Korean film festival to open at Taman Ismail Marzuki
Korean film festival to open at Taman Ismail Marzuki
By Jane Scott
JAKARTA (JP): Koreans are prodigious movie goers and have wide ranging tastes. A recent film, Sopyongje, by veteran Korean director Im Kwok-taek, broke 1993 Korean box office records, drawing over one million viewers. As a comparison, the American film Die Hard attracted an audience of more than 700,000 at Seoul's first-run cinemas.
Koreans are also prodigious movie makers. Even during a production slump between l985 and 1988, after the l960s when it was churning out 200 a year, domestic movie production averaged 83 film a year. For local production anywhere, this is a very respectable number. Just ask the stalwarts of the Indonesian, or the British or the Australian film industry. The vigorous Korean movie industry produced 96 films in l992. That same year the number of movie goers (box office receipts) reached 47,110,000.
For any film, dropping into a flourishing film culture such as this is nothing short of suspicious. But it isn't just local tastes which drive the engine of Korean cinema. Now the international interest of Korean film and the awards it collects on the international film festival circuit confirm that it will follow China as a certified source of interest for movie lovers.
In the l950s it was Japan that first broke through into the international arena of film culture. In the l980s it was China with the cinema of Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou. In the l990s Taiwan had a turn and soon it may come round to Korea.
Intriguing sounding films --Fly High Run Far Kae Byok, The Blue in You, Camels Don't Cry Alone, Passion Portrait, Heave Your Chest, Beyond the Mountain, Because You Are a Woman -- make you feel that you want to unlock that hermetic code, tease out the puzzle established.
Third festival
A festival of Korean Films will screen at Taman Ismail Marzuki next week, and will include some of these titles. It is the third such festival from Korea to be held in Jakarta and for this first time all films are in 35mm wide screen. I have an affection for 16mm film study values but this 35mm means wide screen viewing values for quality international cinema. All the films have participated in overseas film festivals. An opportunity for local audiences to watch fine films for once, at regular cinema screen ratios, rather than laser discs viewed cramped (distorted even) within the squarer television frame.
There are seven films showing over seven nights. The season begins tomorrow with My Love, My Bride the choice for opening night. After the single screening of the first evening, there will be two films screened each night until Sunday, May 28.
The life of a newly-wed couple is the subject of My Love, My Bride, a l991 film directed by Lee Myung-se. The pair have just married, having known each other as college classmates, but they are not convinced they are really in love. My Love, My Bride promises mistaken identity and marital mix up.
There are two films by the eminent Im Kwon-taek: Fly High Run Far Kae Byok and the Diary of King Yonsan. Kwon-taek has been a film maker since the l960s when he was a director pumping out genre films. When he made The Diary of King Yonsan in l987 he had made some 85 films. But the product has changed since the beginning of the l980s, principally with the advent of Mandala (l981).
The Diary of King Yonsan charts the times of the troubled King Yonsan, beset with discord in his kingdom. He has also to deal with memories of his beloved mother, whom he adored, who was deposed and sentenced to death. He finds solace in the company of his courtly ladies only to discover that his brother and disaffected ministers are planning to wrest the throne from him.
Fly High Run Far Kae Byok (l991), one with a wistful title, is also a period drama based on an historical episode. The protagonist is head of the religious sect Chondogyo, during the last days of the Choson Kingdom in the late l800s and early l900s. Popular support is there for him but he has to deal with oppression by the powers at court. His predecessor had been executed. He himself flees into the mountain wilderness.
In Chung-Ji-young's Beyond The Mountain (l991) the setting is the mountain retreat where asceticism is practiced under priestly instruction. A young trainee is sent out on an errand and encounters desire in the figure of a beautiful Buddhist nun. Mutually attracted they risk a rendezvous in the mist.
Because You Are a woman, released in l990, is the work of female director, Kim Yu-Jin. Said to register a protest against the place of women in Korean society, this film covers ground from single parenting to assault in self-defense to rape. The central problem for the female protagonist appears to be how to maintain integrity when social forces, including a new husband, seem determined to undermine it.
Heave Your Chest is a l986 film directed by Choi Won-young. It centers on Mr. Park, retired teacher on an around the country cycling tour, and the two young cyclists he meets along his way. They continue their journey in an "extra-mural" class on life and moral values.
The lesson is also central to A Little pinwheel (l990) which has already been screened once during this week's Jakarta International Festival. Two brothers live alone with their grandmother in a remote country region where to survive requires the elder brother to work in a factory by day (and study by night) and the grandmother to work as laborer on a road construction site. Namdo, who at 15 is four years older than his brother, has aspirations to enter air force engineering school. Young Namsik is loyal and loving and just wants his big brother to stay around.
But Namdo feels impelled to go and take on the world. Failing his air force entrance exams first off only makes the need to leave more urgent and he sets off for Seoul and factory work in the hope that he will be able to eventually bring brother and grandmother to the city with him.
Namsik and his grandmother struggle on bravely, in what appears to be a hand-to-mouth existence. But their circumstances are not exceptional. They are just like the next door family whom you might call the neighbors, living some distance away. A Handicapped father alone with three young daughters to rear. Tales of hardship are commonplace in the hinterlands of rapid development. Families without mothers or fathers wherein young children need to go to work to sustain their sibling in the reality. A Little Pinwheel is based on a true story.
Special lesson
One day Namsik's teacher has a special lesson encrypted in the paper pinwheel they craft in class: "You should be a pinwheel to take the wind, not let the wind take you." Namsik sets to work. Doh has dreams of flying jets but Sik is long on endurance and quickly fills the space vacated by his brother and their father before him.
You can expect a film such as this to have a self-effacing style, so that it does not draw attention to the camera eye and detract from the human drama. Sometimes in A Little Pinwheel stylistic play paints a world of childhood imagery. Sporadically, the film takes on Namsik's point of view.
At night, Namsik awaits his brother where the bus will set down. A vehicle makes its way toward him and for a while you are left wondering what the game is, with those lights up on the screen. Points of light shine wend their way through the background of tree trunks. Whose point of view is this ? A bus headlight suddenly slams into the foreground and Nambo tumbles down, out of frame.
Much of the action actually takes place in darkness, a reasonable outcome for a story about a family so poor they must live in a house without electricity. The night for night photography confers a ghostly pallor on the figures and the faces, probably not the effect of narrative intended, but faithfully naturalistic all the same.
Aside from these occasions, the other stylistic effects are arbitrary, with hand-held movement all of a sudden in the rush of dramatic action towards the end of the film. The several bravura shots, like the camera pulling back dramatically for a coastal location shot, are the cinematographer's attempt to escape the structures of the text.
The cinematographer's chance comes, but too late, with the film's happy ending written into a series of stills behind the closing titles. All of a sudden the film has positioned itself in the late twentieth century, when the mise-en-scene changes with a jolt from dark woods or simple cottage interior, to a final sequences at the air force training college and parade ground. Suddenly, Namdo and Namsik and grandmother seem to have been wrenched with a single movement into the late twentieth century.
Problems aside, next week's screenings are full of promise. Like the protagonist of A little Pinwheel, the cinema of rapidly developing Korea has been growing mushrooms in the dark.