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:
Poet-professor Yeong-min meets Yeong-hee, an attractive writer who has reviewed a collection of his poems. They click: literary criticism is far from their minds as they dash off to a hotel room for some fairly acrobatic lovemaking. He becomes obsessed with Yeong-hee; she makes an effort to resist, but not for long. Yeong-min, pretending to need time away from family for the sake of research, sets the two of them up in a beachside shack where domestic routine vies with passion. How long can this world apart contain them? The film playfully wrong-foots us at the outset. We begin in what looks like a noir crime caper, only to drop into the first encounter of the two main characters. Much later, even amid the passion and increasing tension in scenes at the beach house, the story maintains its balance of humour and visual beauty.
Mark Morris
Poet-professor Yeong-min meets Yeong-hee, an attractive writer who has reviewed a collection of his poems. They click: literary criticism is far from their minds as they dash off to a hotel room for some fairly acrobatic lovemaking. He becomes obsessed with Yeong-hee; she makes an effort to resist, but not for long. Yeong-min, pretending to need time away from family for the sake of research, sets the two of them up in a beachside shack where domestic routine vies with passion. How long can this world apart contain them? The film playfully wrong-foots us at the outset. We begin in what looks like a noir crime caper, only to drop into the first encounter of the two main characters. Much later, even amid the passion and increasing tension in scenes at the beach house, the story maintains its balance of humour and visual beauty.
Mark Morris
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