BONG Joon-ho

Author

Preface

In 2008, it feels as though a cycle in Korean film is coming to a close. This means that Korean film is currently experiencing something of a crisis. Around the late 1990s the renaissance of Korean cinema began and was propelled by the creativity, dynamic quality and diverse experimental spirit of the young cinephiles who appeared en masse during this time. Master of Korean film IM Kwon-taek was receiving attention and awards at international film festivals, and directors representing Korean auteurism, including HONG Sang-soo and KIM Ki-duk, were on the rise. The time also saw the appearance of a group of young directors who practiced commercial auteurism—engraving their own visual styles and tastes within genre film. PARK Chan-wook led the way, and other directors such as BONG Joon-ho, KIM Jee-woon and RYOO Seung-wan developed as a leading group, breathing new energy into Korean cinema while maintaining friendships with one another.

But this renaissance has recently shown signs of fading. The film industry has been withering away at a fast rate, and cinematic diversity (auteurist film, polished genre film, independent film, etc.) is also being shaken. But it is still unclear if this crisis is a temporary phenomenon, resulting from the economic stagnation recently taking place in Korea, or if a renaissance period is really coming to an end. Within this uncertainty, many Korean directors have had to concern themselves with methods of survival within the industry rather than with authorial ambitions and to fret about the production possibilities for their next works. What is certain is that, in the current situation of Korean film, it has become more difficult to discover new counterparts to the stunning new directors who rocked critics and audiences in the mid- to late 1990s or to witness existing directors making the leap to join the ranks of auteurist filmmakers.

Within this trend in Korean film, BONG Joon-ho’s case may be the most exceptional. He made his debut with Barking Dogs Never Bite in 2000, at the very time when a crowd of talented Korean newcomer directors were appearing on the scene. But at that time, he was merely the most ignored of the directors making their debuts, and one of the directors who failed the most commercially. It was the complete opposite of the situation that occurred when his 1994 short film Incoherence received the strongest reception and support out of all Korean independent short films released at that time. Thus, while a number of his colleagues were enjoying sweet success with their debuts, he was sinking deep into failure.

But the situation changed. In 2003, BONG completed Memories of Murder, a thriller based on a real-life unsolved serial killer case from recent Korean history. Already noted as an outstanding script and highly anticipated genre film from its screenwriting stages, the film reestablished the director’s position in Korean film upon completion. It drew 6 million viewers to theaters in Korea alone, received awards at various film festivals, and introduced BONG’s name overseas in countries like the United States, France and Japan. Three years later, he excited Korean society once again with a monster film, the origins of which cannot even be found in Korean film history. The Host was a sci-fi/monster/disaster film pitting a monster lurking in the Han River against a poor family. But it would in some regard be insufficient to limit this film’s success merely to cinematic terms. The film, released in 2006, set a box office record with 13 million viewers—close to one third of the population of South Korea at the time—becoming a kind of social phenomenon. It also marked the broadest overseas distribution for any Korean film. As a result, BONG Joon-ho became almost unique in present-day Korean film in his ability to break away from commercial and creative pressures and realize the kind of films he wants to, when he wants to.

After the experience of Barking Dogs Never Bite, it appears that the director clearly came to understand what he had to do to relate the story he wanted to tell in the way most suited to the public, yet most in line with his own cinephile impulses. Memories of Murder and The Host were both major box office successes in Korean film, but at the same time, they were films that looked upon the wounds and failures of modern Korean history in the most perceptive and challenging ways. With Memories of Murder, he evoked an unsolved serial murder case through the dark structural violence of the military dictatorship in 1980s South Korea, and in The Host, he expressed intense cynicism and scorn toward public authorities and the United States, which has a close-knit relationship with Korean politics. At the same time, the two films reveal the genre fascination that most captivated the director himself and show the pleasure of transgressing genre order with the director’s own intuitive and creative power.

This book is the result of efforts to reach a deeper and broader understanding of the director BONG Joon-ho, who has been the subject of a great deal of popular interest and attention in Korean society in spite of his relatively short filmography of three feature films. The interview, carried out at length over several meetings, was conducted right before filming started on his current project, Mother. With his first film in three years ahead of him, he occasionally appeared very tired and sensitive, but he did not hesitate to give a more logical and concrete explanation of his films than in any other situation. The actual interviews in many cases were discussions centered on certain concepts or themes running through all of his previous films, but the information presented in this book is arranged by film. They also include detailed and descriptive information on the filming process for each work and the perspective of the director on controversies or questions that arose at the time of each film’s debut.

Additionally, four essays are presented on the cinematic world of BONG Joon-ho. First, there is my analysis of the authorial codes and style running through the entirety of BONG’s filmography. The second was written by film critic HUH Moon-yung and attempts a deep analysis of his biggest successes, Memories of Murder and The Host, in terms of the interrelationship of genre and local politics. The remaining two essays were written for the French film journals Cahiers du Cinéma and Positif and have been reprinted here to show perspectives on BONG’s films in countries outside of English-speaking world. Antoine Thirion’s Dark Reflections of the Past is a piece about Memories of Murder that was printed in Cahiers du Cinéma and clearly shows the way in which BONG Joon-ho was introduced to French critical circles, while A Movie of Four Tails, printed in Positif, contains a clear explanation of The Host’s contextual environment by Adrien Gombaud, a critic with a deep understanding of Korean film. It is my hope that this book will provide as much aid as possible in understanding the director BONG Joon-ho and the world of his films.

