner, could not have understood.  (I suspect that the "we" who "felt cheated" by it were really "I," or Stringer himself.)  This is what is commonly called Orientalism, treating Asian cultures as radically, essentially Other from the "West," and each region as monolithically homogeneous.  It's also unlikely for numerous reasons.  Film is an international "language," developed in the twentieth century in numerous countries at the same time, and South Korean filmmakers (to say nothing of audiences) even of Im's generation were heavily influenced by Hollywood and European cinema.  There are different approaches to filmmaking and narrative, but they coexist within each country.  (See, for example, Robert Ray's How a Film Theory Got Lost and Other Mysteries in Cultural Studies [Indiana, 2001], and Ella Shohat and Robert Stam's Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media [Routledge, 1994/2013].)  Stringer concedes some of this, but he still tries to find a specifically Korean filmic syntax in the scene.

Ultimately, Stringer says, "I no longer feel disappointed [by the reunion scene]; rather I am impressed with how Im Kwon-Taek and his composer, Kim Su-ch'ol, have manipulated the soundtrack so as to suggest the presence of national thematics" (172).  He also concedes that "As a Western film student, my sensitivity to formal questions (as well as 'orientalist' fascinations?) may produce rupture where no rupture actually exists" (173), but still holds that "Such possible objections do not invalidate the interpretation of Sopyonje offered in this chapter" (174).  I disagree.

Now let's look at the Korean critics who contributed to this volume, and how they read Sopyonje's reunion scene.  In "Sopyonje: Its Cultural and Historical Meaning" the sociologist Cho Hae Joang quotes reactions to the Sopyonje phenomenon by numerous Koreans, ranging from students to other critics.  Cho claims that Korean "viewers seem to have easily accepted [the reunion] scene," quoting praise from the novelist Pak Won-so.  She also quotes Im himself: "The reason that they can't meet but can't bring themselves to reveal their identities is that they know all too well that neither can be of any help to the other in the future" (143).  "This," Cho comments,

is definitely a view of humanity that is far from the "Korean" way of thinking.  This "wordless parting" scene is an astonishingly new feature of South Korean movies, though it is found quite frequently in Italian and French art films.  Considering that not too long ago South Koreans wept copiously while watching the televised reunions of families separated during the Korean War, this final scene is not "Korean" at all [143].

This is a rather astonishing claim in its own right.  First, if the scene is so un-Korean, why did Korean audiences accept it so easily, as Cho says they did?  Second, it is one thing to weep at the reunions of real families separated by war and national division -- I see no reason to suppose that Americans wouldn't weep at such a spectacle, as I have myself when watching the televised reunions while in Korea -- and another to accept a different resolution for two fictional characters separated by the demands of art; one might very well weep at the scene anyway, because the two choose not to reunite.

Nor is it certain that all Koreans found the scene easy to accept.

In reply to a student who, during an invited lecture at Yonsei University in fall 1993, asked Im why he didn't allow the brother and sister to unburden their hearts in reunion, he said that his personal familiarity with the drifter's life had taught him that there were times when it was better for separated relatives not to meet [144].

Judging by the different individuals quoted by Cho, it seems likely to me that Korean audiences (like audiences everywhere) did not react to the reunion scene uniformly: some accepted it easily, some resisted.  Some probably overlooked it because they were more interested in other aspects of the film, such as its focus on traditional Korean culture and its usefulness as a spur to Korean cultural nationalism.  Im's answer to the student at Yonsei University indicates that he didn't see the scene has having universal applicability anyway: it was his opinion, based on his experience, that there are times when it is better for separated relatives not to meet -- which implies that there are times when it is better that they should meet.  Cho ascribes the protagonists' failure / refusal to reunite to Im's "modern and Buddhist perspective on life" (144), and on his "humanism," worldviews that are not exactly compatible.  Korean culture before modernity is a hybrid of "indigenous" elements, Buddhism, Confucianism; since Buddhism has been part of Korea for hundreds of years, it's hard to see how this perspective is "not 'Korean' at all."

Cho claims that "by focusing on aesthetic obsession and the drifter lifestyle ... the movie actually touch[es] the sensibilities of modern urbanites who feel that 'life is ultimately a sojourner's road and a lonesome journey'" (145).  Perhaps modern urbanites do feel this way, but neither aesthetic obsession nor the drifter's life are specifically modern phenomena.  Traditionalists love to imagine a past when everyone was settled, but Korea's history is pretty turbulent, and even if most Koreans stayed in one place throughout their lives, many did not.  Not that Cho is a traditionalist: she has a Ph.D. from UCLA and is a professor at a modern university in Korea.  As she recognizes, "The movement to revive traditional culture is really an indication of modernity and an effort to rescue oneself" (146).  And similar tensions exist in the West, including the US.  Which indicates that a film which focused on settled, stable peasants instead of drifters would also touch the sensibilities of modern urbanites who want to escape the unsettledness of their lives; in either case, American urbanites no less than Korean ones could have their sensibilities touched by it.  There's more to say about this, but I'll try to address it in other posts to come; for now I want to stick with the significance of Sopyonje's ending.

The third contribution to Im Kwon-Taek that focuses on Sopyonje is by Chungmoo Choi, an exponent of critical theory and an associate professor at the University of California, Irvine when this book was published.  In "The Politics of Gender, Aestheticism, and Cultural Nationalism in Sopyonje and The Genealogy," Choi summarizes the film's ending as follows:

In place of a melodramatic ending, the film depicts them performing together the Tale of Simch'ongi, a piece in the p'ansori repertory that Song-hwa has perfected. The two thus sublimate han.  The next day they set off in different directions, and we learn that Song-hwa has been raising a daughter [106].

