EVENT THE YEAR OF THE 12 DIRECTORS VENUE APOLLO PICCADILLY

The Korean Cultural Center UK
‘The Year of the 12 Directors’ series: Park Kwang-su
(April 2012)

Park Kwang-su, the former deputy director of the Busan International Film Festival — now fifty-seven years old, and a Dean in the National University of Arts’ Department of Filmmaking — is one of the most important filmmakers to ever be invited to the Korean movie scene in London. His earliest films were instrumental in charging mainstream cinema with a sense of political purpose and ideological critique at a time when the creative industries were still under heavy scrutiny from the state. Chilsu and Mansu (Chil-su hwa Man-su, 1988), Park’s debut feature raised questions about political reform under two of Korea’s major dictatorships; A Single Spark (Aleumda-un cheongnyeon Jeon Tae-il, 1995), released three years after the election of the South’s first civilian president, brought Park wider attention in the mainstream for dramatising the self-immolation of Jeon Tae-il, a workers’ rights activist who fought for social transformation and better working conditions in the seventies, and who is probably still a household name given that national boycotts concerning labour matters still persist. His other films — Black Republic (Guedeuldo ulicheoleom, 1990), Berlin Report (Beleulin lipoteu, 1991), To the Starry Island (Geu seom-e gago sipda, 1993) and The Uprising (I Jaesu-ui nan, 1998) — continued in a similar vein, underscoring the impact of state-sanctioned violence on student protestors and isolating aspects of the nation’s history to critique its forward momentum. Park regards the socio-political scene with the same analytical eye today, but he is taking on other assignments, other films: Meet Mr. Daddy (Shiny Day and Nunbushin Nal-ae, 2007), which played here this evening in the third event of ‘The Year Of The 12 Directors’ series.

At the post-film Q & A, Park was a paragon of decency, answering in a soft-spoken manner that settled everyone; from time to time he joked with the interpreter about adding something more in her notebook after saying his piece and their friendly interaction lightened the tone. At the meet-and-greet session later, he regarded the whole act of autographing and posing with fans for photographs as both an amusement and mystery, as if not quite believing that for each and every person here at least one film of his had left its mark. Our host, Dr. Mark Morris, a heavyweight in East Asian film studies and lecturer at Cambridge, explained that Park’s films matched political criticism with artistic integrity, and that no other Korean filmmaker, besides perhaps Im Kwon-taek, had been more influential in steering the course and development of the Korean New Wave.

“Censorship was a very serious issue in the beginning, and I was careful with my films. If we had rubbish on the street in one scene then it would be edited out, or I would otherwise have to substitute scenes in order to get a film distributed.” These cuts would have been imposed by the Public Performance Ethics Committee (PPEC), a government board which screened each and every film produced by a company expecting a licensed commercial release and reviewing it carefully in its pre- and post-production phases to make sure everything was acceptable for the state; when Park submitted his second feature film, Black Republic, in 1990 the PPEC deleted a flashback sequence on the grounds that it depicted, and in all likelihood would have “encouraged,” antigovernment activity. “Nowadays in Korea,” he continued, “it’s hardly an issue anymore, but back then I had to release Chilsu and Mansu on the opening day of the Olympics ceremony, when no one was really paying attention, just to get it shown.”

This was a critical period in South Korean history and Chilsu and Mansu a vital product of that time. The Summer Olympics of 1988 was a huge propaganda event, intended exclusively for party political purposes. With President Chun Doo-hwan at the helm throughout most of the eighties any form of legitimate opposition or political protest against the military regime was forbidden and violently repressed. Television, film, radio and print were tightly controlled and used to plug the red scare message with news of impending doom coming from the North. But when Chun went down in 1987, the disputed 17 December election went to his hand-picked successor Roh Tae-woo. The Olympics went ahead as Chun had planned but according to David Black and Shona Bezanson “the combination of widespread internal dissent” and massive international scrutiny at this time “had a signal effect on the pace and peacefulness” of the transition towards democracy. A paper for the John Hopkins University which considered the legacy of the Seoul Olympics said that, on the subject of activism, the Chun government had successfully “constrained radical action” by giving the public (“students and the middle class”) a stake in the Olympic preparations. A more comprehensive study by James Larson and Park Heung-soo found that although the Summer Olympics could not be separated from the Chun government in the mass consciousness, the ideological message nevertheless filtered through, via President Roh, that the eyes of the world were watching and a concerted effort should be made to “work for the Olympics out of national pride.”

Screaming at the bastards of Seoul: billboard painters Man-su (Ahn Sung-ki) and Chil-su (Park Joon-hoon) in Park Kwang-su’s Chilsu and Mansu (1988)

It was in this context that Park’s screen version of Chil-su hwa Man-su, which was deeply aligned with the play directed by Kim Sok-man for the Yonu Theatre Company in 1986, became so valuable. The film and play were almost seen as failures by radicals deeply committed to the removal of military influence from all aspects of Korean public life — they pushed, instead, for hard art, plays and films that could beat the crackdown and disseminate their message more widely. But above ground, both Kim’s play and Park’s screen version expressed criticism of the major regimes in unprecedented ways, thus earning a definite place in the history of the cultural movement. Eugène Van Erven, in his 1988 discussion of resistance theatre, explains the political significance of the play, but above all he points to the value of improving the aesthetics of the theatre movement and migrating “underground” ideas to nervous popular audiences. Park Kwang-su successfully brought some of these ideas to the cinematic mainstream and to this day he is remembered for it.

Looking back he says that he was simply writing and filming honestly about the basic issues of the day. “Every night I would go home, work on the script, then come back and devise the next scene. The first half of the film was very haphazard and I just told the actors to say whatever so we could get it done. But in the second half we had to make do . . . [In retrospect] I think that part of the film is quite weak.”

Kim Gi-young (Moon Sung-keun) and Young-sook (Shim Hye-jin) in Black Republic (1990) Ha Sun-young (Ye Ji-won) with daughter Joon (Seo Sin-ae) in Meet Mr. Daddy (2007)

On this matter, Park includes the film’s most iconic scene: two downtrodden sign-painters, having completed a giant billboard in the city featuring a tanned blonde in a bikini, suffer a meltdown and release their pent-up frustrations on the general public below. “In the 1980s, it was illegal for foreign men and women to be models in Korea. Of course, for the last scene in Chilsu and Mansu we had to use an advertisement with a foreign female model on it. Well, the police came and ordered us to pull it down immediately. So I rushed to shoot coverage of all the scenes with the billboard in shot, and then later filmed everything in the other direction.”

A few in the audience wondered if the director was on sabbatical from filmmaking to prioritise study. To this, Park said that his hands were tied until the summer break. “In the past I focussed a lot on the pure arts and theatre, which spoke to a minority audience of educated people. I moved into film in order to communicate with a larger, more-everyday audience, but it transpired that the intellectual viewers picked up on my films again, partially due to my methodology. So the driving question for me remains: how best to communicate with the audience? Back then few people were making serious political films, but today many directors are tackling these issues, anyone can do it . . . It’s time for me to think about what kind of film I should make, and my desire is to communicate with a more popular audience. That’s not to say that I will avoid making films with social and political issues in the future — but hopefully I can produce something that will satisfy that driving question.”

This article was originally published by New Korean Cinema.

9 April, 2012

FILM | THE REEF | DIRECTOR | ANDREW TRAUCKI

Eyes watching horror and calculated assaults in,
Andrew Traucki’s The Reef (2010)

In horror cinema the appetite for explicit, punishing and phantasmagoric deaths is insatiable. At the Frightfest screening of Final Destination 5 (Steven Quale, 2011, USA) this year, the artless nature of gymnast Candice Hooper’s (Ellen Wroe) death was so breathtaking, so lingeringly unashamedly brazen, that we very nearly gave this one sequence a standing ovation in the aisles (it received enthusiastic applause instead). By the time Miles Fisher’s Peter decides much later on in the film to intervene in the Final Destination schema (he fixes, in the third and dullest act, to kill off a survivor in order to save himself), not one Frightfest attendee in Cinema 1 that night wasn’t wishing for a return to the Fischli & Weissian chain-reaction of death that made Candice’s earlier comeuppance so memorable. Her death scene is up on YouTube with a three hundred thousand view count and rising. This fetishistic adulation of the “death spectacle” (very much the USP of the Destination series) is largely absent from The Reef (2010, Australia), Andrew Traucki’s low-budget horror film about a group of stranded vacationers who are stalked by a Great White as they navigate the Coral Sea Islands. This absence allows for a more interesting cinematic world. The gags may be staler (this is the most humourless Australian thriller I think I’ve seen in years), but Traucki makes particularly effective use of the first-person camera, exploring the potentialities of objective and subjective camera work in underwater photography. Our sense of fear, curiosity and alarm derives in great part from this point-of-view structure: like all slasher films, The Reef teases us, it makes us look, and then it hurts us. So in addition to our common hunger for the death spectacle, there is then the simple fact that we pay good money to experience an assault of sorts on ourselves; the pleasure of surviving unscathed, though deeply shaken, simultaneously liberates and excites us.

