1970-1979

  Many people look back on the 1970s as the darkest era of Korean cinema. Under Korea's military regime, harsh censorship combined with constant governmental interference in the industry to essentially destroy the robust film culture that had grown up in the 1960s. Directors were given very little artistic freedom, pressured instead to produce a very limited range of genres and styles for the promotion of government policy. Over the decade, attendance levels plunged as audiences turned to television (MBC-TV first debuted on August 8, 1969) or other forms of entertainment over film.

Looking back now on the films of the 1970s, we see a large number of uninteresting genre and propoganda films that were made just to please the regime. Dig a little deeper, however, and you find that selected directors were able to produce a range of highly original works. Many of them, with their manic inventiveness and logic-defying plot turns, feel more modern and relevant today than they likely did in the era in which they were produced.

     Reviewed below:    The Insect Woman (1972)  --  A Mad Woman (1975)  --  March of Fools (1975)  --  A World Without Mom (1977)  --  Iodo (1977)  --  The Shower (1977)  --  Splendid Outing (1978)  --  The Genealogy (1979).

Short Reviews

These are some reviews of the features released from the 1970s that have generated the most discussion and interest among film critics and/or the general public. They are listed in the order of their release.

    The Insect Woman (1972)

"You should be a housemaid" proclaims the wife Oh Soo-ja (Jeon Kye-hyun) to Myeong-ja (Yoon Yeo-jung) in Kim Ki-young's The Insect Woman. This film further explores recurring Kim themes of ambivalent modernization first displayed in The Housemaid. But in spite of its similarities, The Insect Woman is not a remake of The Housemaid. (Those would be Kim's Women of Fire in 1971 and Women of Fire '82; whereas The Insect Woman would spawn its own Kim remake, Carnivore.) In fact, it's the differences from Kim's most internationally famous film that make The Insect Woman all the more fascinating.

First major difference, this Myeong-ja has a back story. (Kim Kyeong refers to these recurring characters in Kim Ki-young's oeuvre as "the Myeong-ja's" since he often reuses that name for them.) The daughter of a mistress mother, we are shown the dire straits that lead Myeong-ja to become a bar hostess and later a mistress herself to Dong-shik (Namgung Won). (And, yes, this being a South Korean film of the 1970's, the clich? rears its ugliness - their relationship begins after he rapes her.) Second major difference, Dong-shik's wife Soo-ja isn't particularly threatened by Myeong-ja. The primary bread-winner for the family through her transport business, (the Sigmund-Kim-ian reason for Dong-shik's impotency that Myeung-ja cures), Soo-ja takes control of Dong-shik and Myeong-ja by providing them an allowance and a modern two-level house in which they can only spend days together, for the nights are Soo-ja's. And so are Dong-shik's testes, because Soo-ja drugs him in order to have his doctor perform a vasectomy to prevent Myeong-ja from thrusting a paternity wedge between Dong-shik and Soo-ja and their two children. The absurd complicity on the part of the wife in her husband's affair keeps this Myeong-ja from being seen as the sole evil temptress. As Kim So-young noted in her contribution to the book South Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre, and National Cinema (edited by Kathleen McHugh and Nancy Abelmann), contemporary female audience members screamed for vengeance to be taken upon the housemaid in The Housemaid. Yet, in The Insect Woman, the wife's surreal participation in her husband's affair deflects any attempt to temper moral unease with tempers flared through the fourth wall of the movie screen. And as a final difference, this being a Kim Ki-young film, there are rodents in the house, this time mice instead of rats. And this time, the Myeong-ja is scared of them and it's Dong-shik's daughter (Kim Ju-mi) who handles them without any fear.

Rather than ruin the surprise spectacle of one of the more memorable scenes in The Insect Woman, let me just say it involves psychedelic-colored candies. And again digressing from Kim's previous scenes of shock, this candy-covered cinematic capsule shocks more for its scandalous nature than for its morbid nature.

One of the more illuminating discussions of the work of Kim Ki-young is Chris Berry's chapter in Seoul Searching: Culture and Identity in Contemporary Korean Cinema (edited by Frances Gateward). Berry best sums up the extant oeuvre of Kim Ki-young by writing that his " . . . films can be both considered under the rubric of the horror film and an ambivalent response to the Korean experience of modernization as at once forced and desired. This paradoxical state that defies either realist representation or critical distance prefers direct somatic response and full ambivalence" (p. 101). This modernization was forced upon South Koreans by the Park Chung-hee dictatorship rather than emerging organically from a middle-class, such as in Western Europe, Canada, the USA and the Antipodes. Yet that doesn't mean modernization wasn't desired by South Koreans simultaneously. It is this ambivalence, this paradox that results in the anxious rush and thrill that Kim's films provided for South Korean viewers of the time. Rather than presenting this modernization through realism, Kim portrayed it through surreal horror, scenarios that couldn't possible be true, (although The Insect Woman, like The Housemaid, was inspired by a true story), yet still feel true through the anxiety it provoked. Though our anxieties may be different now, The Insect Woman's absurdities help us get an idea of how disconcerting that forced rush to modernism might have felt for the contemporary audiences.      (Adam Hartzell)