Choi declares that Sopyonje "elicited a collective outpouring of han -- and an abundant flow of audiences' tears" (107), which undermines Cho's claim that weeping at real family reunions is somehow incompatible with weeping at a refused reunion in a fictional narrative.  But did Im reject melodrama in the ending of Sopyonje?

Julian Stringer says that "the reunion scene is so effective partly because it represents the culmination of a narrative process that has built up themes of loyalty and desire and then resolved them in a satisfyingly melodramatic fashion" (165).  I think he's right here.  Renunciation is as melodramatic as reunion.  Think of a classic Hollywood weeper like Stella Dallas, which ends with Stella accepting her daughter's estrangement for the latter's own good.  If Song-hwa and Dong-ho going their separate ways inspired "an abundant flow of audiences' tears," Sopyonje fits comfortably into the category of melodrama, which is at least as popular in Korea (albeit disparaged) as it is in the West.

As a postcolonial theorist, Choi is deeply invested in opposing West and East, colonizer and colonized, "scientific rationality" and "non-articulative, aesthetic felicity."  I'm always bemused when Western-trained academics, using concepts and methods and citing authorities from the West, try to set up and perpetuate these binaries.  As Choi is aware, the modernizing, rationalizing changes that overcame Korea also overcame Western cultures, and are evaded and resisted here no less than there.  The past of rural traditional innocence is cast as the Good Other, menaced by the Bad Other of urban industrial rationalism.  (It's not clear in this formulation just who, or where, the Self is.)  Previous foreign impositions, like Confucianism, are brushed aside, though they had their own deleterious effects: Choi seems to blame the patriarchal violence in Sopyonje on colonialism, for example, though she must know better.  The father's sexual use of his adopted daughter has its counterpart in the pre-modern, non-Western, anticolonialist prophecies of Ezekiel; equating patriarchy, let alone violence, with modernity is a basic error that undermines the rest of Choi's argument.  But, again, more on this another time, I hope.

Cho Hae Joang thought that Im Kwon-taek's intention in the reunion scene was "un-Korean."  Since Im is Korean, Cho's essentialism is both misleading and harmful.  Im probably isn't a typical or "representative" Korean, but given Sopyonje's immense and unexpected popularity in Korea, being atypical is clearly no barrier to Koreanness.  But Koreans took away many different meanings and lessons from their viewing of the film.  Like any other nationality, Koreanness is a historical accident of birth, not a mystic essence inscribed in blood or, in the currently fashionable metaphor, DNA.  That doesn't mean that misunderstanding is only a failure to engage, of course: I can't apprehend the Korean language simply by adjusting my consciousness, I must put in time, study, and effort.  Nor am I saying that human nature is the same everywhere; there are numerous human natures within each culture.

I must confess my own naivete and arrogance in approaching Korean and other foreign media: it never occurred to me that I couldn't in principle understand them, that some Korean essence would render Korean film's meanings inaccessible to me.  That's not to say that I understood everything I saw without difficulty; of course not.  The Korean friends who introduced Korean films to me explained much of the historical and cultural background, some of which affected my understanding and some of which didn't.  The more I learned about Korean history and culture, the more Korean films and TV I watched, the better I understood.  My understanding will never be perfect, but as the widely varying reactions to Sopyonje by Koreans show, that would be just as true if I were Korean. (After all, I don't share or understand many of the values assumed in American media and art either. The current electoral campaign has brought home to me very forcefully that many of my fellow citizens, Republicans and Democrats alike, might as well be from Uranus.)  I think that assuming in advance that one won't be able to understand a foreign artwork is like assuming in advance that one won't be able to understand someone's foreign accent: it's a refusal to understand, rather than an inability.  I believe that approaching a film or any other work with the attitude that understanding is possible is much more productive.

Here's another possibility, from Im Kwon-taek himself, quoted in Chung Sung-il's monograph:

However, if it was simply contemplating while giving up the past, Sopyonje couldn’t have gained so much attention from the public. I had to let the accumulated resentment and grudges from giving up oneself to surface in a bright way. I had to show the bright light of willing to win and overcome the past. When I say giving up, I don’t mean just the unfair and sad han. I meant it including the bright and joyful side as well. If Sopyonje only displayed despair from giving up, it wouldn’t have touched the hearts of so many people. I saw that in pansori. Pansori itself is lonely and sorrowful and it sounds like that too at first. However, if you put it in a motion picture and let your ears become familiar with it, the listener begins to accept it as a great form of song. Once you start to feel inspiration, you can feel humor and joy. I believe that’s what the public saw.

As I read this, one can see the ending of Sopyonje as a resolution of the story: Song-hwa and Dong-ho have been trapped by their painful past, but their meeting enables them to leave it behind and move into their respective futures.  (One reason for the tears of the "reunited" families Cho Hae Joang mentioned is that they aren't really reunited: they've been brought together briefly for a televised spectacle, but they will once again be separated, and have to return to their respective sides of the 38th parallel.  The national division leaves them frozen in the past; if reunification of North and South took place, they too would have to face the future.)  I don't know how many Koreans saw it that way, but it's a reasonable and helpful message to take from it.  A major problem of postcolonial critics like Choi Chungmoo is their assumption that colonized people have no agency: they are totally determined by the forces that rule their countries.  In reality, people not only resist those forces, they select which aspects and products of modernity and foreignness they will adopt, as their ancestors did with previous foreign imports.  This is a more hopeful approach to postcolonial theory; I think it has the added benefit of being true.

The Servant

Eek, I've been neglecting this blog scandalously. I hope to rectify that, but for the moment, my review of the new Korean film The Servant just went up on Koreanfilm.org.

New Reviews at KoreanFilm: Thank You, The Naked Kitchen

Even if I haven't been very busy here, I've kept sending reviews to Koreanfilm.org, and they've been posted. New today, my review of The Naked Kitchen, which I also discussed on this blog below. Recently my review of the 2007 TV drama Thank You also went up. More to come soon, and I'll try to post some more content here before long.

