UPCOMING: Alexander Kluge Retrospective at Seoul Cinematheque

If you cannot make it to the Jeonju film festival, the Alexander Kluge retrospective will be coming to the Seoul Cinematheque May 13-18. It will include six features and a number of shorts. The program is available at the website, although the screening schedule has not yet been released.

THE VIRGIN STRIPPED BARE BY HER BACHELORS (Hong Sang-soo, 2000)

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NOTE: This post is longer than usual and also contains numerous spoilers.

Hong Sang-soo's third feature offers a culmination of his previous films and their thematic, narrative and stylistic concerns. The focus on male-female sexual relationships is pared down even further, as this is essentially the story of the consummation of a love affair between the virgin Soo-Jeong and her lover Jae-Hun. Narratively, it is the most extreme of Hong's formal experiments, presenting the story of this affair in two parallel sections, with many scenes being repeated with slight variations. Likewise, the long take style of the first two films is taken to a much greater extreme. The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well had an average shot length (ASL) of 24 seconds; The Power of Kangwon Province had an ASL of 33 seconds; here, the ASL is over 52 seconds. This is mostly due to an large increase in extremely long takes of 100 seconds or more: each of Hong's first films contained 9 such shots, while The Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors has 22 of these prolonged takes. Furthermore, these takes tend to be of far less dramatic importance than in the earlier films, where they usually took place between lovers or at tense table conversations. In this film, Hong's minimal editing tends to serve his narrative experiment, as does the decision to shoot in black and white. The sparseness of editing and color allows Hong to position the viewer to concentrate on the variations he develops throughout the film's second half.

The narrative structure is alluded to in the film's international title (the Korean title is simply Oh! Soo-Jeong) and its reference to Marcel Duchamp's glass artwork "The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even" (1915-1923). Both pieces of art are divided into two, and this division is along gender lines. Both can certainly be interpreted as explorations of sexual desire, but the abstraction of both can also lead against interpretation and criticism all together. Watching Hong's films, there is a certain meaninglessness that comes across that especially separates him from fellow Korean director Lee Chang-Dong. This difference in sensibility is ultimately why I believe I prefer Lee's films to Hong's. The critic Huh Moonyung has written of Hong:

"His attitude of denial is radical. Even the most basic preconditions, like axioms in mathemathics, such as 'meaning is more valuable than meaninglessness,' 'all human beings are entitled to dignity' and 'life is superior to death,' are all denied in Hong's films. Hong is not a critic. In order to criticize, one must possess a value system as criteria for criticism, which Hong Sangsoo lacks." (Huh, 13)

In contrast, consider Lee Chang-Dong's remarks about cinema generally and how he approaches it:

"In the 90s, being serious kills the party because you make a fool of yourself by talking about things people already know but choose not to talk about. In the 80s, there was some merit in telling the truth. But by the 90s, truth was not appreciated. Here I am, still taking things seriously and trying to tell the truth. How irritating!" (Kim, 63)

"We're now in the age of post-meaning. Whether we like it or not, movies have become the dominant medium. Other mediums which deal with meaning have weakened, degenerated and lost their power over people. Maybe because I'm coming from the literary world, or I grew up that way, i tend to implant meaning into film. I suppose I'm trying to create as much meaning as possible and communicate with the audience through my films." (Kim, 75)

As a result, Hong's films tend to both invite analysis because of their complexity (by contrast, Lee's films seem deceptively simple) while discouraging interpretation into the film's ultimate meaning (Lee's narratives, on the other hand, tend to be packed with meaning and meant to be interpreted). That Hong is a favorite of formalist scholar David Bordwell should come as no surprise.

The narrative form of The Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors can be plotted as follows:

"Day's Wait" (Jae-hun waits for Soo-jeong in hotel and talks to her on the phone, urging her to come)
"Perhaps Accident"
-7 numbered sections
black screen
"Suspended Cable Car" (repeat of first scene but showing Soo-jeong) (Soo-jeong is suspended on a cable car overlooking Seoul)
"Perhaps Intended"
-7 numbered sections
"Naught Shall Go Ill When You Find Your Mare" (epilogue: cable car begins to move; Soo-Jeong arrives at hotel and they make love; they wash the bloody sheet; the final shot (figure 1) has them in each other's arms as Jae-hun says, "I'll try to fix every fault I have for my life.")

It is tempting to view the two sections as almost-Rashomon like, in which we first get the male and then the female perspective on a relationship. However, this art cinema reading simplifies the film far too much. There are some examples when shots and scenes are repeated almost exactly (figure 2 and 3, taken from a party sequence that reappears in the second half), and others that are close resemblances taken from opposite angles (figures 4 and 5) (It should be noted that Hong apparently filmed in sequence, returning to original locations weeks later). However, just as often the variations are such that they are not simple perspective shifts. Bordwell thus argues that:

"(The film) doesn't supply any subjective motivation for the disparities. It isn't that Jae-hun remembers a moment in their affair in one way, while Soo-jeong remembers it differently. Indeed, we have no reason to believe that the flashbacks represent the characters' memories at all. The scenes are presented in crisply numbered sections, as if they were items in an objective outline, or scenes in parallel worlds. Framed by the present-time scenes, the variants carry out Hong's concern with a pattern that can't be reduced to a dramatic structure." (Huh, 26-27) (from Bordwell's essay "Beyond Asian Minimalism: Hong Sangsoo's Geometry Lesson" )

I find one variation particularly intriguing. In the first section, Jae-hun lures Soo-jeong into an alley by saying he has something funny to tell her, explaining that there is an old man who lives with a girl in the building. When they get into the alley, he says the old man anf the girl are not there and attempts to accost Soo-jeong (Figure 6). In the second half, the older film director, Yeong-soo, is walking with Soo-Jeong and passes an alley. He says to her that he has something funny to show her. The scene then cuts to them lying down in a room with Yeong-soo threatening to rape Soo-jeong (Figure 7). Is this Hong playing with a line of dialogue and location and then showing how the scene could play out differently in an opposite narrative universe? Or, are we to think back to the earlier line of dialogue from Jae-hun and believe that, however coincidental or fantastic, that both scenes may have occurred? As Hong has stated, "I welcome strange coincidences and think they are like a wedge driven into the frame of a banal and conventional mind." (Huh, 57)

The film's ending crystallizes the fascination and disturbance of Hong's work. There is something both optimistic and ridiculous about the couple's union, symbolized by the bloody sheet that they wash and that Jae-hun wants to take home with him. Hong's cinema has a certain obsession with purity that he acknowledges:

"I think I went through puberty clinging onto the ideals such as absolute truth, perfect world, absolute purity, etc. Everything I had encountered in life was automatically compared against an ideal value. I failed to comprehend things in life that couldn't be incorporated into that ideal system. So, my life became fraught with schizophrenia asking why reality cannot easily converge with these beautiful ideals. Only when I reached my 20s did I fortunately begin to see the falsehood behind those ideals and began to better appreciate life, that is, as it is. Characters in my movies reflect such experiences. Specific characters chase after cliched ideals, or even get chased by them, but I want my gaze of characters to be composed from visions that are free from these cliches. To those characters, the conflict between ideals and life that veer away from these ideals is very painful. I want to say that all these pains are actually unnecessary. It's the ideals that are the essence of the problem, not life itself." (Huh, 51-52)