The Insect Woman ("Chungnyeo"). Directed by Kim Ki-young. Screenplay by Kim Ki-young, Kim Seung-ok. Starring Yoon Yeo-jeong, Jeon Kye-hyun, Namgung Won, Kim Ju-mi, Park In-chan, Lee Dae-geun, Park Am, Park Jeong-ja, Sa Mi-ja. Cinematography by Jeong Il-sung. Produced by Han Lib Corp. 115 min, 35mm, color, Cinemascope. Released on October 6, 1972. Total admissions: 162,024. Officially selected at the 5th Sitges International Film Festival. Winner of Best Director (Kim Ki-young), Best Actor (Namgung Won) at the 9th Korean Film & Theater Arts Awards.

    A Mad Woman

The Korean Film Archive and the 15th Pucheon International Fantastic Film Festival are presenting in late spring and summer 2011 a series of genre programmers headlined by the quintessential '60s and '70s action star Park Nou-sik (1930-1995), who allegedly made 900 films (!) in his astonishing career spanning fifty years. The highlights among them are his directorial efforts: most of these screened by the KOFA deserve the reputation of instant cult cinema, in their eye-popping combination of bargain-basement hutzpah, outrageous macho preening mixed with heart-rendingly intense thespian endeavors from their director-star and ludicrously illogical yet somehow emotionally impactful mis-en-scene. And even among these para-auterist crackpot-masterworks guaranteed to blow Quentin Tarantino's pants off his legs, Quit Your Life (1971), Why? (1974) and A Mad Woman (1975) are truly sui generis.

A Mad Woman is supposedly a revenge thriller about a band of independence movement activists qua bank robbers during the colonial period who escape from the Japanese prison and locate the loot, only to go separate ways. While Dong-sik (Park) had been exiled to Manchuria fighting the Japanese, the rest of the gang kill the family of their young compatriot (Park Geun-hyung) as well as a senior comrade named Old Man Song and drive the latter's daughter (Yeo Soo-jin) insane by gang-raping her. Dong-sik, of course, mad as hell, tracks the dastardly gang down, who are now working for North Korea (!), and exacts terrible revenge.

To begin with, there is a zero attempt to make any of the colonial period setups historically accurate. The movie then simply jumps from '40s to '70s chronologically, with principals barely aging more than five years. Dong-sik is so incongruously dressed either as an independence movement fighter or a revenge-driven enforcer of justice- decked out in shades, pantaloons and laced silk shirt-that his character, no matter how gravely he intones his elementary-school-ethics-textbook lines, is thoroughly impossible to take seriously. Even more bizarrely, this supposedly "action" film has maybe two or three scenes of actual fist-fighting: instead, a long, long portion of the movie is obsessively devoted to illustrating the mad girl's subjective state of mind, which involves teleportation (?) and a chain-smoking orang-utan (?!), among other mind-boggling visuals. When it comes to individual sequences, don't even ask: what is with the "treasure-hunting" sequence that only shows the naked legs of the protagonist squishing around in a mud-swamp? Why does the Japanese jeep have to run over a live frog and a live snake while heading for the headquarters? To indicate that the evil Japanese violate even the natural hierarchy of predatory food-chain? Didn't I just say don't ask?

A Mad Woman sometimes feels so juvenile and all over the place that its offensive aspects (mostly due to its archaic attitude toward women as well as director Park's ultra-conservative propensities) are doubly shocking and disturbing. To cite but one example, this is the first film I've seen in which another woman's gang-rape is used as a therapy tool to "cure" a rape-victim's trauma! The screenwriter is Yun Sam-yuk who wrote for Im Kwon-taek and Lee Doo-yong among other luminaries, but it is reasonable to suppose nearly everything we see on screen popped directly out of Park's head. What can I say about the other actors? They are all pros showing their all rolling around in mud and listening to Park's head-spinning moralistic lectures with absolutely frightened faces: only Park Geun-hyung is allowed to give a "normal" performance, basically because his character dies in the first twenty minutes.