In some respects The Reef is a film about our compulsion to look at and register horror. Carol Clover (1992), who’s written extensively on horror cinema and particularly on our spectatorial need to see horror films, uses the phrase “eyes watching horror.” Her phrasing can and does encompass many eyes of horror: the victim’s eye looking in at horror, an innocent who sees telepathically the harm done to others, the eye of the killer itself, the “memory eye” which visualises people or events otherwise lost in the past, and not least the spectatorial eye which is assaulted by horror over and over (from Hitchcock and Powell to Hooper and Craven, through even to Gens and Laugier). Those familiar with both the fatalistic desire of protagonist Heather Donahue to capture the eponymous entity of The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999, USA) on film and with the cartoonish assault which floors her in the final reel will recognise in The Reef similar strategies at play, though clearly reformulated to achieve different ends. In The Blair Witch, for instance, the many “incidents” captured by the documentary filmmakers on handheld cameras in the dead of night are memorable for being disorienting but also for containing absolutely nothing—as Mallin (2001) states: the film “makes the fact of not seeing the proof of a malevolent otherworldly presence.” Mallin adds that “the story is about the need to complete the story.” As consumers of narrative, we search for information and certitude—our personal “project” as an audience therefore is to become active participants and to “see” in the footage of The Blair Witch Project that which the documentary filmmakers ultimately failed to see and fully grasp for themselves. In The Reef, more than simply involving us in the scene, first-person cinematography is used repeatedly to train our spectatorial eye to similarly drop its guard—to borrow terminology used by Cumbow (1990), it imposes a way of seeing, a vision, on the audience, a vision that is not necessarily adversarial but which plays to and plays on our compulsion to look. Inevitably, as the film moves on, we begin to search for the thing that now hunts us.

Two things occur from the outset. Firstly, The Reef owes much to its unique geographic location. Set in the Coral Sea off the coast of Queensland, the film traces the plight of four victims—Luke (Damian Walshe-Howling) and Kate (Zoe Naylor), and Matt (Gyton Grantley) and Suzie (Adrienne Pickering)—as they use small sections of the Great Barrier Reef to escape the dangers of the open ocean. Filmed almost entirely offshore and in ubiquitous light, Daniel Ardilley’s camera moves effortlessly from the pastel-blues and off-white glare of the surface to the clear warm waters of the reef and the ominous voids that appear beyond its magnificent sections of coral. So effective is the approach that the whole endeavour feels like an underwater movie. It becomes quite clear early on that The Reef offers audiences of popular thrillers, especially those in the west, respite from the animated environments that plague the screen victims of Open Water (Chris Kentis, 2003, USA) and Adrift (Hans Horn, 2006, Germany). The ocean is idyllic, the characters bathed in sunlight, the currents aid their survival plan, and errant objects that appear on the surface are visible at much greater distances. In this environment, not only can we see telltale signs of danger adequately from far away, we also see adequately enough below the surface (rarely have the two approaches been coupled competently in Hollywood film). This produces an uncanny affect. One could argue that the film channels and exorcises Joseph Sargent’s Jaws the Revenge (1987, USA)—the third sequel in the Universal franchise—for the fact that Traucki’s staging of the drama recalls the Ellen Brody character’s nightmarish vision of herself swimming alone in crystal waters, a vision which betrays a fatalistic longing to return to the ocean despite her overt fears. When we dream we are not so much in control of our bodies as watching our bodies forcefully rebel; common-sense takes a walk, and reality dawns on us cuttingly fast. This dream-logic marries well with The Reef’s fantastic environments: human rationality, emotional reasoning and decision-making at the non-conscious level all figure large in the film. A sequence in which Matt breaks away from the tightly-grouped party of survivors in order to retrieve a stray kickboard is a sound example of bodily rebellion: the scene works cheerfully as suspense, but we instantly write off Matt’s chances because his actions are foolhardy, no one in their right mind would ever attempt the same thing. Yet Matt’s compulsion to swim for the kickboard overtakes him, primordial feelings—I have a body, it must be protected—kick in. Another immersive set-piece—in which Luke and Kate, still far from making landfall, make it to several coral clusters that break the surface of the water—plays well too, but once again seems more in keeping with our expectations concerning fantasy and dream-logic. The conceit is so effective allegorically, and in addition it plays so well on primordial feelings (during, and especially in the hours after the film), that the entire sequence delivers an authentic experience for us as viewers—in Todd McGowan’s (2007) words (used about a different film but helpful here too) it keeps us in the attitude of questioning. With its survival theme and fantasmatic set-pieces set in colourful environments, The Reef feels like a wish-fulfilment narrative dreamt up by an anxious, and fevered, and desiring Luke.

Stranded: Kate (Zoe Naylor), Luke (Damian Walshe-Howling), Suzie (Adrienne Pickering) and Matt (Gyton Grantley)
consider their options, while Warren (Kieran Darcy-Smith) looks on in The Reef (2010)

The second point to make concerns the first-person camera. Thankfully we’re spared in this scenario anything quite so roundly stupid as a Jawsian camera—mounted behind the dorsal fin in Jeannot Szwarc’s not-terrible sequel Jaws 2 (1978, USA); sharing the nodding, bobbing shark’s-eye-view in Jaws: The Revenge; or matter-of-factly conjuring shark-vision through a goldfish bowl in Renny Harlin’s godawful Deep Blue Sea (1999, USA). However, Traucki uses unusually long takes of the stalking shark, pieced together from footage shot with underwater cameras from the safety of a cage and a boat respectively, in order to create the illusion of the first-person subjective camera. This footage, remastered, edited, and digitally cleaned, becomes everything that Luke sees underwater through his goggles, or at the very least it privileges an omniscient film-world camera that captures the same things Luke sees. The film makes good use of this device to generate tension—it is Luke who monitors the shark as it circles the defenceless group and only Luke; the others remain none the wiser. But more than a gimmick, the first-person camera is used over and over again. This makes clear two things: that the filmmakers aim for a verisimilitude which is difficult to attain (particularly for low-budget productions) without recourse to authentic underwater footage of real sharks; and secondly, that the first-person camera becomes effectively the reactive gaze of slasher horror cinema—it performs the same job as Pablo’s (Pablo Rosso) infrared camera in the memorable closing moments of [Rec.] (Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza, 2007, Spain), as Heather and Josh’s cameras in The Blair Witch Project.

What excites me about this approach is that the film affords us, albeit in edited form, several opportunities to observe characteristically small changes in the Great White’s threat display. The sharks (we use here the plural because the film-shark is of course represented by many different Whites) move slowly from non-aggressive posturing into a subtly more pronounced display advertising at first bulk and body length, and then jaw size and gape. Of course, Traucki’s footage of the shark circling its prey still provides a distortion—a White which has been drawn to a fish carcass by human agency via chumming moves in on its prey very differently to an unmonitored White that is provoked by something far larger, less familiar, and potentially more dangerous than itself, like a swimmer—therefore, we are still watching an imaginary. The available footage is configured and manipulated for fantasy cinema, thus the shark’s behaviour is still misrepresented. But considering we’re in an age where Hollywood productions (and news organisations) can barely do a thing with Whites, Makos or even Reef Sharks beyond recapitulating the same tired representational strategies employed by Steven Spielberg thirty-six years ago, this sense of a half-turn towards real-world experience and real-world behaviour does at least offer us, as engaged audiences, possibilities for making sense of the cinematic White shark in less mercurial ways.

