The current Korean film industry can be described as unprecedented prosperity; With their backs to the mainland and facing the world, Korean directors have become regulars in international mainstream film festivals. Some people say that Bong Joon-ho's "Parasite" reached the top of the Palme d'Or and swept the Oscars, undoubtedly marking the peak of Korean cinema. But obviously, the success of Korean films is also inseparable from the efforts of other Korean filmmakers; Among them, director Park Chan-wook, who was 59 years old at the time, was one of the pioneers in the international film world.
Park Chan-wook & Bong Joon-ho
Born in Seoul, Park chan-wook graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy at Sogang University. Although he studied philosophy, he attended film seminars outside of class, learning film theory and writing film reviews with other like-minded filmmakers. Later, through the introduction of the seniors of the seminar, he served as an assistant director in the company owned by director Lee Chang-ho, and the films he participated in included Guo Zairong's "Watercolor Painting on a Rainy Day" in 1990. Until 1992, he officially filmed his own work "The Moon is a Dream Made by the Sun".
Looking back at Park Chan-wook's previous films, from the early "Common Security Zone" that focused on the north-south issue, to the later stylized "Revenge Trilogy", they have been highly praised in the international film industry. Among them, "Old Boys" won the Cannes Grand Jury Prize for the first time on behalf of a Korean film. Then "Robot Love", "Bat", and "Miss" also entered the main competition of the three major film festivals.
Park Chan-wook and his actors
It can be said that Park Chan-wook's films have never been absent from the highest stage of the international film industry. In May this year, his new work "The Determination to Break Up" once again returned to the main competition unit of Cannes with a strong posture, and finally won the best director in Cannes.
I still remember that Fu mao commented on the movie "The Determination to Break Up" as early as the Cannes press conference: "When you watch works like Park Chan-wook's new film and feel its sincerity to the film, you will find that it feels like a movie born 40 years ago or even 80 years ago, but at the same time it is very modern." ”
2022 "The Determination to Break Up"
In my mind, Park Chan-wook's films always aim to break down audience stereotypes about Korean genre films. He interprets genre films with the ultimate dreamy, exaggerated, and even slightly crazy personal style, stimulates our senses with an aggressive posture, and then wraps the genre film narrative with the shell of allegory and mythology, smoothly introducing us into the gorgeous image world he creates, and leading us to feel the fleeting fantasies of the world of light and shadow.
Lying down and tasting guts, bizarre and changeable - Park Chan-wook's directing career
Park was born on August 23, 1963, to a relatively wealthy middle-class family in Seoul, South Korea. He grew up with a strong artistic influence, and the whole family listened to Bach's records after tea and dinner, which was even a family life routine.
When he was a student, Park Chan-wook began to watch a lot of movies by chance, but he did not dare to apply for the film major. He believes that film directors need a strong control, and he is more suitable for writing with a milder personality. He was then admitted to the philosophy department of Sogang University, but it wasn't long before he was disappointed by the rigid academic atmosphere of the philosophy department and turned to more energy on movies.
It wasn't until his junior year that Park Chan-wook, after watching Hitchcock's Ecstasy, fell in love with this great movie completely, quietly had the dream of becoming a director like Hitchcock, and began to write the script. At the same time, he also began to write film reviews part-time in Screen magazine, so much so that many friends thought he would become a film critic.
After graduation, Park Chan-wook had the privilege of getting acquainted with director Koo Jae-young, who later made "My Savage Girlfriend". Subsequently, he joined the crew of Guo Dao's debut film "Watercolor Painting on a Rainy Day". In this sentimental love movie, Park Chan-wook took on a lot of responsibilities as a fledgling assistant director, and even did production work.
But when the shooting progressed to about 90%, Park Chan-wook decided to leave the set. At the end of the 1980s, the situation of the Korean film industry was still quite "primitive", due to the long-term downturn in the film market, Korean filmmakers had to face a cruel reality, and Park Chan-wook was forced to make such a choice. Since then, he has devoted himself to retreat, immersed in creation, and temporarily left the mainstream industry.
