South Korean New Wave Cinema is Changing Film Forever..

Every nation in the world enjoys and creates film; it is important to watch films from different nations and era to understand the beliefs and anxieties those times and places carried. Living in American exposes us to Hollywood at an early age, we are lucky enough to see the most grandiose and expensive films ever made....every few summers. This is a stark contrast to other nations whom don't have resources to put into film, so they create art with very raw emotion that are more plot-centric than anything else.

Image from a scene in the Black and White 2000 film 'Joint Security Area'

I can appreciate the surrealism and heroic fairy tales 'Bollywood' has brought about, but I really appreciate the darker genres that have surfaced in the 'La Nouvelle Vague' (French New Wave), and those that have evolved within South Korean cinema. I want to talk about the latter for a bit here because some of these films are incredibly impactful.

Not many foreign directors are household names in the US, in fact not many directors are household names at all (unless your last name is Spielberg or Lucas). This is why it is so impressive that a few South Korean directors have become mainstays in my household, and even my best friends love to talk 'SK' dramas with me now.

Director Park Chan-wook

My two favorite directors from South Korea are: Park Chan-wook and Kim Jee-woon. These two men are single-handedly revitalizing South Korean cinema with their visceral and deeply immersive tales of vengeance. Jee-woon is most notable for his 2010 film 'I Saw the Devil' (a brilliant must see, but there is carnage and torture throughout so I must warn you of that). Besides a few classics I will get into, this is arguably the most hard hitting Korean thriller ever created. I have never had to catch my breath and stop a movie in action before, but I did the night I watched this masterwork. The pacing, the violence, the writing..it is all perfect. The film throws you straight into the furnace; the viewer is treated as a witness to the barbarism of the antagonist, and the pain of our eventual hero. The subplot of this film is in itself a twist, you begin to realize 20 minutes in that this isn't your normal tale of vengeance, the point of view completely changes once the unravel lings come to fruition. This film is incredibly dark in tone, graphically violent, beautiful in composition, and pays the viewer off beyond anything they could have expected. Truly a marvel of film making that deserves to be seen by anyone intrigued by human nature.

Byung-hun Lee in 'I Saw the Devil'

I also clamor for Park Chan-wook films because they display the same level of pure emotion and animosity towards repressed feelings. His 'magnum opus' (if you will) is definitely his 2003 vengeance piece 'OldBoy'. I can make a whole post on this film, in fact a whole thesis might not even be enough. It is a bewildering tale of true vengeance, hatred, madness and love... If you have not seen this film, don't even bother with the rest of this post, just go watch it and we'll talk later. If you have seen the film, you know what I mean in terms of my description. It is a jarring masterclass that deals with social anxieties, burdens, fears and desires. There are so many levels and facets to each character that you stay as afraid as you are intrigued. There is constant allegory to Kafka and 'The Metamorphosis', the many moments of pause and dream like floating feel very surreal yet applicable to the situation. Each scene is carefully crafted, the colors and saturation are perfection. For a film 14 years old, it feels timeless, not worn out but finely aged...

Min-sik Choi as Dae in the classic 'OldBoy'

South Korea has gone through many film eras, each depicting the era in existence. I won't go into the complete transgressions of South Korea's film evolution, but it is interesting to note the era between 1980 and 1996 was called 'Recovery', and was in response to the nation's president being assassinated. These films were politically heavy and mostly made commentary on how unhappy the people were with government, it seems that's why only 15% of films that year were made domestically...and the rest were foreign films bought for the public's viewing. The current era of film for South Korea is said to have begun in 1997, when films starting attaining higher budgets for more sought after local directors. The film 'Shiri' in 1999 made more than 'The Matrix' and 'Titanic' in South Korea, it was the first highly budgeted film about a North Korean spy who plans a 'coup' in Seoul. There is a love story involved and twists among who is leaking information to the 'NK' government and what not, it is cheesy 90s action film stuff but it related to the high running conflict between 'SK' and 'NK' and that is what people want to see.

Image of scene from the 1999 South Korean spy drama 'Shiri'

In Eastern Culture self realization is '...knowledge of the true self beyond both delusion and identification with material phenomena..', whereas Western Culture defines self realization as '...the fulfillment by oneself of the possibilities of one's character or personality.' The vast difference between our societies (and our cinema) is that in the East they want to know why things are the way they are, and be at peace with that result...in the West we want to fulfill our utmost desires using all the experiences we have gathered along the way. This at least is my interpretation, but it comes to me as quite interesting when comparing the way societies think and act.

I truly do believe the European and Asian New Wave of cinema will drastically change and format the way American directors make film. You can not deny the raw emotion and how viscerally binding these films can be; there are so many unravel-lings in each one of the films, it's almost as though you lived a few lives in two hours.

Yoo Gong as our hero in the 2016 zombie blockbuster 'Train to Busan'

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