Thus bringing us to the importance of looking. In The Reef, looking is about as helpful as screaming and kicking. Luke lowers his head into the water compulsively, both to see if the threat is still real and to see from where the next attack is coming, but he gleans no useful information by doing this (he can’t help the others because the shark is unpredictable, fast and, in its circling patterns, mildly hypnotic); all he can do is look. Why, then, does Traucki make him look so often? We, on the other hand, scrutinise the frame and anticipate the assault because we need to see, it is part and parcel of our masochistic (to cite Clover again) investment in pain. We do so not out of curiosity, but of necessity. The most interesting aspect of The Reef for me concerned the nature of this desire to look. On the one hand, the subjective camera is very clearly a device which can be manipulated by filmmakers (in this case Traucki) to create a desired effect: to heighten suspense, to collapse the visible distance between the shark and its prey, or to launch a visual attack on an audience. Being on the receiving end, we either overlook this system of production in order to preserve the illusion of an autonomous world, or we suppress our direct involvement altogether and remain detached. On the other hand, the very cinematic image generated by the subjective camera takes on and brings into being a variety of meanings/ideas which move cinema beyond the technical aspects of its construction. On this website, we’re mainly concerned with the latter. This idea that cinematic images in some way convey or hold consciousness, or thought, inspires many of the responses on these pages. In the end, The Reef is possibly no different from a film like Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960, UK), which brings the protagonist Mark’s victims face to face with their own deaths, but which critically trades on Mark’s own masochistic identification with their suffering. Traucki’s film turns on a similar pleasure: the very human compulsion to see with our own eyes the horror which is about to befall us.

29 September, 2011

FILM MOTHER DIRECTOR BONG JOON HO

Mother (2009)
and the cultural remasculinisation of Korea

I’d like to address a few things in Bong Joon-ho’s new film Mother (2009) in the context of a broader dialogue within South Korean film studies on nation, national victimisation and infantilisation (as it relates to family, and maternal and paternal subjectivity). Let me briefly mention a vital Korean study by Kim Kyung Hyun The Remasculinisation of Korean Cinema (2004, Duke University Press, Durham and London). As Kim describes it, contemporary Korean cinema up until the millennium (he clarifies “1999”) invokes feelings of personal self-loathing, institutional repression and a damaging sense of shame; critically, this regime is gender-specific. For Kim, the fallen man is the subject of Korean cinema: a masochistic plaything in some narratives, an infant who stutters “ŏmŏni” (mother) incessantly in others. Kim ties these themes to several historical and cultural developments in Korean society:

1. the crises of the latter half of the twentieth century, during the era of military rule.
2. the deliberate phasing out of the “national” (in terms of traditional culture and identity) for a transnational Korea.

Police brutality, as evidenced in Im Sang-soo's melodrama The Old Garden (2007), in which a socialist activist retraces the turbulent era of the 1980s The hunt for a kidnapper in Park Jin-pyo’s Voice Of a Murderer (2007) ends in another failure

The first category of changes include: the civil war (1950-1953); the ensuing cold war between North and South; the sensitive subject of America’s involvement in the latter’s economic rejuvenation; the assassination of dictator Park Chung Hee in 1979; the subsequent rise to power of general Chun Doo Hwan in 1980, and the devastating Kwangju massacre that largely resulted. (Kwangju has been dramatised in Jang Sun-woo’s A Petal (Ggotip, 1996), Lee Chang-dong’s Peppermint Candy (Bakha satang, 1999), Kim Ji-hun’s May 18 (Hwaryeohan hyuga, 2007), and Im Sang-soo’s deeply moving The Old Garden (Orae-doen jeongwon, 2007) starring Yum Jung-ah). In the second development, under the globalising process that represents transnationalism, the “nation” of Korea is conceived increasingly in ways that move beyond a critique of the nation-state to a Korean transnationality, a Korea that is burdened with issues pertaining to “state” and “nationhood”. Within the cinema, its male characters work through the effects of this new constitution, obviously a continuing process, and come to suffer personal crises that steer them either towards a life of violence or self-destructive masochism.

I find this interesting with regard to cinematic depictions of the justice system, law enforcement and police authority — institutions that remain very masculine in composition and politics to this day, but which suffer the burdens of the remasculinisation process described by Kim. Many modern Korean films underline the fact that the police are either politically and socially ineffectual, or straightforwardly inept on their own bureaucratic terms. Jin Kwang-kyo’s Beautiful Sunday (2007), for one, follows a corrupt detective whose guilt and self-loathing caused by a past traumatic experience lays the foundation for a fantasy in which he ruthlessly pursues a mystery killer. Then, there is Han Jae-rim’s The Show Must Go On (Uahan segye, 2007), a touching gangster film in which the Sadang police are impotent in the overall social power structure, which seems to be dominated, rather, by the Dogs and the Jaguars crime families. The Chaser (Chugyeogja, 2008), a film in which the hero, a former cop-cum-pimp, crashes a police van full of cops in his pursuit of Min-ji’s kidnapper and works over a suspect on police premises, is indebted to Bong Joon-ho’s seminal Memories of Murder (Salinui chueok, 2003), of which more shortly.

Thus, with the political democratisation and globalisation movements of the nineties, South Korean cinema has become increasingly critical of police authority at local and state levels. The law itself is more often than not undermined by routine procedure, in some cases — Memories of Murder for one — desperately so. Lee Yeon-woo’s Running Turtle (Geobugi dallinda, 2009), while appearing to resist these dominating tendencies in its final scene (in which Jo Pil-seong’s unit put on a marching parade for the benefit of his daughter’s primary school class), must first work through a narrative that continually robs the detective, his colleagues and his bosses of professional competency. And finally, Hwang Su-a’s lovely Why Did You Come To My House? (Woori jipyeo wae wassni, 2009) is fairly ambivalent about its investigating officers, dependent as they are on a bittersweet monologue from Byeong-hee (Park Hie-sun) for information and ultimately clarification on an unsolved suicide.

Detective Park Du-man in Bong Joon-ho’s Memories Of Murder (2003)

Taken together, these films construct an image of law enforcement in Korea, and to an extent the larger judicial system, that is at best corrupt and draconian, at worst adolescent, masochistic and dysfunctional. Memories of Murder, however, provides a slightly different perspective. Late in the film’s second act, the police, aided by a specialist forensics team, work together without contradiction; Park Du-man and Kim Sang-kyung’s detective Seo Tae-yoon share for the first time characteristics of maturity and discipline and invention. I know some disagree with this reading, arguing that, on the contrary, the law is irredeemable while the fact is that the science of forensics, which surfaces quite late in the movie, remains, quite literally, unintelligible — a point I can accept. But I suggest that Bong’s film resists a totalising symbolic representation; just as the partnership between the two detectives matures throughout the movie (their approaches no longer demarcated), the department undergoes its own process of maturation, such that it becomes collaborative, and networked, and communicative. Rather than denounce them as inherently problematic or hamstrung by incompetence, Memories of Murder instead dramatises the perpetual suffering of the authorities in Gyeonggi province even as they are learning to overcome and transcend their inefficiencies. Failure is no longer structural, or interdepartmental. The disillusion of Park Du-man, dramatised so brilliantly in the denouement, signifies the law’s gradual disappearance from the corrupt urban spaces of modern Korean cinema — but only after it has established some legitimacy, only having found a sense of self in the new modernity.