However, it is difficult to view the ending here as simply critical or ironic (as it would almost certainly be clear in the hands of Lee). The final title card "Naught Shall Go Ill When You Find Your Mare" and the final line "I'll try to fix every fault I have for my life" would seem to be examples of idealized thinking, but given this sequence's stable place within a difficult and unsettling narrative, it can also be considered Hong's "most optimistic film". (Huh, 14)

Huh Moonyung, Hong Sangsoo (Seoul: Korean Film Council, 2007)

Kim Young-jin, Lee Chang-Dong (Seoul: Korean Film Council, 2007)

THE POWER OF KANGWON PROVINCE (Hong Sang-Soo, 1998)

The Power of Kangwon Province is the second film of Korean director Hong Sang-soo, and his first film as both writer-director. Like his first film, The Day a Pig Fell Into The Well, The Power of Kangwon Province contains a complex storytelling style that relies a great deal on the viewer's ability to recall earlier scenes and make connection. However, the narrative is simplified to some extent. Hong's first film was split into four parts with four main characters. Here, there are two halves with two leads. This, combined with images that are have more depth and have a more picturesque quality, makes The Power of Kangwon Province a slightly more accessible work.

In an interview, Hong described the film's structure as follows: "A woman and a man, who recently broke up, travel separately to a same location by coincidence. One person trails the trace of the other person. It is about two individuals missing their partners and they ae connected by the structure of the film. (2-1)+(2-1)=2 structure." (54) This structure does not reveal itself, however, until the second half, which makes the audience have to retrace the original story and the meaning we felt it had. In one way, this makes the film work similarly to many mainstream movies in which the plot gradually enfolds and we can make sense of earlier actions that seemed ambiguous. But at the same time, Hong is calling on a far greater cognitive ability from the viewer than most films, almost insisting that the viewer re-examine the film a second time.

Thematically, the links with Hong's earlier film are clear. These are films dealing with sexuality in contemporary Korean society, with its mixture of hedonism and repression as ultimately two sides of the same coin. Both of Hong's early works show graphic sex scenes, often involving prostitutes and/or the affairs of married men. Like popular cinema, Hong places human relationships at the center of his concern, and could certainly be viewed as almost apolitical, especially compared with his contemporary Lee Chang-Dong. But the difficulty and violence of these relationships is such that Hong leaves the viewer unsettled. The Power of Kangwon Province is more subtle in this regard than Hong's debut film, but if the implications of what has been shown are considered, it is just as disturbing. Adding to this disquieting atmosphere is the sense of irrationality and mystery that Hong inserts. With The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well, this occurs with a Bunuel-like dream sequence. In The Power of Kangwon Province, the conclusion features the lead male character returning to his office to see only one of two goldfish remaining. Earlier, the lead female character had, in a curious scene, buried a goldfish she had discovered on a mountain path. In an interview, Hong explains the use of such coincidences:

"I think I focus on serendipity a lot. I think those things happen unusually when I shoot. If I told a person next to me of all of the coincidental events that I have experienced in my life, that person would surely think of me as either a charlatan or a fanatic. I welcome strange coincidences and think that they are like a wedge driven into the frame of a banal and conventional mind. And I would like the audience to feel the space that is open beyond the broken structure." (57)

Stylistically, Hong opts for more long takes and often simplifies the number of angles he shoots from. Earlier in the film, especially during scenes in nature, Hong opts for a shorter focal length and shoots many depth of field compositions. But as the film nears its conclusion, Hong flattens his images more in the style of Asian minimalism (for example, the still above in which the two main characters come together near the conclusion). I am looking forward to viewing Hong's third film, The Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (2000), which I also just purchased here on DVD, in which Hong takes on black and white cinematography for the first time.

Huh Moonyung, Hong Sangsoo (Seoul: Korean Film Council, 2007)

Upcoming: Jeonju International Film Festival

The Jeonju International Film Festival will be held May 1-May 9 and features a line-up of over 200 features and shorts. The schedule is available on their website. However, it is only up on the Korean version of the site, not the English version (as of now at least). You can still navigate the Korean site, it's just a little more time consuming.

In addition to many new Korean films, the highlights include:

-a nearly complete retrospective of Hungarian director Bela Tarr, one of the most acclaimed filmmakers of the last decade and a big influence on the recent work of Gus Van Sant. All 8 of Tarr's features (yes, this includes the 7 hour plus Satantango, showing on Tuesday, May 6th at 2:00 pm) as well as a program of shorter works (including his hour long version of Macbeth) are included.

-a retrospective of New German Cinema director Alexander Kluge, including 6 of his features (one of which is his debut, Yesterday Girl (1966), widely considered the first feature of the New German Cinema movement) as well as a program of shorts. Also showing is Germany in Autumn (1978), an omnibus film featuring Kluge and other New German directors, such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Edgar Reitz and Volker Schlondorff.

-a retrospective on Vietnamese cinema, including films made during the war as well as more recent features and documentaries

-the documentary Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows (Kent Jones, 2007) (narrated by Martin Scorsese), as well as one of Lewton's RKO horror films, The Seventh Victim (Mark Robson, 1943)

-a screening of Springtime in a Small Town (Tian Zhuang-Zhuang, 2002), followed by a master class with Tian

-new films by Eric Rohmer, Alexander Sokurov, Ken Jacobs, Manuel De Oliveira, Hong Sang-Soo, John Saysles, Koji Wakamatsu, Jia Zhang-ke, and Hana Makhmalbaf

Upcoming: Program of Japanese Art/Exploitation Cinema

From April 22 to May 12, the Seoul Cinematheque is showing a 18 film program of Japanese films, mostly from the late 1960s/ early 1970s. Most of the films deal with sensationalist material, usually concerning sex, but which are also artistic breaks with the classical past of Japanese cinema. Unfortunately, it appears only 7 of the films we have English subtitles. They are:

Go, Go, Second Time Virgin (Koji Wakamatsu, 1966)
Ecstasy of the Angels (Koji Wakamatsu, 1972)
Bad Boys (Susumu Hani, 1961)
The Inferno of First Love (Susumu Hani, 1968)
Extreme Private Eros: Love Song (Kazuo Hara, 1974)
Pastoral: Hide-and-Seek (Shuji Terayama, 1974)
The Prisoner (Masao Adachi, 2007)

I have not seen any of the films in the program, although I am familiar with the work of two directors who seem to represent influences from opposite sides of the art/exploitation binary: genre filmmaker Seijun Suzuki, and art cinema director Nagisa Oshima. The program offers an opportunity to examine this time period in Japanese film. It seems that some of the films will be shown in 16mm, which means the overall quality of the prints may not be great. However, this may actually add to the atmosphere of seeing these works.

Conference: The Global Cartographies of Cine-Feminisms

On Monday, I attended the first half of a day-long conference on film and feminism, held at Ewha Woman's University and sponsored by the Women's Film Festival. The conference included a book that contained all of the articles translated into both English and Korean. The schedule was as follows:

Keynote Address: Teresa de Lauretis, "Cine-feminism and the creation of vision"

Part 1: The Sustainabilities of Women's Cinema

Patricia White, "Women's Cinema as World Cinema"

Meaghan Morris, "Sustaining the Festive Principle: Between Realism and Pleasure in Institution-Building"

Part 2: Women's Cinema in East Asia

S. Louisa Wei, "Chinese and Japanese Female Film Directors: Could They Hold Up Half of the Sky?"

Ahn Ji-hye, "The Status and Future of Female Directors in the Korean Film Industry"

Peng Xiaolian, "Shanghai as Female Space"

There was also a third section devoted to questions. Again, unfortunately, I was only able to attend the first three presentations.

