POSTWAR MASTERWORKS RECEIVE NEW YORK PREMIERES IN THE FIRST MAJOR U.S. SERIES DEVOTED TO KOREAN CINEMA
Featured Directors Will Introduce Their Films in Person on
November 21
Three Korean Master Filmmakers: Shin Sang-Ok, Yu
Hyun-Mok, and Im Kwon-Taek
November 21December 6,
1996
Although South Korean films have made occasional, well-received
appearances at European and American film festivals over the past thirty
years, they are generally unknown here. Beginning Thursday, November 21,
The Museum of Modern Art presents Three Korean Master Filmmakers: Shin
Sang-Ok, Yu Hyun-Mok, and Im Kwon-Taek, a groundbreaking exploration of
this energetic and sophisticated national cinema and the first major film
series in the United States devoted to Korean film.
Shin, Yu, and Im
will all be present on November 21, the first day of the series, to
introduce My Mother's Tenant (1961), Daughters of the Pharmacist
Kim (1964), and Sopyonje (1993), respectively. The series closes
December 6.
Postwar Korean cinema has evolved amid turbulent social and
political realities. The work of the three filmmakers in this series offers
acute, subtle reflection and commentary on this period and on the difficult
metamorphoses of Korean society over the course of the twentieth century.
Directors Shin, Yu, and Im were chosen for their considerable influence on
Korean film in the decades since 1960, through the military regimes of the
sixties and seventies to the relatively more relaxed conditions of the late
eighties and nineties.
"We are honored to introduce to American
audiences not only three major Asian filmmakers but also three filmmakers
who are among the finest in international cinema," says Laurence Kardish,
Curator and Coordinator of Film Exhibitions, Department of Film and Video,
who organized the series.
Shin Sang-Ok (born 1926) is South
Korea's most controversial filmmaker. In 1978, after heading his own studio
and making some eighty films since his 1952 debut, he disappeared and
resurfaced in North Korea. Eight years later, Shin (now Simon Sheen) made
his way to Hollywood, where he has produced The Three Ninjas and its
two sequels.
Shin is best known for My Mother's Tenant, a subtle
work of longing in which a young widow, the popular actress Choi
Un-Hui, who is Shin's wife, is torn between her love for a visiting
painter and the social codes that would deny this love. Other acclaimed
works by Shin in the series are Sam Ryong, the Deaf (1964), a
folktale from the feudal days of the early 1900s; Dream (1965),
based on a thousand-year-old fable of a libidinous Buddhist monk; The
Cruel Destiny of the Women of the Yi Dynasty (1969), about the dynasty
that lasted from 1393 to 1910; and Eunuch (1968), an action film
about a young man in love with the consort of the thirteenth Yi king.
Yu Hyun-Mok (born 1925) has made more than forty films since his debut
in 1955, including what may be considered the earliest of Korea's "New
Wave" films, the powerful Obaltan (The Aimless Bullet) (1961). A
story of life in impoverished postwar Korea, it movingly captures the
hopelessness and despair shared by many Koreans at the time.
Other works
by Yu in the series are Daughters of the Pharmacist Kim, a family
saga spanning six centuries; Martyr (1965), based on Korean-American
Richard E. Kim's eponymous novel, about an incident in North Korea
involving Christian ministers and the military; Rainy Days (1979),
in which a family contends with the approach of the Korean war in 1952; and
Son of Man (1980), a contemporary murder mystery.
Im Kwon-Taek
(born 1936) made his first feature in 1962 and has since directed more than
ninety films, including Sopyonje, which drew record audiences
domestically and was the first Korean feature film acquired by The Museum
of Modern Art's film archive. Sopyonje is a haunting saga of three
rootless people brought together by p'ansori (traditional Korean musical
storytelling).
Im's other films in the series are Daughter of the
Flame (1983), about a young man struggling to choose between
Christianity and his shaman heritage; Gilsodom (1985), the tale of a
family trying to reunite following the postwar partitioning of North and
South Korea; Adada (1987), a study of an arranged marriage; and
Ticket (1986), based on newspaper reports, which portrays life in a
coastal tea shop where the waitresses also work as prostitutes.
Three Korean Master Filmmakers is presented in association with
the Korean Cultural Service, New York, and with the help of Open Work, a
New York organization that promotes Korean artists. The program is
presented with the support of the Korean Ministry of Culture and Sports,
the Korean Motion Picture Promotion Company, and the Korean Film Archives
in Seoul.