Mother concerns a disabled young man, Yoon Do-joon (Won Bin), who the police charge on circumstantial evidence and coerce into signing a confession for the murder of a schoolgirl. The film traces the difficult journey of Mother/Hye-ja (Kim Hye-ja), Do-joon’s poor single mother, who seeks first to unpick the state’s case against him, then forcefully uncover the truth from the local townsfolk. A handful of objectionable authority figures impede her way, each conforming largely to type: the imprudent lawyer whose greed knows no bounds, who expends his energies in a karaoke lounge fondling pricey escorts; Yoon Je-mun plays a not altogether indecent character, but his cop Je-moon refuses to help Hye-ja once her son is incarcerated; and finally, Detective Sepaktakraw (Song Sae-byeok) is Je-moon’s “heavy” on the force, whose fascination with the game of sepak takraw (a form of kick volleyball which he brings into the interrogation room) echoes the extracurricular activities of the violent Detective Cho (Kim Roe-ha) in Memories of Murder. Furthermore, Mother recapitulates motifs familiar from that film: the botched crime reconstruction, in which the team responsible for staging an again very public walk-through are similarly humiliated before the nation’s press; the importance of forced confessions as the key determinant of guilt, given more credence here in the absence of an “educated” cop from the city; and there is an amusing gag about forensics teams and their increasingly infantile fascination with populist television shows, like CSI. Indeed, in a film that effectively canvases the opinions of a range of unhelpful professionals in law enforcement and the legal system, in addition to those civilians who are bereaved or in mourning and therefore incapable of acting rationally or without emotion, there is no better symbol of strength, loyalty or crucially competence than the character of Jin-tae, played by Jin Goo. (But as Jin-tae himself comments at one point in the film, who can be trusted?) And Bong sheds enough light on the key aspects of Jin-tae’s life — in one sustained sequence, Hye-ja secretively watches him having sex with his under-age girlfriend — to remind us that good and evil are not mutually exclusive.

Kim Hye-ja, in a field of long grass, before she begins the enigmatic dance which opens
Bong Joon-ho's Mother

Mother fits well, therefore, into existing discussions on Korean gender empowerment and cultural remasculinisation. On the one hand we have Jin-tae, in many respects a model anti-hero proud of his identity and (despite recent developments) military heritage, while on the other we have self-important figures within the bourgeois sphere, people like Hye-ja’s boastful attorney, the Mercedes Benz-driving golfers who view people of lower class stature (including the police themselves) with contempt, and most alarmingly, we have the brace of desperate, middle-aged men who exploited the disillusioned schoolgirl, Ah-jung (Moon Hee-ra), for sexual favours throughout most of her teenage life. The film not only holds that the remasculinisation of Korea is still a going concern in thematic terms, it suggests the nation is institutionally hapless, its authority figures (predominantly male) disreputable creatures.

Fetishising that which is finally lost: emotions of youth.
Woo-jin's sister, Lee Soo-ah (Yun Jin-seo), in Park Chan-wook's Oldboy (2003)

There is one last point to make concerning memory. Mother is an intriguing portrait of one woman’s unflinching determination to prove the innocence of her only child. Importantly, Hye-ja’s actions are driven as much by psychic wounds, unhealed from the past, as by a sense of instinctive maternal duty. The film reminds me of the melancholia of Oldboy, a film which, for its part, evokes the romantic purity and innocence of the past in hopeful terms. Think of the cherished sequences recounted to Oh Dae-su by Lee Woo-jin (Yu Ji-tae) about his youth. The desire which lured Woo-jin and his sister together, while representing emotions that are taboo in the eyes of society, and therefore impure, is nonetheless affirmed as something beautiful in the film by virtue of the fact that it is a pure (i.e., authentic) emotion. The potency of this emotion finally proves devastating for Woo-jin. The intense anguish which the dissolution of their relationship causes (and guilt relating to her death) is so traumatising, even a decade later, that he can only stop the cycle of pain by taking his own life.

Both films concern the troubling effects of memory. Oldboy creates a definite linkage between Oh Dae-su’s desire to forget his past life and the libidinal impulses that have driven him unknowingly towards incest, whilst in Mother, the sins that Hye-ja tries categorically to forget are multiple, though all can be critically examined against her misplaced but unquestioned faith in her son’s innocence. Neither figure emerges from their respective crises victoriously, but crucially (and this is one of the important aspects of the films for me) both characters continue with life; they have reasons for living. In Mother, we see a startling glimpse of the carefree woman Hye-ja will become in the final scene of the film — upon performing the acupuncture that will blank her memory of events, she joins an enthusiastic band of partying travellers — but she is, finally, incoherent to us by virtue of the fact that we simply do not recognise this new character; she has lost her subjectivity, traded it; her mirrored self (in Do-joon) is therefore also, we assume, forgotten. Although there is perhaps no better option for Oh Dae-su in Oldboy — his lover, Mi-do (Kang Hye-jeong), would never accept his suicide — he nonetheless escapes with her in an attempt to reconstitute the self; he will live, it is suggested, because she is in desperate need of him, and he dependent on her for care; yet Mi-do is suffering more in this arrangement, because she is rejecting a “new” life absolutely liberated from Lee Woo-jin. Whatever their outcomes, these films ultimately demonstrate the potential harmful effects of memory. The act of remembering is characterised by repetition — masochistic and destructive. The fault, in looking back to the past, is theirs.

On this note, the two films differ largely in their intended outcomes: one leaves the viewer very clear about the “success” of the memory erasure, while the other instead appears to affirm its cruel and bitter failure. In the end, the mother dances her way to the front of the coach (and hence onward to a new life, bathed in the regenerative warmth and hues of sunshine), while the monster is forgotten on a cavernous mountain, doomed we suspect to a sour, ugly future with a mirrored version of his self in Mi-do. But above all, he is doomed to a life ensconced in the disappointments and evils of memory. That Mother concludes on a comparatively upbeat note does nothing to undercut the tragic sense of loss that has occurred — the loss of her child, and the loss of an existence defined solely by her child.

23 November, 2009

EVENT | BLADE RUNNER DAY | VENUE | BFI SOUTHBANK CENTRE, LONDON

‘Blade Runner Day’
The BFI, London (21 March 2009)

In mid-October 2008, the BFI promoted its ongoing 75th birthday celebrations by announcing the winner of its nationwide Visions for the Future poll. Industry leaders, film and TV professionals, and BFI members had chosen Blade Runner, Ridley Scott's seminal science-fiction film released in 1982, as the one film they wished to share with future generations. In addition to creating huge buzz around the institute’s Visions for the Future screenings from January 2009 (the films included Quadrophenia, The Godfather, Stalker and Pulp Fiction), the poll rounded off the BFI’s year-long birthday with a themed day of activities dedicated to the winner. Blade Runner Day took place on March 21 2009 and brought together a number of high-profile guests: author Paul M. Sammon, producer Michael Deeley, actor Rutger Hauer and director Ridley Scott. Following an onstage Q&A, Scott was presented with the BFI Fellowship, marking his contribution to British film and television culture, by director Stephen Frears. What follows is a brief overview of the day and some highlights of the best interviews.

The morning began with a screening of On the Edge of Blade Runner (UK, 2000), Andrew Abbott’s 52-minute documentary produced for Channel 4TV and written by film critic Mark Kermode. Shot seven years before Charles de Lauzirika’s Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner (2007) for Warner Home Video, Abbott’s film begins with the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and combines archival recording, special effects test reel footage and newly commissioned interview (circa-2000) to reprise the story of Blade Runner’s genesis, its production, reception and legacy. Like de Lauzirika’s film, On the Edge benefits from the testimony of key players: screenwriter Hampton Fancher recalls reeling from disagreements with Ridley before the hiring of co-writer David Peoples (“Ridley never said ‘if you don’t do what I want you to do then we’ll get somebody else to do it’; [he] was shy and manipulative”); executive producer Bud Yorkin reflects on Ridley’s style and his need for reshoots (“I think he was indulgent”); while Ridley himself recalls his strained relationship with certain crew members, including its executive producers (“On the film I became a screamer, I got really angry”). The film adds to the Blade Runner narrative with testimony from sources left out of the Dangerous Days history: science-fiction author Brian Aldiss describes Dick’s amphetamine use (“Dick was writing about what was happening to him and the drug culture of California with a little twist of lemon”); actors William Sanderson and Joe Turkel praise Ridley’s artistic sensibilities and his vision of twentieth-century urbanism; and actor M Emmett Walsh recalls tensions onset due to Ridley’s perfectionism and the pressures brought to bear by executive producers Yorkin and Jerry Perenchio. Unlike de Lauzirika’s film, On the Edge provides no interviews with Harrison Ford — placing the documentary in the context of its time, before Ford embraced his promotional role as an advocate for the 2007 Warner Home Video release — but includes descriptions from Ridley and production executive Katherine Haber addressing the actor’s unease during production.