De Lauretis began her talk by commenting that the film festival and its directives as outlined on its website reminded her a great deal of when she first began considering the concept of "women's cinema" and "seeing the world through women's eyes." As she put it, it functioned almost as a kind of time travel:

"Looking at the Festival's website, for me, was more like the kind of travel that film and science fiction represent as a time loop: moving forward in space and time toward what will turn out to be the past -- not the past as it actually was, the historical and personal conditions in which I lived then, but rather the time of what might have happened in the future that I could imagine then."

What the theme of the festival ,with its focus on seeing the film through women's eyes, evoked for De Lauretis was her own personal history which also coincides with the history of both "women's cinema" and "feminist film theory". Discussing two films in this history, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975) and Born in Flames (Lizzie Borden, 1983), De Lauretis illustrates how feminist filmmaking and feminist film studies developed hand-in-hand. But what about today? Do feminist film studies constitute a legitimate and stable academic field? De Lauretis answers both yes and no. Yes, in the sense that Women's Studies and Gender Studies have been well established, but no in that this has both fostered the post-feminist illusion that the goals of women have been met. Now, most of the work on feminism and film comes not from Film Studies programs but from interdisciplinary programs in the arts and humanities. As De Lauretis argues, this "has, on the one hand, the advantage of direct exposure to current critical debates and theories but, on the other hand, the danger of losing the knowledges and analytic skills specific to cinema."

In conclusion, De Lauretis returns to the question of sustainability and usefulness, especially in the light of many women rejecting the term "feminist" altogether. What can a cine-feminism do for these women, and can it exist without them? For De Lauretis, this points out the fact that a feminist film culture cannot come solely from within the academy. It depends instead on a "shared social and aesthetic project by women and for women, not as a global or transnational enterprise but as an intervention in specific cultural and social contexts and film traditions."

Patricia White's paper on "women's cinema" as "world cinema" flows logically from De Lauretis' keynote by considering how the notion of women's film has had to negotiate the politics of festival programming. As White points out, many early feminist academic essays and books emerged out of women's film festivals. Today, however, these have become increasingly rare (hence the importance of the Seoul festival). As White states: "In the less politicized, more prestigious arena, an unprecedented increase in the number and clout of international film festivals has eclipsed events dedicated to women'w work ... there is little consciousness of 'women's cinema' as such in the 'postfeminist' cultural climate fostered by the festival network."

The question becomes: how are these films made intelligible within the festival market? More and more women are making films, but they are framed as "world cinema" rather than specifically feminist films. Two examples White cites are Water (Deepa Metha, 2006) and Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Parranaud, 2007), and White questions how these films made by and about women are used in the art cinema market to foster a very broad and vague humanism that treats the countries of India and Iran as simply backward (I had similar misgivings about Persepolis, which I discussed here).

White gives two other recent examples: Grabavica: Land of My Dreams (Jasmila Zhanic, 2006) and Love for Share (Nia Dinata, 2006). The first film received a Golden Bear at Berlin and a art-house release, while the later only had selective festival screenings. However, Dinata's film had a great deal of local impact in her native Indonesia. This brings White back to the question of feminism and world cinema. She notes the critique of the "sisterhood is global" assertion of 2nd wave feminists and agrees with the call for more situated of power. She quotes from scholar Priya Jaikumar, who urges that work on transnational women's film culture by a "search for alliances and solidarities that acknowledges potentially incommensurate difference." White closes by stating: "In evaluating this juncture of women's cinema, we need to remain committed to the 'global' question, but not seek global answers."

The final paper by Meaghan Morris discusses the notion of festivals from a different perspective, focusing on the very idea of "being festive", of using festivals to give pleasure within the institution-building process. Using slides of her own history of attending festivals and organized rallies, Morris looks at the question of how institutions can sustain and mature movements, and argues for the importance of the festive spirit to this goal. Citing Mary Douglas' work on "how institutions think", Morris is aware of the negative aspects of institutions, such as the "loss of imaginative independence" and the "pressure to conform". However, she sees the "festive principle" as being a potential counter to this:

"The 'festive principle' in institutional work is a political principle which manoeuvres between the harsh 'reality principle' which institutions are dedicated to reproducing, and the 'pleasure principle' which alone (I think) can over the historical long term sustain the 'good' narcissism of collective self-love and shared self-respect that social movements must affirm if they are to flourish."

Morris believes that in order to avoid cynicism and burnout within the academic institutional setting, sustaining the festive principle is crucial. She points out, correctly, that neo-liberal models of maximizing profit and economic value of even Arts departments can have a deadening effect on individuals working in these environments. This in turn can of course be counter to any kind of politically engaged work within these institutions. This is why Morris concludes by stating, "I hope I have explained why I see the 'festive principle' not as in contrast with a fighting activism but precisely as a way of making and taking bridges -- and as itself one of the battles to sustain women's cinema."

Overall, the three papers worked as a panel on the current state of feminist film both inside the academy and outside in the world of filmmaking. The very fact that the Women's film festival would have a conference associated with it points to the connections between theory and practice that remain in feminist filmmaking. Although these types of women's festivals have declined in North America, the presence and strength of this festival in Seoul is encouraging. Perhaps a return to the origins of women's cinema in the 1970s can, as De Lauretis suggests, point the way to future directions.

TAKE CARE OF MY CAT (Jeong Jae-eun, 2001)

The International Women's Film Festival in Seoul began its full program today and will continue until next Friday. I would encourage people to check out a film or two for a number of reasons. First, the chance to see films by female directors, which is unfortunately rare. Second, the chance to see Korean films in the theatre with English subtitles, also rare. And, finally, many of the screenings include a question period with the filmmaker (with English interpreter included).

All three of these applied to the screening I attended on Friday night, Jeong Jae-eun's Take Care of My Cat. The film details the lives of five friends from Incheon who have just graduated from high school, focusing specifically on three of the group: Hye-Ju, who is working for a company in Seoul; Tae-Hie, who volunteers as a typist for a poet with cerebral palsy; and Ji-Young, who lives in a collapsing apartment with her grandparents. Most films I have encountered in the West that deal with female friendship tend to revolve around their relationships with men and how this breaks apart their bond. In this film, however, the tension between the friends is caused much more by class differences. This grounding of the film in the social rather than personal is extended to the importance of Incheon as a location. Part of Hye-Ju's separation from her friends is expressed through her job in Seoul, with her friends remaining at the margins of the city. However, Incheon is also the location of the international airport in South Korea, and thus plays a crucial role in the film's climax.

The style of the film is fairly classical. Jeong avoids the heavy cutting of contemporary cinema, but there are few examples of long takes in the style of other Asian minimalist directors. Interestingly, the film has been discussed as "experimental" within Korean film circles. The only real experimental element of the film is it subject matter and the rather quotidian nature of the narrative. The film reminded me much more of films from the American independent cinema movement than of Korean art cinema directors like Hong Sang-soo and Lee Chang-Dong. And the conclusion reminded me particularly of Spike Lee's Clockers (1995) with its mixture of optimism and critique. The escape at the end of both films offers hope, but is also critical of a society that offers its characters no other options.