On the Director

Part I

Mourning and Anamnesis

By JUNG Ji-youn

New Wave

In 1995, as the 100th anniversary of the birth of film was being celebrated in Europe, Korean cinema was also experiencing a special moment. Just in that year, an unprecedented number of weekly and monthly magazines specializing in film were appearing in Korea, and the ability of these magazines to capture the public became undeniable. Cine 21, a film weekly in excess of 150 pages, boasted the highest sales in the Korean magazine market, while the monthly KINO, which had formed a journalistic relationship with France’s Cahiers du Cinéma and Positif and Great Britain’s Sight and Sound, was selling more than 30,000 copies a month in this tiny country. The publication of film journals would continue steadily on through 2000; just a few years later, more than five film magazines with 150 to 200 pages of articles about film were being made in Korea every week. A few of the magazines, such as Cine 21 and KINO, were printing not simple film information or gossip pieces, but fairly in-depth, almost scholarly film criticism, and the public responded.¹

As was vividly revealed in the situation of film magazines, a strange atmosphere was forming in Korea in the mid-1990s. Just a few years before, in the 1980s, Korea cinema was going through a qualitative and quantitative dark age, with no real film history to speak of. There had been an appearance of Korean New Wave directors such as PARK Kwang-su and JANG Sun-woo, but they were unable to capture popular interest. Commercial films from Hollywood dominated the theaters, while Korean films were almost totally ignored. Then, in 1995, the 100th anniversary of the birth of film became an important event in Korea as well, and an atmosphere of cinematic culture began to form among the public soon after, centering on film magazines. Some film critics enjoyed popularity equal to that of directors and actors, and Western art house films with names that were difficult even to pronounce for Koreans, such as Abbas Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s Home? and Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, were drawing over 100,000 viewers even when shown in single theaters, without any real publicity. Cinephiles were all over the place, private cinemas began to appear, and film departments began popping up in four-year educational institutions. Film figures who had studied in places like the United States and Europe returned home and also began to really establish themselves in Korean film circle around this time.

The main players in the new New Wave (New Korean Wave) of Korean film started appearing en masse in the late 1990s. In 1996, HONG Sang-soo made his debut with The Day a Pig Fell into the Well and KIM Ki-duk made his with Crocodile. LEE Chang-dong, an award winner at Cannes recently for Secret Sunshine, made his debut the same year with Green Fish. Then, in 1998, E J-yong made his debut with An Affair, KIM Jee-woon his with The Quiet Family and IM Sang-soo his with Girls’ Night Out, while 1999 saw the debuts of JUNG Ji-woo (Happy End) and KIM Tae-yong (Memento Mori: Whispering Corridors 2). In 2000, IM Kwon-taek was invited to Cannes for Chunhyang, and PARK Chan-wook, who had already made two feature films that were miserable commercial failures, came back with the box office whirlwind of Joint Security Area. That same year saw RYOO Seung-wan’s debut with Die Bad and, at long last, BONG Joon-ho’s debut with Barking Dogs Never Bite.

Barking Dogs Never Bite, 2000

With the exceptions of IM Kwon-taek, an old veteran of Korean film, and KIM Ki-duk, who received almost no formal education in Korea but filled his works with a stunning energy and originality, the remaining directors all shared certain characteristics. Most of them had received formal education in Western or Korean film schools and were cinephiles demonstrating their experience of having viewed a vast and diverse range of films. Most of all, they were the beneficiaries of a cultural diversity somewhat removed from the political gloom of modern Korean history. They had the freedom of no longer needing to talk about politics, labor, class or liberation through film. (Directors from the generation of PARK Kwang-su and JANG Sun-woo, appearing in the late 1980s, had all participated in social movements during their university days and could not be free from the social obligations of film.)

BONG Joon-ho appeared at precisely this point in time. But it wasn’t easy for him. His debut was the biggest commercial failure out of all of the debuts mentioned above, and it was scarcely even mentioned by critics. This is somewhat odd, since BONG was already known to the public before making his feature film debut with Barking Dogs Never Bite. His short film Incoherence, made in 1994 as a graduation project at the Korean Academy of Film Arts, was shown at various independent short film festivals that year and praised enthusiastically by Korean audiences, even earning invitations to some overseas film festivals. His debut was highly anticipated, along with those of other stars of the independent world like E J-yong, JANG Joon-hwan, Daniel H. BYUN and KIM Tae-yong. But the film was a huge flop. In BONG’s own words, the film met with something even more terrifying than criticism—it was totally ignored.

