Celeb (and Celeb SO's) Obit Thread

[baby doll]

I read that Film Comment article when it first came out and it seemed a dubious argument, that somehow Kim Ki Duk wasn't well liked in Korea, that he was the "wrong" guy to kick off the Korean wave of the '00s in North America. Often people in other countries like certain movies more than their home countries. Showgirls was better liked in Europe than it was in America (until it was reappraised). Harmony Korine was better liked initially in Europe than America. Shyamalan's Lady in the Water made Cahiers du Cinéma's top ten list in 2006. Did they give a rat's ass that critics and audiences in America mostly disliked it? Nope. Portrait of a Lady on Fire is more beloved in the UK and North America than France.

Film Comment used to write articles like that occasionally. Like "here's this foreign film that caught on in America. Let's shit on it and tell people they are wrong for liking it." They did the same thing with Amelie (which actually was massively popular in France as well).

It's clearly a problematic article insofar as Rayns can't actually prove the thing he wants to prove--namely, that the European festivals which selected Kim's films and the juries which gave them awards were responding less to their intrinsic quality than what Rayns terms their "sexual terrorism." Consequently, he repeatedly falls back on Pauline Kael's old trick of using rhetorical questions to soft-peddle claims that can't be conclusively proven. On Samaritan Girl winning the best director prize at Berlin, he writes, "This is a movie that contrives to glamourize, sanitize, sanctify, and deplore teenage prostitution all at the same time, while providing a long, lingeringly prurient gaze at its young heroines soaping each other in the bathhouse. Was the jury genuinely touched by this? Or merely intimidated by the sexual terrorism?" Although I agree with the first sentence (which doesn't even hint at just how absurd the film's melodramatic plot truly is), we can't know why the Berlin jury gave Kim an award for his direction. And in any case, it's hardly the only time that a festival jury has made an inexplicable choice (Abdellatif Kechiche is a Palme d'or winner, after all).

That said, to stress what is perhaps a minor point, Rayns at no point describes Kim as being part of a "wave," much less having kicked one off. Nor is his argument that Kim's unpopularity in South Korea automatically makes him a bad filmmaker or the "wrong" director to represent South Korean cinema abroad, only that Kim could not have "successfully parlayed his limited talents into an international career" were it not for "the help of several European stooges." In other words, Rayns' article is less a critique of Kim's films per se than the international festival circuit which elevated his work above other, more talented South Korean filmmakers (including then-up-and-comer Bong Joonho).

Anyway, my point is that saying Spring / Summer had little impact on the Korean '00s wave in North America (and even Western Europe) is about as stupid as saying The Death of Mr. Lazarescu had no impact on the Romanian '00s wave or The 400 Blows or Breathless had no impact on subsequent French New Wave, or the US distribution and Academy Honorary Award of Rashomon in 1951 had no impact on the following release of decades of Japanese films in North America.

Or in popular music terminology that The Strokes' "Is This It" had no impact on the decades of garage rock revival bands in NYC and the UK simply because The White Stripes put out records first or Nirvana's "Nevermind" had no impact on the Seattle grunge explosion simply because Soundgarden and Green River made Seattle grunge records first.

One filmmaker doesn't make a wave, so being first counts for very little. After all, Chabrol's Le Beau Serge appeared before either Les Quatre cents coups or À bout de souffle, yet no serious commentator has claimed that Chabrol had an "impact" on the first films of Truffaut and Godard. Nor could he have impacted Rivette's Paris nous appartient, since Rivette began filming his movie before Chabrol did, even though Rivette's wasn't finished and released until 1961. What made the Nouvelle vague a wave was precisely the fact that it was bigger than any of the filmmakers who got carried along by it.

Given Kim's marginal status within the South Korean film industry, there seems to be no grounds whatsoever for claiming that his work had an impact on the domestic film industry at large. (I'm not even aware of any direct imitators.) The separate claim that the unexpected success of Spring, Summer... had some impact on the distribution of South Korean films in the US seems more plausible until one considers that Lee Chang-dong's Oasis opened in the US several weeks before Kim's film (although it didn't become a hit), whereas Bong's Memories of Murder went straight to video in North America. In short, there had already been a steady increase in the number of South Korean films being distributed in North America in the early 2000s, and although Kim's film was the first to become a significant hit, there's no evidence that its success led to any kind of feeding frenzy among US distributors. Indeed, Kim's own subsequent films received only spotty stateside distribution. The film was a one-off.