It’s a shame that producer Michael Deeley’s comments on the Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner documentary are so diplomatic because, going on his anecdotal evidence at the BFI, Bud Yorkin and Jerry Perenchio were the villains of the Blade Runner production story

Following the screening, Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner (1997) author Paul M Sammon discussed Blade Runner onstage with Oscar-winning producer Michael Deeley and academic Will Brooker (ed. The Blade Runner Experience: The Legacy of a Science-Fiction Classic). The amiable tone was set with questions about Yorkin and Perenchio, the film’s completion bond guarantors. Citing On the Edge, Sammon asked Deeley for his response to Yorkin’s onscreen claim that, having gone $5.5 million over budget, the Blade Runner production was at that point effectively “taking money out of his childrens’ pockets”. According to Deeley, “all that anger and bitterness was caused by greed”, “one knew that they were strictly amateur in this respect, especially Perenchio”, and on the matter of the film’s financial arrangement: “at the end of twenty years, the Ladd Company [which owned domestic distribution rights] and Run Run Shaw’s [foreign territories] rights were passed to Yorkin and Perenchio, so they now have everything. Curious to say that neither Ridley nor I have ever been paid a profit on the picture”. Indeed, almost every reference to Yorkin and Perenchio was critical: Sammon condemned Yorkin and Perenchio’s behaviour, referred to the “group” [Tandem Productions, run by Yorkin, Perenchio and Norman Lear] as “obstructionist” throughout production, and emphasised Deeley’s point that Tandem “wound up owning the film, [with] all the ancillary rights” — yet they simply “didn’t give a damn”.

Noting that times have changed, with the release of the Blade Runner: The Final Cut (5-disc Ultimate Collector’s Edition) DVD two years ago, Sammon praised the work of Warner Home Video (which hired him as consultant and commissioned new materials to promote the film’s twenty-fifth anniversary); Deeley’s evaluation of the 1980s market for theatrical distribution reinforced the notion that a platform release could have benefited the film throughout awards season; Brooker, detailing how the film became a classic text for film scholarship in the early 1990s, discussed the subtle changes in the theatrical, Director’s Cut and Final Cut versions which help shape our understanding of the film across platforms (cinematic, literary, digital); and in Sammon’s personal reflections on Philip K Dick, he argued that drugs, rather than being a conduit to another reality as described by Scott Bukatman (1997), were energy boosters to sustain his productivity (“it was prosaic, he just needed the cash”). Sammon often followed up on Deeley’s statements and audience questions with his own interpretations. On the subject of the theatrical version’s original voice-over narration, Deeley's account did not identify the author responsible (only that he was “one of Yorkin’s friends”); Sammon identified the man as the late Roland Kibbee, a television writer then in his sixties, and recounted a story told to him by Ford about the (third and final) recording of the film’s narration: “Here was a man in a hobby suit, the cigarette ash falling all over the keyboard. Ford said, ‘Hello, I’m Harrison Ford’ and [Kibbee] said ‘Shut up and let me write your narration!’ [Ford] said right then, ‘I knew this was going to be a hard slog’”.

Similarly, when recounting the production’s well documented ‘Yes Guvnor My Ass!’ T-Shirt incident, Sammon noted that it was Chief Makeup Artist Marvin Westmore who in Deeley’s amiable version of events “should have known better” than to leave a British newspaper (Deeley and Haber confirm The Guardian) where it could be found by the rest of the unionised American crew. On one unresolved matter, Sammon questioned Deeley about an alternate titles sequence — included in the Workprint section of the 2007 Final Cut Collector’s Edition — featuring single droplets of rain, or tears, gliding through frame. According to Deeley, Yorkin had already stepped in at this point to take over production and had arranged for the graphic to be shot without consulting either Deeley or Ridley. Finally, both Deeley and Sammon confirmed that writer William S Burroughs, who adapted Alan E Nourse’s cyberpunk novel The Bladerunner (1974) into a “half-assed” film treatment called Blade Runner (a movie) (“done to satisfy a contract” and published as a novella in 1979), was paid a $5,000 fee in exchange for rights to the highly desirable title.

Author Paul M Sammon interviews Rutger Hauer (Roy Batty) for Blade Runner Day at the BFI Southbank (March, 2009)

One guest who was bound to attract attention was Dutch actor Rutger Hauer. Where Harrison Ford was less involved in the film’s traditional publicity campaign in the 1980s (though he did participate in on-set interviews), Hauer enjoyed the one-on-one interview, roundtable and press junket process, and has continued to support the film’s publicity efforts, including through multiple charity events, to the present day. Joining Sammon onstage, after a special theatrical screening of Ridley’s The Final Cut, Hauer lightened the tone of the event considerably with his implacable LA charm and star quality. The actor reinforced the notion that he conceived, with Ridley, Roy Batty’s “tears in rain” monologue (which may be accurate, but David Peoples provides conflicting testimony in the Dangerous Days documentary); expressed his delight that the film’s performance in ancillary markets sustains its popularity for global audiences (“the film has been underground for twenty-five years pretty much”); and was critical of the distributor’s approach to marketing the film theatrically in 2007: “They were releasing the film thinking they were hot, they were going to make a shitload of money, and I thought ‘I think they might be right, if they release it right this time’. Guess what? The closer you got to the [release] date, you saw the [distributor] support shrink ... I thought: ‘Amazing, isn’t this amazing. They’re doing it again. And I like it’”. Hauer’s answer to an audience question concerning the textual significance of his character’s body tattoos was equally amusing. Downplaying any explicit meaning that Ridley may have attributed to its design, Hauer described it as another unknowable “layer,” something we look at and wonder “what the hell is that now?” Since the accuracy of Hauer’s memory was probably in question here, Sammon tried to give his explanation for the tattoos based on interviews he had conducted personally with Ridley — but Hauer, with a glint in his eye and behaving like the olympian prankster and sneak, stopped Sammon twice during his explanation (with a cheeky wave of his water bottle that amused the crowd) in order to tell us “I don’t know the answer ... but I’m curious if Ridley answers that question”. For a short time, Hauer and Sammon signed autographs and posed for photographs at the BFI Shop with waves of enthusiasts.

Rutger Hauer (Roy Batty) hooks up with fans, signing autographs for Blade Runner Day at the BFI Southbank (March, 2009)

The highlight of the day came shortly afterwards with the arrival of Ridley Scott. In a preemptory move however, Ridley’s office had block-booked 2/3 of the auditorium for his private guests, few of whom actually showed (and news of which unfortunately unsettled a few in the crowd who hadn’t been able to book online as a result). His onstage interview spanned from the earliest days of his career as a trainee graphic artist in Hartlepool to his latest work on the $200 million blockbuster Robin Hood for Universal Pictures. Reflecting on the strengths of Alien (1979), he said that “the priority of the director is to cast well” and in describing his approach to the chestburster scene he repeated the oft-told elements of his version of the story: it was to be a one-take action, John Hurt’s (Kane) artificial chest was packed with high-pressure pumps loaded with blood and offal, and actress Veronica Cartwright (Lambert) slipped backwards in the carnage. Ridley also alluded to the difficulties he experienced onset with the Blade Runner crew — Special Photographic Effects Supervisor Douglas Trumbull cites one such example in relation to the lighting effects in the Tyrell building — and took aim at those who criticised his autocratic style: “[If] everyone and their mother gets in the kitchen [then] there’s too many chefs. The director is the chef, whether you like it or not, that’s the job and if you don’t like it don’t work on the movie. So I was always thought to be a little tough because [of that]. I don’t want advice, I’ll fall on my own sword thank you very much”.

This response, though persuasive, was characteristic of Ridley’s account. He repeatedly identified his authority as a visual stylist, placing great emphasis on his early career as a media entrepreneur (his scholarship at the Royal Academy of Art; his role in television as set designer; the founding of RSA in 1968 where he shot 2,700 commercials, averaging two per week; this all before before The Duellists in 1977). And in his statements about actors he was both partisan and defensive: citing the five films on which he has partnered with actor Russell Crowe (Gladiator, A Good Year, American Gangster and Body of Lies; their current project Robin Hood marks the fifth collaboration), Ridley asserted the New Zealand star’s superiority as “probably the best actor in the world today”.

