{"id":3062,"date":"2015-07-07T07:13:04","date_gmt":"2015-07-07T14:13:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=3062"},"modified":"2015-07-07T07:15:46","modified_gmt":"2015-07-07T14:15:46","slug":"diary-cafe-noir-%ec%b9%b4%ed%8e%98-%eb%8a%90%ec%99%80%eb%a5%b4-marriage-story-%ea%b2%b0%ed%98%bc-%ec%9d%b4%ec%95%bc%ea%b8%b0-and-the-cinema-of-seoul","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=3062","title":{"rendered":"Diary: Watching Caf\u00e9 Noir (\uce74\ud398 \ub290\uc640\ub974), Marriage Story (\uacb0\ud63c \uc774\uc57c\uae30), and the Cinema of Seoul"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/cfile1.uf.tistory.com\/image\/162E063A4D12078321AA61\" alt=\"\" width=\"601\" height=\"338\" \/><\/p>\n<p>We hit up a favorite Korean\u00a0barbecue spot with my cinephile friend Michael, who recently came to Koreatown after five years spent in actual Korea. Naturally, the conversation turned to Korean films we both knew, and big names from the Korean cinema boom of the early 2000s came up:\u00a0<em>Joint Security Area\u00a0<\/em>(110 minutes),\u00a0<em>Memories of Murder<\/em>\u00a0(127 minutes),<em> Oldboy<\/em>\u00a0(120 minutes),<em> The Host\u00a0<\/em>(119 minutes). I include the runtimes to support the conclusion we happened to reach: Korean movies aren&#8217;t very long. Few of the major ones get much past the two-hour mark, and the average production feels closer to 90 minutes. And Korean three-hour films? Nonexistent, apparently.<\/p>\n<p><center><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/O0uxhsMxzno\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/center>&nbsp;<br \/>\nNo sooner did we decide that than another friend, a Korean-American who gets back there every once in a while, presented us with the opportunity to watch\u00a0<em>Caf\u00e9 Noir<\/em>, a Korean film that, at 197 minutes in, gets over the three-hour mark\u00a0by a pretty safe margin. It immediately became (maybe apart from the full version of\u00a0<em>Until the End of the World<\/em>, whose screenings legally require the presence of Wim Wenders) the motion picture I most wanted to see\u00a0in the world, not just because of its length, but because of the background of its director: Jung Sung-il began as a film critic \u2014 &#8220;a representative man of the first generation of Cinephile in Korea,&#8221; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.koreanfilm.or.kr\/jsp\/films\/index\/peopleView.jsp?peopleCd=10061850\">says KoBiz<\/a>, &#8220;with furious and continuous writing about film&#8221; \u2014 and only later turned filmmaker, a career path that, to my great disappointment, seemed to have died with Truffaut. Wasn&#8217;t filmmaking supposed to be the ultimate act of film criticism?<\/p>\n<p><center><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/9jjETSXCwAs\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/center><br \/>\n<em>Caf\u00e9 Noir <\/em>has another unusual\u00a0thing going for it: its view of Seoul. Given my interest in <a href=\"https:\/\/vimeo.com\/channels\/thecityincinema\">cities in cinema<\/a>, I often ask Koreans to name their favorite films about that particular city, and most of them respond as if I&#8217;d asked them the distance between the moon and sun.\u00a0(The second most common response is, curiously,\u00a0<i>Cold Eyes<\/i>, a local remake of a Hong Kong picture from a few years before.) This despite the fact that most Korean movies seem to take place in Seoul, a condition which has produced a sort of accepted cinematic view of the capital.<\/p>\n<p><center><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/u7oOKmwjqQU\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/center><br \/>\n<em>Caf\u00e9 Noir\u00a0<\/em>has a different one: much of the second half\u00a0takes place in the freeway-turned-public-space of the Cheonggyecheon Stream (which I <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/cities\/2014\/jul\/15\/an-urbanists-tour-of-south-korea-from-alien-spaceship-to-discount-socks\">wrote about for the\u00a0<em>Guardian<\/em><\/a>), and several memorable sequences play out in locations high\u00a0above the city, such as on the funicular running up to Seoul Tower. Other sequences involve long tracking shots which give a strong linear sense of the city \u2014 and often not the parts approved by the bureau of tourism. I&#8217;d call it<em>\u00a0<\/em>a cinephile&#8217;s movie, not just because of its form, but because of the extent of its references to other works of Korean cinema, all the way down to\u00a0<em>D-War\u00a0<\/em>(which \u2014 you laugh \u2014 may yet show up among\u00a0my Los Angeles video essays).<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/chilsu-and-mansu.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter  wp-image-3065\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/chilsu-and-mansu.jpg\" alt=\"chilsu and mansu\" width=\"601\" height=\"338\" srcset=\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/chilsu-and-mansu.jpg 640w, http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/chilsu-and-mansu-300x169.