Asian Cinema In Europe

My immersion into a week of Asian Cinema in Europe began before I arrived in Udine, Italy, the home of the Far East Film Festival. It began in Vienna, where, while visiting a good friend of mine, I finally had the opportunity to see Takeshi Kitano's Dolls. Although I know no Japanese and my German is below the preschool level, I had to see this film since it had yet to be, and still has not been, released in my home country, the United States, and was not scheduled to be shown in Udine. Thankfully, my German was good enough to be able to understand some of the subtitles. Regardless, Takeshi's films are such that missing most of the dialogue does not result in missing most of the film.

Although some may find Dolls fatalistic, a valid argument, what I found was a wonderful meditation on devotion. We were shown four couplings where one party was truly devoted to the life of the other party. My friend, however, helped me see that even more so, it was a meditation on responsibility. The coupling that demonstrated this quite vividly was that between the pop idol and fan boy. When the main fan boy comes up against a rival fan boy, he realizes he has a responsibility as a fan to be even more devoted to his pop idol than he already is. When tragedy strikes his object of devotion, the fan boy takes drastic measures to meet the pop idol's new needs at that time. Rather than a desire to be taken care of by the person he devotes himself to, the fan boy chooses the responsibility of taking care of the person he idolizes. To some viewing this film, this may seem ironic, since the fan boy disables himself for his pop idol and mainstream prejudices towards the disabled might lead many to assume the fan boy's self-inflicted disability would lend him to be the one desiring to be taken care of. In fact, it is truly the other way around.(1)

Not shown at The 5th Annual Far East Film Festival, organizers could have drawn from Dolls as a model for this year's festival. If you are going to devote your film festival to Asian Cinema, you have to be responsible for the individuals that create that cinema. No more was this evident than in the regrettable withdrawal of the invitations to those involved in the film industries of the Asian countries most effected by the Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic, such as China and Hong Kong. Although some Italian political groups appeared to be using SARS to their advantage, (there was a very tiny, I mean tiny, tiny, protest on the first day consisting of two adults and one child wearing masks and holding a protest sign), the festival organizers conveyed constant empathy for those who could not attend due to the pressure to revoke their invitations. The organizers - who were not the ones to make the decision to withdraw the invitations, that decision was made by local health officials - took pains to filter out the public's hysterical response to SARS, the political response to the unknown. With all this hysteria over SARS, we forget that someone dies of tuberculosis every 15 minutes(2). Do the math and we begin to wonder where our hysteria might best be placed. Korean(3) director Kim Sang-jin, whose blockbuster comedy Jailbreakers (2002) was enthusiastically received in Udine, experienced this hysteria firsthand. When Kim approached a customs official at the Venice airport, the official immediately covered his mouth with a mask. The customs official then refused to touch Kim's visa and passport. Apparently, this customs official was unaware that at the time South Korea had yet to experience a verified case of SARS.(4)

Sadly, incidents like SARS heighten the sociologically-created reality around the biological fiction that is race, resulting in some individuals assuming all whom they perceive as Asian are suspect carriers, such as the abovementioned customs official. The organizers in Udine exhibited great care in challenging their community regarding such perceptions. Underscoring the responsibility of such devotion to Asian Cinema, the organizers included in their program a lengthy dedication of the festival to those who made the festival possible yet could not attend due to the political and health concerns surrounding SARS.

Following the lead of the festival organizers, I had to think about my own responsibility as a film essayist who primarily writes around Korean Cinema. Udine focuses on the commercial and cult areas of Asian Cinema, whereas my interests lie in the non-commercial works. When Kim Sang-jin noted in the panel discussion of Korean Comedies that the running joke in the Korean film industry is that his highly profitable comedies indirectly financed Im Kwon-taek's Chi-hwa-seon (2002), Kim reminded me that the films I love may not survive without the money brought in by the films I could care less about. It's a symbiotic relationship that becomes fragile when any species within the complex ecosystem is threatened.

