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

Robert L. Cagle currently works as the cinema studies specialist at the University of Illinois Library. His essays have appeared in such publications as Cinema Journal, The Velvet Light Trap, AfterImage, and CineAction. Cagle is currently completing a study of contemporary South Korean melodrama, for which he received the Korean Film Council's 2005 Grant for Overseas Research on Korean Film.

One of the must enduring and mutable forms of popular entertainment, the melodrama enjoyed its greatest success in both the U.S. and South Korea at approximately the same time. While Douglas Sirk, Nicholas Ray, and Vincente Minnelli created lavish Technicolor tearjerkers about the middle-class concerns of the American audiences, Im Kwon-taek, Yoo Hyon-mok, and Shin Sang-ok unflinchingly showed life in a country left in ruins and occupied by foreign forces. Robert L. Cagle will discuss how these works, despite their differences, both reflect and perpetuate the dominant melodramatic mode of representation that inspires and structures the national cinemas of the U.S. and South Korea.

The Gallery Talk is being presented in conjunction with The Korea Society's current exhibition, Advertising a Dream: Movie Posters from Post-War Korea, which runs through October 31, 2006. The exhibition may be viewed from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM in The Korea Society Gallery.

Photo:
Hongdoya Wujimara 홍도야 우지마라 (My Dear Sister Hongdo, Do Not Cry!) (1965) Starring: Shin Yeong-Gyun, Kim Ji-Mi, Lee Su-Ryeon
Directed by: Jeon Taek-In
Distributed by: Korea Art Films Genre: Drama