The Rule 4 - GoGo 70

Today I watched GoGo 70, a 2008 Korean film about the Devils, a Korean soul band of the 60s and 70s. I should probably say "based on" them rather than "about", because according to the author of a book on Korean rock of that period, the filmmakers consulted him on the historical background and then largely ignored it; the band in the film is "fictional." I'd already suspected that, since when I found a list of the real-life band's lineup, the names were completely different from the names of their movie counterparts.

(N.B. I have only the most rudimentary knowledge of Korean, but it was easy to find the band's names in that article because the names of their instruments are printed in English. Any interested reader who can read Korean ought to look at the article: it apparently consists largely of interviews with surviving members of the Devils.)

The movie Devils started their career playing in bars servicing US Army bases in Daegu, while the real-life band began in Itaewon, the shopping and entertainment district of Seoul that also caters to US servicemen. The film alludes to the black/white segregation of those bars, in the music they supplied and the girls who "went with" the soldiers. Their music, according to this blogger, seems to have been much less soul-oriented than what we hear in the movie, though they recorded covers of "Proud Mary" -- presumably Credence Clearwater Revival's version instead of Ike and Tina Turner's -- and the "Theme from Shaft." (Some of the sites I link to here have links to samples of the Devils' music, but all seem to be broken.)

But that's par for the course in biopics. I'd like to know more about the real band (they're not mentioned in Korean Pop Music: Riding the Wave [Global Oriental, 2006], edited by Keith Howard, a great but incomplete source of information on the history of Korean pop), but GoGo 70 is still quite a good movie -- not great, but solid, well put together, and entertaining. I'm not sure why the online reviews I've read mostly disagree with me, but I think it may be because of the political and historical context of the Devils' history.

In the 1970s South Korea was ruled by a harsh military dictatorship, and GoGo 70 shows that very clearly, to a young South Korean audience of today that may be almost as ignorant about the period as Americans of any age. The film begins with archival footage of parades and period patriotic songs that may lead many viewers to believe that the film is set in North, not South Korea. South Korea in those days had a curfew from midnight to 4 a.m., which in the movie is used by promoters and bands to their advantage for a while. As in numerous countries, the Park regime cracked down periodically on "decadence," shutting down clubs, forcibly cutting the hair of young men too influenced by Western pop trends, jailing musicians, banning songs, and the usual beatings, torture, and murder. One commenter at Internet Movie Database declared that "In fact the entire setting is unnecessary, and could have easily taken place in modern day." Well, no it couldn't: the dictatorship ended in 1987, and as far as I know South Korean musicians are no longer jailed for decadence, nor are nightclubs raided by club-wielding storm troopers who lob in tear gas to drive the crowd into their clutches. (Which doesn't mean police violence in Korea is a thing of the past, of course.) Interestingly, the trailer (embedded above) puts the political context, and the police violence, squarely in the foreground.

One reviewer, who mostly liked the movie, complained that he "was less than taken by the ensemble cast of whom none seemed to really shine through as a charismatic lead ... [O]n the whole the film could have used a more clearly defined protagonist." I think that the band itself is the protagonist, but then I'm partial to ensemble films where there is no clear lead, and different characters take turns at the center. One of the things I like about Korean films is the political awareness and sensibility so many of them have, the integration of social and political factors with individual ones. Which doesn't mean that there aren't Korean movie stars who often dominate the films in which they appear, or for whom films may be constructed as vehicles to show off their talents and please their fans -- only that there's a wider range of possibility in Korean commercial cinema.

That being said, it's true that GoGo 70 is a very conventional biopic even by American standards. You have the story of the band's rise from obscurity to fame, you have the conflicts of egos among its leaders, the tension between commercial success and artistic exploration, the climactic show that almost ends prematurely but is saved by someone's determination and quick thinking. But these conventional elements are treated quite competently, aided by the large amount of performance footage -- more, I think than in most such movies. The cast handle their performing duties very well, and one of the leads, Cho Seung-woo, is a musician who's also performed in stage musicals. (He broke into movies in 2000 as a romantic lead in Im Kwon-taek's Chunhyang, which had a limited US release.) He sings his own parts, often in English, and does a good job on the 60s Stax-Volt material.

Korean rock was as much a boys' club in those days as Western rock was, but the presence of only one real female character in GoGo 70 is a bit noticeable I think. Shin Min-a (also of Kitchen) plays a young woman who prefers to be called Mimi, who still manages to strain the limits of the stereotype for such a character. Though she follows the band devotedly from the sticks to Seoul, and we learn she had a one-night stand with the leader Sang-gyu (Cho) and got him to try to teach her to sing, she is more of a would-be impressario. She makes the Devils' often elaborate costumes, nags the music journalist who opens the Seoul music scene to them, and finally rescues the band's faltering career by becoming their go-go dancer, training two more young women to join her in that role, and finally taking an exuberant vocal solo in the climactic show of the movie. Korean women are expected to be entrepreneurs, which is at odds with the shared Western and Asian masculist belief in female subservience, but there you are. If you want a clearly-defined protagonist, Mimi's it.
This photo is the only one from here that shows a girl with the band. Mimi, is that you?

But that in itself doesn't make for conformance with the Rule, which requires that a movie have at least two women characters, who talk to each other about something besides a man. GoGo 70s manages to squeeze in even that, a scene in which Mimi and one of the women who'll join her as a dancer are working on costumes and talking about music. The other young woman is the daughter of the motel where the band squatted when they first arrived in Seoul; she connived with her brother to sneak them in past her father. It's not much, but even in the canonical statement of the Rule, a single conversation in Alien does the trick. That's a reminder that the Rule is not meant to be a guarantee of high feminist consciousness, but only a minimum requirement for watchability. On other fronts, though, GoGo 70 is fun, well-made, and worth your time -- another Korean movie that American audiences should have seen, but didn't.

