Author: FAN Xiaoqing (Associate Professor, School of Drama, Film and Television, Communication University of China, Consultant of Busan International Film Festival)
This year marks the 30th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and the ROK. 20 years ago, when Korean film and television dramas were mentioned, Chinese audiences often commented: "The traditional oriental story of crying and laughing is not ugly." "Before the new century, Korean film and television often gave people a conservative and sad movie-watching experience, as if it was very different from today's avant-garde and diverse Korean stories. In fact, since Hollywood opened the door of the Korean film market in 1988 on the occasion of the Seoul Olympic Games, Korean films have a sense of crisis of life and death, and have developed rapidly after two generations of unremitting efforts.
"Love Homecoming" poster profile picture
From the 1990s to the present 30 years, Korean films have grown from unknown and unknown pawns, from box office slumps and screen aesthetic conservative single backward elements, to the representatives of video culture invited by major international film festivals, and the flowers inside and outside the walls are fragrant, not only the local film box office is hot, repelling the cultural offensive of Hollywood, but also quickly establishing a creative content industry chain, through self-empowerment, so that the whole field of culture echoes continuously.
In fact, more than 30 years ago, south Korea's screen content was lackluster, mainly relying on two kinds of movies, one is a popular melodrama with poor women as the protagonist, and the other is an action movie with a rough man as the protagonist. Both the content and the form were old-fashioned, and the production of domestic films in exchange for Hollywood imported film indicators was the only motivation for Chungmuro producers to make movies at that time. Chungmuro, a central street in Seoul's bustling old town, has become synonymous with the Korean film industry because of its presence of film companies, and is also a spatial area that symbolizes the history of Korean cinema. Therefore, "Chungmuro aesthetics" can be said to be the reference to the old-fashioned and monotonous korean traditional film style, and it is also the historical foundation of the high-profile "Hallyuwood" cultural aesthetics today.
I. "Chungmuro Aesthetics"
Korean Peninsula cinema started late, and it was only in 1919 that attempts to create films began under the watchful eye of the Japanese colonists. Therefore, film technology and narrative style are difficult to get rid of Japanese influences. At that time, the "new school drama" was popular on the Japanese stage, that is, the story of the conflict between the rich and the poor, the upper and the lower, the strong and the weak, which was rich in strong tragedy. Introduced to the Korean Peninsula around 1916, the new school of dramas, because of the poignant and tragic theme expression and sad and even exaggerated emotional settings, coincided with the mainstream emotional tendencies of colonial resentment, so it soon became a dramatic means for colonial people to express their inner sorrows and obtain emotional catharsis.
The two major historical cards of the colonial period, Luo Yunkui's "Arirang" (1926) and Lee Gui-hwan's "The Ferry Without a Master" (1932), are both "new" moody silent film classics. The former tells the story of Ying Zhen, a progressive college student who resisted Japanese colonial rule, was beaten by the colonial authorities because of his participation in the "March 1st Movement", and when he returned to the countryside, he found that his sister was coveted by the dog legs of the colonists, so he stabbed the invaders with a sickle with a sickle at the critical moment.
"Brother and Sister's Summer Night" poster information picture
The latter is also about the revolt of the oppressed in desperation. Haruzo, a shipwright who depends on his daughter and makes a living by ferrying on the Han River, is unemployed because the Japanese built an iron bridge across the river, and at the same time, the evil eyes of Japanese builders also focus on their daughter. One stormy night, after Haruzo hacked the wolf who violated his daughter with an axe, he slashed at the railroad tracks with an axe in rage, when the roaring train greeted him... The old shipwright's resistance and the college student Yingzhen are the same, both of which are desperate bets in the midst of indignation, and even do not hesitate to end up together. This intense mourning, derived from the oppression of reality, triggered a fierce emotional resonance among colonial audiences at the time.
Arirang and The Ferry Without Owners are recognized as early film masterpieces that reflect national reality. They invariably use a family tragedy story as a carrier to express the strong sense of resistance of the colonial people. Luo Yunkui and Li Guihuan, who pioneered this narrative tradition, are undoubtedly the sharp catchers and leaders of the public's emotions, and they also laid the foundation for the aesthetic tendency of the national "sadness" film.
After the end of World War II, the Korean Peninsula gained national independence. After 1948, Korean cinema soon ushered in its renaissance. The 1960s has been called the first golden age in the history of Korean cinema by Korean film scholars, as film production and audience numbers were unprecedentedly bumper. Although chungmuro had several big directors with very different styles at that time, and the genre narrative was becoming more and more mature, the new popular drama flourished in the 60s, according to statistics, as many as 784 films, accounting for more than half of the entire 60s film production. In 1969, South Korea, with a population of only 31.53 million, had a total audience of 170 million people, and the annual production of films also set a record of 229 films, of which 103 were new popular dramas. It can be seen that the suffering of women and the tearful new sentiment are still favored by the mainstream audience at that time. And for this golden age, it is the representative of the most popular family theme new school popular drama in Korean history - "Hate Again".
