Director Lee Chang-dong and actress Moon So-ri were introducing Oasis earlier tonight at Asia Society, and taking questions from the audience. This film, the first of the retrospective this week, is a bit of shocker and is many ways a very hard-to-identify film object. I first watched it quite a while ago, and felt its impact long after the screening. Of course, you can always pick up your conceptual tools and try to come up with something smart, do the critique job: You can adopt the "This works. This doesn't... This is how the film should work" stance, if you are the journalistic type of reviewer, the type that writes fast (and loose),or adopt a "This is how it works" sort of discourse, if you are more of an analytic - and often academic - type. And yes sometimes it works, but sometimes you just fall flat on your face - overinterpretation, over- intellectualization they call it.
Oasis may not necessarily be the most sophisticated (such a simplistic term, come to think of it) film, but there is something in it that defies formal analysis, perhaps because of the way the story and the characters set in motion a fragile drama that walks the thin line between reserve/restraint and its opposite - exuberance, perhaps. This instable balance that Lee Chang-dong managed to reach with Oasis is probably what makes his film - and his work as a director in general - such a unique, compelling spectacle, pushing and takes it miles away from commercial "Sunday-afternoon-distraction" entertainment. I'll come back to this at some point. Possibly in a more "constructed" format, a formal review - just so I can contradict myself - or something.
Anyway, so... the big thing about tonight, really, was that I had the chance to meet the director himself, and the actress... herself (Moon So-ri won the the Marcello Mastroianni award for best "first time" actress at the Venice Film Festival for her performance in this film). Ms. Moon was in New York for the first time, it turned out. The encounter with both Lee and Moon was certainly brief but intense, and an important personal moment for the film fan that is typing these lines. Little did I know, back in the days when I first watched a vhs copy of Green Fish in a tiny Tokyo apartment, that I would meet Lee Chang-dong in the flesh ten years from then.
with Ernest Woo, Moon So-ri, Yuni Cho, and Lee Chang-dong
With the first complete retrospective of Kim Ki-Duk's oeuvre at the MoMa, from April 23 until May 8, the controversial Korean director has been museified alive, officially consecrated/sanctioned (sanctified?) by the prestigious New York institution - they did Artaud, so why not Kim Ki-Duk? This is quite the honor for the maverick filmmaker - for whom I have always had the greatest admiration, I must say - especially considering his persistent problems with the Korean press in the past. Then again, he has a consistent record of getting recognition from foreign critics and audiences: he received the Best Director awards at the Berlin International Film Festival, for Samaria (2004) and at the Venice Film Festival 3-Iron (2004). So honors are nothing new for him, but a major retrospective at such an established museum is something else entirely, in terms of status.
Fourteen films are screened at this showcase organized by MoMa’s Department of Film Senior Curator Laurence Kardish,
and Hahn Dong-sin of Open Work, New York. Director Kim appeared at the screening of Breath for its U.S. premiere.
MoMa
describes Kim’s body of work as “sensuous, sensational imagery and wild
and haunting narratives” and praises his “sweeping camera movements and
long, richly composed shots” (how original, zzz... well, I've probably done worse.)
Among Kim’s best known films in
the U.S. are “the libidinous The Isle (2000), the Buddhist-inflected
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring (2003), and an elliptical
treatise on invisibility, 3-Iron (2004).”
Kim Ki-Duk's new film is coming out this spring in Seoul. As is usually the case for his work, it has a pretty strong premise, Sad Dream (비몽 - 悲夢 - it reads and tranliterates as: "Bimong) produced by Kim Ki-duk Film and Sponge Ent, is about two people who are connected by their dreams. Jin (played by Japanese superstar Odagiri Joe) is a guy
who dreams obsessively about his missing ex-girlfriend. Ran (Lee
Na-young) seems to sleepwalk in accordance with Jin's dream scenario. Dream and reality literally crash into each other, and so do the dreamer and the sleepwalker...
Korean TV and film stars celebrated... themselves, I suppose, for The 44th PaekSang Arts
Awards last week (Thursday, April 24) in Seoul (aired on SBS), and the greater good of all things screen-related, big and small. Not much to say about the "content", since I must admit I haven't seen a whole lot of the films and shows honored this year. What with the doom, gloom and general lapse in enthusiasm around the pop culture industry these days, there was something vaguely vacant about the display of glamor at the event this spring. Or maybe it's just me. At any rate, you (well, I do) get a sense of a very self-referential, self-contained world in which the bodies of the celebrities have become intensely (not to say, absolutely) sexualized and commodified as such. As a show, or performance, it works of course: it is narcissitic but it does looks very good. And looking good is certainly no laughing matter in Korea.