(Crossposted from This Is So Gay)

The Rule 3 - The Naked Kitchen

I've been working on a review of Hong Ji-Yeong's 2009 release The Naked Kitchen, which seems not to have received much attention despite its quite bankable cast. (The Naked Kitchen is a misleading tease of a title; the Korean title is simply the English word Kitchen, transliterated into Korean. From here I'm just going to call it Kitchen.) Darcy didn't even list it in upcoming releases at Koreanfilm.org as far as I can tell, and he's usually quite thorough. One thing that struck me when I watched it was how well it conformed to the Alison Bechdel / Liz Wallace Rule for movies, which requires that they have at least 1) two women characters, who 2) talk to each other about 3) something other than a man.

Kitchen meets the requirement with ease, perhaps because writer-director Hong is a woman. Ahn Mo-rae (played by Shin Min-a, left in the photo above) lives happily with her financier husband Sang-in (played by Kim Tae-woo, right), and has her own shop which sells parasols decorated with her own painted designs. Her friend Kim Sun-woo is a photographer, still unmarried, and they talk to each other a great deal during the movie, not just about men (Sun-woo thinks Mo-rae married too young and needs more experience) but about their work. Early in the movie, for example, Sun-woo drafts Mo-rae to help her photograph a wedding, so they talk about the work they're doing and about Mo-rae's pay for the gig. Sun-woo is a familiar type, the slightly older, tough, brassy working female buddy, but she has a good-sized role in the story, and I find her very sympathetic. (I couldn't, however, find any photos online of the two women together.)

Other than that, Kitchen is pretty conventional. Sang-in quits his job to pursue his lifelong dream of being the chef in his own restaurant, and brings from France a young cooking prodigy, Park Du-re (played by Joo Ji-hoon, center in the top photo), to coach him and help work out the menu. Du-re and Mo-rae start an affair (Sun-woo was right, Mo-rae needed more experience) and things get complicated. Kitchen flirts, ever so delicately, with male homoeroticism -- there seems to be a hint that Sang-in and Du-re also had an affair when they met in France, which Du-re would like to rekindle in Korea; but the flirtation seems more fashionable than sincere. The 2006 hit The King and the Clown proved young Korean women to be as susceptible as young women elsewhere to the fantasy of pretty young men smooching each other, but Kitchen doesn't pursue the theme beyond the aforementioned hint. Too bad -- it might have improved the box-office.

(Crossposted from This Is So Gay)

The Other Extreme Cinema: Lost in Love

Some Western fans of Korean cinema have expressed concern about the kind of Korean movies that have found their way to Western audiences. Will American moviegoers think (these writers fret) that Korean movies are nothing but ultraviolent crime films and misogynist psychodrama featuring on-camera animal slaughter? Some of these fretters champion the very films that worry them – OldBoy, for instance – which causes them to trip over their own fervid rhetoric. They don’t worry that their own reactions to Korean movies might be culturally skewed, incomplete, ignorant; no, it’s the unlettered masses who might misinterpret the onscreen eating of a live squid. (Lordamighty, Maw, that feller’s eatin’ a live octopus! Them Koreans must be a buncha postmodern savages!)

I submit that the trouble lies less with ethnocentric Western reviewers and audiences, as some K-movie fans claim, than with marketing departments. “Extreme cinema” fanboys are a fairly distinct, receptive niche: misogynist psychodrama, and don’t hold the splatter, is exactly what they are looking for. Having Quentin Tarantino (who boosted OldBoy at Cannes) as your advocate is not, in this respect, a good thing. I took heart from Stuart Klawans’s report in The Nation that Sympathy for Lady Vengeance found an audience among educated young American women, but I doubt that even they want a steady, unvarying diet of Lady Vengeance. Lord knows I don’t.

South Korea lacks the political and economic clout to dump its product in American multiplexes, so it’s most unlikely that Korean or any other ‘foreign’ films will ever see wide release in the US, in any significant numbers. The American movie industry really has no reason to help its competition. What, you think that Disney, Warner, the Miramaxis of Evil are in it for the art? Relatively few Americans will seek out Korean or any other ‘foreign’ films on their own, and those who do will not always do so in a quest for Truth and Beauty. It’s easy to order the DVDs online nowadays, but you have to educate yourself, buy a multiregion player, and take some chances in buying films sight unseen.

Which is too bad, because I think a lot of Americans would like Lost in Love, as well as other recent Korean melodramas, if they had a chance to see them. It’s the kind of date movie Nora Ephron or Cameron Crowe might have made. I suppose it counts as a Chick Flick (the dread genre that makes fanboys splutter and cup their gonads protectively), but I don’t really care. Let me count the ways I’m Lost In Love.

First, I love me some Sol Gyeong-gu.* I admire Choi Min-sik, who if he weren’t such a good actor would basically be a Korean John Belushi or Jack Black. I’m afraid, though, that Choi’s tough-guy-with-han (and bad hair) routine is wearing thin for me. The roles he’s chosen, though they’ve made him famous, are hemming him in. He’s doing comic stuff in TV commercials that is surely meant to crack that mold, but a split second of giggles isn’t really going to change his image. I haven’t yet seen Springtime (Ryu Jang-ha, 2004), in which Choi plays a troubled school teacher bringing out children’s musical talent, and I’d rather see Choi do it than Richard Dreyfuss. But lurking in the back of the audience’s minds there must have been the fear / hope that Choi would eventually go berserk and fight his way out of the child orchestra with a claw hammer, or gobble down a live bluebird of happiness. I know it lurks in mine.