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 601px) 100vw, 601px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I can&#8217;t quite tell whether to call\u00a0<em>Caf\u00e9 Noir<\/em> an urbanophile&#8217;s movie \u2014 it hits the whole &#8220;isolation in the metropolis&#8221; feeling pretty hard \u2014 but I certainly enjoy its\u00a0heightened awareness of a city that, like Los Angeles, so many films treat as nothing more than the default set of backgrounds. In <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=2603\">my\u00a0<em>Notebook on Cities and Culture\u00a0<\/em>interview<\/a> with long Korea-resident American film critic Darcy Paquet, we talk\u00a0about films that take Seoul seriously (he mentions\u00a0<em>Cold Eyes),\u00a0<\/em>and more recently, for his \ud55c\uad6d\uc77c \ubcf4 column on life in Korea, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hankookilbo.com\/v\/030c4b0769c441468224d7d5d99b9e94\">he wrote about the view of the rapidly-changing city<\/a> you get if you watch the right movies from over the past few decades:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>After beginning with some brief glimpses of the city in the years before the destruction of the Korean War, we see the outdoor markets and chaotic reconstruction of the 1950s and early 1960s, the slow urbanization of the late 1960s, and then the appearance of high rise buildings and overhead pedestrian crossings in the 1970s. (For some reason, every Korean film from the 1970s seems to prominently feature an overhead pedestrian crossing.) By the late 1980s, manifestations of wealth appear more obviously in the cityscape. There\u2019s something unforgettable and bittersweet about the iconic helicopter shots of the Express Bus Terminal and Apgujeong Apartments at the end of <em>Chilsu and Mansu<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>You can watch\u00a0<em>Chilsu and Mansu<\/em>, a picture we also discuss in our interview, <a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/6cmtZ4XYz7E\">free on the Korean Film Archive&#8217;s invaluable Youtube channel<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 or\u00a0<em><a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/iYsXymLXasY\">Marriage Story<\/a><\/em>, a movie I watched just the other day, and which in most ways represents the polar opposite of\u00a0<em>Caf\u00e9 Noir.\u00a0<\/em>Darcy writes about\u00a0<em>Marriage Story<\/em> in his book\u00a0<em>New Korean Cinema: Breaking the Waves<\/em>, describing that 1992 release as the first &#8220;planned film&#8221; in the industry&#8217;s history: not only did it get its financing from mighty conglomerate Samsung, it got not just tested but conceived by round after round of focus groups in which members of its target demographic dictated\u00a0exactly that they wanted to see.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/marriage-story.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter  wp-image-3066\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/marriage-story.jpg\" alt=\"marriage story\" width=\"601\" height=\"416\" srcset=\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/marriage-story.jpg 764w, http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/marriage-story-300x208.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 601px) 100vw, 601px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>That sausage-factory of a process\u00a0produced a more interesting movie than you might expect, and, like most works of Korean cinema, one with sharper\u00a0edges that you might expect. (Its frank depiction of wife-beating alone would feel horribly incongruous in any equivalently major American film, let alone a rom-com.)\u00a0But although\u00a0set in Seoul, I wouldn&#8217;t call it urbanistically interesting. The\u00a0couple at its center live a lifestyle almost implausibly middle-class by the standards of Korean newlyweds in the early 1990s, and in many ways a more Western one than I live myself: they drive everywhere, for instance, which half the time reduces the city\u00a0to a gray smear outside the car window. Still, scenes like <a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/iYsXymLXasY?t=1h6m51s\">their big rooftop fight around which the camera revolves and revolves<\/a>\u00a0do reveal the Seoul\u00a0of that era, a metropolis still very much under construction.<\/p>\n<p><center><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/iYsXymLXasY\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/center><br \/>\nWhy would I watch such an aggressively\u00a0mainstream film in the first place? For the same reason Koreans plow through entire seasons of <em>Friends<\/em>: language practice. Seven years into studying it, Korean remains, for me, an infuriatingly difficult language to reliably understand (and no matter how long you live in Korea, as I heard Darcy say in another interview, you never really master catching\u00a0anyone&#8217;s name over the phone the first time). According to long-term foreign residents of Korea, nothing trains your ear as well as watching Korean movies with Korean subtitles (which the Korean Film Archive helpfully provides) over and over again. Hence my usual answer to the usual question about\u00a0what got me into Korea: most truthfully, it was the Korean language, but almost equally truthfully, it was Korean cinema.\u00a0If I didn&#8217;t like the\u00a0movies, I doubt I&#8217;d persist with\u00a0learning the language \u2014 and my interest in Korean cities has kept\u00a0that feedback loop going to the extent that, in a matter of months, I&#8217;ll live in an actual Korean city myself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We hit up a favorite Korean\u00a0barbecue spot with my cinephile friend Michael, who recently came to Koreatown after five years spent in actual Korea. Naturally, the conversation turned to Korean films we both knew, and big names from the Korean cinema boom of the early 2000s came up:\u00a0Joint Security Area\u00a0(110 minutes),\u00a0Memories of Murder\u00a0(127 minutes), Oldboy\u00a0(120 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,5,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3062","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film","category-korea","category-seoul"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3062","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3062"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3062\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3073,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3062\/revisions\/3073"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}