In 1990, Park married his wife, who was also a fan. After getting married, he really realized how embarrassing real life was, and he had to find a way to make money for it. He began working in a film company as a subtitle translator, poster designer, and preparation for the premiere, which lasted for more than a year. It wasn't until Dreambox brought him orders for film production: a low-budget film called "The Moon is a Dream made by the Sun" and explicitly asked to be starred by singer and teen idol Lee Seung-chul at the time.
The birth process of Park Chan-wook's debut work was not smooth. Lee Seung-chul, who was appointed as the lead actor, was a layman at the time and had no confidence in whether he could play a good role. This greatly hit Park Chan-wook's creative enthusiasm, and even wanted to give up at one point. In the end, the words of a senior made him firm: "In the Korean film industry, only Chungmuro's film production is different from other places, and Chungmuro has always been open to aspiring new directors, if you want to fight for a better future, just make a name for yourself in this project." ”
However, fate did not pity Park Chan-wook. After the film "The Moon is the Dream of the Sun" came out, the box office was dismal, and only Lee Seung-chul's young fans contributed some theatrical box office, and since then it has been completely ignored. Even the subsequent release of videotapes has gradually disappeared from video stores across the country because few people have rented them.
After experiencing this failure, Park picked up a pen again and began writing a film review column in a film magazine. Influenced by Hitchcock, Park's commentaries tend to focus on the study of montages and are happy with psychoanalysis of films.
As the number of films expanded, Park began to dabble in the genre of films produced by directors such as Nicholas Ray and Sam Laus. Even for a while, he became obsessed with Hong Kong movies. At that time, Wu Yusen's films were particularly popular in Korea; Park Chan-wook believes that Hong Kong movies are not as sleek and neat as Hollywood movies, and this is why they are uniquely charming.
Park Chan-wook's evaluation of Korean films is the same, praising Lee Doo-yong's "The Solver" and Kim's "Fire Girl", and even arguing that such films are more valuable than the widely known films in textbooks. For Park Chan-wook, it is the cultivation of this period that has greatly developed his film aesthetics, and also allowed him to gradually form a film concept that truly belongs to himself.
In 1993, Park Chan-wook met director Lee Hoon through a friend's introduction, which once again awakened his creative heart. Four years later, he finally got his second film, The Trio. However, he once again suffered a box office setback. But this time, he did not give up lightly, but continued to conceive of a new film, and completed the short film "Judgment" in 1999. It's a highly stylized work and a test of the suspense genre.
In 2000, Park Chan-wook got the perfect opportunity to direct "Common Security Zone", which became an important turning point in his film career. In this film about the north and south issues, it is full of dramatic climaxes one after another. Accompanied by a suspenseful retrospective narrative, the entire film twists and turns between tragedy and comedy, touching people's hearts and getting unanimous love from the general public.
At that time, people's pursuit of stars such as Lee Byung-hyun, Song Kang-ho, Shin Ha-kyun and Lee Young-ae further pushed "Common Security Zone" to incredible box office success. As a result, Park Chan-wook officially gained commercial recognition and began his brilliant film creation. His unique film aesthetic is no longer limited to relying on film criticism to spread, but really wins the big screen.
In 2002, Park Chan-wook completed his new book I Want Revenge. Unlike the tragedies and joys of "Common Security Zone", "I Want Revenge" is headed for an extremely cold tragedy. Around the background of the financial crisis, the film examines the survival struggles of the low-level characters with a completely objective and calm gaze, allowing them to move towards a fatalistic tragedy.
The film has very few lines, but relies entirely on the actors' performances and camera language to narrate the story. Park Chan-wook's iconic personal style has finally begun to emerge in "I Want Revenge": an allegorical, mythical narrative, with taboo picture content under the sports lens, in a "detached" way of real life, allowing the audience to slowly accept these violence and darkness in the video world.
Obviously, "I Want Revenge" marks Park Chan-wook's entry into a new creative stage. He no longer stuck to the box office, but really began to boldly practice his film aesthetic style, thus opening the prelude to the most famous "revenge trilogy".
In 2003, Park Chan-wook continued to make a fuss about "revenge." Born from this is one of Park Chan-wook's best works so far, "Old Boy". It's a very magical Korean film, nesting the shell of King Oedipus on the basis of the suspense genre, and once again introducing the audience into a more crazy dream in the form of an allegory.
