The London Korean Film Festival (LKFF) presents three early features at Close-Up Cinema by Korean New Wave director Lee Myung-se. Presented here on 35mm each film will be followed by a discussion between Lee and LKFF programmer Mark Morris. Full details here.
"People
might find my films confusing, and perhaps that’s because I insist that
film communicates without explanation. I think of my films as
transmitting meaning directly, from heart to heart." – Lee Myung-se
“Lee Myung-se’s
films are exceptional and distinctive, and not only by Korean
standards. Of the "new wave" directors he is perhaps the one least
obviously marked [...] by the political struggles of the 1980s, but his
films bespeak an even stronger impatience with the mainstream
movie-making tradition [...] Lee’s work is committedly cosmopolitan in
its refusal to limit itself to Korean terms of reference. It is also
committedly innovative” – Tony Rayns
Writer Grady Hendrix has written an excellent introduction to the films of Lee Myung-se in Film Comment which you can find here.
Writer Grady Hendrix has written an excellent introduction to the films of Lee Myung-se in Film Comment which you can find here.
Close-Up introduction:
Yeong-shin is an innocent young woman from a nice family living in a pleasant if fairly poor neighbourhood in a town somewhere far from the big city. When her am-dram club decides to invite a writer from Seoul to come direct their production of Our Town, Yeong-shin, despite an unpromising first encounter with a grubby, hard-drinking Chang-wook, manages to fall head over heels. The film plays with our melodramatic reflexes, involving us in a sentimental education made all the more bittersweet through nuanced acting of Kim Hye-su. Rather than offering melo-realism, however, the film revels in the sheer beauty of its sets, subtle lighting, fantasy scenes – Yeong-shin’s ghostly visit to Chang-wook is both funny and heart-warming. Our Town has been termed a form of meta-theatre. Maybe we could consider Lee Myung-se’s aesthetic a kind of meta-cinema.
Mark Morris
Yeong-shin is an innocent young woman from a nice family living in a pleasant if fairly poor neighbourhood in a town somewhere far from the big city. When her am-dram club decides to invite a writer from Seoul to come direct their production of Our Town, Yeong-shin, despite an unpromising first encounter with a grubby, hard-drinking Chang-wook, manages to fall head over heels. The film plays with our melodramatic reflexes, involving us in a sentimental education made all the more bittersweet through nuanced acting of Kim Hye-su. Rather than offering melo-realism, however, the film revels in the sheer beauty of its sets, subtle lighting, fantasy scenes – Yeong-shin’s ghostly visit to Chang-wook is both funny and heart-warming. Our Town has been termed a form of meta-theatre. Maybe we could consider Lee Myung-se’s aesthetic a kind of meta-cinema.
Mark Morris
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