Lee lives in a civilian neighborhood in Seoul. Not far from here is the mansion of the rich in Gangnam District, the same city, with high walls separating different classes. He once served as The Minister of Culture of South Korea and is also a famous director himself, but in his daily life, he advocates simplicity and the home decoration is not fashionable. Even when he dined with stars such as Liu Yaren and Steven Yuan in the crew, he ate meals equivalent to dozens of yuan.
The picky Kim Ki-duk once said: "In South Korea, I am the third person, Kang Tik-gyu is second, and Lee Cang-dong is first." Although this is an individual opinion, it shows Li Cangdong's influence among peers. In South Korea, Lee Cang-dong is famous in the industry for his poetic films with humanistic care, and in the minds of many film fans, he is an uncompromising civilian director, born in an ordinary family, most of the film protagonists are also ordinary people, even if he has achieved fame, Li Cangdong's body still retains the two temperaments of intellectuals and working class.
Since the millennium, Korean cinema has gained momentum, with Lee Cang-dong, Bong Joon-ho, Hong Sang-so, Park Chan-wook, kim Ki-duk, etc. being regulars at the three major film festivals, and "Parasite" won the Oscars in 2020, once again pushing the South Korean whirlwind to a climax. Some commentators have pointed out that "Parasite" can win the Cannes Film Festival and the Oscars successively, not only because of the ability of Bong Joon-ho's team, but also because of the overall recognition of Korean films in the world film industry. As early as 2019, Li Cangdong's "Burning" was recognized by the highest rating in the Cannes Film Festival, and he is also one of the most recognized Asian directors in the world today.
Li Cangdong has a high literary attainment, but also has the sociologist's in-depth exploration of public issues, and his films focus on reality and are full of unique poetic beauty. For example, in "Burning", he cares about why today's young people feel anger and despair; in "Mints", he uses individual narratives and flashbacks to present the tearing and hidden pain of the Korean people in the period of social transformation; in the movie "Poetry", he focuses on a 65-year-old woman, filming how she learns to write poetry, photographing a woman's love for life and the direct face of the burden of self-survival and others.
"Mints" together with "Green Fish" and "Oasis" is known as Li Cangdong's "Green Trilogy". They all feature ordinary people as protagonists, presenting the indelible scars left by the pain of social transformation on a generation. Foucault once pointed out: "Psychosis is not a natural or physiological disease, but a social function that classifies the population, and its birth is a product of history." Lee Cangdong's film also presents patients, even people with mental problems in others, but his focus is not on the accusation of patients, but on the retrospection of the causes, what causes the mental trauma of a generation, different generations of ordinary Koreans, what is the difference in the loss they face?
Li Cangdong's works are like pathological reports, he integrates sociological perspectives with the heart of a poet, and projects a serious gaze at the aphasia of the times, which is not cheap sympathy or film festival winning material, but a concrete person and the life they need to be understood. There is a theme running through Li Cangdong's works: no laborer deserves to be sacrificed. In a society, there are people who focus on glory and achievement, but there is always someone who listens to dust, ruins and rubble. Art is not to create illusions and accelerate forgetting, art should have the courage to face reality and pierce dreams. More importantly, keep your courage and anger, which in many cases is more important than talent.
Before becoming a director, Li Cangdong was a novelist, and his novel collections "Burning Paper" and "Deer River Has a Lot of Dung" were created in the 1980s/1990s and were introduced to China by the Deer Book Studio of Wuhan University Press in the past two years. Li Cangdong once humbly said that writing novels by himself was not good enough. Obviously, As a novelist, Li Cangdong is not as good as he is as a film director in terms of achievements. But Li Cangdong's novels are still worth reading, even after thirty years, looking at them with serious artistic standards, "Deer River Has a Lot of Dung", "About Fate", "Sky Lantern", and Li Cangdong's debut novel "Burning Paper" of the same name and "Fire and Ashes", are all well-conceived novels worth savoring.
"There is a lot of dung in Shikagawa"
For example, in "Deer River Has a Lot of Dung", in the novel, the protagonist Toshishi is an ordinary person who is not proud of his appearance, he was a small clerk when he was young, living in a simple rental house, struggling for half a life, not famous, and the money earned is only enough to buy a house in a place full of excrement in the countryside, "although there are only 23 pings". In contrast, his brother Min-woo is a student of Seoul National University, inheriting his father's literary temperament, with a beautiful face and white fingers, and because of his participation in the student movement, he used his brother's house to avoid the police.
They are two very different types of people, Junzhi lives a humble life and is unwilling, and Minyu is idealistic but not good at life. Junji is like a mother, an ordinary-looking, savage working woman. Min Yu is like his father, a cultural person with a sense of justice and concern for national affairs. Lee Cangdong did not favor one side and accuse the other, but through the difference in the two people's concepts and the intensification of contradictions (Joon-sik's wife took good care of Min-woo, which aroused Joon-sik's suspicion), to show the real psychological state of Korean intellectuals and migrant workers in that era. Instead of glorifying the underclass and intellectuals, or showing a strong sense of morality, his novels blend contrasts, satire, metaphors, symbolism, and so on, revealing to the reader mercilessly that our lives may be built on a lump of filth.