I first saw Sol Gyeong-gu in Peppermint Candy (1999) then in Oasis (2002), both written and directed by Lee Chang-dong. In both films he’s a powerful presence, in very different ways. In Peppermint Candy he plays a man who’s tortured by guilt for what he’s become, a guilt he usually takes out on everyone who can’t fight back. Once in a while a bit of lost sweetness and innocence peeks out. It’s a sort of Jekyll / Hyde performance, though Hyde dominates. In Oasis, Sol plays an innocent. Fanboy reviewers often referred to Sol’s character as “retarded,” but I think “poor impulse control” is a more likely diagnosis. He sees, he wants, he acts, he forgets. Sol changed his bodily movements, his posture, his face, his laughter. It’s the kind of transformation I associate with Dustin Hoffman. With Hoffman, though, much as I like him, I never forget that Dustin Hoffman is in control here, giving you a virtuoso performance. Sol simply disappears into his role. In the interview with him on the Extras DVD disk of Oasis, Sol is almost invisible, let alone unrecognizable. He’s wearing a baseball cap and his large, pudgy hands keep getting in the way. He talks seriously, thoughtfully. At first I thought it was the wrong interview, but it was Sol.

After and before Sol’s work with Lee Chang-dong, he mostly played heavies, usually comic heavies as in Jail Breakers (2002). He would be the clown while another actor was there to draw the girls. Sol can do such roles very well: he’s expert by now at the explosions of temper and violence that they require, and they continue to define his career. He ventured out of type with I Wish I Had a Wife, Too (2000), where he played a nerdy banker, a rather ordinary Korean man, whose quirk and hobby is stage magic. Half an hour into the movie, Sol performs a trick for the bank’s video camera, shredding and reconstituting a newspaper. “Falling in love, Kim Beom-soo,” he intones solemnly in English, then crows, “I got it! You got it! Heyyyy, check it out!” and flashes a peace sign at the camera as he walks out of the shop. The sweetness and boyish vulnerability he radiates here seem to come from as deep a place as the rage and violence in Peppermint Candy. Sol’s nondescript looks are a blank slate on which he can inscribe almost anything.

In Lost in Love, Sol gets subtle -- as subtle as it’s possible to be, anyway, given that he’s playing an aging, lovelorn jock named Han Woo-jae. Woo-jae dropped out of college when his girlfriend dumped him – or maybe he was expelled for punching his rowing coach, who’d been caning him for losing his edge. (This made me love Woo-jae right away. I’ve gotten tired of watching Korean men in movies submit to beatings [often quite brutal] by their seniors. I know, it’s In The Culture. But that doesn’t mean they like it, or that it is not a part of Korean culture that needs to change.) Yeon-su (Song Yoon-a, who also appeared with Sol in Jail Breakers), a fellow student, had been nursing a crush on Woo-jae all along, but knew it wasn’t returned. She visited Woo-jae during his military service, but then they fell out of touch. When they meet again in the film’s present, she’s a veterinarian, and he’s just begun coaching a high school rowing team under his old college rowing coach. That’s right; the one he slugged. The film’s comic moments are built of such small connections and recognitions – even what you might call rhymes, where the same bit of business is given to different characters. For example, Woo-jae can’t figure out the locks to get out Yeon-su’s door, so she has to let him out; soon after, Woo-jae’s father is baffled by the locks on Woo-jae’s door.

Sol Gyeong-gu isn’t likely to make it as a romantic lead for American audiences, but then he’s not a romantic lead in Korea either. The big trouble is that he’s far too old for the character, especially in the film’s earlier sections where he’s supposed to be 22 or so but looks every bit of the actor’s thirty-eight years. Song Yoon-a is five years younger than Sol, and is better able to look like a college student. It’s less of a problem later on, when the film is about grown-up love, not teen romance, and the two stars have good chemistry. (In fact, they eventually married, in 2009.)

The film develops Yeon-su’s character in more depth than Woo-jae’s. We meet her widowed mother (Lee Hwi-hyang), who still lives in the country at Hongcheon and is dating a stocky, lower-class older man (Jang Hang-seon). We see a lot of Yeon-su’s relationship with her mother, and with the young man (Lee Ki-woo) who works for her, who longs for Yeon-su as hopelessly as she longs for Woo-jae. All we see of Woo-jae’s family is his father, in one telling scene: Aboji visits his son’s bachelor apartment, upbraiding him for being a slob and for still being single at his age. It all rolls off of Woo-jae, but you can recognize where he got his crankier qualities.

Woo-jae must figure out that he not only likes Yeon-su, he loves her. That progress drives (or constitutes) Lost in Love’s forward movement. It doesn’t rely on talk (like Beom-su’s video diary in I Wish I Had a Wife, Too); Woo-jae isn’t stupid, but he’s not very articulate, especially about his feelings. So Sol has to show the changes in him. The film is punctuated, ballad-like, by close-ups of Woo-jae feeling a difference in himself. He’s not sure what the difference is, but he likes it, it interests him. Those shots do a lot of work, and it was a pleasure to watch Sol do that work so easily.

Much is shown, rather than told, in Lost in Love – and sometimes it’s not even shown. When Woo-jae hits his rowing coach, the film cuts away to rowers on the water. We hear the impact, but we don’t get to see it. Often director Chu Chang-min cuts away just before the impacts; at first it feels like stepping on a step that isn’t there, but after awhile it becomes witty, as if Chu is saying, “Oh, I don’t need to show you what comes next, this is a romantic comedy, you know the drill; let me move on and show you this instead.” The film elides the normal emotional climaxes of a melodrama: they’re there, but left for the audience to fill in ourselves.