Making It Through Customs

Philipino director Erik Matte (Prosti, 2002), the Japanese directors Hirayama Hideyuki and Ishii Teruo, and the Korean directors Mo Ji-eun (A Perfect Match, 2002), Youn Je-gyon (Sex Is Zero, 2002), and Kim were able to attend this year's festival since their respective countries have not been effected by the SARS epidemic. Teruo's presence was particularly special since he's apparently not one who travels much. Japanese Film critic Mark Schilling curated the Teruo series and chose to show Sexy Line (1961), The Man from Abashiri Jail (1965), Horror and the Malformed Man (1969), Porno Period Drama: Bohachi Bushido (1973), Masters of the Gensenkan Inn (1993), and Wind-Up Type (1998). Of the films out of the series I saw, I was most impressed by Sexy Line, an intriguing tale of a man, Yoshioka (Kokonoe Keiji), accused of killing his fiancee. Yoshioka investigates his fiancee's connection to a string of deaths amongst women of a secret call girl service. Mihara Yoko is particularly captivating in her tough-as-manicured-nails role of Mayumi who re-enters the dangerous world of prostitutes and pimps to help Yoshioka track down who killed his fiancee. (One suggestion to the festival organizers would be to not schedule a movie as eccentric as Teruo's Wind-Up Type at 9:30am, as many who saw it then commented that it was a very difficult film to see that early in the morning following a Midnight showing the day before.)

In the barrage of the 52 films shown, I had to remind myself that I saw Jeong Yon-su's Yesterday (2002) and Hou Jianqi's Life Show (2002), which says a great deal about the little impact they had on me. The former being one of the three Korean sci-fi box office bombs of 2002, the other bombs being Yu Sang-ho's R U Ready? and Jang Sun-woo's The Resurrection of the Little Match Girl, neither of which were shown at Udine. Sci-fi appears to be the rare genre with which Korea presently has trouble. Whereas Moon Seung-wook's Nabi (The Butterfly, 2001), (not shown at Udine), did too much with too little, Yesterday did too much with too much, confusing everyone.

From the gist of conversations I had before it's screening, Life Show appeared to be the most anticipated film of the festival. As often happens with buzz, I was left disappointed, finding the lead character, Lai Shaunyang (Tao Hong), unbelievable in her glamorous, Dostoevsky-reading characterization amongst the squalor of a food stand that sold duck heads. The Chinese film critics with whom I spoke appreciated the film's underlying portrayal of the emerging Chinese middle-class but they also found Tao's character poorly molded.

Yet Life Show was one of a welcoming number of portrayals centered around middle-aged and older women in commercial Asian cinema. Maria Barberi, in her article in the festival program, "The Other Side of Heaven: Women in Chinese Cinema," argues that the portrayal of strong women, regardless of age, is a present trend found in Chinese Cinema, citing festival films Life Show and Gone Is the One Who Held Me Dearest in the World (Ma Xiaoying, 2002) as examples. Ma's film takes this trend completely to heart by revolving her story around not only a middle-aged woman, but an ailing 80-year old grandmother as well. Outside of China, we also note the presence of strong women characters in two Korean films. Ryu Seung-won's No Blood, No Tears (2002) featured a return of 80's star Lee Hye-young in the role of an independent taxi driver who holds her own in the ass-kicking department. And then there was the surprise Korean hit The Way Home, which utilized the previously untapped acting skills of a 77 year-old Kim Ul-boon, who, as has been well PR-ed, never saw a movie prior to being in one. Arguably, we could even place Bae Doo-na's portrayal in the festival opening film, Saving My Hubby (Hyun Nam-sup, 2002), in this category, since her 22 year-old character is forced to grow up by almost 20 years in her efforts to save her kidnapped husband while avoiding the many obstacles of predatory men and the expectations Korean society has of mothers.

