Cinema neighbor relations – Weekend
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For a long time, one of the indicative cliches of South Korean cinema and TV series has been the character-citizen of the DPRK – a fanatical soldier, an insidious spy, a saboteur, a fanatic. This cannot even be called negative – he is simply an enemy, scary or cartoonish. However, over the past 40 years, South Korean cinema has managed to get rid of its self-created bogeyman and saw ordinary people in its closest neighbors.
With the end of World War II and the Japanese occupation, the history of modern Korea began: the peninsula was divided along the 38th parallel into Soviet and American zones of influence. It is no coincidence that the Republic of Korea and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea are called South and North for simplicity: water and fire, heaven and earth, hard-won democracy and hereditary autocracy, capitalism and communism – underline what is necessary. The gap between these states formed after the Korean War (1950–1953), which is still formally not over. The ideological confrontation, intensified by front-line traumas, was also reflected in the cinema, where the party line – both in the DPRK and the ROK – did not allow sympathy for former fellow citizens.
This formula of dehumanization is well known from the anti-communist period of Hollywood during the McCarthy era or Soviet post-war cinema. The soldiers are faceless, buttoned-up monsters who sympathize with the Juche ideas – fanatics who are ready to sacrifice their own and others’ lives for the sake of an abstract goal. Such characters can be seen in “Arirang” (1954) by Lee Ghan Jong and “Death Box” (1955) by Kim Ki-young. It also introduces the most unpleasant type of conformist – a person who uses someone else’s humanity to achieve a goal: in “Arirang” a man forces a woman who shelters wounded American soldiers to marry him.
True, here the analogy with Hollywood, American and Soviet, creates a somewhat distorted picture of South Korean cinema. The young Polish film critic Roman Gusarski notes that not so many “anti-communist” films were produced in the country, about 18 per year, and then we are talking more about individual plots or motives, rather than stories entirely focused on the blasphemy of the DPRK. In the same 1950s, tragedies about separated families were published, and the already mentioned Lee Ghan Chong filmed “Piagol,” dedicated to North Korean soldiers who refused to agree to the truce. The director did not make the characters ruthless antagonists, so a compromise with censorship ended up being the final scene, where the last survivor wanders towards the South Korean flag.
A landmark film in depicting not so much the North Koreans as the ideological dynamics between the countries was Lee Doo-young’s The Last Witness, a nearly three-hour eccentric detective story in which cop Byung-ho (Ha Myung-joon), with the charisma of a noir private eye, investigates the murder of a winemaker. The origins of the case are found in the Korean War, portrayed in a hard-boiled plague-on-both-your-houses tradition: Communist atrocities are indistinguishable from those of South Korean soldiers, and many characters’ choice of sides is driven by profit rather than ideology. Filmed in 1980, at a time when the state’s grip was weakening – between the assassination of Park Chung-hee and the dictatorship of Chun Doo-hwan – the film managed to become a hit at the national box office before it was seen as sedition. “The Last Witness” was shortened by almost an hour, cutting out at least the episodes where the communists rape a South Korean girl, who is then harassed by a fellow prosecutor. They also decided to cut the scene of him receiving a bribe. The producer and screenwriter were arrested. In more or less its original form, “The Last Witness” was shown only at the beginning of the 2000s, as well as at the Berlinale 2017, where Lee Doo-young personally presented the film.
It is noteworthy that it was in 1980 that Kim Il Sung came up with the idea of unifying the North and South – and since then the issue has continued to pop up on the agenda. It was especially active in the 90s, when South Korea chose the “sunshine” policy, seeking to separate ideological confrontation and economic or humanitarian cooperation. By this time, the drift of military dictatorships towards democracy and civil liberties had ended in the Republic of Korea, and the idea of “Hallyu” was proclaimed, designed to promote cultural exports around the world against the backdrop of an economic crisis. And at this moment, Kang Chae Kyu’s film “Shiri” is released.