The brilliance of "Old Boys" lies in its super high technical level and creative film art and action design. The long, traverse shots of the hallway fight scenes, the Cult-style visual elements, the psychoanalytic sets in the interior scenes, and the smooth editing of the card point style all make this film a classic of the 21st century.
This film also gave the world a new understanding of Korean cinema. At the Cannes Film Festival that year, Park Chan-wook fully demonstrated the backbone of the new generation of Korean creators: no longer melodrama, tragicomedy, or social family films known for text narratives, Korean films can also be briefly detached from reality and turn to purely sophisticated images, in order to give the audience a visual feast.
For Park Chan-wook himself, "Old Boy" not only brought him the Jury Prize awarded by the Cannes Film Festival, but also won him a double harvest at the box office at home and abroad, and once became one of the hottest directors in the early 21st century.
Therefore, in 2004, he was invited to "compete" with Takashi Miike and Chen Guo on the same stage, and thus filmed one of the short films of "Sangen 2". In the face of two senior directors, Park Chan-wook is not inferior, continues to show off his talents, and his short film "Cutting Love" can even be said to be the best of the three.
In 2005, Park Chan-wook, who returned to his own creation, completed his new work "Gracious Gold", which ended the "Revenge Trilogy". Four masterpieces in four years, before people can lament the exuberance of its creative power, the film "Kind Gold" has brought a profound impact to global audiences at the Venice Film Festival.
The film "Gracious Gold" may be the one that best fits the revenge proposition in the "Revenge Trilogy". It revolves around Li Jinzi, a scarred woman, and once again presents her revenge and self-redemption in an allegorical theme. Compared with "Old Boys", the visual elements in this new work are more gorgeous, with a large number of flashbacks and a great sense of religious ritual, coupled with slow and neat mirrors, in addition to the madness of the revenge proposition, but also make the whole film full of solemnity.
After ending the "Revenge Trilogy", Park Chan-wook decided to try a new genre. He briefly broke away from the suspense genre and devoted himself to fantasy films. What came into being was 2006's "Robot Love". In this film, Park Chan-wook abandons the hatred between the characters, but instead lets the marginalized people of society huddle together to warm up, showing the mutual support and love between the "different".
But that doesn't mean he completely subverted his style. Under the warm narrative shell, there is still a dark and cruel Park Chan-wook style hidden inside. Behind the innocent and simple robot girl is the shadow of a painful childhood, the elegant hospital looks depressed and strange under the symmetrical composition, and the so-called hospital is the garbage disposal plant that society abandons at will for "aliens".
At the same time, the whimsical performances and action design also make the film look cult-flavored. Although it is not his best work, it is still recognized at the Berlin Film Festival, which is undoubtedly another level of encouragement for Park Chan-wook.
The four-year non-stop creation inevitably made Park Chan-wook feel exhausted. After completing "Robot Love", he took a short break and was active in short films worldwide with his younger brother Park Chan-kyung. It wasn't until 2009 that Park Chan-wook returned to feature films, bringing with him a new film, Bat.
Among Park Chan-wook's many creations, the film "Bat" is often the most overlooked work. In fact, this film is an important dividing line in Park Chan-wook's creative career. This time, Park Chan-wook, with his signature gorgeous audiovisual language and art design, launched a new proposition of "lust". It can be said that "Bat" has once again brought the audiovisual style in the "Revenge Trilogy" to the extreme, and it is also a milestone work that opens a new creative theme of "Post-Park Chan-wook Era".
The focus of the film "Bat" is no longer to make revenge based on "hate", but to go to another extreme field: "After encountering injustice and torture, the protagonists completely release themselves, pursue instincts, and enjoy pleasure." ”
Animal nature and humanity, faith and confusion, revenge and redemption, and even the identity puzzles of God and demons are all gorgeously integrated into it, and the scale of content has once again broken through the limits and reached new heights. Park Chan-wook used the film to declare: "The era of hate and revenge has passed, and the instincts of lust and human nature will take their place and become the core of Park Chan-wook's film world." ”
Even if Park Chan-wook remains changeable and self-breakthrough, he is still winning awards at the three major European and international film festivals, and there are still a large number of die-hard fans who are willing to pay for his "recklessness". This has also made Hollywood and the European and American film circles gradually realize Park Chan-wook's talent as an Asian director and unprecedented box office appeal. As a result, the European and American film circles extended an olive branch to Park Chan-wook.
