UCLA Center
for East Asian Studies Center
Shadows of the Modern: Social Change and the New Korean Cinema
A Festival of Films together with a conference and a day
with
Korean filmmaker Park Kwang Su
February 9-18 2001,
University of Southern California
The USC School of Cinema-Television and Korean Studies Institute present "Shadows of the Modern: Social Change and the New Korean Cinema." The festival will explore how the New Korean Cinema has been actively engaged with the transformation of Korean society over the past two decades.
The twelve films to be screened over two-weekends (Feb. 9-11 and Feb. 16-18) all depict the darker side of Korea's modernization, through engrossing narratives, extraordinary characters and dramatic imagery. As part of the program, USC is also presenting an academic conference on Saturday, February 17 at the School of Cinema-Television. Prominent scholars who will present papers on the subject of the New Korean Cinema include Christopher Berry (UC Berkeley), Chungmoo Choi (UC Irvine), Jae-Chul Im (Hannarae Publishing), Youn-Kwan Lee (Korean Film Commission) and Gina Yu (Dongguk University).
Highlights of the festival include the Los Angeles premiere of Lee Chang Dong's Peppermint Candy (2000) on February 10 and the participation of celebrated filmmaker Park Kwang Su, who will lead a Q&A session about his career and films between screenings of "A Single Spark" and "Black Republic" on the closing day of the festival, February 18.
All screenings are free and open to the public. For more information, please contact Christopher Evans, USC Korean Studies Institute, (213) 740-2993.
Screening Schedule:
Friday, February 9, 7:00 p.m., Lucas Room 108
Declaration of Fools (Lee Jang-Ho, 1983, 97 mins.) A pickpocket, a driver and a prostitute depart together on a journey, building a camaraderie between them in sadly funny Chaplinisque situations. Narrated from a child's point of view, Declaration of Fools intends to dispense with logical and dramatic narrative. The film is an allegorical depiction of the repressive society and the outrageous film censorship under a notoriously authoritarian regime. The film renders penetrating social satire through sight and sound gags, slapstick and humor, and formal experimentation.
Friday, February 9, 9:00 p.m., Lucas Room 108
Deep Blue Night (Bae Chang-Ho, 1984, 93 mins.) Having left a pregnant fiancé behind in Korea, a handsome but brutal Korean named Gregory Beck arrives in America. He seduces and marries a rich divorcee in order to get residency and a green card. He achieves his goal and his American wife falls slowly for his charms, but the Law finally closes in on him. A box-office hit director throughout the 1980s, Bae here made a commercially successful yet relentlessly revealing melodrama about the reality of broken dreams and hopes.
Saturday, February 10, 7:00 p.m., Norris Theater
Green Fish (Lee Chang-Dong, 1997, 111 mins.) Having just been discharged from military service, Mak-Dong dreams of reuniting his family. He schemes to earn some money by joining a gang. He kills a rival boss in accordance to the gang boss's order. However, the rules of the game are much more ruthless than he has imagined. Loosely based on gangster genre, Green Fish vividly portrays the modernized urban space of Seoul, representing violence as an inherent part of the rush to developments of Korea.
Saturday, February 10, 9:00 p.m., Norris Theater
Peppermint Candy (Lee Chang-Dong, 2000, 130 mins.) Peppermint Candy depicts a man's life in seven separate chapters, covering a span of twenty years and going backward in time. Young-Ho is a crazed forty-year-old man who shows up unexpectedly at a reunion party of a group of former factory workers. As Young-Ho apparently attempts suicide by not escaping a train running towards him, the film shows in reverse order the most important moments of his life. Peppermint Candy explores with ingenuity how the modernization of Korean society has been inscribed upon an ordinary man's life.
Sunday, February 11, 7:00 p.m., Norris Theater
Sopyonje (Im Kwon-Taek, 1993, 112 mins.) Early in the 1960s, Dong-Ho, a man in his thirties recollects the past while drifting to find his stepsister Song-Hwa. Both of them had been adopted and trained to be artists of pansori (a form of traditional folk opera) by a pansori singer. The three travel throughout the countryside, enduring the hardships of poverty and the public's increasing indifference to their art. This small art film, by representing the Korean aesthetic and the destructive effects of modernization and Westernization, surprisingly set the highest box office record among Korean films up to that point.