The most interesting of these portrayals of actualized 40-somethings was Hirayama Hideyuki's Out (2002) which featured four actresses in their 40's who've stumbled into an underground profession of chopping up bodies for easy disposal. Harada Mikiko, Baisho Mitsuko, (who appeared in another Hirayama film at the festival, Turn (2000), a Love-Letter-y film where a phone takes the place of the letter), Muroi Shigeru, and Nishida Naomi. Each actress skillfully differentiates their roles in their friendship and the heroine, Hatori Masako (Harada), particularly captivates the audience with a nice tempered sexuality that unintentionally snares her a young suitor. The portrayal of each of these women allows for a more complex, respectful view of women in their 40s. And each of these films provided a nice balance to the adolescent-oriented sex comedies presented, such as the Taiwanese Better Than Sex (Su Chao-pin and Lee Feng Bor, 2002) and the Korean Sex Is Zero.

Two Hong Kong films showed that the island's cinema can still produce gems. Riley Ip's Just One Look (2002) is a nostalgic trip through the Hong Kong Cinema of the 70's through the eyes and hearts of teenage first loves that ends up being a nice exploration of the fruitlessness of revenge. Anthony Wong skillfully performs in a supporting role that gradually causes the viewer to identify with an initially dislikeable character. Wong appears again in Andrew Lau and Alan Mak's Infernal Affairs (2002), this time as a Hong Kong police chief who must filter out a double agent in his own department while protecting the identity of his own spy within the gang he's investigating. Infernal Affairs is a wonderful example of what Hong Kong Cinema has been known for internationally, excellent action with tense intrigue. It won over the audience at Udine, receiving this year's audience award.(5)

Japan's Sori Fumihiko steps up to the table, the Table Tennis table, that is, in Ping Pong (2002) to convey heroically a sport many have never found much to cheer about. The character of Peko (Kobozuka Yozuke) displays a teenage exuberance that nicely counters Smile's (Arata) almost Eeoyore-esque, why-bother reservation to fully utilize his talent. Although the film drags at points, the humor, intensity and joy will remain unmatched in the Table Tennis film genre, if it ever becomes one.

But it was the single Singaporean entry, Talking Cock (Colin Goh and Jocelyn Yen Yen Woo, 2002), that has stayed with me most beyond the festival. "Talking cock" is the Singaporean English, or "Singlish", verb for "to bullshit." Goh and Woo worked off the material they had been generating on their Singaporean parody website of the same name and an earlier short to present a collage of skits skewering Singaporean culture in all its multicultural splendor. Although of very low production value, which one would never expect to perform well at the box office, this film is of the genre of neglected subcultures, such as the Queer Indian film Mango Souffle (Mahesh Dattani, 2002), (not shown at Udine, where the enthusiasm and passion evident in the efforts to represent these communities make up for any flaws in the films. One can easily sense the joy and fun everyone involved in Talking Cock was having in the wonderful Bollywood parody scene, a joy more sincere than the fantastic battle that Sori presents at the end of Ping Pong, a film with many more production techniques at its disposal. Some, upon viewing Talking Cock with its serious needs for editing may think I'm talking cock myself here, but it is truly the film that left the biggest impact on me. Singaporean Cinema has not yet arrived, but we have here a nice document on perhaps a more accurate portrayal of Singapore through farce than we've probably ever seen on screen before.

An Other "Another Korea"

Darcy Paquet, who manages the Koreanfilm.org website, was the curator of the 1960's Golden Age of Korean Cinema series. (Full Disclosure: I have had essays and brief reviews posted on Paquet's website for the past three years. I also manage the Bibliography of Korean Cinema articles on the website. It is through my work here and elsewhere that I was invited to Udine.) The films shown were Kim Ki-young's The Housemaid (1960), Kim Ki-deok's Barefooted Youth (1964), Lee Man-hee's The Evil Stairs (1964), Jeong Jin-woo's The Student Boarder (1966)(6), Yu Hyon-mok's Guests Who Came By The Last Train (1967), Kim Soo-yong's Mist (1967), and Kwon Cheol-hwi's Public Cemetery Under the Moon (1967). With my strong interest in Korean Cinema and the difficulties in seeing subtitled older Korean films in the United States, I was most anxious to see this series at Udine. For the most part, my internal buzz did not disappoint..