Yet, despite all this, A Mad Woman cannot be brushed aside as a laughable piece of trash. It exerts a strange hold over the viewers, unfailingly communicating a perhaps misdirected but very real devotion to cinematic excitement and even beauty. Despite the movie's zero budget, cinematographer Koo Joong-mo (Surrogate Mother [1986], Aje Aje Bara-aje [1988])'s widescreen lensing is excellent, contributing to the sweaty and desperate atmosphere of the key scenes.

I have seen few European or Asian cult films that are so ridiculously, claustrophobically intense, so ridden with macho posture and moral self-righteousness yet so haphazardly and nonsensically put together, not to mention drop-dead hilarious in all the wrong ways. And yet there is something genuinely charismatic and unnerving about A Mad Woman: it is indeed a film made by a man possessed by cinema, a real auteur's signed piece. It is exhilarating, deeply offensive and quite a bit scary all at the same time, deserving of at least some-perhaps not a whole lot but still some-admiration on the part of film fans, not to mention rediscovery of a wider scale.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

A Mad Woman ("Gwangnyeo"). Directed by Park Nou-sik. Starring Park Nou-sik, Yeo Soo-jin, Moon Oh-jang, Park Geun-hyung. Cinematography by Koo Joong-mo. Produced by Samyoung Film. 90 min, 35mm, color, Cinemascope. Released on November 15, 1975. Total admissions: 12,584.

    March of Fools (1975)

One of the most talented Korean directors to work in the 1970s was Ha Kil-jong. Orphaned at age 10, Ha moved to Seoul and eventually entered the French Literature department at Seoul National University. He worked for Air France after graduation and then moved to the U.S. in 1964, where he supported himself by working odd jobs as a waitor or at gas stations. After finding his feet financially he entered the UCLA Film School, where he studied together with Francis Ford Coppola. Upon graduating he was one of four film students nationwide to receive the MGM Mayer Grand Prize and was reportedly offered a teaching position at UCLA as well as the opportunity to make films in Hollywood. However he decided to return to Korea with his wife and newborn son in 1970.

Ha took up work in the Korean film industry just as it was entering its most oppressive era. He made seven films from his debut work Pollen in 1972 to his last film Byungtae and Youngja in 1979, all the while struggling with governmental censorship and an industry in commercial decline. Nonetheless through his innovative films and thoughtful essays he earned great respect from many of his peers. Tragically, on February 23, 1979 he suffered a stroke and died. He was 38 years old.

Ha's most famous work March of Fools first premiered in 1975, and it would eventually acquire legendary status among the leading directors of the next decade. The film's plot centers around two wayward university students, Byung-tae (Yoon Mun-seop) and Young-chul (Ha Jae-young), who spend their time drinking beer, going on dates, and running away from the policemen on the "hair squad" (who dragged long-haired college students to the station for an involuntary haircut). One day on a blind date they meet two women named Young-ja (Lee Young-ok) and Young-sook (Kim Young-sook), who end up becoming an important part of their lives.

Much of the film is a lighthearted echo of a typical 1970s university student's experiences, set to memorable songs of that era. Some scenes are hilarious, such as when Byung-tae represents the Philosophy Department in a school drinking contest. Nonetheless, the mood turns subtly darker as the students confront questions about their future and their goals, living amidst a constrictive and sterile society.

Alas, the film itself would not escape unscathed from the oppression of those times. Prior to its release in 1975, close to 30 minutes were cut by government censors, including seemingly innocuous material that contributed to the downbeat mood of the film. Only later during the brief political spring of 1980 was a more complete version put together with excised footage, although there remain segments that were never able to be recovered. (For a heartfelt and illuminating account of March of Fools's struggles with censorship, I strongly recommend the second segment of director Kim Hong-joon's 2003 video essay My Korean Cinema).

Like many of the greatest Korean movies of the 1970s, March of Fools was shot by cinematographer Jung Sung-il, who these days is better known for his collaboration with director Im Kwon-taek. Jung's work in this film is a joy to watch, with its restless movement and unexpected camera angles reflecting the unsettled mood of its protagonists. The songs featured in the film by Song Chang-shik and Kim Sang-bae are also enjoyable and at times quite moving.

