Inaugurated Korean New Wave. Hyun-Mok is credited with bringing Italian Neo-Realism to Korean Film Industry. Immediately following Korean Civil War of the 50's, this film focuses on two brothers in a defunct family: a mad mother who shouts "Let's get out of here!" continually, a pregnant wife, and a sister who turns to prostitution. One brother is an obedient but underpaid accountant in need of dental surgery, the other a sergeant who can't find a job in peacetime. There is also a younger "brother" who sells papers (which sometimes also serves as food) and a younger girl "child" who constantly asks for new things like shoes or dresses.

The sergeant turns down a job as an actor who plays a wounded soldier. Instead he devises a scheme to rob a bank. The plan fails. He is hunted by the police and eventually caught. The elder brother loses his wife and child due to complications in pregnancy. He undergoes risky dental surgery, and dies from loss of blood.

Several deaths: The sergeant's old lover and her young poet admirer.

The elder brother's pregnant wife, and their child. The elder brother.

The family left is the mad mother, the prostitute sister and the two younger siblings (boy and girl).

This film foregrounds two concerns: Have children, raise family.

How do you do that with little money?

Where do you do that when you have to "get out of here"?

The choices are between Liberty Village, the hospital, and the police station.

Several key moments where the camera's POV stands in for the character's. For example, the driver of the getaway car eyes the woman celebrity on the curb. He gets out of jeep to gaze at her. He looks at her then looks across the street. The camera records her figure in front of the bank, then a shot of the buildings across the street cut across by telephone wire, then he looks back and a Christian marching band cuts across his view. The ironic drama is brought to a climax with the sound of gunfire from within the bank.

"Aimless Bullet" gets its name from a shot fired with no particular reason, and with no particular result. A literal example in the film is the last shot fired by the sergeant before surrendering to the police. He fires a single shot into the air, simultaneously shouting a cry of frustration and failure.

None of the shots fired in the film hit any targets or achieve any result. Neither hard work, nature, love, nor stealing prove useful either. The only hope is in TV acting.

Life on a String meets Yellow Earth. Several long takes. Steady-stationed camera. Told in flashbacks but fairly straightforward.

A Pansori widower travels with his adopted orphan daughter and the son of his deceased lover. The film chronicles the disappearance of Korean Culture in the form of pansori, "blues" folk songs, immediately following Japanese occupation and withdrawal. The film foregrounds the notion of Han in connection with cultural suffering.

The Pansori teacher professes to wed Sopyonje (way of singing) with Chunjonge (way of drumming) "to keep our grief the same."

The orphaned boy is brought up to play the drum, the girl to sing. The boy runs away from the cruel treatment of the Pansori master. The Pansori master blinds the girl to force her to stay with him. Years later (as the story begins) the boy searches out the infamous girl to perform with her one last time (a reunion and healing).

Husband married to Christian wife, but from a shamanistic upbringing, attempts to come to terms with the spirit of his mother who visits him in dreams.

Expressed partly in flashbacks with long takes of rituals and religious symbols, the film takes a Shaman festival re-appropriated as a Christian celebration of "Moses' second crossing" as a way to explore the roots of Korean culture overlaid with the intrusion of Christianity.

The husband ends the tale by embracing shamanism - crossing to the other side. He leaves his wife and son in the hopes that one day they will realize that "their blood is one."

Madness/Reincarnation

I lose his search for his father. Is he the blacksmith, who turns him over to the boatman with one eye? Is he the boatman? Is he the blacksmith's cousin who is forced out of another village for being a bully and later returns with a mad woman (the shaman mother)?

The mad woman is first an exorcist at the boat village, then a woman brought to the blacksmith's village, then a contemporary shaman from a temple (?) who claims the husband as her son - the woman and place he returns to in the end.

Parting of the sea - the tour guide's explanation followed by his advertisement special on tube socks: "A long time ago we escaped from one island inhabited by tigers to this other one. But we forgot grandma mulberry on the other side. So we prayed for a miracle. The waters receded between the islands and we were able to rescue grandma mulberry from the other side. But she died here from lack of food...

Begins with narrator of story in voice over:

1)Fate of Eunuchs (and maids) is based on their ability to keep secrets

2)The love between Chung-Ho and Ja Oak is discovered by the master eunuch. They are led away and interrogated.

Their testimony leads to an explanation of incidents four months ago and leads to the flashbacks.