This film, which is also translated as "Love Me Again", tells the story of kindergarten teacher Hui Ying who falls in love with her husband, President Jiang, and gives birth to an illegitimate child, and has no regrets about love. Because it is highly sought after by middle-aged female fans, the sequels of the film continue to be released in four years from 1968 to 1971, each of which makes people cry and cry, and the box office continues to be popular. It shows that the sadness and sadness of the new school of emotions and the more abusive and joyful have an irreplaceable position in the hearts of Korean mass film fans. Mr. Lee Young-il, South Korea's most authoritative film historian, once pointed out the reason for the long-term prosperity of the new popular drama in South Korea: "They are based on sacrifice, so that people can neither see hope nor wait for the result, but can only entangle with each other." This sentiment just alludes to a certain tendency and stereotype of the Korean public psychology at that time. ”
In the 1970s and 1980s, South Korea's economy grew by leaps and bounds, and the Miracle of the Han River gradually led to a post-war country that was extremely poor. However, with the popularity of television and other reasons, the unenterprising Korean movies have increasingly shown a shabby scene of the end of the road. The sluggish Chungmuro entered the decadent era, and the filmmakers hastily changed the coat of the new popular drama and continued to earn cheap tears by selling misery and strange feelings. "Pillows and Fists" can be a brief summary of the Korean screen content of this stage.
The new popular dramas of this period were later jokingly called "waitress movies" by critics, mainly targeting the groups of foreign sisters who went to the city to work, telling that they were unloaded in the bustling wine alley tea shops in the tide of economic development, and the neon lights reflected the bitterness, unbearableness and struggle of their physical livelihood. Representative works include Lee Chang-ho's Hometown of the Stars (1974) and Kim Ho-sun's Young-ko's The Heyday of Young-ko (1975). "Xingxing" represents countless ordinary people, and "Hideko" is the most common name for country girls in that era. Although their faces and backgrounds are different, they are all tricked into the city in order to make money, and they begin a routine life of maid-maid-female worker-wine-selling spring. Occasionally, there are lucky people like Hideko, who are "rescued" by green plum bamboo horses after being humiliated by life, ushering in the spring of wild lilies, but more people are infinitely sinking.
The social psychology of escapism mixed with the exuberant demand for entertainment after the material development, which caused the proliferation of sentimentalism on the screen in that period, and also reflected the collective psychological characteristics of rapid economic development but emotional repression and loss of faith. "Waitress movies" have become a special category in the history of Korean cinema, and have been in theaters for decades.
"August Photo Gallery" poster information picture
II. The transformation of traditional aesthetics
Following the characteristics of the times, the new school of stories are also constantly changing on the screen, but the conservative gender view, exaggerated tragic color and popular drama tendency with slight erotic hints have gradually become the three axes of Chungmuro drama films, and the empathy mode of appealing to sadness and catharsis has gradually become the public's demand and habit of dramatic aesthetics.
After the Seoul Olympics, in the face of Hollywood's attack armed to the teeth, the old and monotonous Korean movies once collapsed. In the early 1980s, South Korea's local film market share was still more than 40%, but in 1993 it fell off a cliff to 15.9%; In contrast, the annual import volume of foreign films jumped sharply from 27 in 1985 to 347 in 1993. On the brink of life and death of national films, it is undoubtedly the mission of a new generation of Korean filmmakers to learn from Hollywood's genre narrative strategies to tell the stories around them, and to enhance the aesthetics of the era of image expression while catering to the national film tradition.
The 1999 spy blockbuster "Life and Death Spy Change" turned out to be the most symbolic historical event in the rise of Korean local films, because it defeated the Titanic, which swept the global box office. But if this is the only case and everyone pursues the "blockbuster effect", the Korean film market can only be happy for a while. Therefore, finding a breakthrough in the aesthetic tradition of Korean films, grasping the emotional distress and communication troubles of modern people, is the reason why small and medium-sized productions can continue to set off a small climax of screen culture. Among them, "August Photo Studio" (1998) directed by Heo Qinhao is the representative of this new style of opening the era, and it is also the most successful variation of Korean traditional family theme popular drama. Film critic Lee Dong-jin said: "In the past 20 years, the highest achievement of Korean melodrama is still Heo Qinhao. Another film critic, Kim Yong-jin, wrote: "In order to reject the tears of popular dramas, it has opened up a new realm of expression of sadness." "As they say, "August Photo Gallery" has contributed to making breakthrough changes in the most traditional genres and promoting the modernization of traditional aesthetics in one fell swoop.