No one will ever know what Ha Kil-jong would have accomplished if he had lived a longer life. He would have been in his mid-sixties now, perhaps enjoying the same level of attention and prestige as Im Kwon-taek. Though it is painful to think of what has been lost, we still have March of Fools -- left behind as a singular achievement amidst the very worst circumstances faced by Korean filmmakers since the end of the war.      (Darcy Paquet)

March of Fools ("Babodeul-ui haengjin"). Directed by Ha Kil-jong. Screenplay by Choi In-ho. Starring Yun Mun-seop, Ha Jae-young, Lee Young-ok, Kim Young-sook, Kim Sang-bae, Jeong Se-gun, Park Kyu-hyun. Cinematography by Jung Il-sung. Produced by Hwacheon Corporation. 102 min (based on existing negative), 35mm, color, Cinemascope. Rating given on May 13, 1975. Released in censored version on May 31, 1975. Partially restored version first screened in 1980. Total admissions: 153,780.

    A World Without Mom (1977)

When I was a kid, I was a fan of Gertrude Chandler Warner's books about the Boxcar Children, four orphaned siblings who run away and live in an abandoned boxcar to keep from being separated. It's a popular premise to this day: think of Lemony Snicket, or the two brothers in The Host. Children expect to be taken care of, but dislike being dependent, so fantasies of being on one's own have a perennial appeal. Of course, in Korea as in many other countries, children have sometimes had to be independent. But fantasies, which can be stopped at will, are not reality. Kids can experience the heady, scary rush of being independent for a while, then go back to their ordinary, and hopefully safer, lives. (Note: some spoilers in the plot synopses to follow)

Young-chul (Kim Jae-seong), age 12, and his brother Young-mun (Lee Gyeong-tae), six, live with their father and mother in company housing at a salt farm where Father works. Young-chul's Mother (Jeong Yeong-suk, Maundy Thursday) is pregnant, and earns money by digging for oysters in the low-tide mud. Father (Park Geun-hyeong, Marrying the Mafia) suffered a head injury in an accident a year or so back, and has spells of terror and violence whenever a jet flies overhead. The newly completed Busan airport is nearby, so this happens too often. After Mother gives birth to yet another brother, Cheol-ho (Kim Hyeon-seong), she takes on Father's job at the salt farm so the family can stay in the company housing, but one day she collapses and dies. Honoring her dying command, Young-chul takes charge of the family. Carrying Cheol-ho on his back, he digs for oysters, tries to keep up with school, and works at the salt farm. Father gets progressively worse, and finally is sent to a mental hospital. The neighbors help out at first, but soon convince themselves that the boys would be better off sent away. Determined to stay together, the boys resist successfully. Just as the movie ends, Young-chul tells us that his diary was published; President Park Jeong-hee read it and decreed that the boys should be helped.

What makes A World Without Mom interesting is its generally low-key, almost social-realist tone. It dwells more on the experiences and pastimes of Korean children in the early 1970s and downplays the great melodramatic crises. Young-chul feels the weight of his responsibilities, but Young-mun is a cheerful and aggressive ringleader, playing Doctor with a neighbor girl and leading battles with other boys. Except for Father, who must scream and rave and generally behave like a Korean Renfield, director Lee Won-se (A Small Ball Shot by a Dwarf) got natural, appealing performances from the actors. The only problem is that, as was normal in those days, the characters' voices were dubbed by different actors, and the boys were voiced by adult women, not very convincingly. Young-chul especially sounds like a cartoon character, not a twelve-year-old of either sex.

A World Without Mom was popular enough to spawn two sequels and numerous imitations; the first sequel has been released on DVD along with the original. In A World Without Mom 2 (1978), Young-chul takes care of his brothers while letters pour in from fans of his published diary. Suddenly Father is released from the hospital, and the neighbors find a miraculously suitable woman for him to marry. The new Mother (Yun Mi-ra) is kind, patient, and undemanding, but Young-mun resents her arrival, and runs away from home. In the end everything turns out okay. The most interesting thing here is the handfuls of letters that Young-chul receives from other Korean children, but the filmmakers weren't interested in exploring how this fame affected Young-chul's life. Instead they made a conventional family melodrama, with puppy love, lost children on stormy nights and tearful reconciliations.

The filmmakers wrung out one more sequel, subtitled Festival of Chicks, in 1978. According to a plot summary on IMDB.com, in the third film Young-mun takes up baseball, but loses interest, so Young-chul must use all his big-brother powers to persuade him not to quit. No wonder it was the final film! But the original is well worth watching.      (Duncan Mitchel)

A World Without Mom ("Eomma eomneun haneul arae"). Directed by Lee Won-se. Screenplay by Kim Mun-yeop. Starring Kim Jae-seong, Lee Gyeong-tae, Kim Hyeon-seong, Park Geun-hyeong, Jeong Yeong-suk, Ko Young-gap, Park Ju-hui. Cinematography by Park Seung-bae. Produced by Han Jin Enterprises. 120 min, 35mm, color. Released on June 23, 1977.