Four months ago, Chung Ho was not a eunuch. He was in love with Ja Oak, but she was to become a maid to the emperor. Discovering their love, Ja Oak's father had Chung Ho castrated. He then entered the castle. Ja Oak was unable to secure the feelings of the emperor who fell in love with her handmaid instead.

Some threads get twisted here. At the beginning of the film, it is Lady Kim who is the favorite of the emperor. Ja Oak becomes the emperor's interest only through the actions of the head eunuch who wants to punish the two lovers. Eventually, it is Lady Min (the servant of Ja Oak who conceives a child by mistake with the emperor, and later has a miscarriage).

What is confusing is that Ja Oak is forced into bed with the emperor as a punishment for her love with Chung-Ho, but they were not discovered as lovers until afterwards.

In any case, the conventions of the court system are made to function here. Miscarriages are bad omens for the lineage of the emperor. Deaths of maids, especially deaths of pregnant ones, are erased by killing anyone who has knowledge of such events. Gates are closed and no woman is ever allowed to leave. (The exception was the corpse of Lady Min - made to seem alive, when in fact the emperor, his child and his wife were actually dead). In this way, the emperor could be said to live on.

Chung Ho and Ja Oak are allowed to escape by the master eunuch who keeps the emperor's guards at bay.

The overall plot is conventional and predictable. The staging and acting is quite theatrical. Most of the interior camera work seems like theater on stage, but some of the outdoor camera work hinted of Kurosawa, especially with the swordplay.

Foucault would have had a field day with the closed system of power, bodies, sexuality, progeny, etc.

A monk falls in love with the governor's daughter who is betrothed to a town lord. The governor arrives at the temple to perform some marriage rites for his daughter. The monk is taken into seclusion where he envisions an entire married life with her. He raises three children on a piece of land he farms. Eventually he is tracked down by the town Lord who still desires the woman. Found by the lord's army, the monk is about to be executed, when he repents his ways and asks for forgiveness. He is given back his monk's robes and is executed. He awakes to find that he is back in the temple and that it was all a dream.

There are some editing discontinuities: The head monk refers to the rising moon in one scene, and shortly afterwards, it is mid day. There were also other scenes shot in clear day light that were reportedly taking place at night.

The Buddhism featured was of the Shinran sect - "Save me merciful Buddha" under the direction of Yang Sun at the Yak Son Temple near the Kokuryo kingdom.

Best so far.

Immediately following Korean Civil War, KBS broadcast a telethon in which separated family members attempted to find each other. People gathered to watch the broadcasts and participated. The split screen showed two people who would question each other, assisted by a broadcaster. They would ask each other personal questions and interview each other in order to determine if they were in fact long lost relatives.

The film begins with TV inserts of some of these broadcasts. A mother, with her two kids and husband watch the broadcasts in their home. The husband suggests to his wife that she should go and participate in the broadcast - alluding to and supporting her need to connect with and come to terms with her past.

She was orphaned at an early age and taken in by another family who had one boy child of their own. The two children, although raised as sister and brother, eventually came to love each other and conceive a child. To avoid shame, the girl was sent away to have the child, but before the couple could reunite, the war broke out and the family was split on either side of the battle lines.

The two lovers eventually meet at the KBS broadcast station and decide to go forward and attempt to find their child. They find their child to be an impoverished man living in tolerable squalor with a wife and child of his own. The wife chides him to just go ahead and agree to being their son in order to improve their own living conditions. The man, on his part, wants to be honest.

Shocked by who the son turns out to be, the wife finds support in her husband at home. Meanwhile, the exact opposite reaction comes from the man's wife.

Eventually, blood tests are given and return positive. Because they are not 100% accurate in a way that is satisfactory to the mother, she decides to deny the claim and the identity of this child. She leaves a baffled "son" and his wife as well as her former lover and drives off on her own.

The end subtitles voice over suggests that some people when given a chance to reunite, refuse to do so for whatever reasons. Most likely it is so that they can keep their own Han.

Prior to the occupation of Pyonyang (the present day capital of N. Korea) by South Korean forces, 12 Christian ministers were executed by communists. A captain is sent to investigate this matter and encounters two Christian ministers who were at the executions. One has become insane, the other leads Captain Lee into the political subterfuge involved with the struggle between communists and Christians.

At times pure propaganda, at others this film attempts to wax philosophical and religious. What it does hammer home consistently is an attempt to answer the questions: Is there a god ? And is that god aware of the sufferings these people are enduring ?

