Kim Ki-Duk: The Walking Dead

Details: Category: Essays

A Petal

A Petal: Jang Sun-Woo's controversial masterpiece

On Thursday, July 12 at 6:30 PM, there will be a special screening of Jang Sun-Woo’s A Petal (1996) and a Q&A Session with Actress Lee Young-Lan, Associate Professor of drama at Kyung Hee University.Voted one of the “Best 50 Korean Films” by the Chosun-Ilbo Newspaper (July 16, 1998), this very controversial film by the director of Lies, Timeless Bottomless Bad Movie and Resurrection of the Little Match Girl has never been released as a commercial DVD. The only extant version is from a private collection put out for research and promotional purposes, and is part of a series called The Varied Colors of Korean Cinema, distributed only to academic and diplomatic institutions.

Lee Young-Lan, actress and academic

Lee Young-Lan, who won a Best Supporting Actress Award in 1996 at the Asia-Pacific Film Festival for her stirring performance, will talk with the audience about the making of the film, the impact its release had throughout Asia and the painful, lingering legacy of the Gwangju uprising, which has been described by some commentators as the “Korean Tienanmen”.

Lee Young-Lan stands right at the crossroads of theory and praxis, and in many ways, of East and West. An actress on the big screen and on stage, she is also one of Korea’s leading academics in her field. Her theatrical career favors one-person shows, large scale outdoor environmental theatrical happenings, and feminist works such as the annual Anti-Miss Korea Festival. She has also appeared in major feature films, like Kang Je-Gyu’s Taegukgi: The Brotherhood of War. In 2005, she received the Critic’s Special Mention at the Berlin International Film Festival for her performance in Sara Jeanne. She began her tertiary education in dance at Ewha Woman’s University—Korea’s leading all female university that is similar to America’s Smith College. She then completed her M.A. in Performance Studies at New York University. She is at the tail end of completing her dissertation at Chungang University.

The following interview was conducted on June 12th, at The Korea Society.

Q. Professor Lee, you have divided your time between cinema and the theater. What’s more important for you? Being on the stage or on screen?

Lee Young-Lan: They are equally important to me. But when I went back to Korea, I wasn’t as young as other actresses. There weren’t many roles or opportunities for me, as a newcomer in the world of cinema. Compared with the theatre where, right from the start, I was able to get leading roles, I didn’t have as many chances to be on screen, so I ended up being in a much larger number of plays.

Q. Did the theatre have more substantial audiences at the time?

LYL. Yes, in the 1980’s and the early 1990’s, theatre was much bigger. There were many more theater-goers. It was definitely the era of the theater, and of musicals as well. I was in New York for most of the 1980’s, though. However, cinema grew again in the late 1990’s. I think it will continue to grow until the end of the decade, despite recent signs of decline. Probably, the theater will rise again in the next few years. That’s what I assume, at least, and hope as well. Anyway, acting-wise, being on the stage is a basic, core experience for an actress. A lot of actors and actresses tend to return to the stage. Most of the big stars in Korean cinema came from this world.

Q. Yes, Choi Min-Sik [Old Boy] came from there and now refuses to appear in films… [as a protest against the reduction of the screen quotas.]

LYL. Right, a huge star like Song Kang-Ho also came from the stage, and so did my partner in A Petal, Moon Sung-Geun.

Q. Are there any significant theatrical activities outside Seoul?

LYL, It’s very minor actually. Everything is so centralized in the Seoul area. Which is really bad.

Q. How did you get to be cast in the part of the mother in A Petal?

LYL. In 1992, I had a big hit in a one-woman play [in Korea] called A Room of One’s Own [adaptation of a text by Virginia Woolf]. I was quite lucky to be successful after such a long time away from the stage! That’s when they contacted me [for A Petal]. That was my return to Korea after twelve years spent in the United States. I had my debut on the stage back in 1978, and the show was a big success. I got an award for the part. So people were sort of expecting me to go on actively at the time, but I left… and only came back to Korea twelve years later. For the first three years following my return, I worked for the Seoul Institute of the Arts as a Visiting Professor. A Room of One’s Own was a big success, and I started getting attention from people in the industry. That’s when an offer came from a film company, only three days before they started shooting.

