Moon (Moon, 2005) speaks of how Korean films have evolved with time and how they have represented the political and cultural scenarios of the times. The new trend of films has departed from the crude and vulgar films of the past and the new wave speaks of films with an approach that can be called auteurism with realism. He mentions a number of films such as Chihwasean (2002), Oasis (2002), Old Boy (2003), 3-Iron (2004) have won awards at various international film festivals. According to Moon, Korean films have achieved commercial success and won critical acclaim on par with Hollywood films. There are three interesting threads of discussion in this paper.
The most interesting film that Moon speaks of in this paper is ‘Memories of Murder’, which is about a murder that a Detective is investigating. The detective is supremely confident and believes that nothing can deceive his eyes. The director has explored various facets of imagery and the act of seeing and tries to portray the concept that the gaze the detective puts on an object is basically flawed and that while the detective is watching a person, the person, in turn, gazes at the detective. The detective believes that what he sees is so confident that he doubts what he sees and this leads to deep-rooted confusion. The last scene is when he visits the crime scene after 20 years and is told that someone suspicious has visited the site. The detective turns to the camera and then the observer becomes observed.
According to Moon, the new wave of Korean films does not distance itself from the commercial films but rather blends the pure art films with the commercial films. This is to draw in more of the younger generation of film viewers who are exposed to television, video, and the Internet. The films use elements of irony and raw imagery to convey a multitude of feelings. The second interesting film that Moon speaks of in this paper is a film called ‘Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, the directors have explored stark contradictions of imagery in which a number of men are masturbating in a room to the accompaniment of moans of a female from another room. The camera pans to the other room to show women moaning in pain from an illness. The extreme imagery of pleasure and suffering invokes mental vertigo among viewers that few viewers are able to forget.
The third interesting topic that Moon has explored in this paper is the film called ‘Save the Green Planet’. The movie has explored the childish violence and imagery never seen in Korean films before. The film has heavily used elements of childhood and violence in a varied mosaic of imagery in which earth has been attacked by aliens. The alien’s telepathy commands can be blocked out by wearing a helmet and they can be killed by a bandage. The film portrays a barber chair and a toilet seat as torture implements and uses sets of an underground secret chamber that look like a vagina. The male boss wears women’s underclothes, the spaceship looks like a fallopian tube and the film persists in twisting and warping everyday images into something sinister and comic-like. The last scene shows the earth has been blown up and an alone television set is floating and this flashes utopian childhood images. Moon suggests that there is an innate fallacy as the TV has been regarded as an unreal object and any last images flickering from this point to a melancholic and lopsided view.
The student of this paper suggests that the above-mentioned films are made by filmmakers who have their own agenda and would rather use the film medium to present a single-dimensional view of the world, that belongs to neither the Korean culture of the past nor the current Korean culture. The films are heavily based on the western concept of filmmaking and cater only to a limited section of the populace.
References
Moon Jae-cheol, 2005, The Meaning of Newness in Korean Cinema: Korean New Wave and After, Korea Journal. 2005, pp. 36-59