I haven’t been so excited by a director’s Q&A before. Twice in interview the houselights were brought down and clips were screened: the chestburster scene from Alien, in which Kane succumbs to his dreadful fate as carrier of a living organism that must literally eat its way out from within; and the rousing ten minute-long Germania battle sequence which opens the historical epic Gladiator (2000). There followed some light discussion, with Scott reflecting on the changing nature of the industry: for him, the second half of the 1970s was the heyday of Modern Horror which he linked to the release of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). This discussion did not thrill me quite as much as the experience of spectatorship — we were in the company of one of the most important directors of the New Hollywood whose name still carries enormous symbolic weight in commercial cinema and modern advertising. Like my fellow filmgoers, I’ve seen these clips hundreds of times in my life: the subtle concern in a look shared between the science officer Ash (Ian Holm) and Kane at the dinner table; the gruesome beauty of the alien as it emerges slowly, insidiously, from a gaping red cavity now in the latter’s chest; and in Gladiator the images of archers readying their arrows, an entire hillside in flame as fire pots strike every tree, every pitiful soldier. I was more interested in Scott’s response to his own images; and I admit to being fascinated with this very idea, the author onstage viewing iconic moments from his past work in real time with his audience. I was thrilled to be present.

Images: by me.

23 March, 2009

Producer Michael Deeley signing autographs for Blade Runner Day at the BFI Southbank (March, 2009)

THE SINGAPORE FILM INDUSTRY

BEST FOREIGN LANG. FILM
SINGAPORE, MEDIA 21
AND ERIC KHOO’S ‘MY MAGIC’

Against the massive international powerhouses of the Japanese and Korean industries Singapore barely registers, both as a film-producing community in its own right and as a nation producing films worthy of international recognition. On the home-multiplexes front, Hollywood and Hong Kong imports tend to reign supreme, pushing the overall market share for local films down to between 3 ½ and 5%. In its most promising years during the nineties Singapore cinema produced such filmmakers as Eric Khoo, Tay Teck Lock, Jack Neo and Teng Bee Lian, names which became synonymous with a sort of embryonic local cinema which gained some purchase in 1998 and 1999. This development was undercut, ostensibly, just a year later. There were two reasons for this. Firstly, Singapore has an indomitable video piracy system; it’s so strong, in fact, that film-producers are purportedly losing 30% of their profits on their biggest local hits. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly in artistic terms, the local cinema was already handicapped by creative limitation and thematic repetition. Censorship regulations and the relative ‘immaturity’ of the industry itself (filmmakers must look overseas for post-production facilities and to partake in joint ventures) disadvantaged the cinema further. The establishment of a Film Commission (the S.F.C.) in 1998 helped matters by promoting cinema (hitherto denigrated culturally and politically) as a worthwhile and productive pursuit — and indeed films like the high-profile Be With Me (Eric Khoo, 2005, Singapore) demonstrate a similar approach to domestic and social concerns as the critically well-received Jack Neo film I Not Stupid (Xiaohai bu ben, 2002, Singapore) — but questions still remain about cinema and other arts-oriented initiatives in Singapore.

One interesting offshoot of the Media 21 plan — an initiative set in motion by the Media Development Authority — is Singapore’s emergence as a potential site for foreign film production. I recall the finale of My Scary Girl (Dal-kom-sal-beol-han-yeon-in, Son Jae-gon, 2006, South Korea), a Korean film in which two former lovers meet serendipitously on Marina Bay promenade. It’s a dopey ending, but admittedly also the one watchable scene in an almost unwatchable movie; interestingly, the locale (which showcases the distinctive Esplanade building and a popular tourist feature known as the Merlion which pulls in a million people per year) becomes, one suspects for all audiences besides just Korean, a sort of stand-in for foreign exoticism, for economic prowess and for the glamour of a rampant capitalist culture. Last week, the S.F.C. selected Khoo’s My Magic as the official contender in the Best Foreign Language Film category at the 2009 Oscars; if accepted, the film could join the likes of Japan’s Departures (Okuribito, Takita Yôjirô, 2008, Japan) and South Korea’s Crossing (Keurosing, Kim Tae-gyun, 2008, South Korea) next year. Preposterously enough, Be With Me, the state’s entry in the 2006 Oscars, was disqualified from the process when the Academy rescinded its original decision based on their determination that English was the dominant language (its other languages include Cantonese, Singlish and Hokkien) — see Foreign Oscar Pix Lost in Translation (Variety, 21 December 2005) and Rules of the Oscar Game (Forbes, 2006).

This setback notwithstanding, Khoo was awarded best director at the Torino Film Festival and the Brussels Festival of Independent Film; and Be With Me opened the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes 2005 — the FIPRESCI jury award, representing the International Federation of Film Critics, would ultimately go to Her Name is Sabine (Sandrine Bonnaire, 2007, France). For Singapore to have any shot at the Best Foreign Language Film category in the 2009 Academy Awards My Magic must be in exhibition nationwide before 30 September, the official deadline for all contenders; as of 18 September the film has yet to be released. According to Variety the distributors are hastily rescheduling for a September 26 release in order to comply, but it is all a bit of a mess and questions remain about the S.F.C.’s role in this. This does not bode well.

18 September, 2008

FILM ALIEN DIRECTOR RIDLEY SCOTT

Morphologies of identity,
Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) — Part Three

It’s actually Ridley’s own detectable enthusiasm for the non-fascistic (i.e., the not-invincible, not-super-body (the “survivor”, yes, but also therefore the vulnerable species)) meanings of the alien, and for a more specific debate regarding morphologies of identity which, if not really enabling this reading in the first instance, then very definitely frees the text for such an opportunity, opening it for prospective analyses beyond the boundaries of simple b-movie horror convention.

A while ago I came across this quote from Scott. His comments can be found in the highly recommended Cinefex Alien The Special Effects written by Bill Norton and Don Shay, and published by Titan in 1997. The quote is worth reproducing in full:

That [cocoon sequence which prefigures Ripley’s flight to the Narcissus] was quite spooky, and it actually worked very well ... I liked it because it was a brief way of explaining what had happened on the derelict and what was now happening on the Nostromo. And I think it provided some explanation for the alien’s killing spree — like a butterfly or an insect, it has a very limited life span in which to reproduce itself. It also helped explain why it didn’t attack Ripley in the Narcissus. Its days were over. Like a chameleon, it had found a protective corner in that ship and was working itself in there to die. So in that respect, it would have been nice to have kept that footage. But it really killed the pacing. By then, Ripley was the only one left on board and everything was moving very fast — and it just slowed down the drive. So I cut it out.

Much like the addition of the origami unicorn in the director’s cut of Blade Runner (1982 / 1992), then, the cocoon sequence opens the text to interpretation, inviting specifically a consideration of developmental biology in the alien as life-form.

This passage can’t be taken as definitive. Ridley is well known for issuing alternative readings, at worst contradictory statements, on his films, a weakness which his critics tie in with his apparent limitations as a director of story and of character (I ultimately disagree, believing Ridley to be well on a par with, say, Michael Mann when it comes to mastering both). It's still valid to think the alien’s withdrawal to the Narcissus is dictated by an atavistic mode of instinct, the “imperatives of nature” which it “incarnates” as Stephen Mulhall puts it in his On Film (Thinking in Action S.) (2001), and this is something the two films support: the creature, not knowing where the Narcissus might take it — if it even knows at all that it is a separate technological body from the malfunctioning Nostromo itself — seeks to blend cryptically with the environment of the lifeboat, to remain inconspicuous until after a short period of dormancy. The Revised Final screenplay dated 28 December 1978, published by Orion in the Alien: Complete Illustrated Screenplay (2000), includes a passage which supports this:

Ripley looks out of the locker window. Waiting for the Alien to attack. Instead it returns to its position in the wall. Building its new lair.

Regarding the morphology of the alien – and critically the possibility of morphology in its victims: the fate of Lambert (Veronica Cartwright) remains unclear. While Parker and Brett both suffer the indignities of generic slasher deaths, importantly before our very eyes, the ‘disappearances’ of Dallas and Lambert from the narrative have attracted considerable interest about just what the alien does to them once they are executed. The emergence of the cocoon scene on numerous DVD-releases, and incorporated into the Director’s Cut in 2003, reiterated the film’s thematics of natural and unnatural birth and consumption, with Brett’s slumped body harvested or rendered into an alien egg, and Dallas awaiting a similar fate nearby.