The film tells a modern warm story of mourning but not hurting, both father and son love, but also the love of men and women, but they are warm and moist, just like the spring wind and autumn rain, leaving people with sentimental and timeless memories of the change of seasons. Although the plot of the film is still a setting of life and death, it is completely different from the tragic rendering of the bitter wind and rain that once prevailed on the Korean screen, so it is eye-catching.
The owner of the prairie photo studio, Liu Zhengyuan (Han Seok-gyu), knows that his time is short, but he does not want to wait for death in his hospital bed, but commutes to work like a normal person, attends various small gatherings of friends as promised, and secretly bids farewell to relatives and friends one by one. Unexpectedly, one day, Jin Dolly (Shen Yinhe) of the traffic police team broke into his quiet life in order to flush the evidence photos of illegal parking. But time can't wait for love, and Zhengyuan, who is ill, has to leave Dolly's world. Seeing the closed windows and doors of the photo studio, the owner who had been talking and laughing was gone, and Dolly, who was immersed in thoughts and incomprehensions, was a little difficult to let go, so she threw stones at night and smashed the glass of the photo studio. The stars shifted, Zhengyuan had long since passed away, and his elderly father had to take over the photo studio. One day Dolly passed by here again, and in the photo display window, she saw herself smiling that summer...
The hot screening of "August Photo Studio" with mourning but not sadness and long afterglow quietly opened up a new world of Korean drama films. The traditional new sentiment is no longer the only on-screen endorsement of tragedy, and the genre expression of Korean films has begun a journey of aesthetic reshaping.
III. Family films of the new century
With the advent of the new century, the narrative methods of family melodrama focusing on family affection and love have become increasingly flexible and diverse on the Korean screen. On the one hand, the aesthetics of Korean films are becoming more concise and condensed, on the other hand, genre grafting is also more comfortable, and the imagination space of existing genres is infinitely expanded. While the audience experience is diversified, the influence of local film brands is more deeply rooted in the hearts of the people.
2002's "Love Homecoming" is the second feature film directed by Li Tingxiang, and like its debut film "Next to the Zoo is an Art Museum", it is also a "small movie" with only two protagonists, but "Love Homecoming" no longer focuses on love, but depicts the affection of grandchildren.
In order to find a new job, the unemployed single mother had to take her 7-year-old son Xiangyu back to the small mountain village of her hometown several times and entrust it to her mother who lived alone. The 77-year-old grandmother was dumb and poor, and could not satisfy her grandson who grew up in the city, so a tragicomedy of old and young people told by chickens and ducks began to appear. The mountain road is rough, the little naughty boy finally waited for the old grandmother who walked half a mountain road on a hunchback at dusk, and the previous fear, the surprise and hunger at this time attacked him... Xiang Yu's nonsense and willfulness are irritating, but grandma never cares and tries her best to fulfill her grandson's wishes. Accompanied by his grandmother, Xiang Yu became more and more accustomed to the materially poor mountain village life, made friends, and began to teach his grandmother to recognize. But his mother in the city finally found a job, and the day he returned to the city was approaching.
This simple and simple film with a production fee of only 1.5 billion won was a hit on the Korean screen in 2002, and the box office was well received and awarded, once again refreshing the audience's imagination of tepid family movies. It is said that there are only 8 families in the small mountain village where the film was filmed, and the 77-year-old grandmother was born and raised there. She and the 7-year-old naughty boy are both ordinary actors, all relying on the sense of truth to touch people's hearts, so the humble emotions are particularly real and natural. What is even more valuable is that the grandmother has no lines in the whole film and completes the touching and profound performance in the most restrained way.
"Love Homecoming" is also the first box office work of a Korean female director, Lee Ting-heung expresses the affection of grandchildren with a natural and delicate narrative technique, and successfully crosses the barriers of language, culture and time to become a timeless and moving masterpiece.
2010's Happy Family (also translated as Happy Ghost Upper Body) is a classic new classic that borrows from other film genres to complete the narrative of family relationships. Mention ghost films, often reminiscent of family hatred, especially the enmity between stepmother and stepdaughter. The film, on the other hand, borrows the folklore of the ghost upper body and tells the cute story of the inseparable family.
The unfortunate ghost protagonist Shang Wan did not do anything, and even several suicides were unsuccessful. When he opened his eyes in confusion, he not only found that he had not died, but also became a psychic who could cross the yin and yang realm. In order to drive away the ghosts stuck around as soon as possible, the frustrated Shang Wan had to agree to their requests one by one to help them fulfill their long-cherished wishes. Seeing that he was finally able to "go on the road" quietly after suffering "Sweet", Shang Wan suddenly remembered the last fragment of his parents' life when he was a child. It turned out that he had never been abandoned, and his family had always guarded him in their own way...
