New Korean Cinema by Darcy Paquet

Author:Darcy Paquet
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER004000, Performing Arts/Film and Video/General, PER004030, Performing Arts/Film & Video/History & Criticism
Publisher: Wallflower Press
Published: 2010-04-18T16:00:00+00:00

The age of debut directors: 1996–2000

The biggest grounds for optimism, however, lay in the content. By 1998 it was becoming clear that a younger generation of directors was bringing a distinctly new aesthetic to Korean cinema. Youth-oriented, genre-savvy, visually sophisticated and not ashamed of its commercial origins, the New Korean Cinema of the late 1990s was perceived by Korean audiences as being something entirely different from the works that preceded it.

Kim Jee-woon’s debut film, the horror-comedy The Quiet Family (1998)

The Quiet Family (Joyonghan gajok, 1998), the debut feature by director Kim Jee-woon, is a representative example of how the new films contrasted with the old. Set in a family-run lodge located alongside a hiking trail, the film focuses on the increasingly desperate actions of the owners when their lodgers keep turning up dead. Shifting back and forth between comedy, suspense and a dull sense of dread as the bodies pile up, the film exhibits a playful, carefree attitude at the same time as it shows how one act of violence can quickly lead to more. Meanwhile, a misprint on a signboard early in the film identifies the lodge as a ‘safe house’, a 1970s term referring to homes used by intelligence agents for interrogations and other secret operations. Film critic Kim Hyung-seok argues that, given this and other references, the eerie space of the lodge is meant to evoke the horrors of 1970s Korean politics (2008: 27–9).

On a visual level, The Quiet Family looked markedly different from its cinematic predecessors. Shot in rich, saturated colours, the film prioritised the use of lighting and set design to create memorable visual compositions rather than to capture the locale in any realistic manner. The opening shot, an exhilarating Steadicam sequence that meanders from the second floor down the stairs and onto the first before turning and retracing its steps, introduces the layout of the lodge but also clearly revels in its own technical bravado. If the visuals of the Korean New Wave functioned to ground the work in reality, the new directors were more likely to view visual expression in abstract terms, or as an end in itself.

Most notable about the film in the context of its time was its eclectic approach to genre. The Quiet Family’s casual appropriation and juxtaposition of genre conventions – from the lighting effects of horror to the broad physical movements of slapstick comedy – set it apart from both the commercial and art-house traditions of Korean filmmaking. Kim was not the only one practising such genre alchemy: in its wrap-up of the year 1998, film magazine Cine21 named ‘genre diffusion’ as the first of ten key issues that had defined the year (Anon. 1999). On one level, New Korean Cinema grew out of a sincere love for genre films of all sorts. And yet for directors such as Kim, genre remained an object to be manipulated rather than a model to be followed. The enigmatic and open-ended conclusion of The Quiet Family violates the conventions of both the horror and comedy genres.

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