Depending on whom you ask and their particular definition of a "Korean" film, films began in Korea as early as 1919 or 1923.(7) No copies of Korean films prior to 1945 presently exist due to their presumed destruction during the Korean War and a history of poor storage and care.(8) With the present popularity of Korean Cinema, efforts have been made to better catalogue, locate, and protect older Korean films. The Busan Film Festival (9) has presented retrospectives of older Korean Films so that Korea and the world can see that the present surge of critical raves for Korean Films did not come out of nowhere, but is part of a long history of quite a cinephilic country.

Although some sections of the The Housemaid were available in Korea, without the help of the San Francisco International Film Festival a complete print would not be available. Thanks to those efforts and a retrospective he received at the second edition of the Busan Film Festival in 1997, Kim Ki-young is receiving re-appreciation in Korea and new appreciation abroad. Taken from an actual incident from the time, The Housemaid tells the tale of a housemaid who plots to cause the collapse of the family for which she works while seducing the husband. The film features the first film credit of a young Ahn Sung-ki, one of Korea's greatest actors still working today.

Long considered by many Koreans as the best Korean film ever made(10), time has caused what Kim intended as horrifying to now be, well, hilarious. The scene where the housemaid's head is bounced from each step of the stairs caused uproarious laughter from the audience at Udine. The setups meant to frighten us, such as the shock of discovering the housemaid lurking outside the window, no longer ring fear amongst our modern, desensitized souls. Still, the film is considered a classic of its time and is still highly entertaining, if not how the director initially intended.

The most disappointing film of the series was Public Cemetery Under the Moon, which also caused more laughs than screams when viewed with 21st Century eyes. Again, we have a housemaid trying to destroy a family, this time she successfully poisons the wife and steals the husband. Kwon Cheol-hwi relies heavily on screeching, abrupt sounds to bring fear to the audience, coupled with visuals of the ghost staring expressionless into the camera. (Interestingly, a modern Korean horror tale shown at Udine also relied heavily on the volume of sounds to frighten, The Phone (Ahn Byong-ki 2002), which like Turn's turning a letter into a phone, takes the videotape of The Ring (Hideo Nakata, 1998, shown at the 2nd Far East Film Festival in 2000) and replaces it with a cellphone.) A popular film when it was released, part of the horror was very likely helped along by the fact that ghosts have been an integral part of Korean culture for ages, an apparitional weight still felt by many Koreans today.(11) In Udine, however, the film only seemed to cause the audience to be frightened of kitsch.

The 1960's Korean film I enjoyed the most was Lee Man-hee's The Evil Stairs, which sincerely startled some in the audience, such as myself. This time we don't have a housemaid trying to destroy a family but a nurse trying to revenge a doctor after her "accidental" death on the titular evil stairs. The black and white cinematography bolds well for this morality tale. Lee's setups to frighten the audience work much smoother than The Housemaid and rely less on sound forcing the effect. Kim Jin-gyu conveys the doctor's guilt-ridden hysteria quite well and Moon Jeong-sook's revenge is well-paced. With what I saw in The Evil Stairs, I plan to take the necessary steps to see more of Lee's work.

During the panel discussion on 1960's Korean films, Adrien Gombeaud, a writer for the French film journal Positif, noted an interesting aspect of 1960's Horror films, and, for that matter, all genre films in Korea of that time: They also had to be melodramas. One festival attendee noted how he was confused by what Barefooted Youth wanted to be, that it appeared to veer off into melodrama at the end. Similarly, Public Cemetery Under the Moon starts off intending horror but brings in a melodramatic brother and sister relationship that seems dissonant from the original intent of the film.