Chu Chang-min’s previous film was the gangsters-meet-grannies comedy Mapado, which I enjoyed. Lost in Love, I think, is Chu’s take on Hur Jin-ho’s understated melodramas Christmas in August and One Fine Spring Day, both of which keep the lid on emotional display. Chu goes for more comedy and a happy ending in Lost in Love. When I’ve seen too many Korean gangster or war or vengeance movies, this is the kind of movie I return to with relief. Maybe that’s the other Extreme Cinema.

*Note on transliteration: I can see I'm going to be inconsistent in how I spell Korean names in English. To be correct, this actor's name should be written as Seol Gyeong-gu, not Sol. (As usual with Asian names, Seol, his surname, comes first.) But I'll try to make things a little easier for readers who know even less Korean than I do by choosing the most phonetic spelling where I can. ("Choi", as in Choi Min-sik, is rather hopeless. It sounds like "Chay", but no standard transliteration spells it that way.) "Eo" stands for the short O sound, much like the O in the English "song". The E is silent, but many foreigners try to sound it, turning "Seoul" into "Say-ool" for example. I don't usually bother with dubbed movies, but when I checked out the English dub of The Host, it drove me crazy to hear the English voice actors pronounce an important character's name, over and over again, as "Hyun-sayo" instead of "Hyun-suh."

The Rule 2 - Shadows in the Palace

As I mentioned in my previous post on the Liz Warren Rule for motion pictures, a surprising number of films that pass the Rule's criteria come from such conservative places as South Korea. (For a recap of the Rule and its requirements, see the first few paragraphs of that posting.) Here's a report on another Korean film I saw recently, that passes the Rule's criteria with flying colors, 2007's Shadows in the Palace. That it does so isn't all that surprising when you consider that not only the director, Kim Mi-jeong, the producer, executive producer, and much of the crew, but most of the characters are women. I picked up the DVD in Korea on the strength of Darcy Paquet's review at his Koreanfilm.org website, but only watched it a week or two ago.
Two women talk to each other in Shadows in the Palace, set in late 18th-century Korea. On the left is Chunryung, physician to the Women's House in King Jeongjo's court; on the right is Ok-jin, a court maid whose roommate was found hanged in their room. Was it suicide as everyone else prefers to believe, or murder as Chunryung suspects? They are talking mostly about another woman in this scene. (image credit)

But almost all the interaction in the film takes place between women, so much of the dialogue occurs between women talking about something other than a man. And it's a strong film, though at times it has trouble deciding whether it's a murder mystery or a ghost story. The cast are good, and though it was shot on a low budget, it looks great. (A lot of money was saved by using the sets for another costume drama, the immensely popular The King and the Clown.)

Shadows in the Palace is the kind of film that should get a US DVD release at least -- palace intrigue, a fair amount of violence and creepiness, and a couple of torture scenes would recommend it to distributors of "extreme" Asian cinema for American geekboys -- but apparently that's not in the works. Too bad; there should be an audience here for such a stylish, intelligent movie; the difficulty is getting it to them.

(image credit)
(crossposted from This Is So Gay)

The Rule - Blue Swallow

I've been meaning for a long time to write about "The Rule", a 1985 episode of Alison Bechdel's comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. About a year ago it was featured on National Public Radio, which is some kind of sign of cultural arrival, but it had long been discussed online and elsewhere. As with anything that catches on, there's a certain amount of confusion about it -- what it means, or even what to call it. The name of the episode is "The Rule," but you'll find it referred to as "Mo's Rule" (though this was before the character Mo was introduced), as "The Bechdel Rule" and (as on NPR) "The Bechdel Test." So read it for yourself (click on the image to enlarge it for better readability).

Bechdel has mentioned in interviews that she stole the idea from her friend Liz Wallace, whom she credits in the strip's opening panel, but only hardcore Dykes to Watch Out For fans would recognize a reference to "Liz Warren's Rule." So I'll try not to be too pedantic, especially since there are other, serious issues involved.

First of all, you might wonder if too much isn't being read into The Rule. As it appears in this strip, it's as much a dating strategy as anything. The woman who describes it is as much interested in getting her date alone for some romance as in watching a movie. (Better to eat popcorn at home than in a crowded theater.) But that's part of what makes Alison Bechdel fun to read, and reread: at her best, she mixes interesting ideas with entertaining human stories, and one of her primary aims in Dykes to Watch Out For was to make a comic strip about lesbians and their loves at a time when media images of women-loving women were scarce, even in alternative media. That's what keeps DTWOF and this strip in particular from being a mere exercise in didacticism.

The fact that The Rule has stuck in many people's minds over the past quarter-century, though, while they often forget the story in which it's embedded, shows that the idea has been important for them. Sometimes I think that the idea becomes just an excuse for sloppy list-making, like the quizzes you find on social and tabloid news sites. ("Ten Things You Should Never Say To Your Date." "Which Character in Twilight Are You?") The NPR story is a painful example of this sort of thing, with its clumsy attempts to come up with "rules" for other minorities. It's also arguably mistaken that one reason for the paucity of good female characters is the scarcity of female writers in film and TV. As blogger Jennifer Kesler tells it, the industry is aware of what it's doing, and aspiring female writers will be told not to write scripts that conform to The Rule.

I had to understand that the audience only wanted white, straight, male leads. I was assured that as long as I made the white, straight men in my scripts prominent, I could still offer groundbreaking characters of other descriptions (fascinating, significant women, men of color, etc.) – as long as they didn’t distract the audience from the white men they really paid their money to see. ...

... there was still something wrong with my writing, something unanticipated by my professors. My scripts had multiple women with names. Talking to each other. About something other than men.

At first I got several tentative murmurings about how it distracted from the flow or point of the story. I went through this with more than one professor, more than one industry professional. Finally, I got one blessedly telling explanation: “The audience doesn’t want to listen to a bunch of women talking about whatever it is women talk about.” That, they explained nervously, was not okay. I asked why. Well, it would be more accurate to say I politely demanded a thorough, logical explanation that made sense for a change (I’d found the “audience won’t watch women!” argument pretty questionable, with its ever-shifting reasons and parameters).