Red Carpet: Best Actress and New Actress winners Kim Min-Hee, Han Ye-Seul
To go back to the heart of the matter. the awards, the top prize in the film category went, predictably if I may add, to the critically acclaimed crime thriller The Chaser, directed by
Na Hong-jin, who also won the best new director award. The Chaser was a suprise hit: with 5 million filmgoers as of now, it is the biggest commercial success of 2008 so far. As far as I can tell, the film looks pretty good and has a strong premise. I don't know what it is with South Korea and violent crime thrillers, but there definitely seems to be something going on. The past few good films I got to see recently all belonged to that category. Interesting... It is tempting to compare this phenomenon with the persistent/perennial use of melodramatic conventions: as if Korean filmmakers worked best within pre-determined generic frameworks like the melodrama, the gangster movie, horror, etc. Then it becomes a matter of style over substance, or rather of stylizing (sorry about the wording) the substance: it is what they do with the material that makes it or break it - but somehow, melodrama always returns, like the repressed, and gets re-injected in the narrative as the dominant trope. Darcy Paquet calls it "genre-bending", I think. As good a term as any other. So yes, crime does the trick. More on The Chaser when I have a chance to see it (could take a while)
The best director award went to
Lee Chang-dong of Secret Sunshine and the best picture award to Forever the Moment. Lim Chang-jung (Scout) got the award for best actor and
Kim Min-hee (I Like It Hot) for best actress. Kwon Sang-woo and Kim Jeong-eun won the popularity vote. And here's the complete list of this year's winners: [click ]
Classic, but cool: Park Jin-hee and Park Shin-yang
One of my colleagues - a true connaisseur of all things anime -brought this to my attention yesterday: Studio Flying, the animation team that worked on Aachi & Ssipak, is coming back with a spectacular-looking project, Mad Monkey. The format if the film is basically a series of 3 OAVs (70 minutes total) that will be directly released on DVD some time this year.
Kim Byung Gap (better known as Kim Gap) is directing this singular work, which is already becoming the talk of the town - or at least of the blogosphere. Kim has gained an excellent reputation and quite a bit of buzz with the brilliant Aachi & Ssipak (2006), a first outing widely received - and acclaimed - as an exhilarating mixture of weird and cool.
For the record, the official synopsis went like this:
"An animated film from director Joe Beom-jin about a
futuristic world powered entirely by human feces. With the government
anxious to control this sole, important source of energy, they install
special sensors on its citizens' anuses to monitor production, while
controlling the populace by distributing addictive popsicles."
Kim Gap is bringing the same kind of graphic, provocative visual and narrative material, without the scatological part - I think. A supernatural martial arts fantasy set in a brothel, the film deals with 6 super fighters who get together to go... to hell (and back?). Yoon Young-ki (Wonderful Days, a forgettable but nice-looking film that suffered a lot from lame storytelling) and Peter Chung (Aeon Flux) are taking care of the animation.
Those who have liked Aachi & Ssipak, will be in terra cognita with Mad Monkey. Studio Flying is arguably the most original, if not the best Korean animation studio at the moment. Combining a tremendous amount of in-house technical talent and a cutting-edge artistic approach, the studio has developped a distinctive, aggressive, dynamic style (vaguely reminiscent of Kemonozume, some would say) a rarity in the world of animation these days. One can only hope for a theatrical release of Mad Monkey in addition to the dvd release, some time soon.
As a blogger, I have been clinically dead for quite a while: more months than I would care to count, but not exactly a year. Not a small amount of time in any case, and not a small paradox for someone who recently talked about blogging at a recent panel discussion.
I have found rather challenging the reconciliation of long-term writing aspirations - particularly fiction-wise - and a relatively new switch to full-time nonprofit work, close to what I used to do with the French cultural administration ("cultural diplomacy" is what some like to call it), or closer than I expected. Challenging is still a bit of an understatement.
Lately, though, I seem to have either gotten better at managing my personal time or simply, I might have become more detached from, well, a few things: the kind of detachment to allows you take a few steps back and look at "stuff" a little differently. Thus, I have been able to invest more time into getting my papers, files, etc. in order. In the process, I fortuitously put my hand on a large number of seemingly unrelated pieces of writing on Korean cinema. Odd, random, but reassuring, considering how the quantity of text I have signed at least publicly, in the past few months, has diminished dramatically. At any rate, to cut a long story short, this finding, which was not small excitement, prompted me to put the pen back to the paper - figuratively. Writing, has a lot to do with desire, after all, and this time around, I do have a plan, not just a flash in the pan. Besides, I have taken the decision to stick to short posts. Which should help.
To conclude this personal parenthesis, I have been a marginal part of this programming project:
Classic Movie Night: Vintage Korean Cinema on the Third Thursday of Every Month
A Tradition of Critical Realism
The second season of Classic Movie Night is an exploration and examination of political upheaval and social change in Korea from the 1960s through the 1990s. The screenings are accompanied by a discussion of the film’s history and context followed by Q & A with Kelly Chung.
We started off with Spring in My Hometown (아름다운시절) 1998, 121 min.Director: Lee Kwang-mo Starring: Ahn Sung-ki, Yu Oh-Sung, Song Eun-Suk
To The Starry Island (그섬에가고싶다) 1993, 101 min.Director: Park Kwang-Soo Starring: Ahn Sung-Ki, Moon Seong-Keun, Shim Hye-Jin
Green Fish (초록물고기) 1997, 114 min. Director: Lee Chang-Dong Starring: Han Suk-Kyu, Moon Seong-Keun, Shim Hye-Jin
Yeong-Ja’s Heydays (영자의전성시대)1975, 107 min. Director: Kim Ho-Seon Starring: Song Jae-Ho, Yeom Bok-Sun