The film that intended melodrama from the beginning to the end was Kim Soo-young's Mist, and perhaps, since it stayed true to its genre, many considered it the prize of the series. Gi-joon (Shin Sung-il), a middle-class man from Seoul returns to rural Mujin, where he grew up, to pay respects at his mother's grave. While there, he meets a music teacher, (Yoon Jung-hee), who longs to be taken away to Seoul. A relationship between the two develops that, although sincere, eventually results in their respective desires canceling out the desires of the other.

Gombeaud utilized a scene from Mist during the panel discussion to underscore the aspirations of hope he finds in 1960's Korean Cinema. The scene has Gi-joon come to his old school as the music teacher is leading her class in a song. They set a date through the window of the classroom and a wide shot is shown of Gi-joon walking across the schoolyard. Along a path away from the school, Gi-joon climbs a tree, catches a bug, and places the bug on its back on the ground. The camera then focuses on Gi-joon's hands patting the ground around the bug as it struggles. The bug successfully turns itself over to fly away. Gi-joon walks off with his back to us, but we can imagine a smile on his face resembling that of a schoolboy who has just set up his first date. The bug's success at turning himself upright underscores the hope of romance, of a happy future. Although suffering, particularly by the women characters, is a staple of these Korean melodramas, each film contains glimpses of hope that challenge pessimistic interpretations of the conclusions.

Ever since I saw Jang Sun-woo's Korean segment of the BBC's Century of Cinema series (The Cinema On The Road, 1995), I've wanted to see Kim Ki-deok's Barefooted Youth. The story revolves around a gangster named Doo-soo who stumbles upon two young women being accosted by rival gang members. Coming to their aid, the one young woman, an ambassador's daughter, seeks out Doo-soo and they both eventually fall for each other. In their courtship across class lines, they each strive to understand the world of the other. One of the most delightful scenes involves Doo-soo interrupting some young Koreans twisting the night away at a bar by forcing the DJ to play Beethoven's 5th. It's a wonderfully playful moment that gets its humor from the dissonance of playing classical music in a 50's dance club. The two leads, Shin Sung-il, (who is the same Shin from The Evil Stairs), and Eom Aeng-ran, were the most popular of onscreen couples during the 60's who eventually took their onscreen magnetism off screen where they married. The film also features the dancer/actor Twist Kim, whose gangster character floats throughout the film, practically pirouetting when slapped around by Doo-soo. A tragic love affair, Barefooted Youth plays with action, comedy and teenage rebellion/coming-of-age, but, as expected, ends up being the melodrama all Korean films needed to be.

Yu Hyon-mok's Obaltan (A Stray Bullet, 1961), like The Housemaid, is one of the most lauded of Korea's films from the 1960's. (Interestingly enough, it was salvaged by the San Francisco International Film Festival as well.) With Obaltan recently released on DVD, Paquet chose to offer the audience a chance to see another of Yu's less accessible films, Guests Who Came By the Last Train. The film revolves around three male friends, a doctor, a man with a fatal disease, and a rambling, independently wealthy, jack of all arts. Each man has a woman in their life who underscores the differences in their personalities. Kim Seong-ok is particularly fun in his portrayal of a histrionic artist who attempts to become the premiere Korean pop artist. Although he's able to manipulate the press to hype his show, no one but his friends arrive at the gallery showing. And even though they found the where and know the who, they, like the public, don't understand the what and why of his work. Yu has described all the characters of this film as those who are just steps behind society's trends. "They are the passengers who hurry gasping onto the last train."

Yu's quote also nicely describes 1960's Korean Cinema. Although some Korean films from the 1960's played internationally at festivals, they were not appreciated highly outside of Korea and, until recently, were mostly forgotten. Gombeaud argues that this was because the directors worked within styles, such as neo-realism, that were becoming passé in the respected cinemas of France and Italy at the time. Trying to desperately rebuild their cinema after many years of colonial rule by Japan and a civil war after that, these directors rushed to build a collective cinema for their country, realizing how behind they were from the rest of the world. Termed "The Golden Age of Korean Cinema" now, one could also refer to 1960's Korean Cinema on the world stage as the "Guests That Came By the Last Train," gasping to be taken seriously in the global cinema dialogue.

