There is no instant of time when one creature is not being devoured by another. Over all these numerous races of animals man is placed, and his destructive hand spares nothing that lives. He kills to obtain food and he kills to clothe himself; he kills to adorn himself; he kills in order to attack and he kills to defend himself; he kills to instruct himself and he kills to amuse himself; he kills to kill. Proud and terrible king, he wants everything and nothing resists him.
 
Joseph De Maistre, Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg (1821)

Following the lecture that Soo-Im Lee gave not so long ago about the zainichi Korean community in Japan, a presentation punctuated by personal narratives delivered with only the faintest quiver in her voice as she mentioned some of the most tragic episodes of a long and troubled history between the peninsula and the Japanese archipelago, it seems appropriate to go back to a film that professor Lee partially showed and commented during her talk, a harrowing film that is both a relevant illustration of her speech and a stand-alone piece of cinema that transcends its subject-matter: Blood and Bones, by Sai Yoichi, a zainichi/kyopo (overseas/ethnic Korean) himself, who lives in Japan and has recently made Soo in Korea under his original Korean name, “Choi Yang-Il” (same Chinese characters, but pronounced differently).

 

The film opened in Japan on November 6, 2004 and swept four Japanese Academy Awards, including Best Actress, Best Director and Best Screenplay, and was nominated in a further eight categories. Acclaimed actor/director “Beat” Takeshi Kitano, turned in what may be the most riveting performance of his career as the disturbingly charismatic character of Korean immigrant Kim-Shun-Pei. In 2005, he won the Award for Best Actor at the Kinema Junpo Awards and at the Mainichi Film Awards.

Portrait of a community of shared pain

Loosely based on the eponymous semi-autobiographical novel by Korean-Japanese author Yan Sogiru (Yang Seok-Il), Blood and Bones marks one of the rare times Kitano appears in a leading role under another director’s supervision (most notably, Oshima Nagisa).

Sai reportedly waited six years until Kitano became available and accepted the part. In fact, a lot of the film, which follows both the story of real-life immigrant Kim Shun-Pei and the history of his community, is a matter of patience. This aspect and its persistence are inscribed in the very process of production of the film and install themselves in the continuous procedure of repetition that defines the limits of the scenario, strictly set within the confines of a few streets, despite the epic 60 year time-span.

As gamblers to the wheel's bright spell,
As drunkards to their raging thirst,
As corpses to their worms — accurst
Be thou! Oh, be thou damned to hell!

Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal, (trans. George Dillon)

Directed by Shin Sang-ok. Screenplay by Lee Jeong-seon. Starring Choi Eun-hee, Kim Hak, Jo Hae-won, Gang Seon-hee. Cinematography by Kang Beom-gu. Produced by Seoul Film Company. 86 min, b&w. Released on April 20, 1958. Winner of a Best Actress award for Choi Eun-hee at the 2nd Buil Film Awards.

Flower in Hell will be playing at The Korea Society on March 15th.

Sueyoung Park-Primiano will give a brief lecture on the film’s history and context and discuss the work with the audience after the screening.

For more information, click here.

A season in hell

Last week, while the first flowers in bloom were making us hope for the possibility of an early spring  here in New York, winter had a brutal way of coming back to life with insanely low temperatures, snow and a blizzard that seemed like it was not going to run out of breath any time soon (at least upstate). Koreans, who know the phenomenon well, have baptized this late cold wave 꽃샘추위 (you need a Korean font set up on your computer to read this) which can literally be translated as “the cold, envious of flowers”, a last poetic whim apparently, as winter seems to have made way for spring in a more definite manner in the past few days. Now, I did not really intend to talk about the weather with this little piece of small talk, but since I am speaking about flowers, this provides me with a (tenuous) link to the Baudelairean-titled film by Shin Sang-Ok, which will be playing at The Korea Society this Thursday.

Shin, who died last year at age 80, occupies a central place in the history of Korean cinema. He directed more than 70 films, 7 of which were made with Kim Jong-Il as the executive producer. The current DPRK leader (he was “only”, if I may say so, his father’s son at the time and the author of On the Art of the Cinema, published in 1973) had conceived the bright idea to have the respected South-Korean auteur work for the greater Communist good, instead of making big bad capitalist goods for the US-supported nation-state on the other side of the 38th parallel.

The story of moral downfall that Flower in Hell tells us has a lot to do with capitalism indeed. The film, which was rediscovered at the 2001 edition of the PIFF (Pusan International Film Festival), was a critical success, if not a commercial one. If Jiokhwa, as it is known in Korean, has aged in many ways, the approach it adopts to deal with prostitution as the human transaction par excellence resonates probably even more strongly now than it did in the late 1950’s. Shortly after completing his military service, a modern-day Candide, Dong-Shik (Jo Hae-won), goes to Seoul to fulfill another type of duty: finding his elder brother who has gone to the ruined capital. His mother has entrusted him with the task of bringing the prodigal son back to the village. But hardly has he set foot in the city that he gets robbed of his meagre possessions while he is trying to help a damsel in distress, the victim of a theft. Another disappointment awaits: he comes across his brother Young-Shik (Kim Hak), who has fallen for a prostitute who calls herself Sonya (played by director Shin’s wife, Choi Eun-Hee), and belongs to a gang that lives an existence of petty crimes near a US base, from which they steal goods that they sell on the black market later.

This stark beginning, shot in a resolutely neo-realist mode, makes good use of actual footage from that era, showing us the aftermath of the Korean War in Seoul, which has become a city of dire destitution and despair. Worse, the presence of American troops has resulted in the development of a specialized underground economy: traffic, hostess bars, diverse outbursts of violence… a world on which Shin Sang-Ok gives a fly-on-the-wall perspective. This documentary-like pessimism initiated a quasi-verist trend in the Korean film industry at the time of its release (1958), and heralded the first days of the 1960's Golden Age.

 

Park Chan-Wook in Berlin, 2007

Even though a lot of people had left the theater during the press screening of I'm a Cyborg But That's OK, obviously unmoved or repelled by the extreme visual and narrative quirks that seem to be Park Chan-Wook's signature, the jury presided by Paul Schrader was seduced by the unique directing style of the author of Old Boy (which earned the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004) and its Vengeance-sympathetic brother and sister. Director Park received the Alfred Bauer Prize on Sunday, February 17th, while I was utterly absorbed by the preparation of the Bong Joon-Ho mini film festival. The award (one of the event's main eight distinctions), named after the renowned German photography director who was also the first director of the “Berlinale”, honors a particularly innovating work that “opens new perspectives in the art of filmmaking”. Director Jang Sun-Woo's film Hwaeomkyung also received this award in 1994.

Director Park Chan-Wook in front of the Berlinale "Palast" last year (Feb. 2006):

a lone protest against the reduced screen quota in South Korea