But at the end of that year, Cine 21 printed a feature article entitled I’m Sorry, Movie in its year-end special edition, giving new attention to Barking Dogs. In KINO as well, the film critic HUH Moon-yung said that he had underrated the film, and he wrote the following: "In my first encounter with it, I found the film dubious. The humor was somehow familiar, not original, and the characters were distinctive but not appealing. These are the most agonizing moments. Like it or not, you have to have a sense before you write for it to be enjoyable, and I couldn’t get that sense. Only later did I realize what I hadn’t gotten. In Barking Dogs Never Bite, warmth and coldness, laughter and fear, cynicism and tolerance, and the realistic and the dreamlike all coexist. These contradictory elements are not all vaguely connected together, but rather create an original chord under the direction of the cartoon generation’s distinctive imagination and sensitivity. I had failed to hear that chord."

With his debut, BONG certainly made a film that depended upon very personal experiences and tastes. Even the apartment in which the film is set was the actual apartment BONG had lived in with his wife as a newlywed, and the episodes of the basically good-for-nothing husband and his young wife have been brought in from his own experience or the experience of people he knows. Most of all, the images and the flow of editing appear similar to a cartoonish construction in which frames are connected in strips. It was clearly the film of a new cultural generation, but it didn’t appear to fit in anywhere—not Korean cinematic culture (the new class of audiences wild about Andrei Tarkovsky and Abbas Kiarostami), not auteurism, not commercial populism. With his first failure, BONG realized that he had to make a film that he would like himself, rather than a film about himself. BONG had been a crime film buff since his youth, and Memories of Murder was the project he chose for his second film.

The Incoherence Sensation

Korean and foreign viewers know BONG only as the director of Memories of Murder and The Host, but one should start with Incoherence, his major short film piece in order to examine the trends and thematic consciousness that run through the entirety of his cinematic world. Incoherence is an omnibus work made up of three segments and an epilogue. The first story: A university professor is walking through the campus and catches a glimpse of the body of a female student walking ahead of him, at which point he slips into an odd sexual fantasy. His sexual indulgence does not stop there, but continues on as he looks at pornographic magazines in the office while he prepares for class. Then, when it is time for class to begin, he quickly heads to the classroom, leaving one magazine open on his desk. During the lecture, he realizes that he has forgotten some materials and asks a female student to go to his office and get them. Suddenly, he remembers the magazine lying open on his desk and pathetically races after her to his office. He finally catches up with her at the moment she opens the door to the office and goes in. He throws another book onto the desk and succeeds in covering up the magazine. The student is surprised at his odd behavior, and he says, There was a cockroach. The second story: A man who jogs every morning on the side streets of a residential area sneaks sips from the milk bottles placed in front of other people’s houses. One day, the owner of one house comes out when he is drinking the milk, and the jogger pins the crime on a passing newspaper delivery boy and runs away. The framed paper boy chases the shameless man down the street. The third story: A man is walking down the street late at night, fairly drunk from a reception for a guest held earlier, and he suddenly feels stomach pains. It appears that he’s suffering from diarrhea, but he can’t find a suitable bathroom. Frantic, he attempts to relieve himself on the wall of a nearby apartment, but he is discovered by the security guard and thoroughly shamed. The guard gives the flustered man a newspaper and tells him to do his business in the apartment’s basement. Upon arriving at the basement, the man is indignant at the injury to his pride, and he uses the guards’ rice dish in the corner to relieve himself. And the epilogue: An experts’ debate on political affairs is taking place on TV. Three panelists cry out for a more conservative Korean society: the professor with the dirty magazine, the editorialist at a conservative daily who was stealing other people’s milk, and the public security prosecutor who shat in the security guards’ rice dish in the basement.

Incoherence, 1994

This short film, lasting only 30 minutes, already bears the origins of the codes that would continue in BONG’s works, from Barking Dogs Never Bite to The Host. The authoritarian characters, when they encounter certain obstacles that everyone is likely to encounter in the course of daily life, act in a shamefully shallow and comic way. Each episode emphasizes the characters’ duality and comic elements rather than the plot, bringing out the characters’ subtleties in a way that maintains genre tension at every moment, but at the same time violates it. In particular, as the director confessedly identifies himself as a TV fanatic, it is the TV debate presented in the epilogue that is a mechanism to bring together each of the omnibus episodes presented in this short film. Through this device, he does not stop at making hypocritical and comic elements of the characters things in themselves, but expands them with the social mechanism of distrust and cynicism toward the ruling class of Korean society. Additionally, the chase scenes depicted at length in the second episode (the pursued editorialist and the pursuing paper boy) and the portrayal of the apartment basement in the third episode assume metaphors of underground space that would be presented in each of BONG’s following feature-length films. Thus, the basement is a space in which dirty and ugly masses of contradiction cohere, not revealed on the surface but hidden away in the depths. It is in the basement that the kidnapped dogs are butchered and boiled for stew in Barking Dogs Never Bite; it is in the drain pipe, buried away under the surface, that the gruesomely butchered corpses of women are laid out in Memories of Murder; and it is in an underground sewer next to the Han River that the bodies of victims kidnapped by the monster decompose in The Host. In Incoherence, the apartment basement is already a metaphorical place where excretion and appetite (the rice dish) are merged into one objet, and where that junction leads the viewer not to feel seriousness but to explode