Although perhaps not as entertaining to an audience expecting mostly modern blockbusters, Udine's willingness to provide a significant showcase of 1960's Korean Cinema again shows the responsibility it chooses to accept in providing a forum for Asian Cinema as a whole. Out of the contemporary films at the festival, Korean films were also the most represented, with 11. Considering the fact that the phrase "another Korea" in Italian has been used to describe disasters effecting the Italian citizenry ever since the fateful 1966 World Cup in England where the highly favored Italian national team lost to the highly ignored North Korean national team(12), and considering the fact that South Korea repeated this national horror by ousting Italy in the most recent 2002 World Cup, Udine is obviously taking on a great responsibility by showing so many Korean films. I guess it goes to show that regardless of national and world events, Udine is truly devoted to Asian Cinema.

ENDNOTES

(1) Interestingly, Kitano subverts this stereotype of the disabled through two other relationships in the film where one party is disabled. But that's a topic for another article.

(2) Personal Conversation with Tamara Ja, Clinic Project Assistant of the San Francisco TB Control Section.

(3) As is common when writing of South Korean Cinema, I will refer to it as Korean Cinema.

(4) A confirmed case of SARS did eventually occur in South Korea. As of June 23, 2003, the World Health Organization's website (http://www.who.int/csr/sars/country/2003_07_01/en/) reported 3 confirmed SARS cases out of a population of over 50 million. All three confirmed cases had recovered.

(5) The Korean press had mis-credited Park Chan-wook's Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) as the winner of that award. It, however, did not even place. Second place went to Miike Takashi's Shangri-La (2002), whereas Korea did represent in third place with The Way Home.

(6) Sadly, I was not able to see this film, the last shown in the series, due to travel complications.

(7) Hyangjin Lee discusses the debate around whether the first Korean film was The Righteous Revenge (Kim To-san, 1919), The Plighted Love Under the Moon (Yun Baek-nam, 1923), or The National Borders (Kim To-san, 1923) in her book Contemporary Korean Cinema: Identity, Culture, Politics (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2000) on pages 18-20.

(8) Rumors do, however, abound regarding what classic Korean films we'll find when North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-il opens up his vault of films to the rest of the world. An avid film enthusiast who supervises North Korea's film industry and published a book entitled The Theory of Cinematic Art, his vault is said to hold over 15,000 films. The source is again Hyangjin Lee's book mentioned in the footnote above.

(9) Some readers may wonder why I spell Busan with a "B" rather than with a "P" as readers may be more accustomed. In July 2000, the Korean Ministry of Culture and Tourism (MoCT) system of Romanization replaced the old McCune-Reischauer system (M-R). The M-R system ignored extremely important phonetic distinctions, such as calling Busan, Pusan. "Although imperfect, the MoCT system comes closer to preserving the phonetics of native words and minimizes the use of punctuation marks, including hyphens. Consistent Romanized spelling in the digital age is a particular concern for the MoCT, as websites and subjects spelled M-R-style tend to use symbols not commonly found on keyboards and tend to be broken up by hyphens, apostrophes and spaces, making Internet searches difficult at best." (Sean Sehoon Chung, "Hello, My Name Is . . .." Koream Journal, Vol 13, August 2002, pg 50-53, available online here: http://www.koreamjournal.com/search_detail.asp?id=304). Thus, I use the MoCT system here.

(10) Recently, the April 29th issue of the Korean film magazine Film 2.0 polled 74 Korean film researchers and critics on their opinions of what the best Korean films were. Number one was Obaltan (Yu Hyon-mok, 1961), while number two was The Housemaid. Both were far ahead of the next highest vote-getter, Im Kwon-taek's Mandala (1981).

(11) Bruce Cumings, Korea's Place in the Sun (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997).

(12) As noted in the documentary about the 1966 North Korean World Cup team, The Game of Their Lives (Daniel Gordon, 2001).

                                                                 © FILM JOURNAL 2002