SANSHO DAYU (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954)

One of Mizoguchi's many pictorial compositions showing the depth of the physical world.

The final shot: the mother and son reunited

The final shot continued: camera moves away to another character at work

Very few directors in the history of cinema have received the amount of critical attention and almost unanimous praise as the Japanese filmmaker Kenji Mizoguchi. Although he died fairly young at the age of 58 from leukemia, Mizoguchi had a vast career spanning many the first half of the 20th century and its various social upheavals in Japan. Mizoguchi is perhaps the director most influential on the style of "Asian minimalism" that developed in the past two decades in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea. He is most well-known today for the films he made in the 1950s, many of which appeared in European festivals at the time. Of these films, the two most acclaimed are Ugetsu Monogotari (1953), winner of the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and Sansho Dayu (Sansho the Bailiff) (1954), also a Silver Lion winner at Venice. These are also the only two Mizoguchi films currently available through the Criterion Collection.

However, high-brow critics have often championed Mizoguchi's earlier work. The formalist critic Fred Camper considers Mizoguchi's war-time film Genroku Chushingura (The Loyal 47 Ronin) (1941), made or at least commissioned for propaganda purposes, his masterpiece. Jonathan Rosenbaum calls Mizoguchi's The Story of the Late Chrysanthemum (1939) one of the ten greatest Japanese films of all-time. And modernist film theorist Noel Burch, in his study of Japanese cinema, To the Distant Observer (1979), makes the case that Mizoguchi's most distinctive work was made in the 1930s, before he "westernized" his aesthetics and made films designed to be praised in international festivals.

What are the differences between Mizoguchi's later films and his work in the 30s? Most of Mizoguchi's work shows an interest in the long take, but in the later work, these long takes often are combined with elaborate camera movement that presents the scene to the viewer in a way familiar to viewers of western cinema. The Mizoguchi of the 1950s bares a certain resemblance to the work of Jean Renoir, using a long take approach to his sequences but not breaking radically with classical norms. Mizoguchi's 50s films use deep space compositions to reveal the world to the spectator and position the viewer at the center of the gaze. In the 1930s, starting with Osaka Elegy (1935) and Sisters of the Gion (1935), Mizoguchi employs a style that uses the long take to flatten the screen space, much like Godard would later do in films like Weekend (1967). Film theorist Brian Henderson called this "non-bourgeois" camera style, which he describes as follows:

"What are the implications of these shifts from three dimensions to two, from depth to flatness? An ideological interpretation suggests itself -- composition-in-depth projects a bourgeois world infinitely deep, rich, complex, ambiguous, mysterious. Godard's flat frames collapse this world into two-dimensional actuality; thus reversion to a cinema of one plane is a demystification, an assault on the bourgeois world-view and self-image. Weekend's bourgeois figures scurry along without mystery toward mundane goals of money and pornographic fulfillment. There is no ambiguity and no moral complexity. That space in which the viewer could lose himself, make distinctions and alliances, comparisons and judgments, has been abrogated -- the viewer is presented with a single flat picture of the world that he must examine, criticize, accept or reject."

Mizoguchi's Sisters of the Gion is an exemplary example of this flatness, and it is probably not coincidental that Mizoguchi was a follower of Marxism at the time. Sisters of the Gion is also set in contemporary times, and like Weekend shows its characters pursuing goals of money and pornographic fulfillment within this bourgeois milieu. There are few close-ups and very little identification with characters. One of the few close-ups occurs at the conclusion, with a character almost directly speaking to the audience the views of Mizoguchi himself. There is little depth or complexity on display in terms of the film's thematics.

Sansho Dayu, however, is a very different film. Its ideology is not Marxist but rather Buddhist, and it is the film that makes Mizoguchi's conversion to Buddhism most explicit. It is also a period drama with a long take style that includes many depth of field compositions. In other words, a film perfect for festival consumption. The beauty of the compositions and photography in the film are, as the stills above give some indication, almost overwhelming. But they are also contained within a film that has a very contemporary humanist message. In fact, the film it immediately reminded me of was The Grave of the Fireflies. Although set in the distant past, it is hard not to view Sansho Dayu without thinking about World War II.

The politics of these later Mizoguchi films have been debated. Are they essentially about passive acceptance of suffering and sacrifice, and thus potentially conservative? Perhaps, but the rage of Mizoguchi's 30s work, especially regarding the treatment of women in society, is not absent. It is rather combined with a worldview that no longer sees violent resistance as a cure. It sees the world more complexly. Is this a positive? Maybe not. But a certain humanist brand of Marxism seems to remain in these works. For example, the last shot of this film, like his earlier Ugetsu, moves from the central characters of the drama to a shot that shows other people going about their work. There is a communal component to depth of field long take compositions that can be seen as an alternative to the individual centered dramas of Hollywood. Of course, you can still view this as too reliant on bourgeois concepts of depth, richness, complexity and ambiguity.

For further discussion of Mizoguchi, I would recommend Robin Wood's essays in his books Personal Views and Sexual Politics and Narrative Cinema, which includes a career overview I have drawn upon for this piece.

Upcoming: The International Women's Film Festival in Seoul (WFFIS)

The 10th annual International Women's Film Festival in Seoul begins next Thursday, April 10th and runs until Friday, April 18th. The program is quite extensive and can be viewed in English at their website: www.wffis.or.kr

Most of the film being screened have English subtitles (or are in English). There is a story about the festival in The Korea Times:
www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/art/2008/04/141_21664.html

In addition to screenings, there are numerous other events, including two academic conferences on Monday, April 14th and Tuesday, April 15th, featuring well-known feminist scholars Teresa de Lauretis, Patricia White, Meaghan Morris, and others from Korea, USA, Australia, China and Japan. Details are available at the website.

Link to documentaries

I've added a link to the user DemocraticMedia on youtube. The user has uploaded a large number of great documentaries in quite good quality, from older films such as HEARTS AND MINDS and MANUFACTURING CONSENT to recent work by Michael Moore, Robert Greenwald, and the British director Adam Curtis, among others. Particularly interesting is the work of Curtis, who has made a number of multi-part docs for the BBC: THE CENTURY OF THE SELF (2002) (4 parts, 1 hour each), THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES (2004) (3 parts, 1 hour each), and THE TRAP (2007) (3 parts, 1 hour each). My favorite of the group is THE TRAP but all are worth watching. The great Canadian film THE CORPORATION as well as Alex Gibney's Oscar winner TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE are also included.

THE DAY A PIG FELL INTO THE WELL; CODE UNKNOWN

I finally watched a film by noted Korean auteur Hong Sangsoo, whose new film Night and Day is currently playing in theatres. I have also recently read a book of interviews and analysis on Hong published by the Korean Film Council (KOFIC). This is part of a series of books on Korean directors, including such filmmakers as Lee Chang-Dong, Park Chan-Wook, Im Kwon-Taek and others. I've read 3, on Hong, Lee and Park, and all are interesting despite needing an editor.

The book on Hong is particularly useful because of the difficulty of his work. He is definitely the most experimental of the Korean auteurs to gain success on the international festival circuit. Also, Hong may be the most critically acclaimed of Korean directors in the West. For example. the book on Hong published by KOFIC has pieces by film scholar David Bordwell and French director Claire Denis, and Hong has endeared himself to cinephiles by noting in interviews his high regard for directors like Robert Bresson and Luis Bunuel.