    Iodo (1977)

It may be no accident that one of Korean cinema's most compelling, unnerving depictions of the primal forces that drive humankind was conceived during the mechanizing, industrializing era of the 1970s. As the military government pushed ahead with an all-out campaign for modernization, the warped genius of the cinema Kim Ki-young was busy shooting a film that peels off the many layers of modern society to expose human experience at its most primitive.

Iodo is centered on an island off the south coast of Korea populated by women who live off the sea, and who structure their lives "according to the old traditions". Removed from the modern influences of the mainland, the island stands as a detached society where ancient customs prevail and the local shaman wields a great deal of power. When one of the island's native sons (Choi Yoon-seok), who had gone to the mainland, disappears off the deck of a tourist ship, a businessman (Kim Jong-cheol) suspected of killing him travels to the island in hopes of uncovering the truth behind the man's disappearance. This visitor comes to learn the tangled history of the man's supposedly cursed lineage, while also getting caught up in the affairs of the island himself.

Not an easy film to absorb in one sitting, Iodo is told through a complex structure of flashbacks (each flashback signalled by the sound of bubbling water) that slowly lead us to an understanding of the film's central narrative. The film juxtaposes and contrasts modern and traditional social practices, from environmental activism and aquaculture to superstitious rites and exorcisms. But what unites the primitive and the contemporary is an obsession with procreation. Whether for humans, pigs, or artificially farmed abalone, the ability or inability to successfully reproduce determines the fate of nearly everyone in the film.

From the opening shots of this work, Kim Ki-young dispenses with any pretext of pursuing psychological realism. With its breathless tempo, sudden detours, highly dramatized dialogue and extreme close-ups, the film revels in its own unpredictability and force. This, combined with the zoom shots, dated hairstyles and cheap special effects, makes the film seem at first to be inviting parody. Yet Iodo's genius lies in the cohesiveness and weight of its central themes, together with its strange, unexpected beauty.

One unforgettable element of this work is the mesmerizing performance of Lee Hwa-shi as a barmaid who works on the island. Lee Eun-shim's turn in Kim Ki-young's Housemaid may rank as the most astonishing performance in 1960s Korean cinema, but Lee Hwa-shi's collaboration with the director in the late 1970s and early 1980s is no less of an achievement. Seven of her first ten films, which were shot between 1976 and 1981, were directed by Kim, and the intensity, sensuality and intellect which she brings to the screen is the perfect complement to Kim's madly inspired direction.

However, what viewers inevitably talk about as they file out of a screening of Iodo is its ending. The penultimate scene culminates with one of the most brazen, jaw-dropping sequences ever shot by a Korean director. It goes without saying that this image was censored from the film's release print in 1977, but an uncut version was exported to Japan, and so modern-day viewers can enjoy Iodo in all its glory. Thank god for that, because this film is the very opposite of cheap thrills, or shock for shock's sake. It's one of the best Korean films ever made.      (Darcy Paquet)

Iodo ("Ieodo"). Directed by Kim Ki-young. Screenplay by Ha Yu-sang. Starring Lee Hwa-shi, Kim Jeong-cheol, Park Jeong-ja, Park Am, Kwon Hye-mi, Choi Yun-seok, Yeo Pyo, Ko Sang-mi. Cinematography by Jung Il-sung. Produced by Donga Film Export Co. 110 min, 35mm, color. Rating received on October 4, 1977. Presented at the 28th Berlin International Film Festival.

    The Shower (1978)

For non-Koreans who watch Korean movies, The Shower will bring to mind one of the film "scenarios" written by the Girl in My Sassy Girl. Gyeon-woo recalls it as a defining melodrama of their generation: "I couldn't sleep for a week!" The ending sucks, the Girl declares, and she proceeds to rewrite it in her own inimitable style (violent and hilarious slapstick), with herself and Gyeon-woo as the leads.

I soon learned from friends that Hwang Soon-won's original story, first published in 1953, was an almost universal Korean experience, read in every middle school for decades. It's surprisingly short, under 4,000 words in Brother Anthony of Taize's translation, and not all that melodramatic--in fact its simplicity of style and directness of tone are among the reasons why it's a Korean classic. I hadn't expected I'd get a chance to see the actual The Shower anytime soon, but the Korean Film Archive has just released it on DVD, so I got a copy and prepared to immerse myself in this film that, in Gyeon-Woo's words, "shaped our people's sensibility in their teens."

