Asian Cinema - Volume 23, Issue 2, 2012

South Korean cinema entered in a new phase in the late 1980s as a group of young film directors started the National Film Movement (NFM). The new film-makers developed critical interests in contents, styles and languages of their filmic representation. They often exposed the scares of political oppression in the public memory of South Korean people. They examined the historical past and psychoanalytical dimensions of characters in their films. Peppermint Candy (Chang-dong, 1999) follows the footsteps of those NFM films. Lee Chang-dong’s film critically examines a time span of two decades, from 1979 to 1999 of the protagonist Kim Yong-ho’s life. In those eventful years South Korean people witnessed the rule of the military junta, popular uprisings and democratic movements, unprecedented state oppressions, coming of the civilian government in power, liberalization and privatization of the national economy and the International Monitory Fund crisis. These twenty years are important in the life of the protagonist of the film as well as in the national life of South Korea. Having disregarded his tender love of young age Yong-ho built his career in military service and established himself as a ruthless cadre. When he realized the mistake, it was too late. While critically investigating the role of the nation state, the film excavates collective memory of the people and delves into the individual psyche.

Korean filmmaker Hong Sangsoo’s films are remarkable in their similarity to one another not only in subject matter but also in their formalism. His minimalist oeuvre is highly self-reflexive. Hong’s unique approach to parallelism utilizes different forms of repetition that re-position the audience from seeing his films to reading them. Through the act of apperception, ‘the echo effect’ and other cinematic strategies he problematizes the traditional construction of parallelism in which the same cinematic signifiers refer to the same concrete reference. His films boldly embrace reception theory by making the audience the bearer of connotative meaning in how it perceives parallelism to be indeed parallel and significant.

Hahaha by Hong Sangsoo (2010) alternates between a conversation taking place in the present between narrators photographed in black-and-white still images who take turns describing the experiences each had in a small South Korean seaside town and images in colour and motion that present those past experiences. Viewers quickly realize that the men were in the town at the same time, though the pair never understands this because they frequently crossed paths without encountering one another. The narrational shifts between past and present obscure how in Hahaha, Hong reworks the potential for cross-cutting that existed, purposely unrealized, in a portion of Gang-wondo-ui him/The Power of Kangwon Province by Hong (1998), the director’s second film, into a single, linear but somewhat discontinuous chronology without the simultaneous action usually indicated by alternating.

This article discusses the use and reinvention of genre tradition, specifically film noir, in contemporary South Korean cinema. Film noir conventions were established by a group of Hollywood films in the 1940s and 1950s, and this genre is highly influential but often overlooked when discussing Korean film. This article explores the contemporary history of Korean cinema and the conventions of film noir in order to examine the recent phenomenon of Korean film noir. Park Chan-wook’s 2003 film Oldboy is an exemplar of this trend, and this article includes a close reading of Park’s appropriation of film noir conventions. Korean film noir provides an example of the transnational exchange of ideas and film conventions, and shows how fruitful these cross-pollinations can be.

Preparations for the Seoul Olympics in 1988 and the Beijing Olympics in 2008 involved the large-scale demolition of dilapidated houses in the old towns of Seoul and Beijing and the forced relocation of their residents as the urban poor. Two activist video documentaries in South Korea and China, Kim Dong-won’s Sanggyedong Olympics (1988), Seoul, South Korea, Purn-yeongsang) and Ou Ning’s Meishi Street (2006), Beijing, China, Alternative Archive), bear witness to those detrimental effects that the urban transformation linked to the two cities’ hosting of the Olympics had on their communities. This article examines the ways in which the two film-makers used the capacities of video technology, such as spontaneity and portability, and the relative ease with which the amateur can access and handle it, to capture the truth of demolition and relocation in the observational, realist aesthetics, and to develop alternative modes of documentary subjectivity for representing the poor residents’ embodied knowledge and emotion. The use of an amateurish female voice-over in Sanggye-dong Olympics, and the casting of a male resident as an amateur documentarian who operates a video camera in Meishi Street testify to the extent to which video technology enabled the film-makers to develop the ‘participatory’ and ‘performative’ modes of documentary in which the residents could be empowered to speak for themselves. It is through the modes of subjectivity, this article argues, that the two political documentaries succeed in bringing into the public consciousness the interests and issues of the social actors who are neglected by the host countries’ official media and authorities.

This article argues that Japanese ‘pink film’, a cycle of exploitative soft-core pornography popularized throughout the 1960s, frequently brutalized women for their perceived role in declining social values following an assumed transgression of expected gender behaviors. Subsequently, films of this subgenre deployed sexual and fetishistic practices designed to reposition women within subordination, a theme particularly evident in Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion which utilizes this exploitative genre to explore a male fear of progressive female sexuality. Rather than a meditation on gender equality, Female Prisoner can instead be read as a warning from those who face disenfranchisement at the hands of social parity. Such concerns, this article concludes, manifest themselves throughout Japanese cinema, especially J-Horror with films such as Ringu and Ju-On: The Grudge. However, whereas the pink film reflects male fears of female ascension, J-Horror rearticulates such issues from a feminine perspective. In the pink film, women are punished for challenging the status quo whereas J-Horror presents females as oppressed victims of masculine monstrosity within a transitional modernity.

The years 1946, 1964 and 2009 are references to three Hindi films, Dr Kotnis ki Amar Kahani/The Immortal Story of Dr Kotnis (Shantaram, 1946), Haqeeqat/Reality (Anand, 1964) and Chandni Chowk to China (CC2C) (Advani, 2009). The article will draw on three points in history. The first film Dr Kotnis ki Amar Kahani/The Immortal Story of Dr Kotnis, is set during the anti-imperialist struggles in India and China, when India sent a team of doctors to China to support the CCP during the Long March and anti-Japanese activities. The team included the famous Dr Kotnis, and the film, a bio-pic, provides a great deal of material for Indian perceptions of the Chinese and attitudes towards China at the time, Comintern activity and the revolutionary fervour that bound the two. The second film, Haqeeqat, was a direct response to the 1962 invasion of India by China, and here we see the valorization of the Indian army defending the nation against the ‘enemy’: China. The third film, CC2C, set in a time of a globalized world, with India and China as confident trading partners, reveals yet another set of values that shows admiration for China’s ancient traditions while ridiculing the self and yet triumphing over the other. These films will be analysed to reveal interactions between these two global players and what they mean at different points in time.

JAPANESE CINEMA GOES GLOBAL: FILMWORKERS’ JOURNEYS, YOSHIHARU TEZUKA (2012) Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 200 pp.,ISBN: 978 988 8083 32 9, h/bk, £50.83,ISBN: 978 988 8083 33 6, p/bk, £38.40

SOUTHEAST ASIAN INDEPENDENT CINEMA: ESSAYS, DOCUMENT INTERVIEW TILMAN BAUMGÄRTEL (ED.) (2012) Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 304 pp., ISBN: 978-9971-69-640-5, p/bk, US$30

18 MARCH, 6:30 P.M. CONVOCATION ROOM,HKU