The Day A Pig Fell Into The Well (1996) is Hong's debut film, following the lives of four interconnected characters. The narrative is divided into four sections, each focusing on one particular character. The action takes place over the course of a single day, as the metaphoric title suggests. The difficulty of the narrative results from the concentration on everyday events and then, as the story progresses, the inclusion of scenes that are logically unclear. In particular, there is a dream sequence that, a la Bunuel, is not really signaled as such. The film feels closer to other directors of Asian minimalism than other Korean filmmakers. Tsai Ming-Liang's Vive L'Amour (2004) provides an especially useful comparison in the materiality of their concerns, primarily in regards to sexuality. While an initially off-putting work in terms of its characters (especially the writer whose story we see first) and its visually unpleasing look, the film is nevertheless quite compelling as its multi-character narrative enfolds and Hong's overall aesthetic strategy becomes clear. Apparently, Hong's next films continue narrative experiments while also minimalizing his style and approach even further (more long takes, even more concern with the quotidian). I hope to track down more of his films in the coming months.

Also this week I watched another multi-character drama, Michael Haneke's Code Unknown (2000). I first encountered Haneke's films almost a decade ago at a retrospective at the Canadian Film Institute in Ottawa. At that time I saw his first two theatrical features (he has made a number of films by TV as well), The Seventh Continent (1989) and Benny's Video (1992). I have since seen The Piano Teacher (2001), Cache (2005), and most recently his original version of Funny Games (1997). Despite his admiration for all of these films, particularly Cache, I think Code Unknown is Haneke's most formally and thematically complex cinematic experiment to date.

In many ways the Oscar-winning Crash (Paul Haggis, 2005) is a Hollywood bastardization of Code Unknown, and a particularly obscene one at that. Unlike Crash, Haneke's film is both formally adventurous in its stylistic and narrative form and pointed and specific in its political and social analysis of race and poverty (for a breakdown of the film's style, see http://www.cinemetrics.lv/movie.php?movie_ID=1411). After a quickly edited prologue (itself a great sequence) Haneke establishes a pattern of sequence shots separated by short shots of black. This pattern is broken only by sequences involving the making of art. One main character is a photographer, and we get two sequences of still photos he has taken. The female protagonist is an actress, and one particular sequence shows a highly edited suspense scene from the film she is making. Haneke clues us to the movie-ness of this scene even before it is revealed to us explicitly by editing the scene completing differently from every other sequence. He concludes by giving us the two actors unable to stop laughing while dubbing in the dialogue (see still above).

If Paul Haggis has contributed nothing else to film culture, he has at least shown that multi-character narrative webs are not inherently progressive. But in the hands of directors like Hong and Haneke, they have the potential to be among the most politically relevant movies we can make in today's world.

TOP TENS

I have added both a decade by decade Top Ten list as well as yearly lists for the past 20 years (1988-2007) on the right hand side of the blog. This came out of a recent attempt to try to recall and organize every film I have actually seen and organize the results by year. One of the things I realized was the enormous gaps in my viewing of cinema history compared with the number of films I have seen from recent years. While this is in many ways not surprising, I nevertheless was taken aback, since I always believed that I see relatively few newer releases. Almost half of all the movies I have seen have been released in the last 20 years. In any case, the lists will give a better idea of my tastes and maybe provide some ideas for viewing.

THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG (Jacques Demy, 1964)

In addition to the vast availability of bootleg DVDs of recent films available through street vendors throughout Seoul, there are also cheap DVDs (between 3900 and 7900 won) of older films for sale at the larger book stores in the city (Kyobo and Bandis & Lundi). I recently (and finally) watched Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg through one of these DVDs and it was one of the most enjoyable viewing experiences I've had.

I recently listened to an old review of the film on filmspotting.com and one of the questions that was raised was whether the music and singing was necessary to the story. The uniqueness of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is that all of the film is scored and all of the dialogue is sung. Thus it is a musical that is in many ways not one, in the sense that there are no song and dance performances and very little traditional spectacle. But what the singing dialogue and score do accomplish is make the film distinctive of what the French New Wave represents as a whole.

The French New Wave, as exemplified by such early films as Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1959) and The 400 Blows (Francois Truffaut, 1959), was an extreme mixture of realism and formalism. Traditionally, realism and formalism are seen as opposite poles of the spectrum, but the French New Wave challenges this dichotomy by treating these terms as more circular in nature. For example, Godard's jump cuts are such an extreme formal device that they become realistic in the sense that they call attention to the reality of the viewing experience (film is not reality, it is an illusion). Likewise, some of the more realistic long takes in a film like The 400 Blows continue for so long that they can actually draw attention to the presence of the camera.

Without the music and singing dialogue, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg would be a rather realistic, bittersweet melodrama. However, as a musical, it offers a reconsideration of both the musical and the melodrama. The extreme stylization of the use of music makes strange the realistic story of a couple torn apart by the Algerian War, and at the same time, the quotidian nature of the story grounds the spectacle of the musical genre. This is especially the case during the final third of the film, labeled "The Return." Instead of a conventional happy ending, Demy takes the material into darker places before eventually concluding with a emotionally complex finale. The final shot, seen in the still below, is one of the most resonant I can remember.

FUNNY GAMES; GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES

The wink at the camera

The ten minute plus long take

I've added a link to the site filmspotting.net, a website for a podcast I discovered about a month back which I highly recommend. The podcast began over 2 years back, hosted by Adam Kempenaar and Sam Hallgren. Recently, Hallgren left the show and was replaced by Matty Robinson. The podcast strikes a good balance between standard film reviewing and more serious film discussion. Kempenaar in particular has a background in studying film at the university level, and all the hosts have the ability to discuss film on a formal as well as thematic level. They also split their time reviewing new films and discussing films of the past through their weekly Top 5 lists as well as their marathons of films they haven't seen (for example, they have had a Western marathon, a Hitchcock marathon, a Bergman marathon, etc).

And often, their reviews of current films are better than most printed articles. One recent example of this is their discussion of Funny Games (Michael Haneke, 2008). I have not seen the new version of the Haneke film, since it has not opened here, but I did watch his original 1997 German language version this week. The new version is apparently a shot-for-shot remake, and most of the reviews have focused more on Haneke's concept of the film, so it seems reasonable to have an opinion about the negative backlash the new version has received. Many reviews mention Haneke's now infamous comment about the film: "Anybody who leaves the theatre doesn't need this film. Anyone who stays does." This has been interpreted by critics as Haneke preaching to the audience, but I think it's more of a descriptive statement than an evaluative one. People who do not watch or enjoy violence have no stake in the film, and nothing really to think about. If you have an interest in watching the film, especially knowing what it is about, it will provoke you. The negative critical reaction seems related to this challenge. It reminded me of the negative reaction of journalists this year to David Simon and his criticism of the press in the final season of The Wire.