Heavily influenced by Russian dramatic approaches as well as a tinge of war time agit-prop style, I was impressed by the attention to set design both in interior (office spaces, hospital rooms, churches) and exterior (bombed out buildings and churches) places. Also the lighting made use of cast shadows (constant cross motifs, etc). There were also several shots through windows, between building ruins, and during falling snow. This was probably the most contrasting filming styles: the opening was a literal newsreel re-enactment (from the social realist agit-prop variety) with the exterior scenes more existential and sparse.

Opening credits down with sign language. Sam-Ryong plays the part of the town fool. Friends with the young and old as well as the women and the men. Sam-Ryong falls in love with his brother's beautiful wife. Both he and the wife are cruelly mistreated by the brother, who is busy having an extramarital affair of his own. When Sam-Ryong discovers that his brother is not in love with his wife and is having an affair with another man's wife, he goes to inform the jilted husband. In a rage, the two husbands fight and Sam-Ryong's brother almost loses. Suddenly, Sam-Ryong has a change of heart and saves his brother's life nearly killing the other man in the process. When the men are brought before the police to testify, it all hinges on Sam-Ryong's testimony. (Ironically enough, the word of a Mute). Sam-Ryong again has a change of heart and lies to save his brother. The other man goes to prison and Sam-Ryong's brother returns to his normal life of cruelty and mistreatment. When the other man is released from prison, he returns to seek revenge. He sets the house of Lord Oh (Sam-Ryong's father) on fire. Risking death, Sam-Ryong enters the flames to save his love. And again, risks his life to save his worthless brother (who had just recently beaten him close to death). Lost in the fire and unable to see, Sam-Ryong and his brother are engulfed in flames.

There was a high degree of physical and foppish humor played out through the character of Sam-Ryong. Beginning with a happy village wedding, the film quickly moves in to establish the evil qualities of Kwan-Sik, Sam-Ryong's half brother. Sam-Ryong was abandoned by a circus troupe and taken in by Lord-Oh. He took to doing the physical chores while the legitimate son became spoiled. Even at an early age, Kwan-Sik physically abused and took advantage of Sam-Ryong's complacent demeanor.

It is hard to find the counterbalance to this level of humor with the level of cruelty. The opening scene of the film shows Sam-Ryong peacefully taking a nap out on the porch. Kwan-Sik sneaks up on him and places a lit coal on his foot. He begins to fan the ember (almost like a cartoon) and slowly Sam-Ryong awakes and comes to realize that he is on fire. Lord-Oh enters and rebukes Kwan-Sik and after dragging him off by his ear, comes back to apologize to Sam-Ryong for his weakness in raising a spoiled child.

There are two beatings of Sam-Ryong that are so tremendously grotesque that they remain imprinted on my mind. In the first, Kwan-Sik begins beating Sam-Ryong with some kindling. The branches are about two or three feet long and fairly thick. They are also barbed with smaller nubs. In a rage, Kwan-Sik beats Sam-Ryong until the branch breaks. Angered by this, Kwan-Sik turns to find an entire stack of kindling and continues to beat Sam-Ryong until the pile is severely diminished. This is all filmed in real time. Later, he chases Sam-Ryong with an iron rake and succeeds in impaling Sam-Ryong with the spikes several times. The tables turn and Sam-Ryong gets the rake and is about to strike back. The father steps in and pleads for Sam-Ryong to forgive him for raising a terrible son. Beaten and bleeding, Sam-Ryong backs down. A few scenes later, he dies attempting to save his worthless and cruel brother.

In a more idyllic staging, Sam-Ryong has a dream in which he encounters his brother's wife by a stream and she reveals to him that she knows how he feels about her and even more surprising that she shares feelings for Sam-Ryong. The 10-minute dream sequence then continues with a long verbal monologue delivered by Sam-Ryong to the wife in which he declares himself to her. This scene seemed completely unbalanced in terms of its execution, but it was a bold attempt to reveal a deeper layer of Sam-Ryong to help garner sympathetic identification with him.

The film ends with a reprise of this scene from the POV of Lady Oh, who remembers a day when she met Sam-Ryong by the river and he entertained her with his antics. Of course, by this time both Sam-Ryong and her husband are dead. Like the first time, she is brought to bittersweet tears.

The use of dream insets and recapitulation served to reinforce the melancholy of this piece. The extreme balance between comedy and tragedy, between humor and cruelty also provided a superb example of an early black and white film that would still work today for a general audience.