From Ridley’s commentary:

Would there be [an alien] version of the Cartwright character? Certainly, whatever happens, there would be more humanoid aliens now onboard this craft, and that’s what she’s [Ripley] now got to destroy.

This suggestion that Lambert may have been dehumanised to whatever grisly extent by the alien in her supposed ‘death’ scene — an act which would have effectively reimagined her, or her infant, as an alien crossbreed roaming the darkened halls of the Nostromo, very much still alive, and long after all have been evacuated (a fate which might well have landed Ridley in hot water in critical circles, had he gone ahead and inferred the lesbian relationship between Ripley and Lambert which, again, he remembers considering on the 03 commentary) — isn't only gold dust for those who speculate on the potentialities of the Alien universe, but also feeds back nicely into my point about the alien’s limited lifecycle. The reconfiguration of Lambert into something altogether dehumanised, a traumatic hybrid, hierarchises the alien’s killings in terms of a basic productivity with the straight slasher killing of the character Parker positioned at the bottom of the scale; the nightmarish bastardisation of Lambert into a sadistic hybrid measuring about midway on the scale; and the reconstitution of Brett and Dallas’s bodies into the physical matter of the alien eggs (seen in the famous cocoon sequence) representing the creature’s full potentiality for self-perpetuation and material productivity.

Given that both scenes would have occurred towards the close of the second act in Alien’s narrative trajectory (with the cocoon sequence actually appearing in the Director’s Cut after the deaths of Parker and Lambert), it follows that the alien, having given birth to three potential alien offspring in Brett, Dallas and (in an unusual form of ‘kin’ selection) Lambert, might have withdrawn to the shadowy womb of the Narcissus, away from the combusting and stammering environment of the Nostromo (which I'd argue it does not understand is destined to self-destruct) to end its lifecycle. The final destruction of the Nostromo is only a success in that it demonstrates how and why Ripley was capable of doing what the crew of the entombed derelict on LV-426 could not: namely, the termination of a species. Had Ripley not succeeded, the Nostromo would doubtlessly continue drifting through space: a moving, desolate mirror of the derelict, with its own fateful cargo.

Part I | Part II

16 November, 2007

FILM ALIEN DIRECTOR RIDLEY SCOTT

Morphologies of identity,
Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) — Part Two

The second explanation, then, one that's more narrative-driven (not convention-driven) and thus more arresting as a concept, is simple: like a cat, the alien seeks out a darkened space where it can die; the Narcissus becomes, effectively, the creature’s deathbed. The theory is founded on an assertion that the alien has reached the end of its life cycle, that it has achieved full maturity over the course of the film. This naturally raises its own set of theoretical questions, not least regarding the condensed and shortened life span of the alien in the context of ‘real time’ (as far as it can be determined by us, as spectators, over the course of the film’s 117 minutes). What good, indeed, is the “perfect survivor” as a specimen if it lives only for several days?

To the morphological phases in the alien’s life cycle, then. The violent processes of the alien’s general reproduction (the facehugger’s aggressive capacity to penetrate and impregnate, together with the embryo’s accelerated growth rate once it has brutally extricated itself from the carrier host) can be seen to conform to a not uncommon model of reproduction in various short life-span insects, beginning with the two or more references to grubs and insects by Ridley Scott on the DVD-commentaries. Some species of mosquito — which undergoes a similar metamorphosis to the alien — have a life cycle as little as 4 days; male wasp colonies die away during a typical year, leaving the young mated queens alive to hibernate and then begin nesting again in the spring. (James Cameron’s Aliens (1986) follows a similar tack by revealing a eusocial colony housing a single breeding female.) In the director’s cut of the film, released by Fox theatrically in 2003, the alien’s sexual and asexual reproductive cycle conforms to the parasitic model of some insects. Parasitic reproduction is hinted at by the larvae covering, and presumably devouring, what remains of Brett’s face and body, his entire cadaver being reduced into the leathery organic matter of the egg in which he sits. While it can’t be asserted that these larvae may pupate within whatever remains of Brett’s body after decomposition in order to produce another non-alien species, we might assume that these larvae are part of the alien reproductive cycle. Either an incidental by-product of the alien’s secretions, or a natural consequence of typical bodily decomposition.

With such a high emphasis placed by the film’s makers on the naturalistic reproduction and life cycle of the alien itself (doubtlessly done to increase the monster’s credibility as an extraterrestrial life form with an audience, because ... hey, we’re all suckers for a mutilating killer with some degree of intelligence), it seems trite to return now to explanation (1) where we proposed that the alien has global domination in mind at the end of the picture ... It’s fair to say, then, that the film’s makers use this paralleling, or mirroring, to underline the species type of the alien (dubbed a “Xenomorph” in Cameron’s Aliens Complete Illustrated Screenplay, and formally “a primitive form of encephlepod” [sic] in the Alien shooting script); so the highly modified facehugger, an endoparasite, shares a defence mechanism with certain toxin-producing plants — its bodily fluid is acid — enabling it to first implant an embryo and then sustain the host body for the length of time required for its successful development, after which it appears to retreat from view and die. (In fact, the facehugger famously uncoils from its spot on a ledge and drops harmlessly onto Ripley, causing shock moment #2 for its very tense audience.) My argument would therefore go that the unexpected death of the facehugger prefigures an almost identical death for the monster alien later on. Like the male wasp, its life cycle ends after mating.

So the film — in its conceptualisation of the alien’s maturation into a seven-foot, self-sufficient adult — draws on a received understanding regarding sexual and asexual reproduction, but it truncates and intensifies this form of reproduction in line with a hyper-Darwinian mode of evolution, resulting in a speeding-up of the ‘life’ in essence. The alien’s intensely hostile, colonialist mission would consequently seem to be dictated by its highly accelerated growth rate, as evidenced in the film by the creature’s moulting and ever-increasing size.

Is this thesis supported by the film’s makers? The motivational ambiguities of this scene are compounded by Ridley’s confession (on the ‘03 commentary) that he’d actually considered, however frivolously, a downbeat (and altogether lunatic) ending in which the alien not only prevails in its battle with Ripley, but after expelling her body is able to fathom the ship’s controls, and send a convincing radio message to the frontier, à la the Predator (John McTiernan, 1987), confirming explicitly its imperialist intentions with regard to colonising planet Earth.

Even without this ridiculous proposition in mind, it’s still quite plausible that in the final film the alien has deposited itself in the darker recesses of the Narcissus with a similar goal in mind. If it is indeed a “survivor” in this most fantastical sense, then a desire to continue this unsophisticated killing spree doesn't seem too out of the question. It merely confirms the alien belongs to the cinematic tradition of armoured, unstoppable horror killers ... which would be a big disappointment. Not only does it disambiguate the alien’s status as antagonist, it at the same time fractures our understanding of the creature as a distinguished species with a limited life expectancy. For if the alien understands that it must, and can, get to Earth, then doesn’t that simply align it with increasingly indistinguishable, recurrent cinematic killers like Michael Myers and Freddy Krueger?

In the published Hill/Giler script, revising O’Bannon’s instruction only slightly, the stage direction reads thus:

Ripley watching the final destiny of her ship and crew mates. A very long moment. Then, behind her, the lethal hand emerges from deep shadow. The Alien has been in the shuttle-craft all along.

So clearly, the alien is positioned within this scene by the writers according to the conventions of horror logic . . . or to cite Morris Dickstein, the “aesthetics of fright” , wherein a cheap shock is offered by the sudden unveiling of the monster again. (O’Bannon’s original script being particularly monodimensional in this regard.) But this passage doesn’t provide authority for anything, let alone creative intention; we need to see the shooting script carried through production, Ridley’s thoughts on the scenario (if he had the presence of mind to put them down on paper), and his instructions to Sigourney Weaver and Bolaji Badejo about creature motivation in rehearsal and on set. In all likelihood, it’s possible that the only open conversation conducted between Ridley, Sigourney and Badejo concerned the creature’s passive interest in Ripley as the bearer of sexual difference, now that she is fully dis-integrated from the communal, egalitarian space of the Nostromo. (cont’d.)