Sunday, February 11, 9:00 p.m., Norris Theater
Spring in My Hometown (Lee Kwang-Mo, 1998, 113 mins.) Set in the early 1950s when the US military presence was predominant in Korea, Spring in My Hometown depicts the life of an older generation from a child's perspective. Two children peep through the hole in the fence of an abandoned mill and chance upon the scene of one child's mother having sex with an American soldier. Now the world could never be the same. The film combines historical facts and the recreated life of hard but beautiful times with a rigorous formalism of long takes and long shots.
Friday, February 16, 7:00 p.m., Lucas Room 108
The Day a Pig Fell into the Well (Hong Sang-Su, 1997, 114 mins.) This innovative film explores the relationships among four characters whose lives are filled with repetition, boredom, hypocrisy and worldly desires. A third rate writer Hyo-Seop falls in love with Bo-Gyung, a married woman. Meanwhile, Min-Jae, a box-office girl, dreams of being Hyo-Seop's wife. Bo-Gyung's husband Dong-Woo, a victim of mysophobia, questions his wife's fidelity. The Day a Pig Fell into the Well follows the mundane existence of these four, who desperately try in vain to escape from their disjointed lives, with fantastic, yet terrifying imagery of banal and boring everyday life.
Friday, February 16, 9:00 p.m., Lucas 108
No.3 (Song Neung-Han, 1997, 108 mins.) In No.3, Seoul seems to be full of third rate hooligans represented by bully Suh Tae-Ju, prosecutor Ma Dong-Pal, and low-grade poet Rengbo. Tae-Ju is adamant that he is "Number Two" rather than the "Number Three", which is how he is seen by the rest of the gang. These characters play out one of life's many paradoxes, in which their idea of being "the best" is actually "the worst." A social satire that mixes comedy and gangster genre, this film uses rhetorical dialogue to take humorous jabs at the social hierarchy of power.
Saturday, February 17, 7:00 p.m., Norris Theater
Lovers in Woomukbaemi (Jang Sun-Woo, 1990, 114 mins.) This heart-warming and humorous film depicts the lives of working-class characters in the outskirts of Seoul. Bae Il-Do is employed at a small sewing factory as a supervisor. Although living in an unmarried relationship with a former bar-hostess, Bae falls in love with a seamstress in the factory who is often beaten by her husband. But they have nowhere to go when their relationship is revealed to everyone. Due to a solid narrative combining Bae's flashbacks with the present, seamless acting and scrupulous observation of reality, this tragic-comic melodrama is effortlessly engrossing.
Saturday, February 17, 9:00 p.m., Norris Theater
Chilsu and Mansu (Park Kwang Su, 1998, 109 mins.) Chilsu paints movie ads on billboards for a living, dates a fast-food waitress, and dreams of emigrating to Miami. Mansu is a skilled painter who is deeply wounded by his father's 27-year imprisonment for being a leftist. When they complete their first billboard and celebrate with a few drinks on the top of a building, passers-by mistake them for potential suicides. Chilsu and Mansu successfully shows how a film can interweave an entertaining and engaging storyline with underlying social and political concerns.
Sunday, February 18, 1:00 p.m., Norris Theater
A Single Spark (Park Kwang Su, 1995, 96 mins.) A Single Spark recounts the life of Jeon Tae-Il, a martyr of the South Korean labor movement, through the eyes of the intellectual fugitive Young-Su. Appalled by the atrocious working conditions in the textile industry where he worked in the 1960s, Jeon attempts to organize a workers' union and to insure the enforcement of Korea's own labor laws. On November 13, 1970 the 22-year-old Jeon self-immolates, shouting, "We are not machines!" This film successfully combines a stark social realism with political consciousness.
Sunday, February 18, 6:00 p.m., Norris Theater
Black Republic (Park Kwang Su, 1990, 100 mins.) Black Republic offers angry and graphic evidence of what it meant to live through the period of political oppression in Korea after the Kwangju Uprising in 1980. An intellectual-activist wanted by the police finds refuge under the pseudonym Ki-Young as a factory worker in a decaying mining village. There he forges a companionship with a prostitute Young-Sook. Ki-Young clashes over her with the factory owner's spoiled son. The film recreates the dynamic microcosm of Korean society in the 1980s in an engrossing manner, capturing an era often dubbed "the black age."
