Films of silence, scenery and faces:
On works made by Director KANGYU Garam

KIM Shin , Editor

 

New directors who want to produce films usually start their career by directing drama films. This applies not only to Korean directors but also all directors around the world. It is relatively rare that the new directors in the film industry start their film career by producing the documentaries. or if there are those cases, they change their direction to the production of drama film soon thereafter. The directors who are also the audience of the film are more likely to be attracted to the fictional art as it provide them with more dramatic fantasy.

Garam Kangyu visits the domestic film festivals with two documents which are recently produced <Itaewon> and <Candle Wave Feminists>. He also had the desire for handling the drama film when he first entered the film industry. But though he was moved by the film world of Hsiao-hsien Hou and Edward Yang, which is the kind and moderate view of the film, he was more attracted to the careful attitude of camera which quietly touches the characters instead of depicting the curve of change in the dramatic conflict. So, he has chosen to produce two documentaries in this film history except one. He even exercised the realistic technique which is close to the documentary when he produced the short drama film called <The Jinju Hair Salon>. With his another recent documentary <Candle Wave Feminists> recognized by Seoul International Women’s Film Festival, let us then briefly talk more about his films in following paragraphs.

There is an impressive scene in <Itaewon> which was produced by him last year. In this scene, Director Kangyu has put two different scenes comparatively. He shows the noisy party which continued to late at night under the beautiful neon sign which brightly shines the late night in Itaewon. Then immediately after, the camera moves on to Ms. Naki with the age of 75 who makes a big sigh with the face filled with fatigue. Though Ms. Naki had worked at a club for US soldiers in Itaewon, she is now at a old age and wash dishes at a nearby restaurant, thus keeping the hard life. She says, “Every night, Itaewon is so crowed with people that its soil may collapse under the weight of the visiting people.” But, with the shop filled with people and thousands of people visiting Itaewon to have good time, why is Naki’s face filled with the shadow? These comparative scenes show the eerie asymmetry of capitalization darkly draping the modern society. These simple questions appear many areas of the works of Director Kangyu, thus catching our eyes.

Three works shot by Director Kangyu questions the asymmetry of capital surrounding the space like this. His first work <Sand> was shot in 2011 and was awarded with the Best Documentary Award at DMZ International Docu-Film Festival. The work tells the director’s own autobiographical family story who lived at Eunma Apartment during late 1990 to late 2000 when there was the strong real estate speculation. It shows the sorrow of people who lived in the period of real estate speculation. To take advantage of the strong real estate boom which started in the early and mid-2000, a lot of people borrowed money from bank and tried to move to Eumma Apartment. But then as the situations turned sour that they could not expect more price rise, they ended up to be a house poor who are pressed by the a lot of interests and debts. In <The Jinju Hair Salon> (2015), she described an episode in which, at a beauty salon called Jinju Hair Salon, a middle aged woman had to leave hometown where the hair salon was located but new people came instead, there was a minor dispute between people moving out and moving in. As described above, his most recent work <Itaewon> (2016), he depicted the bad side of the developmentalism. With the plan of moving the US military base from Yongsan to Pyeongtaek, the rampant redevelopment plan in the vacated area makes the people who had lived there for several dozens of years had to leave their place. The film <Itaewon> contained the lives of three women who had lived there for dozens of years but who have no idea on how to live. As commonly shown in the characters in the works, the films produced by Director Kangyu described the people who were dwarfed by the new value of developmentalism which devoured the things of the past and poured out the new things endlessly and who then reached to the point where they were no more visible to us as they did not ride the wave of developmentalism. The movie tries to focus on the people who did not participate in the wave of development of new area with booming economy which is well represented by Itaewon and Gangnam.

Director Kangyu is characterized by the freedom as the producer of documentary. He looks like that he is more attracted by the instant vitality which he feel when he personally meet the field rather than based on the careful planning and script. Director Kangyu confessed that at all filming sites for the works, he experienced the happy powerlessness as he saw his predetermined design of the film collapsed. While he majored in the study of woman in a graduate school and enjoyed the collection and record of the stories who were not well accepted and welcome as the main topics of the history, he put more emphasis on the listening to the deep stories of the storyteller rather than strictly following the predetermined line. He put himself not in a position of overseeing the strict process of producing films but rather in the position of acute lister, thus exposing himself in the work but not being afraid of questing to the other people. His aesthetic form of not describing the site with explicit, but inordinate narration or subtitles, might have been implicitly derived from such attitude. Instead, he keeps this waiting attitude until the target objects from the filmed scene tell their own stories. These pictures of silence and space are not talking much. They are just waiting until the moment the narrator himself/herself, not the objectified Other, casually giving his or her testimonies about their situation in creator’s point of view. At some time, they finally will come to the front and bring up their story on camera. It is quite difficult to add words for those desperate inspiration of pure scenes bloomed from the very end of the moment of difficult waiting.

I think that why there are repetitive appearance of photos in the Director Kangyu’s works may be related to this. There is some implication in the fact that the first scenes of <Itaewon> and “Sand” start with the shooting of the photo of the target object. In addition to the first scene, there are many characters who subsequently appeared in the film without any clear context like the remembrance contained in the photo and video clip. As the photo which is the material copy of a thing, shows a person’s accumulated recollection, Director Kangyu also succeeded in revealing something in a similar way. It can be a individual memory or history impressed on face of the filmmakers, or natural inherent history of the space that we have forgotten in a saturation of cascading spectacles and capital of the society. Director Kangyu also reveals the moment of self exposure throughout the resisting process of individual and spatial history from effacement free from any contrived forms. Therefore, it can be said that the Director Kangyu’s film is not the film of script and explanation but the film filled with the landscape and conversation. It may be that this moderate attitude is the element of effectively showing the characteristics of Director Kangyu who put more emphasis on the production of documentary rather than drama film in which the director leads the story with more active involvement.

The characteristics of “being free” as described before is not only exposed in the individual works but also expressed in all works produced by Director Kangyu. Though the targets in his works are independently shot, they have the relation and share a loose connection each other as if they breath together. The act of the father touching the hair of the mother in the film <Sand> appears again in the films <The Jinju Hair Salon> and <Itaewon> as the act of touching the hairs. In addition although three works are about the space and re-development, it has common ground in that they contain the opinion on the persons who live as women in Korea. In addition, those consciousness of problem has been expanded with more recent works. In that sense, <Itaewon> is not only the work on the redevelopment of Itaewon area but also the charge against Korean society where the discrimination against women are rampant. Although each of three work talks about its unique story, they are interconnected as if they are just the cell of one life and then diversified to expand their scope. It may not be a coincidence that Director Kangyu who has always kept his eye on problems of women and the space as a process but not as a completion was hostile to “misogyny in the plaza” in <Candle Wave Feminists>. This is the reason why we cannot wait to see not just the recently announced <Candle Wave Feminists> but his next film now under its progress.