In the novel, Li Cangdong not only satirizes the powerful, but also satirizes a faction of cultural people who care about distant places but lack the ability to take care of themselves. In the novel, he wrote of Joon-sik's father: "They are very knowledgeable, more knowledgeable than anyone else about the workings of the world, well versed in the political situation at that time or the structural contradictions of Korean society, unable to finish three days and three nights, but in fact not even able to solve a meal a day." ”
It is worth mentioning that the image of Junshik's parents is quite similar to that of Li Cangdong's own parents, Li Cangdong's father is a left-wing intellectual who participates in social movements, and his mother is a hard-working worker woman, and when his father takes to the streets for the future of the country, it is her mother who takes on the responsibility of raising children.
Li Cangdong tries to make the reader think: Compared with a heavy life and a light life, is the heavy necessarily more noble than the light? Are the lives of the people involved in the grand movement more meaningful than those trapped in chai rice oil and salt? If so, how do we view people who sacrifice their careers and confine themselves to kitchens and families?
"Shikagawa Has a Lot of Dung" is a collection of novels that confront the filth of life. Material filth, spiritual filth, and even the moral dilemma of human nature are like the countryside of Kagawa, the dust raised by garbage trucks, the garbage abandoned on the ground, waste water and animal carcasses, and even large areas of smelly feces. When Joon-sik reports his brother and stands on the land surrounded by excrement, Lee Cang-dong bitterly points out the nothingness of the core of his life surrounded by a cloud of filth, but at the same time asks every reader who witnesses this scene - when we stare at Joon-sik's unbearable, how far are we from Joon-sik?
Thus the novel concludes:
"Of course, Minyu will be isolated from the world for a long time, but life is sealed, but it will always continue to live, why not minyu alone?" This filthy world has lost all its purity and decency, but I want to survive here. Let's go, he looked into the darkness, persuading himself. On this huge pile of garbage, all the dirt, the hatred, and the dreams that have been abandoned, all stepped on the feet of my twenty-three pings of comfort that were crumbling in mid-air. ”
In the Douban comment area, some readers noted: "In "Deer River Has a Lot of Dung", almost every story revolves around the student movement, but the protagonist of the story is not in the center of the movement, they are often friends, relatives or classmates of the sports participants. For example, in the novel "Long Chuan Bai", Lee Cangdong depicts an old father who participated in the democracy movement but had no way out, named his son "Mo Su" (Korean pronunciation same as "Marx"), and strangely enough, when he was mistakenly arrested by the South Korean police for espionage, he did not seek justice, but wanted to admit to the crime he had never committed. In a meeting with his son, he said: "There is a word called 'Long Chuan Bai', which can refer to madmen or to lepers who are said to have been punished by Heaven. In short, it is the kind of existence that does not fit in with the able-bodied or ordinary people, and is abandoned by the world... If you do the math, I'll count one of them. ”
There is a passage in the book that describes the psychology of "Yongcheon-bai" in The Korean democratization movement:
"I said I didn't have any crimes and I was lying. I know now what sin I have committed. Now, I want to confess my sins. First of all, I think I haven't sinned, and that's a mistake. I didn't even realize where I started my problem, and that stupidity was a mistake. The problem is with me. I have never given up on myself. Even if I run night schools for laborers, I have never really felt sorry or loved the people of this land, the poor people who have been abandoned, my neighbors and my brothers. I can't empathize with their pain and anger. Although I know the contradictions and evils of this society, I cannot fight it, or even dedicate myself. I don't feel the passion to dedicate myself to anything. I never even really loved my mother. I want to be a good daughter of my mother, study hard, and repay my mother's pain and harshness, and this kind of thinking has dominated me since I was a child. At the same time, I kept trying to escape from my mother. I was stingy with small things, even a blooming flower on the side of the road, and couldn't open my heart. ”
Writing that sticks to social hotspots is easy to decay quickly. In the era when Li Cangdong wrote novels, writing about social movements was actually a hot writing, and hot writing, including writing that was too close to reality, was easy to arouse readers to discuss, but to withstand the test of time, ten or twenty years did not lose readability, which tested the writer's penmanship. In this regard, Li Cangdong has written at least a few novels that do not decay quickly, such as "Deer River Has a Lot of Dung" and "Sky Lantern", and even if I read it now, I can still feel a sharp sense of pain, the moral choices faced by empathetic characters. This shows that Li Cangdong is an excellent novel writer, he has written at least thirty years of novels that still make readers mixed and serious about life.
Therefore, "Deer River Has a Lot of Dung" is a perfect work of Li Cangdong's novel skills. Li Cangdong wrote about reality, but did not fall into the trap of scar literature. It is not simply lyrical and blameless, but is committed to presenting different relationships, different living conditions, and even the mental trauma and sequelae caused by social tragedies to those who have experienced it, so as to leave a specific "patient's note" to fight against the universal oblivion and whitewashing in the world in a literary way.
