Gallery Talk and Film Screening

The Cinematic Golden Age and Cold War Culture

with

Han Joon Magnan-Park
Assistant Professor, Film, Television and Theater Department, Notre Dame University

Thursday, September 21, 2006

After the armistice, South Korean society rushed full-on towards economic development, soon pulling itself up to become one of the most advanced and dynamic countries in the world. It's a story with a happy ending, but Han Joon Magnan-Park, an assistant professor in the Film, Television and Theater Department at Notre Dame University, showed his audience that at the time, Korean cinema wasn't nearly as cheery about the country's prospects.

Using the 1961 film The Stray Bullet as an example, Magnan-Park noted how director Hyun Mok Yoo had consciously patterned the work on the 1948 Italian neo-realist film The Bicycle Thief.  The Bicycle Thief depicted an Italian family struggling to survive in the aftermath World War II; though masterfully sympathetic, the characters in the film only bring their family closer to disintegration as they struggle to save it.

So too in The Stray Bullet: The main character, a government accountant, sacrifices his meager salary to meet his family's needs—to the point of ignoring his own toothache rather than paying a dentist to fix it. But it's just not enough. Beset by chronic unemployment and despair, the accountant's brother turns to robbery and his sister to prostitution. Adhering to neo-realist strictures, The Stray Bullet leaves it to audience members to formulate their own "answers" to the problematic reality it displays.

More than just a philosophical exercise, the film expresses a deep and uniquely Korean unease: the feeling that the Confucian value system isn't up to the task of regulating an increasingly modernizing society. A pillar of Korean society for centuries, Confucian thought mandated clear duties for every individual. All the characters in The Stray Bullet perform these duties as best they know how, and still end up mired in poverty and chaos. With this in mind, Magnan-Park suggested, the film's lack of resolution can be read as a question posed to Korean society: What value system do we rely on now?

Produced during the brief flowering of South Korean democracy that followed the removal of Syngman Rhee, The Stray Bullet's question—and its depiction of a bleak, chaotic society-struck a nerve with viewers. When Park Chung Hee assumed power shortly after its release, the film was banned.

About the Presenter

Gallery Talk and Film Screening

with

Robert L. Cagle
Cinema Studies Specialist, University of Illinois

Thursday, August 31, 2006

Made from overwrought anguish and predictable improbabilities, melodrama doesn't encourage its audience too look too deep. But according to Robert L. Cagle, a cinema studies specialist at the University of Illinois, look at post-war American melodramas and post-IMF crisis South Korean melodramas and you'll see critical thematic and philosophical similarities.

Both sets of cinema were produced by recently traumatized societies: WWII in the case of 1950s America, economic calamity in the case of late-90s Korea. Both societies were embracing economic growth and watching as consumer culture sparked conflict between tradition and modernity. In mid-‘50s America, filmmaker Douglas Sirk presented these realities in films like There's Always Tomorrow, All That Heaven Allows and Imitation of Life. All three melodramas highlighted characters striving to escape lives they feel trap them, in the process creating an even more anguished personal mess. A common thread, Cagle noted, is that American melodramas of the period tend to feature characters that are afraid of losing their place in the world; either physically, through losing a home, or emotionally, through damaging important relationships.

The same can be said for contemporary Korean melodramas. In recent films such as The Man Who Went to Mars and Cracked Eggs and Noodles, Korean melodrama directors portray an emotionally deadening consumer culture through the symbolic pervasiveness of Korean electronic gadgetry. The characters go through the same process of disillusion and loss.

American and Korean melodramas do part ways, however, when it comes to the end of the film. In American melodramas, characters whose world has collapsed around them usually find another form of personal satisfaction and re-invest their faith in the typical American dream: a classic Hollywood happy ending. Contrast this to Korean melodramas, where the main characters don't recover. When Korean melodrama characters realize they've lost it all, the film usually takes them back to a fleeting memory of past happiness and then ends, eschewing resolution.

This perspective gives South Korean melodramas a more sophisticated feel than their American counterparts. Korean melodramas, Cagle said, "dare to raise questions...they don't give audiences the false hope that American films do, and don't feel as manipulative."

About the Presenter

International DUMBO Dance Festival: Contemporary Korean Choreographers

October 19 - 25, 2005

Gallery Talk and Film Screening

with

Heinz Insu Fenkl
Director, Interstitial Studies Institute, SUNY New Paltz

Wednesday, September 21, 2005

It's a classically Korean tale and a small triumph of geopolitics too, brought to New York audiences for the first time by The Korea Society. The animated feature-length film Empress Chung played for one night at The French Institute in Midtown, telling the story of a dutiful Korean daughter who sacrifices herself to the Dragon King in order to redeem her blind father's sight, which starts a magical undersea adventure that ends with her becoming an empress. Already in wide-release throughout Asia, Empress Chung has played in only a handful of American venues. The plot would have seemed familiar to anyone who knows Korean folklore. Less obvious would have been the story behind the production. The film has been hailed as a triumph of geopolitics as well as animation. Directed by iconic Korean American animator Nelson Shin, Empress Chung was the first feature-length joint production employing both South Korean and North Korean artists.

Immediately following the screening, wowed cinema-goers heard a lecture by Heinz Insu Fenkl, director of the Interstitial Studies Institute at SUNY New Paltz. Fenkl's talk, titled "Empress Chung: Korea's Beauty and the Beast," introduced listeners to deep, uniquely Korean values that the film (and folktale) express, and traced the roots of the story through other ancient East Asian traditions. His lecture also illustrated how the traditional folktale had been adapted in this animated version to convey a message about the universal Korean aspiration for national reunification.