The cultural and historical differences between South Africa and South Korea are vast but, for Christopher Wheeler, there are many instructive parallels to be drawn between the two countries’ film industries.
The latest Star Wars never really took off in South Korea. Worldwide, The Force Awakens has grossed over US$1.7 billion and continues to shatter records, but in The Land of the Morning Calm, it never met the hype. Instead, it was thumped by Lee Seok-hoon’s The Himalayas: a moving melodrama based on real-world events about the search for a missing mountaineer.
I spent nearly five years living and working in and around Seoul, and during my time there I explored the country’s industry by familiarising myself with its fantastic features, exciting festivals and world-class filmmakers. Just as I thought I knew what a twenty-first century city could smell and feel like before Seoul, my filmic education was jolted when I experienced South Korea’s thriving industry first-hand; what a dream machine.
After being swept away by Korea’s cinematic carnival of ideas, coming back to South Africa and our stammering image industry was tough and telling; the difference between the two countries’ industries was as vast as the cultures themselves. South Korea, for example, has a homogenous population, whereas South Africa is one of most genetically diverse countries on Earth. There is also the economic health of each country to compare, education, access to technology, socio-political histories, cultural preferences… but beyond these and other obvious truisms, there is a lot South Africa can learn about cultivating cinematic dreams moving forward; particularly in terms of spreading, not just a love for our own dreams, but discovering a common core around which those cinematic blisses are spun.
Cinephiles with a global eye would have heard of Park Chan-wook’s devastating Cannes-winner Old Boy (a film that American director, Spike Lee, remade a few years ago – why you would remake a Grand Prix winner is beyond me); Kim Ki-duk’s bizarre and brilliant 3-Iron, or the stunning spiritual quest that is Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring; Lee Chang-dong’s sublime Poetry; or perhaps marvelled at Bong Joon-ho’s monster movie, The Host.
South Korean directors have also pushed past their language in recent years with English-language films like Snowpiercer (an awesome adaptation of the French graphic novel, Le Transperceneige); The Last Stand (which brought Arnold Schwarzenegger out of retirement), and Stoker (based on Wentworth Miller’s Black Listed screenplay). From its infamous revenge thrillers to its blockbusting period dramas, romantic comedies, and gangster flicks, South Korea’s images are as diverse as South Africa is in reality.
Perhaps the most important aspect that struck me was the relationship between national identity and cinema: to have any hopes of moving from a striving to a thriving industry, South Africa needs more than a few hits and heroes, it needs a stabilising sense of self. But in South Africa there is no galvanising ‘ghost’ in our ‘empathy machine’ (as the legendary film critic Rodger Ebert described it), only individual rays fluctuating in and out of existence. National cinemas are not just reflections of well-oiled machines going through the motions – evolving – on well-funded foundations, they are haunted, two-way mirrors dead reckoning cultural identity; its hopes, fears and fantasies.
If you want to learn about South Korean culture and its people, watch their films; if you want to learn about South Africa, watch the news.
Korea is a small – divided – country surrounded by superpowers (China, Russia, Japan), and like South Africa, South Korea is still reeling from living memory hijacked by power-hungry players on the move. South Korea’s homogeneity and other differences cannot help South Africa, but the Korean core concept of ‘han’ is instantly recognisable. When I asked Koreans what they understood han to mean, what I found was a term that encompassed the suffering and struggles of Korea’s past that impacts all levels of Korean identity “from the highest historical-national level to the innermost-psychic feelings of the person,” as Jon Huer, a Korea Times columnist, wrote: “Virtually all of Korea’s institutions and persons are under the powerful influence of han. Virtually all of Koreans have a deep-seated sense of grief and grievance that they have been wronged by some very powerful agents of injustice.”
Han is an incredibly complex and nuanced term, and if South Korea has a soul, han would be close to It; its cinema is han incarnate. And like its cinema, the term captures the full spectrum of human experience and emotions, often swinging from boundless compassion to cruel condemnation as Korea wrestles with what South Africans know as ubuntu. Some Korean citizens believe this overzealous zeitgeist ought to ultimately be exorcised, if possible; perhaps, but at present it fills a void, fuels creative expression and dialogue, and acts as the vanishing point of cultural address.
There are many things big and small South Africa could learn from modern Korean cinema – ensure there are up-to-date statistics and regular reports to create public awareness and transparency; experiment with genres and styles and promote cinematic expression; encourage criticism, commentary and reflection; support student films and showcase formats of all sorts and sizes; offer older films (even festival screenings) online, for free; foster film studies and engage academics to deepen our conversations around cinema; creatively explore the past with brave new perspectives; it’s okay to put expression and/or style over content; get the public interested with podcasts, infographics, videos and other new forms of media to excite; and honour the archive and promote it alongside the new. It is our han, our struggle, and the images it spawns, that animate.
By Christopher J Wheeler