After watching Funny Games, I finally watched the Japanese animation film The Grave of the Fireflies (Isao Takahata, 1988). Although a very different film, Funny Games did make me think about this film differently. Namely, why I wanted to watch a film like Grave of the Fireflies which I knew would upset me because of its subject matter. Many years ago, film scholar Linda Williams wrote about the similarity between genres like horror and melodrama in their appeal to the body of the spectator. These genres are usually critically neglected and dismissed because of their lack of aesthetic distance. They are seen as merely emotion delivery devices. Both Funny Games and Grave of the Fireflies work to separate themselves from the genres of horror and melodrama, respectively. Funny Games does this more deliberately through the address of the camera and the use of extreme long shots and long takes (one over ten minutes long). Grave of the Fireflies does this through the use of animation and by keeping the violence off-screen. Nevertheless, Grave of the Fireflies still works as a tear-jerker, while Funny Games still creates a visceral impact in its use of violence.

As films, I think they are both great achievements. Grave of the Fireflies works as a humanist drama about war and its consequences, but is best seen as a corrective to other war films. Funny Games is as anti-humanist as most films get, but also works as a mediation not so much on film violence (of which there is little on-screen) as to why we watch any "disturbing" movies (including Grave of the Fireflies) to begin with.

NEXT MONTH: LATE GODARD

Next month, April 12-20, the Seoul Cinematheque is showing three later Godard films:

JLG/JLG (1995)
In Praise of Love (2001)
Notre Musique (2004)

No details on subtitles or even dates have been announced yet.

This Week

Continuing this week at the Cinematheque is the John Huston retrospective. I saw The Maltese Falcon last weekend (a film I've probably seen more than any other) and the print was good if not great. The experience of seeing the film in the theatre was well worth it. The other Huston films showing that I have seen and would recommend are: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), Key Largo (1948), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), and The African Queen (1951). Others I'm interested in seeing are Beat the Devil (1954), Fat City (1972), and The Dead (1987), a James Joyce adaptation that was Huston's last film.

If you missed No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, they are both playing at Cinecube. Also playing at Cinecube is Steve Buscemi's Interview (2007).

4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS (Cristian Mungiu, 2007)

End of the final pull back of the opening shot

The birthday party

The final shot

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is still playing in art cinemas in Seoul, although not with English subtitles, so I watched the film through a bittorrent. This Romanian film won the Palme D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and along with Lee Chang-Dong's Secret Sunshine, I think it was the best film of last year.

The film creates both a sense of realism through its long take style and, increasingly, a sense of subjectivity as well. It's important to point out the extreme nature of the realistic approach here. There are only 65 shots in the entire film, which lasts 1 hour and 45 minutes, not counting credits, making the average shot length close to 90 seconds. This is not a question of a director just letting their camera run, however. The approach establishes the space and the relationships between the characters, and then as the drama enfolds allows the real time aspect of the long take to give the viewer the experience of these characters. The visceral impact that this film has (and thus its political importance) is intimately connected to the nature of its long take approach. The subjectivity reaches its peak with a long tracking shot behind the lead character through the city streets, and then retreats back to objectivity with the final more formally composed two shot at the table that closes the picture.

The longest take of the film is also one of the most effective. It lasts over 7 minutes and show the lead character is framed (trapped) between her boyfriend's parents, with the boyfriend in the background. The tension of the scene is between the middle class conversation of this birthday party and the life and death situation of her friend, which is where her mind clearly is (and where Mungiu wants the viewers concern to be as well). Much has been made of the film as anti-Communist, but this is exaggerated in my opinion. It is a very specific social critique of Communism in Romania, but I think it is actually a movie many Marxists would approve of in its treatment of class. It is also much more explicitly a feminist film, and it reminded me a great deal of Erick Zonck's great The Dreamlife of Angels (1998).

Although the film is certainly grim, it also manages to be both visceral and political and deserves to be compared with other great examples of realistic and minimalist cinema.

THERE WILL BE BLOOD (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)

Still from the Prologue

Extreme long shot/ long take of Plainview and son's reunion

Final shot

There Will Be Blood opened in theatres here last week. It is also available on DVD, and over the weekend I watched the film in the cinema and then again at home in order to try to sort out my reaction to it.

Watching the film initially, I was impressed but also very unsatisfied. I felt there were two major weaknesses. One was structurally in terms of how the story seemed to meander, especially with the introduction of Plainview's brother. The other was a certain emptiness or at least simplicity in regards to the thematic material. Upon further discussion and reflection of the film, I think I was wrong on both counts, and I've gone from thinking the film was very flawed if fascinating to seeing it as a near masterpiece, all in about a 24 hour period. Re-watching the film, the structure is actually very coherent and even tight, bookended with a prologue and epilogue, and the character of the brother is crucial to the overall mediation on blood relations. The simplicity of the film went away on second viewing. My initial problem was with the power of the conclusion that seemed to undercut Plainview's character and make him simply a two-dimensional villain. In fact, this epilogue should be seen in relation to the rest of the movie, not as a conclusion in the traditional sense.

Anderson has typically been seen as a director who simply mimics other filmmakers, particularly directors of the New Hollywood. Thus Boogie Nights is seen as a rip-off of Scorsese and Magnolia is seen as Altmanesque. There are plenty of references and influences on display here, even though Altman and especially Scorsese are less central than Kubrick, Malick and Coppola. In particular, the 13 minute near dialogue free opening recalls 2001, especially the use of music and Lewis's almost ape-like performance (see still above). And the epilogue recalls The Shining in both the composition of the final shot (see still above) and in Daniel Day-Lewis's performance style recalling the Brechtian approach of Jack Nicholson in the earlier film (for a discussion of the influence of Brecht on Nicholson see Dennis Bingham's book Acting Male). And I think Lewis's performance here should be viewed in this context of Brecht, deliberately breaking with realism. The conclusion does not cancel out the character Lewis has created over the previous two hours of the film but rather comments on that character and what he represents.

But despite these many influences, There Will Be Blood is a unique experience that is drawing on the epic themes of Coppola's Godfather films and the visual beauty of Malick (although the landscape here feels more like Monte Hellman's The Shooting in its barren look) without simply mimicking them. One is reminded instead of Scorsese in his prime, drawing on his vast reservoir of film knowledge but creating something distinctive. Anderson's influences are more recent, drawing on the "Golden Age" he grew up with. One of the things worth admiring about There Will Be Blood is its long take style, which is far removed from the "intensified continuity" of contemporary Hollywood (David Bordwell discusses this at length in a recent blog entry http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/?p=1944). The middle still from above is an extreme long shot from one of the longer takes in the movie, removing sentimentality from the reunion of Plainview and his son. A shot breakdown of the film is available here: http://www.cinemetrics.lv/movie.php?movie_ID=1340

I first thought that No Country for Old Men was clearly the better film. Now, I'm not so sure. In many ways evaluating one film over the other is beside the point. Both are equally impressive achievements with different aesthetic approaches. They are the two best American films of the year that I saw, and two of the better of recent years.

2007 Year in Review

Having finally caught up with most if not all of the critically acclaimed releases of last year, I thought I'd put together a year end list and ranking of all the films I saw. I'll add some more films as I see them.

5 stars

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
Milyang/Secret Sunshine

4 and a half stars

No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Taxi to the Dark Side

4 stars

Michael Clayton
Atonement
Gone Baby Gone
Margot at the Wedding
For the Bible Tells Me So
No End in Sight
Once
Juno
Eastern Promises
Death Proof
My Kid Could Paint That
Sicko

3 and a half stars

Persepolis
Superbad
The Lookout
Zodiac
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
King of Kong
The Simpsons Movie

3 stars

The Darjeeling Limited
Knocked Up
Charlie Wilson's War

2 and a half stars

Away From Her

1 star

Fracture

UPCOMING: JOHN HUSTON RETROSPECTIVE

Starting on March 15th at the Seoul Cinematheque is a retrospective on director John Huston. There will be 15 films showing over the course of almost one month. Information is available at the cinematheque website.

MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS (Wong Kar-Wai, 2008)

Opening here today (and already available on bootleg DVD) is Wong Kar-Wai's first English language feature, My Blueberry Nights. The film does not really work on any level and is Wong's least interesting film I've seen since his 1988 As Tears Go By. It is, however, definitely a curiosity and Wong's fans may want to check it out.

What is surprising is how talky the film is. I expected the film to have less dialogue given the film is not in Wong's first language, but this is not the case. Also surprising is how much the film does still feel like a Wong film, even though it also feels like the work of a fan mimicking his approach. Normally, Wong likes to reinvent himself slightly with each film even while maintaining many of his themes. Here it feels simply like recycling.

My Blueberry Nights comes off like an American variation on Wong's 1994 cult item Chungking Express (favorite of Quentin Tarantino, who first made Wong more widely known to the West by releasing this film under his banner), especially in terms of narrative. Stylistically, the film is closer to the later In the Mood for Love (2000), although My Blueberry Nights lacks that film's intensity of visual beauty, partly because the emotions of the story here do not support it. The overall mood of the piece is the lightest of all Wong's work since Chungking Express, and the energy and spontaneity of that film is absent here. The covering of the usual Wong themes of time, memory and romantic longing also seem tired and overly simplified.

In many ways, this is "Wong for Dummies". It is puzzling who this film is going to appeal to. It will most likely disappoint Wong's fans, while at the same time being too much of a Wong project to really generate box office, despite the presence of pop star Norah Jones in the lead. Then again, it may be just the right mixture to please Jones's fans. File under the new "Adult Contemporary Viewing" genre.

ATONEMENT; MARGOT AT THE WEDDING

Opening of tracking shot

Middle of tracking shot

End of tracking shot

Atonement (Joe Wright, 2007) and Margot at the Wedding (Noah Baumbach, 2007), two of the many year-end films now circulating here on bootlegged DVDs (and in the case of Atonement in theatres as well) could not be much different, even if they do share themes in common: the danger of family being linked to the very thing that makes them needed, intimacy; and the danger of being an artist, especially to those close to you.

Atonement is a high class, polished piece of prestige cinema adapted from a very well-respected novel by Ian McEwan. The film was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar and was almost unanimously praised by critics, scoring an 85 on the Metacritic website. Margot at the Wedding is shot with a hand-held camera with many extremely grainy images captured by a low definition digital camera. Its reception was very mixed, scoring a 66 on the Metacritic tally. One can easily understand why, outside of the aesthetics. The characters in Atonement are very sympathetic, even the young girl who causes the tragedy of the film, and are placed in the life and death situation of World War II. The characters of Margot at the Wedding are extremely difficult to relate to, both because of their unpleasantness as well as the seeming pettiness and privilege of their situation.

However, I admired both films about equally. Atonement contains one particular shot that has been much discussed by critics, an almost five minute extended tracking shot of the British army waiting at Dunkirk (stills above) that has already been compared to the greatest long take tracking shots in cinema history. The inclusion of such a bravura cinematic feat seems like a very self-conscious attempt by director Joe Wright to distinguish himself from other Merchant-Ivory style literary adaptations. As far back as Francois Truffaut's attack on the Tradition of Quality of prestigious literary adaptations in 1950s France, this sub-genre has often been accused of being un-cinematic. But with the exception of this one shot, Atonement does still feel like many other World War II love stories, such as The English Patient and The End of the Affair. The story remains very compelling, but at the same time is a literary conceit that Wright never really finds a cinematic equivalent for.

Noah Baumbach's style in Margot at the Wedding, like in his other films, is spiritually linked to the French New Wave. As Jonathan Rosenbaum has argued, Baumbach's first film Kicking and Screaming owes a great deal to the style of New Wave hero Jean Renoir. His last film, The Squid and the Whale, was an homage to early Godard and Truffaut. Margot at the Wedding recalls New Wave favorite Ingmar Bergman as well as New Wave critic turned director Eric Rohmer. In particular, the film's opening titles work to mark Baumbach's work as "art cinema". There is also a Dogma-like feel to many of the scenes and images. Much of what people dislike about the film is what I admired: difficult characters, ugly images, and a lack of story resolution. The interest instead lies in the performances, the awkward humour, and the surprising, uncomfortable eroticism, which is probably the most notable comparison with the often neglected Rohmer. Not a film I would recommend to most, but if you're tuned into its sensibility and/ or interested in the attempt by American indie directors to establish themselves as cineastes, Margot at the Wedding offers a strange and almost indefensible fascination.

This Week

Starting tomorrow at the Cinematheque is the Jean Renoir retrospective. Details are available at the website. Unfortunately, not all the films have subtitles, so make sure to check.

PEPPERMINT CANDY/ BAKHA SATANG (Lee Chang-Dong, 1999)

I recently came across a box set of Lee Chang-Dong's first three films: Green Fish (1996), Peppermint Candy (1999), and Oasis (2002). Being a great admirer of Lee's two most recent films, Secret Sunshine and Oasis, I was anxious to see his first two films, and started with Peppermint Candy.

Lee began his career as an artist as a novelist, and Peppermint Candy is very much influenced by literary structure. The film uses a backwards time construct, starting with a man's suicide. The story in many ways is the reverse of Hollywood melodrama, especially the way in which social and political concerns are handled. Typically, Hollywood attempts to solve social issues through melodrama. There are numerous examples, the locus classicus being Casablanca. It can even be seen in political dramas like JFK with its insertion of the family melodrama into the assassination investigation. Peppermint Candy, on the other hand, starts with the personal and gradually begins to explore the political and social landscape of South Korea over the previous 20 years.

The film achieves, like Lee's other work, a curious and extremely effective mixture of realism and formalism. The style of the film features a great many long takes and favors a naturalistic acting approach. However, there are many motifs that self-consciously call attention to themselves throughout. This begins of course with the artificial narrative form. The hero starts by allowing himself to be run over by a train while screaming "I want to go home". There are then six flashbacks in reverse chronological order. In between each "chapter" there are shots of a train going in reverse. And each chapter contains a scene with a train, which eventually causes the viewer to note this motif. The hero also contains a limp that reappears throughout at key moments.

The film thus works on two levels. On the one hand, it is an emotionally engaging male melodrama about lost love a la Wong Kar-Wai. At the same time, it is a politically astute tale that is both an introduction to recent Korean history and an all-too-relevant commentary on the use of brutality to control dissent.

This Week

A Jean Rouch retrospective begins this week at the Seoul Cinematheque. Jean Renoir's A DAY IN THE COUNTRY plays Sunday 4:00pm and Renoir's MADAME BOVARY plays Tuesday 7:00pm at the Dongseung Cinematheque. Also, the schedule for the Renoir retrospective starting March 1st at the Seoul Cinematheque is now available at their website.

Also, in time for the Oscars, JUNO, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN and ATONEMENT are all playing at many multiplexes across the city.