Two uncles take different sides during the war. This pits two grandmothers against each other because they live in the same household. A young boy holds together most of this story as well as his maternal grandmother, who provides closure for this tale of betrayal and forgiveness.

A highly allegorical tale in which the paternal uncle, a communist sympathizer who betrayed several villagers during the occupation, returns to his mother's home in the form of a snake.

The action for most of this film takes place within the walls of the young boy's paternal grandmother's home. His maternal grandmother is often lost in mystical reverie with spirits. The boy also has friends his own age, including a girl, with whom he confides some of his flashbacks and memories. His memories of his maternal uncle are of a soccer captain who is lean and athletic. Because of his political activities in Seoul, he is forced to hide in the forest when the communists arrive. His paternal uncle is uncouth and fat, without any kind of honor or distinction. It seems he became a communist supporter not for any other reason but to wear a red band on his arm and to strut around with the appearance of power. In order to gain the respect of his new communist friends, he unwittingly betrays members of the village. He eventually turns the maternal uncle in, but they are unable to capture him. This forces the paternal uncle to execute several villagers by bayoneting them with his own hands before fleeing the village.

While the two uncles are away, neither grandmother has any way of knowing whether their sons are safe. In context to the civil war, the sons are pitted against each other in an ideological way that prevents them BOTH being victors. But the prayers for safety are expressed in terms of mothers to sons and not in ideological communist/anti-communist lines.

Nonetheless, the paternal grandmother seeks a fortuneteller to divine the whereabouts and welfare of her son. She is told that he will return on June 14th. The maternal grandmother points out that if he returns to the liberated village, he will be singled out as a communist sympathizer. The other grandmother replies that he belongs to this village, where else is he to go. She sets about planning an elaborate party for him and invites all the villagers to come and celebrate his return. They oblige her and fill their bellies. It grows late, and the villagers leave one by one, thank the grandmother for her feast and assure her that her son will return.

Late in the evening, a snake is chased into the grounds by the village children. The maternal grandmother sees it and recognizes it as the uncle. She prepares a meal for the snake and sits down to minister to its needs. She performs a ritual in which she welcomes the snake/uncle back to his residence and then begs it to depart.

In this way, the two grandmothers begin to reconcile the harm done to them through the war as well as to do honor to each and bring a healing to the village.

This piece was the first overt attempt at a healing to PAIN brought about by the dislocation of the war. While it maintained a household inside a rural village as its locus for drama, it also used flashback and broken families to express its narrative. It also sought to find healing through a reconciliation rather than some kind of justification or punishment.

I found this allegory to be extremely rich and effective in its treatment.

Written up as four stories concerning plights of women as conscripted to Confucian precepts. However, the second story, concerning a jealous mother-in-law who accuses her son's wife of infidelity, was omitted from this screening.

First Story: "A woman must marry only one man in her life"

Shifts to B&W for no apparent reason.

A woman is obliged by her family to commit suicide in order to maintain the marriage contract with the husband of her arranged marriage who dies before she can marry him.

This was basically a didactic and straightforward adaptation of what I am sure is a common folk tale (at least I've seen it in Japanese literature).

Second Story: (missing) but its theme "Once a woman marries, she belongs to her husband's family" was brought out in the following screening of Im Kwon-Taek's ADADA.

Third Story: "Seven prohibitions for women" also phrased as the duties of womanhood. Namely, obedience to husband and required to produce an heir. In this tale, a barren woman tries to sire an heir by sleeping with a farm hand. Her tale ends in suicide at the same time that it is revealed that the husband is impotent.

The tragedy of the situation is made deeper because the husband himself already suspected that he was impotent. His wife is driven to drastic measures only to risk shame and to lead the husband's mother to the denouement of his impotency.

Fourth Story: "A court lady must live only for the king" begins with a sequence that reproduces the opening to EUNUCH in which the court system is explained. Tracking shots of Lords, court ladies, eunuchs, gates opening and closing, and the prohibition that the only way a lady leaves the castle walls is as a corpse.

Of course, this story goes on to contradict this. A court lady is raped. At first she tries to kill herself and the baby, but when she realizes who the husband is (when a lord returns and reveals himself to her as her rapist (oops! lover), two other court ladies devise a plan for her to escape with her child in a coffin. The coffin is stopped at the gate by the head eunuch who suspects their plans. He thrusts a sword through the coffin and a baby's cry is clearly heard. Nonetheless, he allows the coffin safe passage.

The story takes a sudden turn when the father of the child is mistakenly killed by the two court ladies on their way to meet the escaped mistress. The now free woman and child are outside the castle, but without a father/husband - the reason why they had escaped in the first place.

