Local Popularity of Independent Korean Film (Part 1)

I promised to discuss crowdfunding this week, I know, but Willa Schitz had a really good question in the comments section last week that I felt warranted a full explanation. Here's her post, the first part being a quote from last week's article-

I'll deal withKim Ki-dukfirst, because a few years back he was one of the first big beneficiaries of KOFICs policy when"Pieta"won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. All of a sudden mainstream theater chains that would never touch aKim Ki-dukfilm under normal circumstances saw that there was sincere demand for his movies, and accomodated screens accordingly.

Counter-intuitive though this may sound,Kim Ki-dukwas not happy with this. Independent film professionals in general are upset with the way major Korean theater chains explicitly favor mainstream films from major studios when making screen allotments.Kim Ki-duksaw his box office success as implicitly selling out, and so pulled"Pieta"out of circulation to protest these practices.

Kim Ki-duk's next movie,"Moebius", was explicitly about genital mutilation and masturbation. So, um, even if it had won a major festival prize there was no way anyone was distributing it locally."One on One"marked the beginning of what most film critics would callKim Ki-duk's current slump. Not me, though. In my opinionKim Ki-duklost interest in shocking audiences when he realized that whatever weird creepy stuff he shoved into his movies would be met with near universal praise, so he started focusing more on politics and less on shock value.

In the modern film environment this stance has not earnedKim Ki-dukvery many powerful friends. The corporations were irritated because they saw the"Pieta"screenings as a public service. KOFIC, by contrast, likes to trot out big name directors as major international successes, and it's become very clear thatKim Ki-dukcan't be relied on in that role.

Which brings me toHong Sang-soo. Compared to most independent Korean film directors,Hong Sang-sooactually does quite well for himself. His films have a floor of thirty thousand seats sold and a ceiling of eighty thousand. That's not terribly impressive compared to a record-holder like "My Love, Don't Cross That River", which nearly hit five million, but it's good for the independent market.

All the same, one would expectHong Sang-sooto do even better than that thanks to his sheer name recognition. So why doesn't he? Well...as I've mentioned before, it's because he pretty much remakes the same movie once a year with mild storytelling gimmicks. This doesn't make them bad movies by any stretch of the imagination, but at this point, if you've seen oneHong Sang-soomovie in the past several years you've pretty much seen them all. So there's no reason to shell out a ticket unless you're aHong Sang-soofan to begin with.

Another problem withHong Sang-soofilms is simply what they're about- pathetic middle-aged men begging women to have sex with them. That's not really the kind of thing people go to the movies to see. And the wholeKim Min-heescandal has only made that worse. Until news of that broke I always thoughtHong Sang-soowas making fun of the characters in his movies. Now I'm coming to realize to my mild horror that these were actually sincere personal emotional pleas. When you consider that plenty of people have likely watched aHong Sang-soofilm and simply made that assumption from the beginning, his inability to set the Korean box office on fire makes a lot of sense.

As forLee Chang-dong... the last movie he made was"Poetry"back in 2010. As far as I can tell its admissions were roughly on par with those of aHong Sang-soofilm. But you have to understand that Korean film is constantly changing, and had"Poetry"come out a few years later it might have achieved"Pieta"level popularity.

Additionally, going back that far is speculative on my part. Much of my analysis when it comes to the Korean film industry is based on firsthand observation, and I was not in the country when"Poetry"premiered in Korean theaters. Unfortunately, even in the Korean language there simply isn't that much good writing explaining these trends, for much the same reason that most English language writing about the movies can't get at the kernel of Hollywood. A focus on film theory and film personalities largely obscures the market forces which are ever so important to how film industries have always functioned.

Hope that was a satisfying answer. It does, of course, beg for more specifics as to which South Korean independent films have been succeeding lately and why. I'll address that question next week.

- Article by William Schwartz