The film is a dark horse at the end of 2010, and the hilarious bridge sections and warm details are at the bottom, making this tortuous and interesting "ghost film" highly sought after. In addition, Che Taixian alone plays five corners (when the ghost is on the upper body), and the characters of different ages and genders are shown to be exquisite, which can be seen greatly. Of course, a group of supporting actors also collectively shine, so that the audience can immerse themselves in it, laughing naturally and crying earnestly. Therefore, this small film that uses ghost stories to express warm emotions and comedy can beat many first-line movies in the Christmas slot and become an annual box office miracle.
The hit "Happy Family" brought the family story on the Korean screen back to life. Its colloquial and natural genre not only broadens the narrative framework of traditional genres, but also allows Hollywood to see more possibilities, and director Chris Columbus has reportedly obtained the remake rights to the film, starring Adam Sanders.
Another movie worth mentioning is the 2020 film "Brother and Sister's Summer Night". It is like an iced watermelon on a summer afternoon, seemingly ordinary but making people feel "healed", full of small blessings in the plain.
Yuzhu and Dong Ba followed their father back to their long-lost grandfather's house for summer vacation, which was an old-fashioned two-story house with a courtyard and a balcony. Grandpa's health is not very good, Dad's business is not very good, and it just so happens that there are problems in my aunt's married life, so three generations of the family rarely get together. Summer vacation days are idle and mediocre, if cold noodle grilled pork watermelon cold beer creates a happy and harmonious side of the big family, then the runaway mother, the seriously ill grandfather, the inexplicable little boyfriend and the uncle who is not a tool are the other side of the bleakness of real life.
"Sister and Brother's Summer Night" accurately outlines the ordinary and timeless daily atmosphere with ordinary and kind brushstrokes. The poster's phrase "Have we ever quarreled?" is the finishing touch, suggesting a pattern of family interactions that can quickly be forgotten, although occasionally painful. Different from ordinary Korean films with a strong sense of rhythm, the film mostly uses fixed lenses to shoot, and the stable and smooth picture creates the ordinary beauty of family life and the emotional stability between family members. Even if there are various unexpected bad events in the process of unfolding the story, the overall flow of the film is quiet and calm, just like the unsatisfactory vignettes in real life, which is inevitably heart-wrenching, but people always have to learn to accept and slowly reconcile with it.
"Sister and Brother's Summer Night" is the feature film debut of South Korean post-90s female director Yin Danfei, which has won numerous awards since its premiere at the Busan International Film Festival in October 2019, including the 2020 Rotterdam International Film Festival Future Award and the 2022 Korean Film Directors Association Annual Leap Award. Yoon Dan-fei's calm narrative rhythm and capture of the beauty of a quiet life and timeless family love have greatly amazed critics and have even been called "another new discovery in the Korean film industry". The film was not only selected as the second place film of the year in 2020 by the authoritative Korean film magazine "Cine21", but also included in the list of the top ten films of 2010-2021 by director Bong Joon-ho, which is on a par with the works of famous artists such as Jia Zhangke, Hong Changxiu, and David Finch.
"Summer Night of Sisters and Brothers" and "August Photo Studio" more than 20 years ago are both plain and warm family stories, with a clear and shallow joy and sadness. In 1998, South Korea was in the midst of the Asian financial crisis, and 2020 was the most severe moment of the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, these two films that show warmth bring more and more emotional comfort to people under the harsh external environment.
There are many classic korean family movies, such as "Marathon" in 2005, "The Way Home" and "Aging Family" in 2013, "Strange Her" and "International Market" in 2014, "Little Forest" in 2018, etc., each of which is unique and interesting, comforting the audience's emotions at the same time, but also constantly enriching the genre structure and image expression of the subject.
In 2020, the new crown pneumonia epidemic has almost stopped the global film industry, countless "blockbusters" have withdrawn in panic, and streaming media film and television content has become popular for a time, in this unprecedented screen crisis, it has made more creators think about the classic proposition of "what is a movie". In its 2020 "Top Ten Films" list, the French authoritative film magazine "Film Handbook" voted for two votes for the same director in Asia, South Korean director Hong Changxiu. His "The Woman Who Ran Away" and "The Riverside Hotel," one exploring open marriages and the other showing delicate paternity, ranked second and sixth in the top ten films, respectively. Coincidentally, "Minari", a "small film" about immigrant families, was also recognized in 2020, not only winning the 36th Sundance Film Festival Award and the 78th Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film, but also the 93rd Academy Awards also awarded the Best Supporting Actress Award to Yin Ruzhen, the actor who played the mother in the film. It can be seen that small films focusing on family relations have once again shown vigorous vitality at the moment, and the ever-changing newness of this theme deserves the attention and practice of more creators.
Guangming Daily ( 2022-09-01 13 edition)
Source: Guangming Network - Guangming Daily