They had been searching and searching for someone and hadn’t been able to find the right person for the role of the mother. They finally contacted me, on a suggestion from the production team. I knew Moon Sung-Geun, who is a friend of mine from college and the lead actor of A Petal. When we were sophomores, we played together at a theatre in Sinchon [university area where Yonsei, Ewha Woman’s University and Sogang are located]. Because of political pressure, we never actually got the chance to stage the play we had been practising for more than a month. Moon Sung-Geun told director Jang Sun-Woo about me, and basically, he thought I wouldn’t play the role. He thought I had played mostly intellectuals, very modern women, lovely and young people. He was wondering how I would be able to play a much rougher, more down-to-earth character. But, somehow I got the part! [laughs] Director Jang liked me as the mother... at first sight! I was afraid as soon as I read the script: it was so traumatic. It wasn’t a big part, but every scene was so traumatic.

Q. Yes, you had little onscreen time but you appeared in the most intense section of the film. Did your training in performing arts help you with this scene?

LYL. Of course, yes!

Q. There is a very impressive scene of mourning in A Petal, when you just heard about the death of your son. In what ways did your experiences help you?

Lee Young-Lan

LYL. I started studying traditional Korean traditional dance when I was five. I have been practicing since that age. In this practice, breathing is of paramount importance. Maybe you could say I was able to dig deeper within myself because of this. Personal life experiences were also helpful. Living in a totally different atmosphere at age 25 or 26 in New York City [in the late ‘70s through the ‘80s], all alone, as a foreign woman… [laughs]. It gives you some kind of depth, a different, perhaps deeper everyday experience. It made me search within myself.

Q. You were in New York at the time of the Kwangju massacre. How did you hear about it?

LYL. Actually, I wasn’t really aware of the event. I was so young and not very concerned about political upheavals or anything of the sort. I was actually trying not to be concerned. I thought the way things worked was cyclical. Things go up and down, this way then that way… they go around, come around, circle around. I thought one particular event was not going to change the world. I was trying not to get involved. I was trying not to restrict myself within a specific field, to a specific movement, or even, perhaps, to a specific… person [laughs]. I didn’t limit myself to a specific type of artistic training, either. I studied traditional dance, modern dance, ballet, martial arts, tai chi chuan, taekkyon (traditional Korean martial art), then I got into the theatre… into plays, musicals. And finally, I got into performance studies, and anthropology, which encompasses all of these aspects and experiences. I’m really a person who doesn’t want to be stuck in one area in particular: I participated in human rights movements, feminist movements. However, I never fully adhered to one in particular. I always had one foot in, and the other out. I thought: “if I help this group here, it doesn’t mean I don’t want to help that group over there.” So I helped both! I always wanted to be a medium through which a statement, a value, could be expressed and come through. At some point, journalists would often ask me, are you a feminist? To which I would answer: “Yes, I am a feminist. But before that, I am an artist, and before an artist, I am human… a humanist”. That’s what I am, I think. To come back to the Kwangju massacre, I had a very vague idea of what was happening. President Park’s assassination [1979] and Chun Doo-Hwan’s coup… with the demonstrations and everything, it was all very confusing. To tell you the truth, I was mostly worried about my studies back then.Later on when I got involved with the human rights and feminist movements, I really began to think about it more deeply. Then I went back to Korea, and got busy finding a job. A couple of years later, when I was cast as the mother in A Petal, I had to dig it all up, in my memory, in history, and in other people’s memories. For some reason, I felt tremendously guilty. But, I wasn’t even there! I was in New York. Even people in Korea had no idea what was going on. That’s exactly what they were furious about! How could they cover it up? More than ten years later, in the early 90’s, people started to uncover the truth.

Q. And many started writing about it… Choi Yun, with her novella [There a Petal Silently Falls, on which the film is partially based. This 1988 story is considered “one of the most important works of contemporary Korean fiction”) can be downloaded here: Part 1 / Part 2 (click on “download pdf” at bottom left). It is an excellent story, and will clarify what is going on in the film.] among others.

LYL. Finding out about all this touched me deep within my heart.

Q. And it came out in the performance?

LYL. Yes, that’s right. Especially when I was getting prepared to get shot for the demonstration scene. As the special effects people were setting up all these wires inside my clothes and I was putting gauze all over my knees and elbows, I thought about the people who died in that place. I was covering my knees not to get hurt, but all these people suffered and died there. So I cried… and cried a lot during the preparations. I remember the shooting of this particular scene very vividly.

Q. Was this film a kind of political awakening? A Petal is very meaningful. It is the first film about Kwangju, even though it doesn’t deal with the event directly. Jang Sun-Woo wanted a detour through the depiction of the wanderings of a 15 year-old girl to describe the event. There are different layers in the film, aside from the purely historical aspect. Then came two other important films, Peppermint Candy, and The Old Garden. And a new one is coming out, May 18.