Although the stories unfolded mostly as literary adaptations, it was interesting to see several different kinds of camera styles pervade the work. The didacticism of camera technique tended to develop as the film progressed. Some camera work of note was the use of POV shots not previously seen in other works. For example, an inquisitive lord pokes his finger though one of the paper screens. Camera cuts to an obstructed lens standing in for his POV through the hole. In a later segment, (story 2) the woman commits suicide, but before she dies, the camera switches to her POV as she gazes about the room in a haze trying to capture her dying moments. This helped to establish a connection between the tragedy and her situation - even though the story continued on for another 5 minutes.

(Note: some forms of suffering were again muted but present. For example, breaking a mirror and grinding up the glass into fine crystals, before drinking it to induce an abortion).

(French and English subtitles)

Master of melodrama puts forth probably one of his most accessible recent films. Comparable to Sam-Ryong, Im manages to establish a strong identification with Adada as the central character and star of this film, who undergoes a tremendous amount of mistreatment and cruelty at the hands of others. In this way, the melodramatic aspects are elevated to tragedy.

In some respects, I felt their was a strong Japanese (pop) pictorial style. Adada looked a lot like the present day soap operas of Japan. Some of the shots of the landscape and architecture also provoked that same response.

Opening of film had a voice over of Adada (not a general narrator) with fingerspelling. I watched this film with an ASL interpreter who commented that the subtitling both in French and English at times was lacking in terms of representing what Adada was saying.

The opening voiced Adada's position that people considered her to be defective mentally because she did not sound normal - that she looked wrong on the outside. But to her, she felt that those that are normal on the outside are the ones who are capable of tremendous cruelty and are therefore defective mentally.

Initially, this seems humorous -and one can't help but call to mind the humor of Sam-Ryong. But eventually, the muted cruelty to Adada weighs heavier and heavier.

Adada, a mute from a noble house marries down to a rural farmer in another village. She is accepted warmly at first, but eventually the husband tires of her and runs off. He returns with another woman with wealth of his own and the trappings of "high" material culture. Adada is snubbed and slowly forced out. Unable to return to her original home she seeks solace in the countryside where she meets an old friend who is a herdsman who can also sign. They settle in together, but when thoughts of bettering their future through the investment of her dowry become an issue, Adada throws the money into the river. In a rage, the herdsman forces her to recover the money and she drowns. The film ends with a silent tableau of the herdsman by the riverside.

The film obviously thematizes the approach of modernism, the loss of tradition, the move from agrarian to a floating market economy as well as the shift in the transposition of wealth through birth. It is also a subtly subdued handling of women's loss of familial connections due to marriage. The abuse they undergo. The corruption that the transposition of wealth can lead to and the connection between patriarchal power, women's labor and physical abuse.

The tableau at the end as well as the direct voicing of Adada in the beginning are unusual and of note.

An interesting struggle between Voice and Power also becomes thematized. Adada is chided for not standing up to her husband to keep him in line - at the same time, her Voice is not clearly understood. In one scene, the husband tells her that since they are now peasants they should learn Japanese. She replies that she already had to learn Chinese and Korean as well as sign language, and now she has to learn yet another language. This demonstrates that she is more than competent in a variety of languages and is able to express her desires. But what stands in her way is the social structure that produces the relationships she is subjected to.

Also of note are the sex scenes which were depicted in a way unlike the other censored or patently melodramatic representations in other films. The first is on Adada's wedding night where her screams are on one hand proof of her virginity, but are also direct expressions of her desire. She is also depicted atop her husband unlike the passive mistress who is undressed and laid upon a bed much like a large pillow.

In the next sex scene - with the herdsman, she is now older and more worn down. The two make love on a rough mat. The scene is cut like a typical sex scene, her on bottom and a cut to her hand beating on a mat. But seen in the overall context - her hand is not entwined in amorous desire with her lovers, it is beating in muffled "protest" if not to this particular act then at least to her overall situation.

(Adada's aging and performance are reminiscent of Gong-Li in Judou. Though Adada the younger still rings unmistakably of a Japanese pop-cultural feminine look). - Just an opinion.

First film to have a definite sense of an opening gambit (in the modern sense). Also, the opening presents a series of still photos that are altered by video effects set to a four beat soundtrack. This film also had a strong sense of having a soundtrack built up of two modern "English" pop songs and 2 traditional songs sang in transposed places (a bar, a hotel lounge).