Part III | Part I

16 November, 2007

FILM ALIEN DIRECTOR RIDLEY SCOTT

Morphologies of identity,
Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) — Part One

There is a scene towards the end of Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) that I want to explore in some depth. Having just successfully detonated a gigantic star-freighter, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), the remaining survivor of a seven-man crew, busies herself prepping the Narcissus lifeboat (her spaceship) for the journey home; from out of nowhere, the alien’s hand springs up defensively. The full-grown creature has actually stowed itself aboard the Narcissus and makes for her as if to attack. But does it? The hiss it makes is tellingly reminiscent of the cat Jones when it first laid eyes on (former crew-member) Brett’s killer in the undercarriage room (and Jones backed away from the danger (smart cat) rather than foolishly staying to confront it — a point I’ll return to if I remember). Ripley scrambles for safety, but the alien remains where it is. A lethargic beast packed into its dark cubby hole.

Why the lethargy? Why the refusal to extract itself voluntarily from its self-styled dray? The alien’s senses appear to be muted, its sharply honed skill for outmanoeuvring its prey non-evident, its survival instinct defeated. Why, then, does it now not include Ripley in its routinised game of death? Eschewing for the meantime Ridley Scott’s suggestion of some kind of interspecies sexual chemistry here (implicit of course in the imagery of the monster’s jaw opening and extending to full arousal), there appears to be two possible explanations for the creature’s behaviour in this segment. The first, largely convention-driven, is hibernation. Following its survival instinct to the letter, the alien stows itself secretively onboard the lifeboat so that it might return with its (last remaining) victim to a populated planet, where upon arrival the amusement park-style death trip will recommence with presumably apocalyptic results. To this end, the creature appears to anticipate Ripley’s entry into hypersleep for the long journey by entering into a dormant state of its own. This explanation doesn’t fully account for the alien’s sense of passivity aboard the Narcissus.

The alien reveals itself to Ripley by springing its arm when it is accidentally disturbed — an action we can agree is contrary to the stealth-like expertise demonstrated perfectly earlier. One might presume that a Machiavellian creature with grandiose designs on reaching Earth to exterminate an entire population would demonstrate some restraint; it’s (famously) a survivor, after all, meaning that it can control its own aggression. The arm gesture, however, suggests it is caught by surprise — an incoherent reaction for an insidious creature whose deep malevolence is apparently matched only by its shrewdness to follow Ripley home.

It remains inactive (Ripley having by this point fled the room), outstretched in the shadowy compartment, lodged innocuously behind several control panels. There follows a cute montage of the alien mouthing, hypnotically maybe, the various technological components which surround it (and into which might be read Ridley’s final suggestion — one that challenges the point I’m actually making — that the alien is inebriated, experiencing an arousal, or sexual pleasure ... and if that’s the case, then we have a whole other explanation to investigate; but alas, not in this post). It is left to Ripley, finally, to forcibly eject the creature from first its deathbed — where it slumps in visible agony to the floor of the lifeboat and only very slowly begins to right itself — and then from the ship altogether. Before she does however, the alien mounts its last “attack”; as Ripley turns around from another control panel (these things are everywhere in the Narcissus), she sees the alien beside her, jaws agape, tongue extended and ready to punch out. This action is unexpected for two reasons. Notwithstanding the fact that we've never seen this equivocation in the alien before (it killed Parker and Brett cleanly and efficiently, delaying the final gruesome moment admittedly, but nonetheless delivering the fatal head trauma itself in single blows), the creature’s “attack approach” is ill conceived; premature in sexual terms. It allows Ripley the opportunity to eject the alien through the open hatchway and terminate it in the ship’s engine boosters.

For some, including Ridley, the creature’s equivocation is sexually motivated: captivated by the fleshy “fullness” of Ripley the alien approaches her to investigate the heroine’s very physicality; and so its death can be traced back to this form of hesitation. But this reading doesn’t allow for the fact that Ripley has (1) left the room altogether (thus calling into question the creature’s spatial awareness. Does it think the same person is re-entering its space after he/she has already fled?) and (2) crawled into her spacesuit (reducing the curves of her body, removing her scent). Though the suggestion of an alien erotic subjectivity is fascinating, and not altogether theoretically preposterous in this most sexualised of science-fiction universes, I think I stray from this line of thought with regard to the film’s ending.

So I would argue these points: that the alien reacts defensively when it is disturbed; that Ripley caught the creature by surprise; that the creature’s retreat into an innocuous corner of the craft indicates a significant shift in its behaviour; that the creature is no longer privileged as the “perfect” “survivor” in the film’s denouement, and that through a combination of inaction, lethargy, and hesitation, the creature becomes responsible for its own downfall; and finally, that it does not board the Narcissus with intentions of following Ripley back to her homeland at all . . . (cont’d.)

Part II | Part III

16 November, 2007

FILM | A TALE OF TWO SISTERS | DIRECTOR | KIM JEE-WOON

Kim Jee-woon’s A Tale Of Two Sisters (2003)
The Guilt Dream

Recovery brings back terrifying memories of struggling wildly for breath . . . a sense of absolute failure and a very clear understanding of it that makes the last few seconds before blackout seem almost peaceful.

— Hunter S Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt:
Strange Tales from a Strange Time (1980)

A Tale Two Sisters is a guilt dream in extremis. Su-mi’s life is disrupted by the effects of memory, by the emancipatory possibilities of imagination. There is something terrifically indulgent about this form of self-attention yet as Kim’s directorial vision becomes clearer via the film’s double-whammy of revelations, as the sensual and romantic ‘present’ contorts and deferred feelings of guilt return to the surface, and even while Su-mi’s bedevilled father Mu-hyeon wrestles with his own feelings of parental inadequacy and emotional disconnectedness, amongst all of this we can’t help but completely forgive Su-mi for wanting it the way it always was. Accessing the past at least reconnects us with something tangible: it is more real and passionate than her incongruous existence in the hysterical family home, it is more heartening than anything her present identity as the exhausted non-sister and un-daughter can afford her. Why deny her the perfect solace found in self-delusion? Like Tarkovsky’s Solaris, A Tale of Two Sisters positively aches with feeling, with good as well as pathos. We sense it as Su-mi and Su-yeon pore over their mother’s valuables in the bedroom (a batch of

photographs in one hand, a necklace in the other, a pair of worn pumps tucked under the arm; the innocent hope contained within the spell passed down to Su-yeon: “taritakoom, taritakoom”) and when Su-yeon retreats to the protective space of Su-mi’s bed in the early morning, frightened by the noises outside; it’s there in the post-interview subjective POV shot in the back seat of Mu-hyeon’s car as they drive through the yellowing countryside, the air busy with flies, sunlight catching the water.

Su-mi covets the simplicity of the past, and in return it cruelly offers her the illusion of a lost identity. Ever the resourceful one in the relationship we feel, Su-mi becomes again in this temporal loop the permanent provider and guardian, the soulmate and nurturing sub-mother: everything she was she is again now within the wish-fulfilment fantasy of the present. While Su-yeon trots off to eat ground cherries, Su-mi inspects the exterior of the house before they can enter hand-in-hand; after Su-yeon’s brief entombment inside the cupboard where her mother died, Su-mi returns to set her free and give her full reassurance that no one will ever hurt her again — it is the apology she has been yearning to make, and is arguably the centrepiece of the movie.

Yet Su-mi cannot distinguish between reality and sleepwalking daydream; she is overwhelmed by the force of memory and the potency of her own emotion. Things continue as (we suspect) they always did between the pair, but Su-mi’s role carries the trace memory of both her own negligence in the past and the fierce independence of her forming ego. The hubris that commanded her final heavily retaliatory (and totally devastating) confrontation with Eun-ju (which becomes the wound, or fissure, in memory; the source of all negative energies regulating the ‘now’) is writ large in the present, magnified many times and thrust outwards in the theatricality of her various hysterical ‘performances’ within the home.

Ultimately, there is nothing Su-mi can do except to dwell on the past, breathe in at night the familiar scent of winter bed sheets, play outside without inhibition, and later spend the last hour before bedtime writing in her coveted diary before resetting her internal clock again to do more the next day. These are the perfect moments of the past, the soothing instances of perfection that we all have access to but which we all, incapable of mastering time’s final ephemerality, tend to let slip away.

30 June, 2007