Next Thursday (28th), the Cannes winner from this year, 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS, AND 2 DAYS will be playing at Cinecube, along with Korean cineaste Hong Sang-Soo's new film, NIGHT AND DAY, which just premiered at the Berlin Film Festival last week. Unfortunately, it is doubtful either will have English subtitles.

BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU'RE DEAD (Sidney Lumet, 2007)

Sidney Lumet has been directing feature films for 50 years, starting with 12 Angry Men (1957). he probably had his greatest success, like many directors at the time, during the "Hollywood Renaissance" of the 1970s: Serpico (1973), Dog Day Afternoon (1975) and Network (1976). He continued making films over the next decades, producing occasional greatness, for example The Verdict (1982) and Running on Empty (1988), along with a great deal of mediocrity. Lumet was never known as much of a stylist, and therefore was never seen as much of an auteur. He was felt to be as good as the material he was given.

However, with his most recent film, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, Lumet has gotten perhaps the best reviews of his career. Moreover, most of the praise is being heaped on Lumet himself as a filmmaker, as opposed to simply the story and the actors (always a Lumet strength with no exception here). With the rise of the Hollywood blockbuster and with more and more films applying a fast cutting style even in dialogue scenes (what film scholar David Bordwell has dubbed "intensified continuity"), there seems to be a greater critical affinity for films employing a classical style of filmmaking. This helps explain the immense critical success of someone like Clint Eastwood as well as the re-emergence of Lumet as another "old master" of the cinema.

All of this is a preamble to my feeling that Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, like some recent Eastwood (for example, Million Dollar Baby) is slightly overrated, especially as an example of great directing. No complaints about the performances here, nor with the non-linear story structure of Kelly Masterson (although the film's last act does not work nearly as well as what comes before). And credit should be given to Lumet for not needlessly cutting the film to pieces and allowing mise-en-scene to play an important role. The problem is that the mise-en-scene is often rather mannered and obvious. One example is the still above, a very self-consciously designed shot that seems to strain for seriousness (to paraphrase Andrew Sarris). Lumet's style is caught between an efficient classical style and an art cinema long take approach, and the result never jelled as well as it could given the strong story and performers. A rather awkward fast cutting approach to signal flashbacks also seemed unnecessary and the work of a director fresh out of film school rather than the confident storyteller Lumet is supposed to be.

The film is available on bootleg DVD here in Seoul, and given its critical acclaim it may show up in art cinemas soon. Despite some reservations, a film worth seeing, but not the masterpiece some are claiming.

THE PIRATE; THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL; TWO WEEKS IN ANOTHER TOWN

I saw these films at the Minnelli retrospective over the past few days, and are a fascinating trio of films to consider together. The Pirate (1948) is a musical starring Minnelli's then wife Judy Garland and Gene Kelly. This is one of the genres in which Minnelli made his reputation, and The Pirate may be Minnelli's peak within this form. The Bad and the Beautiful is closer to Minnelli's other genre specialty, the melodrama, but it also one of the earlier films in another sub-genre of films about Hollywood itself. Two Weeks in Another Town (1962) is in many ways a follow-up to The Bad and the Beautiful, using the same star, Kirk Douglas, and also exploring what it is to work within Hollywood. But by 1962, the idea of what Hollywood was had changed a great deal. (On Wednesday, The Bad and the Beautiful and Two Weeks in Another Town will both be showing on a double bill. The print of The Bad and the Beautiful is only average, with many scratches and even a few splices, but the print of Two Weeks in Another Town is terrific.)

The common link in all three films is the role of art and artists in society. This is obvious enough in the two Hollywood films, but is also present in The Pirate with its focus on acting. The Pirate closes with the number "Be a Clown" (the same tune is more famous today for its lyrical reworking "Make 'em Laugh" number from Kelly and Donen' s 1952 Singin' in the Rain, another MGM musical) and offers up a celebration of the artist and their role. But, even more, it views art as a way (the only way?) to escape from the confines of society. The heroine Manuela dreams of being taken away by the pirate Macoco (or Mack the Black) in order to escape her dull soon-to-be husband. Teh twist of the film is that this husband is (or was) Macoco and gave up that life to try to be a respectable mayor. The myth of Macoco is just that, a story the heroine reads to open the film. The only illusion that is real is art itself, represented by the acting troupe and, of course, by Minnelli's musical sequences, certainly the high point of the film. The happy ending Minnelli provides is thus one that only exists within the world of illusion. Thematically, The Pirate has a lot in common with Minnelli's earlier musical Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), a seemingly optimistic film that nevertheless reveals the contradictions of society.

The Bad and the Beautiful is Minnelli's Citizen Kane, only set in the world of movies. It has a triple flashback structure to deal with the story of Jonathan Shields, a Hollywood producer with certain parallels to both Val Lewton and David O. Selznick. The film shows a clear affection for the Hollywood of this period. But it also seems to point to a new system (by 1952, the producer package deal was coming in, as the film's frame story shows). And, the film has a decidedly love-hate relationship with the business, as represented by Shields himself. By the time of Two Weeks in Another Town Hollywood was effectively gone. The film is set in Italy at Cinecitta studio, with Douglas as an actor recovering from a nervous breakdown. He is reunited with his director, and in the film's most famous sequence, they watch a clip from The Bad and the Beautiful and both celebrate and lament their past. The film's attitude towards art is increasingly pessimistic, especially in terms of the negative effect it can have on the individuals participating, although it is still ultimately the only thing Minnelli does have some faith.

The three films are also intriguing to compare stylistically, with the color and Academy ratio of The Pirate, the black and white and Academy ratio of The Bad and the Beautiful, and the widescreen colour of Two Weeks in Another Town. Minnelli's style, with its focus on long takes and mise-en-scene, adapts very well and may even be said to be suited to the widescreen format. However, Two Weeks in Another Town is the weakest film of the three, and in many ways proves the point about the advantages of the Hollywood system that are implied by The Bad and the Beautiful. The first hour has a great fascination, but the weak story material and hodgepodge of actors eventually derail the film in its second half. The Bad and the Beautiful, by comparison, while the least stylistically dazzling of the three films, is the masterpiece of the group, a film that compares with the best of Classic Hollywood and with the best of films about the cinema itself.

THIS WEEK: PREMINGER

This week, in addition to the continuing Minnelli retrospective at the Cinematheque, Film Forum is showing 3 films by Otto Preminger over the weekend. The schedule is as follows:

Bonjour Tristesse (1958): Friday 6:20, Saturday 2:30, Sunday 8:30
Advise and Consent (1962): Fri 3:30, Sat 8:00, Sun 5:30
River of No Return (1953): Fri 8:30, Sat 6:00, Sun 3:30

A note on Bonjour Tristesse: this was the second of Preminger's two films with the actress Jean Seberg. Preminger discovered Seberg in a nationwide talent search/ publicity stunt for the lead in his film Saint Joan (1957). After the critical disaster of that film, Preminger cast Seberg in his next film, Bonjour Tristesse, possibly, as Mark Rappaport speculates in his great essay film From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1995), to disprove Seberg's critics. This film also was seen as a failure, but it did attract at least one critic, that being Jean-Luc Godard, who cast Seberg in his debut film the next year, Breathless (1959). Godard has even suggested that Seberg's character was based on the one she plays in this film. Bonjour Tristesse is also a favorite of Preminger fans, although don't go in looking for a great story.