“Not even if it advances the story?” I asked. That’s rule number one in screenwriting, though you’d never know it from watching most movies: every moment in a script should reveal another chunk of the story and keep it moving.

He just looked embarrassed and said, “I mean, that’s not how I see it, that’s how they see it.”

Right. A bunch of self-back-slapping professed liberals wouldn’t want you to think they routinely dismiss women in between writing checks to Greenpeace. Gosh, no – it was they. The audience. ...

Kesler also mentions in a comment that "the passing or failing of the Bechdel test is not the sole measure of a film’s feminist value", and another commenter adds:

Also, I wouldn’t want anyone to fall into the trap of assuming that just because a movie does pass the test means it’s either a feminist movie or a great movie. Beaches passes the test. I’m not going to stand up and say it’s either great cinema for the ages or a great feminist story (again with the breakdown of women’s friendships over men *sigh*), but I still own it and watch it.

If you look again at Bechdel's original comic strip, you'll see that the Rule is a minimum criterion for acceptability in a movie, not artistic quality or exemplary feminist consciousness. It means that if I am going to give my money to the movie industry, it must pander to me at least this much. I've gotten into some weird online debates with people who got upset if I dissed this or that mediocre gay Hollywood film, like Philadelphia, because if we don't support it, Hollywood won't make any more gay movies. (Promises, promises!)

Which brings me to one of the reasons I finally got off my butt to write about The Rule. I recently read the new edition of gay African-American science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany's book of critical essays, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw. It includes a blistering "Letter to the Symposium on 'Women in Science Fiction' under the Control, for Some Deeply Suspect Reason, of One Jeff Smith", written in 1975. Among much else, Delany talks about his efforts to improve his own depiction of female characters, influenced strongly by his then-wife, the poet Marilyn Hacker. Among the "parameters" he developed was this one (page 102):

Women characters must have central-to-the plot, strong, developing positive relations with other women characters. The commercial/art novel would be impossible without such relationships between men: from Ishmael and Queequeg, to Fafhrd and Mouser, to Huck and Jim, to Holes and Watson, to Nick and Gatsby, such friendships are the form, content, propellant and subject of the noel. I would pause here to state, from thirteen years distance, that any novel that does not, in this day and age, have a strong, central, positive relation between women can be dismissed as sexist (no matter the sex of the author) from the start.

In short, we have a formulation of The Rule, ten years before it appeared in Bechdel's comic strip. (Or even longer, considering that Delany worked it out in the 1960s.) After more discussion, Delany concluded (page 103):

I still think these parameters are primary. And they still don't go anywhere near far enough!

I don't bring this up to imply something like "See, girls, a man got there first!"; rather something more like Great Minds Think Alike. Delany had been influenced by Hacker, and also by his fellow sf writer Joanna Russ. His account made me wonder how many other writers of either sex had come to the same or similar conclusions about the depiction of female characters. There is, for example, Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own from 1929, where Woolf describes an imaginary novel, Life's Adventure by Mary Carmichael, featuring characters Chloe, Roger, Olivia, Tony and Mr Bigham:

And, determined to do my duty by her as reader if she would do her duty by me as writer, I turned the page and read . . . I am sorry to break off so abruptly. Are there no men present? Do you promise me that behind that red curtain over there the figure of Sir Charles Biron is not concealed? We are all women you assure me? Then I may tell you that the very next words I read were these—’Chloe liked Olivia . . .’ Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women.

‘Chloe liked Olivia,’ I read. And then it struck me how immense a change was there. Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature. Cleopatra did not like Octavia. And how completely ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA would have been altered had she done so I As it is, I thought, letting my mind, I am afraid, wander a little from LIFE’S ADVENTURE, the whole thing is simplified, conventionalized, if one dared say it, absurdly. Cleopatra’s only feeling about Octavia is one of jealousy. Is she taller than I am? How does she do her hair? The play, perhaps, required no more. But how interesting it would have been if the relationship between the two women had been more complicated. All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. So much has been left out, unattempted. And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. There is an attempt at it in DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS. They are confidantes, of course, in Racine and the Greek tragedies. They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen’s day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman’s life is that; and how little can a man know even of that when he observes it through the black or rosy spectacles which sex puts upon his nose.

This isn't quite The Rule; but the principle that underlies it is present.

Another thing that made me want to write about The Rule was noticing films that conformed to it, though they came from what most people would consider unlikely places. The "conservative" East, for example. When I first saw the South Korean film Blue Swallow (2005), among my many reactions to it was that it passed The Rule with flying colors. A biopic about Park Kyeong-won (1901-1933), one of the first Korean women to become a pilot, it showed Park going to Japan to learn to fly. At the training school she bonded with other young women and discussed the joys of flight and their hopes for their careers. The film was controversial because it dealt with a painful period in Korean history, when Japan colonized and controlled Korea; any ambitious young Korean had to become a collaborator. Park Chung-hee (1917-1979) who later became dictator of South Korea, also trained in Japan.

Park Kyeong-won died when her plane crashed in Manchuria on a propaganda flight. (Jang Jin-young, the actress who played her, also died young, of gastric cancer in 2009.) While Blue Swallow shows Park falling in love with a Korean man (hence the poster image above), as I recall it spends at least as much time on her friendships with other women. It's a very good film in its own right, worth seeing; I like to imagine the two women in "The Rule" stopping off at a video store, picking up Blue Swallow on DVD, and watching it over popcorn. (Image credit)

I've seen a surprising number of other films that conform to The Rule, and I'll probably write about them here in the future.

[Crossposted from This Is So Gay]

Why Korean Films?