This film is set in a port town in which a brothel is run. It is definitely set in modern times with almost no reference to any feudal or rural times or places. Three new girls and one seasoned girl work at a coffee shop/brothel. The head lady - the same actress from GILSODOM - begins to identify with the plight of one of her new working girls, who is being mistreated by her boyfriend. In an attempt to help her, she almost kills the boyfriend and goes insane. By the end of the film, the head lady is in a mental hospital, and the four girls are left to build their futures on their own.

There is something completely different about this film from all the rest. I suppose it has to do with being set in modern times as well as having no political or historical message. As a result, it also takes a different kind of structure in terms of problems and solutions. Overall, in terms of suffering - there is no harm done (the murder never really happened) but a woman goes insane. There is no deformity, though a motorcycle accident does occur. Money is paid to correct past wrongs: abandonment, for abortions.

Firmly established in a subculture, the film does not deal with what is good or morally right, but with what is practical and what is useless.

Intertwined is the story of a lost love (the head lady's) who stopped writing because he lost his passion when he lost her. But this kind of literary melodrama has nowhere to find root in a place or story like this and it ends for the head lady in insanity. But for the other characters they are no worse or better than before - since before is not a place or circumstance.

The Son of Man is a heretic branch of a monastery started by Joseph, a murder victim who was murdered by his most faithful disciple. Told in a police detective format with flashbacks and confessions that go from hard-boiled detective to B-movie horror, the dialogue winds through religion and politics as recorded in Joseph's diary. It records his loss of faith and immersion in world suffering brought about by his contact with a little girl taken away to a leper colony. Joseph befriends laborers and prostitutes preaching God is dead, man makes god, and sin is an obstacle to the reality of happiness.

His eyes open when he realizes that his new found community's god is like the sun to a blind man. At peace with god and with himself, he leaves his religious community. Unable to go on without his leadership, his head disciple murders him.

Concludes with: For a long time, no one spoke of god. When we did, it was with embarrassment. In a difficult time of confusion, Joseph chose to talk about god.

Heavily influenced by Dostoevsky with intricate and stylized flashbacks. There are intercuts of flashbacks with ongoing action with overlaid soundtracks - moving away from the stiff show and tell, present and past separations. Also, there is the use of stop action and freeze frame to tell stories (like in 1950's American TV). One particularly hypnotic flashback occurs with a constant intercutting of a blind flute player, in which the ambient sound mixes with the high pitch flute. The intercutting becomes quicker and quicker producing a climatic and hypnotic effect.

The opening of the film was also similar to TICKET in terms of its use of still photos with opening credits and the use of graphic effects that had nothing to do with the story, theme, or style of the film. (Thus, the opening gambit or opening credit sequence as a piece that can be aesthetically separate from, and indicative of a different technological treatment than the film proper).

These films obviously are not ALL of Korean film and also offer different insights for different reasons. In my original outlook, I was viewing them with an eye for 1)How they depict and resolve suffering. 2)How they display competency in the medium. 3)How they innovate - or generally, what techniques are used.

Overall, the films are heavily driven by a narratorial flow with recourse to flashbacks. Court dramas and period pieces are present as well as the ability to make allegory or to deal with political or religious issues directly. I suppose in this light, Im Kwon-Taek is particularly noteworthy for bridging both domains.

For me personally, it is perhaps easier to say what I didn't find interesting - since there is certainly less of that. I was less interested in the court dramas because the acting was more theatrical and the plot less significant. Both DREAM and EUNUCH would follow that reasoning. Although OBALTAN is historically interesting, I found SON OF MAN and RAINY DAYS to be better, more significant works by director Yu. I liked all of the work by Im but he too has varied work. GILSODOM is obviously more political and historical than say TICKET. SOPYONJE may be more Art house than say DAUGHTER OF THE FLAME, even though they have a very strong common theme of making peace with the past. And I can't help but think of ADADA as box office, though that certainly is not a negative criticism.

My overall observation is that the Korean films represented here do two things. 1)They do establish directors who have their own body of works and can fall in line with the notion of auteurs - in terms of their styles or types of issues they like to deal with. 2) At the same time that there is distinctiveness, there is also an eclecticism. Rich and varied, though at times the narrative may be the thread that holds the piece together (and may not even be the most interesting thing about the film), these films show a healthy and generous interchange of thoughts through the medium of film.

I invite comments on these films as well as other Korean films of note.

J. Cuasay

This page hosted by Free Home Page