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South Korea in 2005 is lucky enough to have the liveliest film culture in the world. Furthermore, the creative-energy surge in Korean film culture is even more visible in the independent sector than it is in the commercial mainstream. The selection of indie work that we’re presenting in Brisbane this year encompasses a very broad spectrum of forms and styles: features and shorts, fiction and documentary, live action and animation, narrative and essay. The only real link between all these films is that they come from an exceptionally vibrant image culture—a culture in love with film and video and determined to explore their possibilities to the full.
To understand this phenomenon, we need to recall that South Korea had—until the early 1990s—the most highly regulated film industry in the non-Communist world. There’s no need to go into great detail here; it’s enough to know that the military government imposed major restrictions on both the production and import of foreign films—and that censorship was draconian. Almost the only foreign films screened in Korea were ultra-commercial titles from Hollywood and Hong Kong. As in Taiwan, Japanese films were banned completely.
The arrival of the country’s first non-military government in 1993 changed everything. First, a few enterprising individuals began importing foreign ‘art films’. Then censorship started to relax. Then Pusan gave the country its first international film festival, bringing its overwhelmingly young audience a huge range of cinema previously unseen and unknown in Korea. And then cinephilia erupted. Serious film magazines began appearing (two of which now publish weekly), international film festivals began to proliferate across the country, and film courses mushroomed in the universities. In the last 12 years, both filmmakers and audiences have worked hard to make up for all those decades lost to cinema since the Korean War. Obviously, that initial rush of enthusiasm has died down, but Korea still looks like the most quantifiably cinephile nation in the developed world.
For understandable reasons, these larger changes have had a huge effect on Korea’s own filmmaking. The commercial film industry has been transformed, and is now the most successful in the world in meeting the challenge of fending off Hollywood’s market dominance. Korean films command anywhere between 50% and 75% of the home market. They are also increasingly successful in other Asian and Western markets. At the same time, independent filmmaking has boomed. All the subjects previously outlawed by censorship are now on the agenda, and so are all the forms and styles that were previously unthinkable in Korean culture.
Independent filmmaking began in Korea as an oppositional practice: virtually all the indie films made in the 1980s were underground protests against the actions and policies of successive militarist governments, and many of them followed orthodox left-wing agendas. But times have now changed: Korea’s current and last two presidents have all been figures once active in the anti-militarist opposition, and the country’s social fabric and culture have changed beyond recognition since the change in government. Freedom of speech is no longer an issue; ‘liberation’ movements for women, gays, and the disabled have made noticeable headway; and old-style Marxist activism has been marginalised. These changes have left indie film culture free to do everything from challenging remaining taboos to giving the commercial mainstream a run for its money.
I’ve made some pretty lavish claims for Korean cinema in general and indie filmmaking in particular, and the notes on the individual films in this programme are designed to back them up. I’m confident that anyone who samples the programmes in Brisbane will come away agreeing that Korean cinema is not just on a roll but way out ahead of most of the stuff coming out of Europe and North America these days. This is not to say, however, that everything is rosy for Korea’s independents. They have the same problems getting their films financed, screened, and distributed that independents have in other countries. Whang Cheol-Mean, for example, the producer/director of Spying Cam, spent many months wrangling for a commercial opening for his film in Seoul—and finally succeeded in getting one only after he’d won the F ipresci Award in Rotterdam earlier this year. Other titles in our selection have never had commercial screenings in Korea, and probably never will. But new solutions to the old problems are already appearing. The shorts in the ‘Twentidentity’ programme, for instance, could be viewed in Korea on G3 mobile phones by dialing up advertised numbers.
At a symposium in Tokyo earlier this year, a number of Korean indie filmmakers spoke about their wish to penetrate the mainstream, to make films for large audiences. Obviously, there is no ‘ghetto mentality’ in the Korean indie sector. But it’s easy to see from the films in this programme that Korea’s indies are proving quite adept at finding niches for themselves. One of the striking things in this selection is that so many of the directors featured here have made both mainstream features and indie films of various lengths. Rather like some of the French nouvelle vague directors of the late 1950s and early 1960s, they don’t think it odd or in any way compromising for their professional status to switch from big-budget to low-budget work and back, or to follow a relatively mainstream piece of work with a relatively challenging or subversive one.
In part, this reflects the filmmakers’ personal histories as young Koreans. Having grown up under militarist governments, and known at first hand such atrocities as the massacre of civilians that took place in Kwangju in 1980, they bring a clear political and historical awareness to everything they do. This is one of the defining differences between Korean independents and their contemporaries in, say, Japan, whose political consciousness is virtually non-existent. It’s not that the Koreans bang on about politics all the time, more that an awareness of social and cultural politics colours the way they think and work. This goes some way towards explaining the interest and level of maturity of their work. There’s an amusing scene in the hour-long film Anti-Dialectic by the Kim Brothers (you’ll find it in the programme) set in a video-rental store in Seoul. A stupid customer comes in and asks where he can find Shiri, the Cold War blockbuster by Kang Je-Gyu. The store clerk’s impatient response is: ‘Look in the Hollywood section’. While Kang and his peers aspire to build a Korean Hollywood, the independents represented in this selection are doing something a lot more interesting and appealing. It’s something you don’t much see in Western societies and cultures any more. They are actively participating in the reinvention of their own country and its culture: celebrating cultural differences, pushing at closed doors, and asking plenty of awkward questions.
I hope nobody reading this is put off by my talk of changes and challenges. You won’t need a degree in politics or Korean studies to enjoy any of the films in this selection. Many of them are funny, touching, suspenseful, even rhapsodic. That’s their indie charm.
Tony Rayns
Tony Rayns is a London-based filmmaker, critic and festival curator with a special interest in East Asian cinemas. He is a contributing editor of Sight & Sound magazine, and contributes to Film Comment, Cahiers Du Cinema and many other magazines. His books include Fassbinder and the forthcoming Wong Kar-wai on Wong Kar-wai. His films include the documentaries New Chinese Cinema and The Jang Sun-woo Variations. He was awarded the 2004 Kawakita Prize for services to Japanese cinema.
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