Li Cangdong did not innovate too much in literary form, but his observation of workers, small citizens, leftists, politicians and other figures was precise and sophisticated, which made him get rid of the bourgeois habits common in literati writing, and exuded a sense of life and compassion for warming up with a salary. Even if he no longer writes novels and shoots movies in the future, the theme that Li Cangdong focuses on continues. During the junta, Lee was concerned with people's struggles against totalitarianism, the search for justice, and the impact of collective social violence (such as the Gwangju incident) on the psyche of a generation. After becoming a director, Lee Cangdong's concerns were more diverse, when South Korea entered the era of democratization, the efforts of a generation were rewarded, and the gap between rich and poor and class in society was not solved, but intensified in the context of the development of plutocracy and neoliberalism.
Thus, Li Cangdong's films are not eager to celebrate the era of democracy, but continue to devote their cameras to the toiling masses, to listen to their anger, pain, and increasingly forgotten sublime.
From "Burning Paper" and "Deer River Has a Lot of Dung" to "Burning", Lee Cangdong used to start with small people in his creation, and let readers feel the overall social atmosphere of Korea through the personnel in the family. For example, Kim Yong-hyo, a middle-aged man in "Mints", Han Gong-so, a severe cerebral palsy patient in "Oasis", and Jong-so, a poor writer who lives near the border between North and South Korea in "Burning". In his debut novel collection Burning Paper, similar characters abound. The widowed mother who was deceived in "Burning Paper", the unjustly killed father and widowed mother in "Umbilical Cord", and the old lady in "For everyone's safety"... They have either lost their loved ones, or they have been wronged for their political activities, or they are the lonely workers and bankrupt citizens who have been isolated in the process of modernization, in short, they have become the bottom of society for various reasons, those we rarely see in the spotlight.
In Li Cangdong's works, anger is a key word, and the anger expressed by Li Cangdong is not hysteria, but a kind of repression rooted in people's hearts. Symbolism and metaphor are his common techniques, for example, in "Burning", Gatsby's terrier, Emi's dance, burning plastic shed, etc., are all hints buried by Li Cangdong.
《Burning Paper》
The rich man Ben said dismissively: "The Korean police, don't care about those things, those useless and dirty plastic sheds, they seem to be waiting for me to burn them all, I look at the burning plastic sheds, I will feel joy, and then here, here will feel the sound of bass, from the depths of the bones." 」 It is these words that make the protagonist Zhong Xiu's teeth cold and disgusted with Ben.
When Zhong Xiu saw Ben's life, he lamented that Gatsby in South Korea was much better, why some people were born so rich and lived quiet and elegant lives, while some people could only live outside the countryside. The contrast between Zhong Xiu and Ben is two different states of hunger. Zhong Xiu's state of hunger is that he finds that he is solidified in the middle and lower classes of society, and it is difficult for him to overcome the fate of the lowly. It is a material and reputational hunger. Ben's hunger lies in the fact that even though he is so rich, he still feels spiritually empty, still feels a kind of existential nothingness, so that he has to get a kind of spiritual satisfaction by burning plastic sheds and even hunting women.
The theme of "Burning" is not limited to class expression, Li Cangdong tells the story of Zhong Xiu and Hye-mi, these marginal people, exploring the meaning of human existence, the relationship between truth and falsehood, Hye-mi began with a question: "Don't think there are oranges here, forget that there are no oranges here." "A man exists in society because someone else recognizes his existence, and if everyone forgets him, he has disappeared in the social sense.
What is the meaning of existence? This is the big question that Li Cangdong constantly asks in his creations beyond class expression. How do we find meaning in life? What kind of life is not a mediocre life? In Li Cangdong's works, you can see the shadow of Chekhov, as early as a hundred years ago, Chekhov through "Uncle Vanya", "Seagull", "Cherry Orchard" to inspire people to reflect on the mediocre life, to make efforts for a truly ideal, just, good life.
Nowadays, when the grand narrative is dissolved and the individual life floats in the broken net, the creator's search for the meaning of life is even more precious. In the movie "Poetry", the old woman Miko boats on the river that carries the suffering of life, but it does not change her love of poetry. Even if life is as ordinary as dust, she can still see the sky and find her own star. Li Cangdong writes about women who write poems alone, and his works are not poems of life.
In Uncle Vanya, Chekhov writes, "We shall continue to live, Uncle Vanya, we shall come to Japan for a long time, and there shall be a long string of monotonous days and nights; we shall patiently endure the trials that are to come." And Li Cangdong's work over and over again actually conveys a belief - don't give up your life so quickly. Don't take it easy to disarm your love from numbness and mediocrity.
Dostoevsky once wrote about a kind of character who loves human beings but does not love specific people, and in Li Cangdong's works, perhaps what really moves me is that from beginning to end, he has not given up the search for specific people, and his characters have not given up loving specific lives because of difficulties, because of ugliness and the imperfection of life itself.
After all, in this day and age, loving a specific person enduringly is more testing than loving human beings.