[TIME CAPSULE] IM Kwon-taek, Korea, Body and Soul

[TIME CAPSULE] IM Kwon-taek, Korea, Body and Soul: by Jean-François Rauger Feb 26, 2016

Being the author of over one hundred films is a feat that few filmmakers who are still active can boast of. Such prolificness is probably characteristic of production systems that manufactured "assembly-lines" of cheap films for consumer-audiences hungry for celluloid mythologies. As the owner of a filmography whose scope is closer to that of prolific Hollywood B-movie makers, IM Kwon-taek epitomizes, all by himself, the qualities of a national cinema that hatched in the late fifties.

Director IM was born in May, 1936. After a difficult childhood and youth marked by the war and its consequences, he became the assistant director of JEONG Chang-hwa before he himself began directing in 1962. Until the late 1970s, IM would string together films at a frenetic pace, accumulating a slew of low-budget productions. It was a period when the Korean film industry was regulated by a protectionist system where imported foreign film quotas were subject to the manufacture and distribution of local productions. This was the era of low-budget films, produced at a low cost and aimed to please general audiences.

IM took part in this frenzy by repeatedly making Manchurian westerns, historical dramas, swashbuckler films, melodramas for women, gangster films and anti-communist war films. IM had long refused to show this first part of his career, until changes in the South Korean political and cinematographic system finally allowed the director to make personal works and to be free from the requirements of genre and mass production programs for cinemas.

In this way, IM could not only incarnate the cinematographic vitality of the mid-1990s, but could also afford us a certain amount of tradition. As a result, this retrospective devoted to him finally discloses most of his works before we encounter (later in France) his most personal films. It is interesting to observe how the filmmaker could sometimes successfully subvert conventions and cliches by choosing particular mise-en-scène and giving attention to characters who manage to transcend their stereotypes and propaganda fiction, and to invent singular dramaturgy.

Anyone who created a work that was, in the beginning, the pure product of a Taylor and Stakhanovist system, (and this is indeed not so uncommon) would know how to capture the profound nature of Korea, seized by its past and present. One could say that what is at the heart of IM’s work is probably the complex relationship between a concrete story and its imaginary representation between national body and soul. If Daughter Of Fire (1983) evokes the adamant power of shamanism, Mandara (1981) and Come, Come, Come Upward (1989) deal with the burden of Buddhism in Korea. Feudalism is what determines stories such as Prince Yeonsan’s Life (1988) or Chunhyang (2000).

Finally, the tragic separation of the twentieth century are the heart of Kilsodeum (1986), an incredible tale of a family reunion (many families were separated by the war) where blood-ties clash with the brutality of class barriers. But what one can singularly capture in the cinema of IM is a particular form of energy, a kind of tension, often sexual, which enlivens even rural chronicles, such as in 1983’s Village in the Mist (women in a village use a simpleton as a sex toy) or 1987’s The Surrogate Womb (a young man feels an irrepressible carnal passion for the girl designated to subrogate his barren wife). His greatest success in France, Chihwaseon (2002) blends story and desire in an artistic and brilliant way.

One can be stricken by the procedures of the mise-en-scène, or by the will to refuse to slip into a resolutely “modern” style, but can also be seized by the fascinating and violent evidence of story and Korean society along with its impulses.

Surely, nothing has better defined the art of IM as Pansori. This vocal art, narrative and musical, is a central element to several of the filmmaker’s works, such as Seopyeonje (1993), which tells the melodramatic story of a singer abused by her step father as well as its “sequel” in 2007 (Beyond the Years), and, most of all, Chunhyang, a representation of both the stage performance of the singer and a cinematographic reconstruction narrated by the singer. Revealing IM’s cinema in its full and monumental dimension is to find oneself at an impossible crossroad of a cathartic anti-Brechtism and a near-scientific desire of an inspection of a particularly Korean specificity.

*Jean-François Rauger is Director of programming of La Cinémathèque française. La Cinémathèque française is holding the “Retrospective IM Kwon-taek,” the most comprehensive screening of his work in France, until February 29th.

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