In 2013, Park Chan-wook returned with his new work "Stoke" in the United States. In an exotic creative environment, Park Chan-wook's portrayal of human nature has taken it to a higher level. Park Chan-wook and his long-time photography partner Ding Jeong-hoon once again presented the audience with a rite of passage driven by the killing gene with a gorgeous camera.
This time, Park has elevated the relevance of character movements to narrative, no longer limiting ritual and visual metaphors. Accented by Clint Mansell's soundtrack, the body movements presented in the film are given a classical-style mystique.
The success of the film "Stoke" has allowed Park Chan-wook to be truly recognized by the European and American film markets, and has also opened the door to Hollywood for Park Chan-wook. In 2013, Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho participated in the production of "Snow Country Train", although the actual director of the film is Bong Joon-ho, but as a supervising producer, Park Chan-wook obviously has no less advice.
In "Snow Country Train", you can still see a lot of Park Chan-wook's shadow: "Cult-style visual elements, playing drama and moving mirrors, and narrative strategies of suspense genre films." "Due to the huge fan base of the original "Snow Country Train", coupled with the film's own card division and the excellence of the finished film, it has caused a huge response around the world. At this point, Park Chan-wook officially became the three giants of Korean cinema alongside Bong Joon-ho and Kim Ji-woon.
But Park Chan-wook did not covet fame and fortune at all, but returned to the Korean film industry and devoted himself to the creation of new films. At that time, Park Chan-wook, on the recommendation of the producer, read the novel "Finger Craftsman Picking" by British writer Sarah Waters, which is a "deception within deception" suspense novel wrapped in a gay shell. After Reading It, Park Chan-wook suddenly had the urge to adapt the novel into a movie.
After more than two years of meticulous polishing, Park Chan-wook returned to the public eye with her new work "Miss" in 2016. For Park Chan-wook, this is obviously the most challenging creative process. On the one hand, he has never dabbled in homosexual themes from the perspective of women before, and on the other hand, the localization of foreign novels in Korea is also a difficult problem. In the end, director Park Chan-wook succeeded in handing over an answer sheet with his obvious personal imprint.
In "Miss", Park Chan-wook abandons the flashbacks he used to use instead of interpolated and chapter-style narratives, enriching the narrative content to the extreme. At the same time, in order to avoid the flattening of the perspective of a single female emotional line, he also added a male-dominated "detective", so as not to lose the core of "deception in deception".
For the portrayal of female emotional dramas, Park Chan-wook continues the body action narrative strategy in "Stoke", giving various metaphors to the characters' actions while being attractive and seductive, and through the emphasis on suspense, to dilute the relatively difficult details of lesbian emotional dramas. At the same time, the film also has quite a few elements of Asian history.
The thorough localization of the British original story in Asia is very rare in previous Park Chan-wook films. Park Chan-wook's self-breakthrough made "Miss" one of the most talked about films at the Cannes Film Festival that year, and once again attracted great controversy after its global release.
After experiencing the arduous creation of "Miss", Park Chan-wook once again felt tired. When the public opinion was huge, he once again retreated from the mainstream film creation circle, and rested for two years before meeting the audience through the British drama "Female Drummer". At the same time, he has also deeply conceived a number of new film projects since 2018: "Axe", "Sympathizer", "Determination to Break Up". And "The Determination to Break Up" starring Tang Wei is the first new project he has achieved the fastest.
Throughout Park Chan-wook's entire creative career, it is full of suspense like his film works. Countless failures and setbacks have not easily crushed him, but have made him more determined. Park Chan-wook on the screen is bizarre and even controversial; In his creation and life, he is simple and sincere. In my mind, Park Chan-wook is like a treasure director in the Korean film crowd.