So, a new blog, this one devoted mainly to Korean film and TV drama, though I will write about some other Asian cinema too. I wanted a site for reviews of work that had already been reviewed by others at Koreanfilm.org, where I intend to go on contributing; I also want to explore some themes, like violence, sexuality, gender, and nationalism, that don’t constitute reviews as such. I don't know how active posting will be, but I've been putting off this project for some time, and just noticed that I'd been posting more and more about Korean film at my other blog. I'll crosspost that material here soon.

Various people, Korean and non-Korean, have asked me why I like Korean films so much. I’m so fascinated with Korean cinema because it’s fascinating: South Korea has an amazing array of brilliant writers, directors, actors, cinematographers and other tech people, who exploded into creativity in the 1990s. The production values improved, largely as a result of increased corporate investment, resulting in some very popular blockbusters; but the Korean environment is still remarkably hospitable to smaller, more personal, more political films.

The first Korean film I saw, in June 1996, was Park Kwang-su’s A Single Spark (Jeon Tae-il), which a Korean friend had rented on VHS from the local Korean grocery. It had no subtitles, of course, so my friend interpreted for me, and explained the political situation depicted in the film.

At the time I was just beginning to learn about Korean culture and history. I had met my first Korean friend in fall of 1995; he is one of the friends I visit when I go to Korea now. I had read a little Korean literature in English translation, but most of the translations were poor, and that interfered with my appreciation of the works. I had read three novels by Choi Inhoon and one by Yi Munyol, plus a few stories and poems. I had probably started listening to Korean pop music by then, but still knew very little -- mainly Lee Seunghwan’s CD Cycle.

My Korean friends had told me that Korean films were not very good, so I was surprised by how good A Single Spark was. I began to investigate availability of Korean films with English subtitles. At that time, there was almost nothing. I believe Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Traveled to the East? had been released on video in the US, and 301/302 was released the following year. A Single Spark had been shown in New York at the Human Rights Film Festival at about the time my friend showed it to me, but there was no video version with subtitles. I should have organized a showing of the film by myself, or looked for an organization that might have sponsored it. But I didn't know where to begin with that. I am not much of a leader, as I think I would have had to be to make such a thing happen.

So it was a few more years, in 1999, before I got a DVD player and discovered that some Korean films had been released on DVD with English subtitles. Im Kwon-taek’s Chunhyang and Lee Myung-se’s Nowhere to Hide were released to art houses in the US, and got some attention. The ‘alternative’ newspaper, the Village Voice in New York City, printed an article about Korean cinema, which showed me that other Americans were paying attention to it. At Indiana University, the East Asian Languages department included some Korean films in their film series, shown on campus on video. First I bought Korean DVDs in Chicago's Koreatown, then discovered online sources that charged less. When I traveled to Korea, as I eventually did, I bought DVDs there too, and occasionally watched Korean films in theaters.

As I watched more Korean films, the more interested I got. Even in something like Nowhere to Hide, which has little substance, the surface brilliance was fascinating. I didn't like everything I saw, but I was still amazed at how many good films were coming out of Korea. There is a combination of intelligence and passion that I don’t find anywhere else, at least not in such concentration. It's hard to separate my personal interest in Korea from my interest in Korean films; I think that each one feeds the other. Because I liked the Korean people I met, I wanted to know more about their country and culture; when I discovered good Korean writers, musicians, and filmmakers, I wanted to spend more time with Korean people, and I wanted other Americans to appreciate Korea as I do. I also wanted Koreans to appreciate the achievements of their artists as I do – many of them apparently discovered the brilliance of their filmmakers even later than I did, with less excuse.

I want to stress, though, that I’m not disciplined or systematic. I looked at whatever caught my attention, partly because I had so many other interests and concerns -- religion, philosophy, feminism, GLBT issues, politics, globalization, literature, education, and so on -- and partly because that’s just my way of doing things. I knew something about Asian cinema from other countries, first Japanese, which was the first to get attention in the US, then Chinese, especially Hong Kong. None of this had impressed me so much, almost none of it really connected with me, except for Tsai Ming-liang of Taiwan and, later, Kore-eda Hirokazu of Japan. Of Japanese films I mostly knew only Kurosawa, Oshima, Kitano, and one or two others. It took me awhile to get to Ozu’s work. In Hong Kong it was mostly Jackie Chan and John Woo, following other Westerners’ interests. From the mainland I’d seen Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou. After all, I was looking at what was released here, which is still pretty limited to what is trendy. Thanks to online vendors, the range has increased a lot. But I’m still moving along slowly, as always, limited by money and time. I just did a quick count, and I guess I’ve seen just over 100 Korean films now, which is not bad compared to most other foreigners, but still only a beginning.

It seems that many critics see something they call “objectivity” as an ideal for reviewing and criticism. To my mind “objectivity” isn’t possible in the study of art or entertainment, nor would it be desirable even if were possible. People are not electrons or rocks, and the domain where we can be studied as if we were mere objects is very limited and doesn’t extend to art.

I don’t pretend to be an expert on Korea, of course, let alone “objective” about it. My Korean is still too limited to permit me to watch Korean films or TV without subtitles. I watch and write about these movies avowedly as a foreigner, an outsider to Korean culture, though an outsider who is trying to learn as much about Korea as possible. I write as an amateur in the word's sense of an unpaid layperson, but also in its etymological sense of one who does the work for love rather than money. Still, I believe that my approach can be useful, not only to other foreigners interested in Korea, but to Koreans interested in how a friendly outsider sees Korean cinema. A variety of perspectives does not produce “objectivity,” but it does teach us more about what we’re looking at. I’ve always found that when I wrote most personally, other people were most likely to find what I wrote useful; I hope that will continue to be true in my entries here.

Procedural note: I'll leave comments on for now, and see how that goes. The blog's design will be work-in-progress for a while; I want a different look, but that can wait.