Have a happy fulfilling new year!

Since a new year is always the occasion of reflecting upon a past itinerary, as is the custom when you reach the end of a path, and since a picture sometimes speaks louder than words, I have put up the poster of The King and the Clown, newly renamed The Royal Jester for some obscure marketing reason (the Korean title is, literally, The King's Man): to my mind, the most emblematic film of 2006, it was picked as South Korea's representative for the Oscars in the foreign film category. The Academy will announce whether or not the film is selected for the official competition on January 23rd. I for one certainly hope so. In the meantime, it will be screened in San Francisco at the San Rafael Theatre on Sunday, January 14th at 6:30pm and Wednesday, January 17th at 8:30pm.

This complex, deceptively low-key historical drama with Shakespearean dimensions (Falstaff, Hamlet... but I will come back to this later) was a tremendous critical and commercial success, and a good reminder that less (money, stars, publicity, etc) can be more in the Korean film world. Not only was it one of the best films of last year, it was also arguably, one of the most unusual and interesting ones. In many ways, it seems to illustrate well what 2006 was all about: instead of an identifiable itinerary, we had multiple lanes and short cuts, dead ends and detours... occasional accidents and incidents. In one word, peregrinations.

What was 2006 about then?

It is tempting to say: figures, lots of figures... lots and lots... and always more figures. That is what people have been talking about, and drowning into, to a large extent (that includes the 13 million ticket-selling The Host as well). To put all these numbers in a nutshell: the screen quota days, established in 1996 to encourage local theaters to screen local films and protect their perennity against Hollywood movies, were halved from 146 days to 73 days by the government, to the distress of many professionals and general public outrage. However, 108 films were released in 2006 (by an odd coincidence, a sacred number in Hinduism and Buddhism), the biggest number in the last ten years, confirming the hegemony of the domestic production (about 60%) over an estimated $1.54 billion market.

These numbers have something to say. Obviously, most commentators and the actual agents and players in the business have been speaking and reasoning in terms of profits and losses, investments and returns, rather than “artistic” value. From an economic point of view, this year's success is far from evident, and has perhaps, never been so fraught with ambiguities. Does it mean that the overall quality of Korean films have dropped this year, as quite a few seem to suggest? Can we speak the dirty word... decline? That is actually quite doubtful. The feverish rush to capitalize on the pop-culture-boosted, hyper-fashionable hallyu (“Korean Wave”) and make a lightning-quick buck on the handful of hot names that tops East Asian box-office lists  has not contributed to an increased number of cinematic masterpieces, admittedly... but I do not recall seeing fewer artistically notable films than the other years, at least not considerably so. Having said that, quality works seem much harder to track because of the current sheer volume of an ever-growing film production, which one adjective characterizes most accurately: massive. This year, size mattered and made both critics and creative crews very nervous.

A lot of anxiety, gloom and perhaps Schadenfreude-feel-alike glee was expressed here and there, as the stakes have gone sky-high, and the commercial failures have become all the more spectacular, stirring controversies, raising new questions and worries about the state of the “7th art” in Korean, and provoking its share of impromptu market studies and sudden fascination for Excel tables and spreadsheets (for example, this very revealing piece from JoongAng Daily: here). So in this respect, 2006 has been a year of intense financial darwinism, where the fittest have turned out to be very few, and sometimes none the happier for it.

From the point of the view of the professional or semi-professional observer/outsider, it is striking to see how easy it has become to consider (to confuse?) Korean cinema exclusively as an industry (which of course it is), or worse, as a factory (which it should not be, for everybody's sake). In that, last year marked a deep structural change, which will entail many readjustments in the near future.

It seems strangely appropriate, in this context, to quote the introductory lines of Adrien Gombeaud's Seoul Cinema:

“From the early 90's to the first hours of the 21st century, Korean films were the most hallucinating under the sun. Unleashed characters beat the living daylights out of each other, spat blood, insulted each other, loved each other to distraction, ran for their lives, screamed, stripped, immolated themselves, got drunk, got sick, slashed each other with bottle shards or ashtrays, cried all the tears of their bodies and collapsed, in exhilaration and exhaustion...” Dont acte (in effect here):

  A scene from A Dirty Carnival