Hatred and desire, the combination of movement and stillness - Park Chan-wook's creative style
As the most stylized director in the Korean film industry, Park Chan-wook's creation is obviously difficult to summarize unilaterally, and usually, Park Chan-wook is most praised by fans for his personal branding of mirror-like and psychoanalytic art. But in fact, if Park Chan-wook does not have the packaging of myths and fables, so that the story is effectively "separated" from the real world, it may be difficult for the audience to accept the crazy image world he created with the hatred and desire in human nature.
Hatred is the motif of Park Chan-wook's film creation. Taking 2009's "Bat" as an important dividing line, before that, Park Chan-wook's creations mainly revolved around the "hate" of the characters; After this, most of them revolve around the "desire" of the character.
Hate and lust, although classified as two motifs in Park Chan-wook's films; But in fact, he will often intersperse the presentation to render the madness of the characters, and even as a suspenseful twist to stimulate the characters to "mutate" in order to complete the narrative level.
The film "Common Security Zone", as an early masterpiece of Park Chan-wook's personal style that has not yet been fully defined, is about outright hatred. In the context of the story, the division between the north and the south makes the people who are originally compatriots hostile to each other, which is a great hatred. And starting from the characters themselves, the accidents encountered by the four protagonists on the night of the incident slowly led to their deaths one by one, which is a small hatred.
It can be said that it is hate that drives the external narrative development of "Common Security Zone". And most of the time, we follow the neutral country investigator Sophie played by Lee Young-ae to see the whole event from the third perspective, with a kind of detective movie-style retrospective, to explore the deep brotherhood under the illusion of "hate" between the four protagonists.
In the "Revenge Trilogy", "hate" is still the main emotion in the work, but its impact on the characters themselves is obviously amplified a lot. In short, the hatred in the "Revenge Trilogy" does not stop at bringing pain and trauma to the characters, but goes further, plunging the characters into madness and extremes, thus triggering the audience's reflection on revenge and hatred.
Among them, "I Want Revenge" is the most extreme, every choice of all the main characters is forced by negative emotions, and because of the existence of hatred, their own choices are more and more deviated from their hearts, and eventually fall into the abyss of eternal disaster. What this film shows is the process of alienating hatred from people.
The boss played by Song Kanghao goes from a good person with social discourse to a blood-stained hand that finally loses control. In addition to the real cause of the financial crisis at the social level, another reason comes from the rationality that the characters themselves are gradually swallowed up by hatred. In the face of the tragedy encountered, the boss chooses to take the initiative to embrace hatred, revenge has long been out of the tragedy itself in the end, and the hatred in the heart gradually replaces reason and language. A character who originally had the right to speak in society finally gave up communication and expression and degenerated into a "aphasia".
The deaf and mute youth played by Shen Hejun is exactly the contrast with the role of the boss. Young people are originally the bottom of the "unable to speak" society, and in the face of accidents, as a low-level people who have no ability to live and self-protection, he can only passively choose to hate, and even suffer more harm in the whole process.
However, the young man still retains some goodwill in his nature, even if he is forced to be wrapped in the tide of hatred, he still insists on using painting to remind himself of his goodwill, and also tries to "talk" to the world. Around hate, Park Chan-wook sets up two diametrically opposed narrative lines of boss and youth, comprehensively presenting the process of hatred alienating people into beasts from both sides.
In "Old Boys", we see Park Chan-wook's more profound depiction of the grand proposition of human nature. The narrative in the film is divided into two chapters, the first hour is the first chapter, and the male protagonist Wu Daxiu is illegally imprisoned for 15 years. In the process, his fantasies and preparations for the revenge plan in the cell are presented to the audience in great detail.
In such a first chapter, it seems that Wu Daxiu has been wronged and has a reasonable reason for revenge. However, Park Chan-wook is clearly not going to make a revenge film, through the deliberate blurring of the real background, The harmony between Oh Dae-so and "Oedipus", hypnosis, exaggerated character modeling, and Oh Dae-so's superhero-style bridge section of knocking down a group of people with his bare hands, Park Chan-wook is deliberately conveying a message to the audience: "All of this is as unreal as a dream." ”
With the appearance of the "villain" Li You, the audience will find that our understanding of Wu Daxiu's background is incomplete, thus unveiling the second chapter of the film. Through flashbacks from the perspective of other characters, Park Begins to structure Woo's so-called revenge plan around desire. The heroic charm of reality disappears under the impact of fragmented memories. The more Wu Daxiu tried to get revenge, the more he appeared foolish and pathetic. The nesting of king Oedipus also slowly emerged in the process, eventually pointing to an unavoidable tragedy.