It turned out to be more difficult than I'd expected, just because My Sassy Girl's parody had imprinted itself so firmly in my mind. Since I had the robust twenty-somethings Cha Tae-hyun and Jeon Ji-hyeon as the models of the boy and girl from The Shower, it was a shock to find that in the story and the movie, the main characters are just entering middle school, not even adolescents yet. It didn't help that The Shower was obviously a prestige project, made with the same "artistic" solemnity that Hollywood applies to Western literary classics, so I think it would have seemed inadvertently funny at times even if I hadn't been remembering the parody version. So harumph harumph, let me get serious here and try to do justice to this classic Korean movie. For non-Koreans who haven't seen My Sassy Girl, be warned: there are spoilers ahead.

The basic story is, as I said, simple: Yeon-ee, a city girl (Jo Yoon-sook, who looks like a very young Jeon Do-yeon) moves to the countryside to live with her great-grandparents when her father's business fails. She gradually becomes friends with Seok-ee, a country boy (Lee Yeong-soo, who looks like a very young and skinny Cha Tae-hyun) from the neighboring farm. One day they go on a long hike to a nearby mountain, where they're caught in a sudden storm. Though Seok-ee gallantly gives her his shirt to keep her warm, Yeon-ee catches a chill and, because her family can't afford medicine, she dies. Seok-ee is deeply moved to learn that on her deathbed, she asked to be buried in the same clothes she wore on their hike, which neither of their families knew about.

The job of directing The Shower was given to Ko Young-nam, a prolific but mostly undistinguished director who made 111 movies during his career. Most except for The Shower and maybe Snow Country (1977) are forgotten now, but after all, how many of us make even one or two memorable movies? Ko did his job with dogged professionalism, and his cinematographer Lee Seong-choon won an award for his lush work. The movie was filmed in widescreen and saturated color, and the leads are lit as if they were Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson instead of two Korean pre-teens. The script, which keeps fairly close to Hwang's original, expands the story and moves the action to the 1970s, so Seok-ee wears bell-bottomed pants and a polyester shirt. He struts around with boyish machismo, competes in cockfights with a neighbor boy, and fights to save Yeon-ee from harassment by some boys in the woods. Yeon-ee wears braids except for their final scene together, in which her hair has been carefully brushed out as if she were appearing in a shampoo commercial.

While their friendship remains "innocent," both kids are more or less subtly eroticized: near the beginning of the film Seok-ee fantasizes about a woman dressed in leaves, who tempts him like Eve as he frolics at one with Nature in the forest. Later, Yeon-ee's great-grandmother tells her a tale of a fox woman who seduces a promising young scholar with kisses, and Yeon-ee has a nightmare of Seok-ee kissing the fox woman while she (dressed as a Confucian scholar, complete with beard and spectacles) calls to him to save himself. None of this is in the original story (though the scene where Yeon-ee scrapes her knee and Seok-ee sucks the dirt from the wound is), but it's entertaining, like the Harvest Thanksgiving Festival celebration that brings the movie to its culmination.

Oddly, The Shower hasn't been remade, though there was recently a successful stage musical version of the story, featuring boy band singer Seung-ri of Big Bang, and there are a couple of short amateur versions on YouTube. These, and the parody in My Sassy Girl, show that The Shower hasn't been forgotten, and now that we can see it on DVD, maybe there's no need for a remake.     (Duncan Mitchel)

The Shower ("Sonagi"). Directed by Ko Young-nam. Original Short Story by Hwang Soon-won. Screenpay by Lee Jin-mo. Starring Lee Young-soo, Cho Yoon-sook, Kang Kye-sik, Kim Sin-jae, Yoo Myeung-soon, Kim Min-gyoo, Oh Young-kab. Cinematography by Lee Seong-choon. Produced by Nam-a Pictures Co., Ltd. 99 min, 35mm, color. Released on September 13, 1979. Winner of Silver award (Lee Seong-choon) at 3rd Golden Cinematography Awards.

    Splendid Outing (1978)

Gong Hyo-hee is a famously successful businesswoman who heads a major conglomerate and who fills her day with meetings, inspirational speeches, and cocktail pleasantries with envious male colleagues. At night, she returns to her home in the suburbs, takes a cursory glance at her children, and falls exhausted into bed, where she is often haunted by strange dreams of a woman calling out to her. She is told that the woman in the dream represents a lost twin sister who died as an infant.

One day she gets into her car and drives out to a seaside town. As she approaches the shore, suddenly a mob of angry villagers surrounds her car. Frightened, she tries to run away, but is then caught (in a net!) by a group of fisherwomen. She is bound and taken by boat out to a remote island, where an unknown man exchanges cash for her. Then she is dragged back to a small hut, where her captor insists that she is his wife, and that she won't be able to escape as she did the last time. Her denials and protests fall on deaf ears. Thus begins her absurd and harrowing new life as an island woman, 'married' to an abusive stranger.

