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Tuesday night (Feb. 27th, 2007) saw a tremendously successful packed screening of The Host at The IFC Center, in the Village that they used to call “Greenwich” (some guide books still do, most likely), in presence of the director himself, who introduced his “creature” to a downtown-meets-uptown looking crowd. Arranged in association with The Korea Society and the Korean Film Council, the film was shown to a full house of New Yorkers from all walks of life (and a long line around the block) – a remarkable mix of Koreans (American or not), students (Korean or not), and various sorts of moviegoers from obviously heterogeneous (i.e. unidentified) backgrounds. An interesting audience for a film signed by a sociology major.

 

 

 

 

This high profile event concluded a retrospective of the spectular career of  Bong Joon-Ho (Barking Dogs Never Bite, Memories of Murder, which were screened the day before) and had the ancillary goal of  serving as a platform to raise more awareness of Korean cinema.

My 9, SBS, MTV Korea, ImaginAsian TV covered the event. Not to mention a number of bloggers, and even the Japanese media (Kodansha).

Practically everyone who attended the screening remained in their seats as the film concluded, visibly keen to listen to what the director had to say about his “thinking person’s giant mutant tadpole pic” (dixit Trevor Johnston, Time Out UK) in the pursuing Q&A session.

 

The disenfranchised underclass and the creature. Coming out on March 9th

    

Bong Joon-Ho, the director as a hard-pressed person. 

What I find interesting on these occasions in general is how the avant-première transforms the theater into a theatrical stage for a sort of secondary show, so that the viewer attends both the primary work and its commentary in the same space. In addition to the transparent promotional ritual, the staging of an introduction and a Q&A (also interesting how the public interview is “coded” into an abbreviation that sounds like a shampoo commercial) structure the screening as both an event and a pretext for a performance, a presentation and a re-presentation – of the director’s “true intentions”, “personality”… in one word, what is asked or expected, more or less tacitly, from the director is to act as the auteur (from the Latin: auctor) of his film. He is asked to stand guarantor of the meaning of his work.

The audience is listening.

This staging installs the director as a spectator of his own film, which can be dreadful in some cases but was particularly exciting in the case of Bong Joon-Ho, as he lent himself with visible ease to a much-repeated exercise, answering questions “always-already” (as some deconstruction people love to say) asked (and not by me, that is the problem). Very obliging and articulate, director Bong complied with the formal procedure, and spoke extensively about how the film originated from a childhood memory (like so many things in arts and literature), discussed the various influences, foreign and “native”, on his genre-bending cinema.