Park Chan-wook completely "teased" all the audiences, and the suspense of "Old Boy" is not at all why Wu Daxiu was imprisoned, but why Wu Daxiu was released to carry out "revenge". Through the transformation and interaction of hate and desire, Park Chan-wook realizes the reversal of the "revenge" subject. Wu Daxiu spent 15 years practicing revenge, but in the end it was Li You's real revenge. In the end, in order to seek self-redemption, Wu Daxiu had to bow down to Li Youzhen and beg for mercy. In this way, Park Chan-wook boldly completes the deconstruction of the traditional revenge routine.
The allegorical narrative around hate and desire is practiced in a more fantastical way in Bat. As a vampire movie, "Bat" directly announces the separation from reality from the theme itself. Like the English translation of the film's title, Bat is faithfully revolved around desire from beginning to end.
When desire becomes the main axis, hate becomes the variable. Although Park Chan-wook generously acknowledges that everyone is a slave to desire, he still shows the difference by portraying the degree to which different characters blend with the variable "hate". Also a vampire, the priest experienced a strong self-struggle after sucking human blood, always refusing to hurt the living.
As the heroine, Taiju has no guilt about pursuing bestiality. The reason is precisely because of the tragic environment in which Taiju grew up from childhood to adulthood, which caused her to be full of hatred for the world around her. And hate, for Taiju's alienation of the process of pursuing desire, is also becoming the biggest suspense in the whole film, pushing the whole story to the climax of the trial.
The film "Miss" is the culmination of Park Chan-wook's allegorical narrative of hate. The three-part narrative of chapters, at first glance, is no different from the narrative structure of other mainstream commercial films; But in fact, the arrangement of these three acts is exactly the three turns around hatred and desire in the film, each of which has an independent narrative perspective of different characters.
In the first act, the audience learns that Shuji is a liar, and through the special introduction of Count Fujiwara, she aims to lure Miss Hideko and trick her into a lunatic asylum to achieve the purpose of usurping Miss's property, which is the first layer of desire in the character. However, in the second act of the film, the variables quietly appear, and a spark of love is sparked between Shuji and Miss Xiuzi, which is the second layer of desire in the character.
In the third act, there is another reversal, and Park Chan-wook stages a deceptive identity replacement for the audience: Hideko turns to the Earl of Fujiwara and sends Shu-hee to a mental hospital as a young lady. Xiuzi "betrayed" Shuji's feelings, but instead imposed her fate on Shuji. Here, she also completed the sinking of the identity of Miss Hideko's role, making her a liar who is no different from Shuji.
This also makes the truth of the final climactic clip even more moving. Park Chan-wook completes the subversion of the self in the end, he denies all reversals, and in turn tells the audience that the emotional line between Sook-hee and Miss Hideko is consistent, and they are lovers and partners who generously acknowledge the convergence of desires and join forces in search of freedom. In contrast, the count and uncle, two men who plotted a conspiracy, killed each other and betrayed each other.
In a sense, Park Chan-wook completed the subversion of the self of the "Revenge Trilogy" period, and he used the reversal of "Miss" to provide fans with a new narrative possibility based on gay, female perspectives. These characters are allowed to acknowledge their desires, seek empathy, and slowly take control of their narrative discourse, rather than being humiliated as they were before. Park Chan-wook's narrative arrangement of hate and desire finally got rid of the fixed framework of "loneliness" and found a more dramatic tension and polysemantic expression of desire.
The narrative around the hatred and desire of the characters is the core of Park Chan-wook's creation; The exquisite audiovisual language is Park Chan-wook's consistent packaging method for the core of creation. The personal branding of the mirror and the psychoanalytic art are the important factors that Park Chan-wook can be unanimously sought after by fans in different parts of the world.