This bizarre, modernist feature from Kim Soo-yong was released in 1978 and stars Yoon Jeong-hee, a major actress of the 1960s and 1970s who will be familiar to contemporary viewers for her leading role in Lee Chang-dong's Poetry. With its blurred, garish colors and disorienting camera angles, Splendid Outing is an exhilerating aesthetic exercise at the same time as being a thought-provoking and troubling story.

The film's narrative is founded on the juxtaposition between a modern, emancipated woman in a modern city and a wife enslaved among the rocks of a remote island. Momentary glimpses of Seoul intercut between shots of our heroine's struggles on the island drive home this contrast, and on the most basic level serve as a visual reminder of the extremes of Korean society: urban and rural, wealthy and poor. But the film isn't primarily concerned with this kind of social message, and plays more as a psychological tease or puzzle. At every turn, the film tries to disorient its viewer.

Of course, Splendid Outing's gender issues are impossible to ignore. Although not a feminist film by any means, it suggests the existence of a primal aggression towards women that lurks just below the surface of modern society. Gong Hyo-hee has climbed the social ladder as high as it will take her, but the narrative's bizarre twists suggest that subjugation and humiliation may be only one false step away. It's a melancholy sort of work, that empathizes with its protagonist but at the same time remains distant and enigmatic enough to defy easy interpretation.      (Darcy Paquet)

Splendid Outing ("Hwaryeohan oechul"). Directed by Kim Soo-yong. Screenplay by Cho Moon-jin. Starring Yoon Jeong-hee, Lee Dae-geun, Lee Young-ha, Kim Jeong-ran, Song Mi-nam. Cinematography by Jung Il-sung. Produced by Tae Chang Enterprises. 93 min, 35mm, color. Released on March 10, 1978. Total admissions: 154,668.

    The Genealogy (1979)

The Quality Films Record System of 1973, a revision of the Motion Picture Law during Park Chung-hee's regime, gave film companies that produced "quality films" privileged access to importing and distributing foreign films. Such access was highly sought after since Hollywood films were dominating South Korea's box office at this time. The "quality films" the Park regime desired included those that promoted their ideas about national identity and high artistic merit. Although Im Kwon-taek had made a decision prior to this time to forgo competing against Hollywood fare by producing "serious" films, beginning with The Deserted Widow, interspersing with commercial fare such as The General's Son, around this time, he identified a need to have Korean films travel abroad for non-Koreans to learn about Korea. This need either meshed with the tenets of this revision of the Motion Picture Law, or, as Chungmoo Choi argues in her chapter in Im Kwon-Taek: The Making of a Korean National Cinema, was "motivated" by this revision. Regardless of where Im's full intent lay, this policy makes The Genealogy an important one since The Genealogy was where he began to focus on creating Korean cinema that would interest foreign audiences.

Im has said that he "realized that films I wanted to send abroad required topics from the period in our history that I myself have experienced." For The Genealogy, Im chose to present a topic he experienced while in elementary school, the "Name Change Order." On February 11, 1940, the Japanese colonial administration imposed the Name Change Order on all Koreans, requiring them to change their Korean names to Japanese ones. As Choi notes, 84% of Koreans complied. One person who resisted was Sol Jin-hyeong, whom Choi states is the person upon whom the patriarch in The Genealogy is based. Sol (played by Joo Seon-tae) is portrayed as a wise and reverent man. Rather than depicting his protest as reactionary, it is portrayed as a delicate balancing of the pros and cons of Modernization.

However, Sol is not the main character of this film, which leads to another important aspect of The Genealogy. The film is adapted from a short story by Kajiyama Toshiyuki. The main character is Tani (Ha Myeong-joong), a Japanese man who, in order to avoid conscription, has joined on with the Japanese colonial administration offices. Tani is sent to Sol's house to convince him to abide by the Name Change Order. What makes Tani unique in South Korean cinema and literature, according to Korean Film scholar Kyung Hyun Kim, is that he is portrayed sympathetically. He is not portrayed as a tyrant or fascist, but as a man who respects Korean culture and is deeply troubled by the actions of his own government. Tani is an artist who shows a great appreciation for Korean craftsmanship and artistry. Sol and Tani connect on this level and Sol embraces him as a son, or more like a son-in-law considering how comfortable Sol is in presenting his already engaged daughter, Ok-sun (Han Hye-sook), to Tani. In respect for Sol, Tani attempts to intervene in holding off the pressure on Sol, along w/ successfully impeding Ok-sun's enforcement into sexual slavery. It is this mutual respect conveyed towards a Japanese that is perhaps the most important aspect of including The Genealogy in any survey of the Korean canon.