The first sign (actually a fish) of the competitiveness of the industry lit up cinema screens in February 1999: a total of 6.5 million people came to see the first domestic blockbuster, which turned out to be one and a half times more than the South Korean box office record holder for 1998 – “ Titanic” by James Cameron. It is believed that it was with the spy action film by Kang Che-gyu, who then directed the war drama “The 38th Parallel” (2004), that the box office successes of Korean films began within the country, and then abroad. At the same time, Asian and then Western markets were conquered by dramas (TV series) and K-pop (popular music). The apotheosis of the soft power of the Republic of Korea was “The Squid Game”: a series about the deadly competition of the poor for a large sum of won, thanks to the media power of Netflix, caused hysteria on a planetary scale.
Actually, “Shiri” is not just an action-packed action film with detective intrigue and melodramatic intensity, but a fantasy on the theme of the unification of the two Koreas, which was in the air at the end of the 20th century. In 1991, they even developed a special flag with a blue silhouette of the peninsula on a white background, which could be used in joint sports competitions. Director Kang Che-gyu, in a sense, reflected on the relations between the countries live – in the format of a spy action film about North Korean sleeper agents who want to carry out a terrorist attack during a football match between the DPRK and the Republic of Korea, designed to increase political attraction (the leader of the detachment was played by Choi Min-sik , the future “Oldboy”). Against this background, a plot unfolds in the spirit of “Romeo and Juliet,” whose participants turn out to be agents of the North and South.
The success of “Shiri” is demonstrably twofold: on the one hand, it adheres to the anti-communist “canon” (North Korean fighters are indistinguishable from the terrorists in “Die Hard”), on the other hand, open hostility is shown as the prerogative of political elites and radical special agents. Ordinary citizens here are traumatized in their own ways by war and division, but can find common ground with each other. The key image becomes the shiri fish (Korean dace), which serves as a code word for the start of the DPRK operation. She embodies the absurdity of the hostility between the Koreans of the North and South: after all, shiri lives in rivers throughout the entire peninsula.
A year later, Park Chan-wook’s “Joint Security Zone” will be released, where Song Kang-ho, who appeared in “Shiri,” will play a sergeant of the DPRK border service, and the role of his South Korean colleague will go to Lee Byung-hun, another future superstar of national and world cinema. And again, it will not do without a detective structure: a shootout in the demilitarized zone, stretching along the 38th parallel, becomes an occasion to figure out what kind of relationships the citizens of the warring countries really have. Spoiler: more friendly than propaganda or old films show. Colleagues with different passports remain faithful to their friendship even under the threat of a tribunal.
From about this point on, the popular culture of the Republic of Korea seemed to feel free from the need to rebuild itself from the political or ideological confrontation with its northern neighbor and could finally focus on internal problems and its own historical scars. Whether we are talking about the devastating consequences of the economic crisis (see Park Chan-wook’s “revenge trilogy”), the influence of the American presence (Bong Chun-ho’s “Invasion of the Dinosaur”) and obsequious orientation towards the West (his “Parasite”, the fight against the slightest manifestations of communist ideology within the country, the apotheosis of which was the brutal suppression of a student rally in Gwangju (see “Taxi Driver” with Song Kang-ho), or the search for other “internal enemies.” Dedicated to the latter “The Hunt” (2022) Lee Jong-jae: The Squid frontman’s directorial debut depicts the struggle between domestic and foreign intelligence in the 1980s, and the interests of North and South Korean patriots are barely distinguishable.
In general, there is an opinion that the South no longer wants a unified Korea, although they are embarrassed to admit it publicly. Integration of our northern neighbor, who will need to be pulled out of the economic swamp, will cost too much for ordinary citizens. Hence the new image of North Korean citizens, who in modern films appear not as schematic antagonists, but as migrants deserving sympathy and social protection, like hard workers from East Asia, India and Pakistan.
The new North Korean hero of South Korean cinema is embodied most eloquently not even in “The Squid Game,” where the supermodel Jung Ho-yeon played a fugitive from the DPRK, but in “Baby Driver” (2022) Park Tae Min. The driver, nicknamed Chef-chan, played by Park So Dam from “Parasite,” helps those who cannot do so legally leave the country for a substantial reward. Usually – hiding from bandits or the police. Having seen a lot at home and in exile, accustomed to responding to any challenge from the outside world exclusively with cynicism, one day she meets a little boy who is wanted by corrupt investigators, and turns out to be capable of sympathy and empathy. In a sense, South Korean cinema followed the same path, which, overcoming its own traumas and propaganda clichés, saw its northern neighbor as a human being first and foremost.
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