From a macroscopic point of view, the "combination of motion and static" of Park Chan-wook's lens language is an unconventional imaging strategy. Motion shots are used in most general narrative sections, while still or macro motion shots are often used for emotional rendering in important sections. Park Chan-wook's usual audiovisual style, under the tone of gorgeous exaggeration and combination of dynamic and static, often tends to change based on the differences in works.
The careful design of the scheduling of the film "Old Boys" makes it an excellent visual film. Obviously, it is the best example of imagery, and it is also the source of inspiration for the vast majority of Park's works.
The film opens with a scene in which Wu Daxiu disappears, and Wu Daxiu and his friends exchange phone calls in the phone booth. Park chan-wook chose to rotate the camera around the character and the phone booth. When the characters in the phone booth alternate, the audience can still see Wu Daxiu in the background, but when the camera rotates 180 degrees, Wu Daxiu quietly disappears.
This kind of circular shaking shooting method also appears often in the general narrative. It happens whenever Wu Daxiu loses control, goes into a frenzy, or presents shocking information. This technique also appears in "Kind Gold" in a different form of deepening the vertical depth; In Hollywood movies, such shooting methods are often used to set off the hero's image in a specific climactic scene.
At the same time, because a large number of action scenes in "Old Boys" are mixed in the general narrative, this long moving shot has become the most basic narrative unit. Park Chan-wook chose to cut these long shots back and forth with the help of momentum or scene construction to form long paragraphs that combine the characteristics of long shots and editing forms.
This approach runs through the general narrative of Park Chan-wook films such as Old Boy, allowing Park to unscrupulously capture scenes by moving the camera without thinking too much about the impact of editing. Looking at Park Chan-wook's many long shots, we find that he loves to start shooting in small scenes, and then let the camera move or zoom farther away and shake around to shoot other parts of the same scene, revealing information to the audience in this form and presenting the inner entanglement of the characters.
In a specific climactic passage, Park Chan-wook turns to make the camera "quiet", mostly focusing on the environment with fixed shots that are close to freeze frame, or small scenes focusing on the characters, or large scenes focusing on the environment. For example, in "Old Boys", Wu Daxiu comes to the top of Li Youzhen's company. After the fierce fight, the truth behind the revenge is revealed. The camera turns to focus on the faces of Li Youzhen and Wu Daxiu, which shows the changes in the characters' looks in detail, but also brings a strong sense of visual oppression to the audience, and achieves a further sublimation of the visual climax itself with the anti-climactic lens language.
However, the reason why Park Chan-wook can be greatly freely scheduled in the space is precisely because of his meticulous design of each scene. When it comes to scene design, it is inseparable from the appreciation of Park Chan-wook's film art style. Park Chan-wook, a philosophy graduate, has a great passion for psychoanalysis, and he apparently brings this passion back to filmmaking.
In his concept of cinema, characters and space are often one. Characters can change space through action, and space can in turn reflect on the character's characteristics. Through the infiltration of a large number of spiritual symbol elements at the artistic level, Park Chan-wook uses the film space to realize the visual externalization of the characters' inner emotions and external situations, and finally form a narrative that promotes space.
Still taking "Old Boy" as an example, several rooms where Wu Daxiu is located are obviously full of spiritual symbolism, and they are all wallpapers made of complex patterns, broken furniture, and dim lighting, all reflecting the brokenness and depression of Wu Daxiu's heart wrapped in such a space.
The difference between the personal images of Wu Daxiu and Li Youzhen also directly reflects the disparity in the status of this revenge. Unlike Li Youzhen's decent image from beginning to end, Wu Daxiu has experienced a process of change in his personal image from madness to decency, which from the perspective of his personal narrative is a redemption of self-sanity.
However, the contrast with Li Youjin in the macro narrative is full of irony. Hinted at by the fate of Oedipus, Li Youzhen's handsome yoga posture in his office indicates that he is the symbol of the sun god Apollo: the handsome man who reveals to Oedipus the truth about his "killing father and marrying mother" to Oedipus. Psychoanalytic scene design divides the status of the characters into highs and lows, and as a noble fate, it always hangs above the film's narrative, reversing any attempt to change the tragedy.