As Choi has argued, Tani is also based on a real-life person, art critic Yanagi Muneyoshi, known by Koreans as Yanagi Soetsu. Yanagi's art critiques stood against the imperialist intents of the Japanese government at the time. Choi notes that even though some Korean intellectuals would later accuse Yanagi of holding a colonialist mindset himself, in 1984 Yanagi was posthumously awarded the South Korean Jeweled Crown Culture Medal. Im appears to have found a kindred spirit in Yanagi's take on Korean art. Choi summarizes Yanagi's identification of "the most salient element in Korean art as the beauty of the curving line that symbolizes Koreans' sorrow, sadness and hunger for love (from the people of other nations) . . ." Furthermore, Yanagi expressed deep remorse over the loss of Korean traditional aesthetics due to his country's occupation of Korea. As we know from Im's oeuvre, Im shares this view of associating Korea with sorrow, sadness, and loss. Yet, along with his usual focus on the Korean landscape in The Genealogy, Im also focuses on celadon ceramics. Although my first exposure to Korean arts was through the gorgeous resonance of the seafoam-ish, chartreuse-y celadon for which Korea is quite respected, this is the only film I've seen that singles out this aspect of Korean culture, presenting yet another unique aspect to this film. As David James and Choi both note, a passage written by Yanagi is invoked by Sol while looking at his collection of celadon ceramics.

Although not what I would consider one of Im's better films, The Genealogy's origins in the film policies of South Korea, its portrayal of a sympathetic Japanese, and its rare cinematic celebration of Korean celadon ceramics places it as an important one to display on the cinematic shelf and to occasionally bring down from that shelf for further viewing.      (Adam Hartzell)

The Genealogy ("Jokbo"). Directed by Im Kwon-taek. Screenplay by Han Woon-sa. Starring Joo Seon-tae, Ha Myeong-joong, Han Hye-sook, Choi Nam-hyun, Kim Shin-jae, Yun Yang-ha, Ju Sang-ho. Cinematography by Lee Seok-gi. Produced by Hwacheon Corp. 110 min, 35mm, color. Rating received on September 29, 1978. Released on May 1, 1979. Total admissions: 529. Winner of Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Ha Myeong-joong) at the 17th Grand Bell Awards. Presented at the 11th Festival des Trois Continents (Nantes).

1970 --    Frozen Spring (Jeong Jin-woo);   Pillyeo (Jung So-young)   -- 1971 --    Bunrae's Story (Yu Hyun-mok)   War and Human Beings (Shin Sang-ok);   Woman of Fire (Kim Ki-young)   -- 1972 --    A Cattle Seller (Kim Hyo-cheon);   Gate of Woman (Byun Jang-ho);   Oyster Village (Jeong Jin-woo);   Pollen (Ha Kil-jong);   A Shaman's Story (Choi Ha-won)   -- 1973 --    Fidelity (Ha Kil-jong);   Long Live the Island Frog (Jeong Jin-woo);   The Testimony (Im Kwon-taek)   -- 1974 --    The Cat Woman (Hong Pa);   The Earth (Kim Soo-yong);   Hometown of Stars (Lee Jang-ho)   -- 1975 --    Flame (Yu Hyun-mok);   Promise of the Flesh (Kim Ki-young);   The Road to Sampo (Lee Man-hee);   Youngja's Heydey (Kim Ho-seon).

1976 --    Aescetic (Kim Su-hyeong);   Concentration (Choi In-hyun);   A School Joker (Seok Rae-myeong);   Wangshimni (Im Kwon-taek)   -- 1977 --    The Gate (Yu Hyun-mok);   Night Voyage (Kim Soo-yong);   Toward That High Place (Im Won-shik);   Winter Woman (Kim Ho-seon)   -- 1978 --    Do You Know Kkotsun? (Jung In-yeop);   Miss O's Apartment (Byun Jang-ho);   A Widow (Cho Moon-jin);   Woman Chasing Killer Butterfly (Kim Ki-young);   The Woman I Ditched (Jung So-young)   -- 1979 --    Byeongtae and Youngja (Ha Kil-jong);   Eul-hwa (Byun Jang-ho);   The Hidden Hero (Im Kwon-taek);   The Last Word Left By My Fellow Soldier (Im Won-se);   The Man I Ditched (Jung So-young);   Rainy Days (Yu Hyun-mok);   Wild Ginseng (Jeong Jin-woo).  

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