But Park Chan-wook also left a subtle warmth for his protagonists. The red color throughout "Old Boy" is a sexual allusion to all the characters in this tragedy. Red appears as a background color in all of Wu Daxiu and Meidu's love nest, and almost all the main characters have worn red costumes.
Just as the commonality of bright red is, all people use the same past, the same present, and eventually step into the same tragedy. But the red vitality also indicates the liberation or rebirth of the characters after the tragedy. Born as ugly as a beast, it also has the right to choose its own life and death.
The combination of dynamic and static video style and psychoanalytic art design became Park Chan-wook's unique secret after filming "Old Boy". Whether it is the interpretation of the entanglement of human nature and divinity in "Kind of Gold", the decipherment of the labyrinth space by the oppressive long shot in "Bat", or the reflection of the character image transformation on the living situation in "Miss", Park Chan-wook has invariably built a new world of light and shadow based on this set of image strategies, which is already an exclusive creative mode.
In "The Determination to Break Up", Park Chan-wook, who returned to the film world after five years, has also quietly changed his creative style. On the basis of the hateful narrative motif and the audiovisual style of combining dynamic and static, he boldly added a more novel film concept, and based on the "determination" in the emotional relationship of the characters, with a variety of unconventional lens language, starting from the "dislocation" of language, evolving into an unexpected meta-film form to interpret the "dislocation".
In "The Determination to Break Up", Park Chan-wook's distancing strategy is already different. It's hard to see all sorts of fictional elements from the beginning of the story to be sure that this is a story that won't happen in the real world.
On the contrary, this new work opens in the daily life of an almost realistic depiction, but instead tears the crack between it and the real world in its signature combination of movement and static.
Park Chan-wook's "combination of motion and static" is an unconventional imaging strategy. In his works, motion shots are often used in general narrative bridges, while still or macro motion shots are often used for emotional rendering in climactic moments, which are essentially anti-genres based on ensuring gorgeous visual effects.
However, "The Determination to Break Up" is no longer limited to smooth and gorgeous, and a large number of cross-axis lens scheduling and cross-scene editing have weakened the overall refinement of the image. When shooting people, the selection of unconventional angles and the deliberate disruption of spatial relations also hinder the normal development of visual logic in the viewing process.
Obviously, Park Chan-wook completely reversed his thinking in "The Determination to Break Up", no longer narrating first, but by making the image "rough" to declare the separation from the real world, and creating a distancing effect with visual allegory.
At the same time, the extensive use of Hitchcock-style zoom lenses and jump-cut editing, which led to leaps and bounds between scenes and the incoherence of the characters' movements, made the whole film more and more away from the words "linear" and "smooth".
In terms of perception, the audience seems to be watching a not-so-complete videotape in the form of a pull film. And it is at the same time that this strange perception is established, and the concept of "dislocation" throughout the film is also born.
The dislocation in the film is both a confusion of the order of time and space at the editing level, and may also be the dislocation of the relationship between the characters at the narrative level. Just as the audience has experienced Park Chan-wook's films as always, when chaos and unreality appear, the follow-up will inevitably greet the audience with a richer layer and a greater amount of information.
In the glorious beginning of Korean cinema, the most out-of-line and rebellious Park Chan-wook was undoubtedly one of the brightest superstars. Park Chan-wook is like a fanatic of the film, and his imagination and firm attitude towards the dialectical criticism of human beings make it easy for him to have creative inspiration and devote himself to the film.
In addition to his genius, his steady and persistent thinking on film aesthetics and the strict requirements for high standards of film technology prove that Park Chan-wook is more worthy of the reputation of a "film craftsman".
Today's Park Chan-wook has strengthened his determination to create after a break: try to get out of the comfort zone. Whether it is the creation of the English script or the new cooperation with Park Hae-il and Tang Wei in the new work "The Determination to Break Up", it shows Park Chan-wook's enduring love and enterprising for creation.
He seems to be getting closer and closer to the realm of all free-will creation, and it is inevitable to look forward to it, in the future, where will the old boy's fanatical determination of the film be pinned?