Im, Kwon-teak
BIOGRAPHY
Born in Changson, Cheollanman-do, 2 May 1936. He grew up in the southern city Kwangju, where he completed senior high school. His family suffered considerable hardships and losses in the Korean War, and he moved to Pusan in search of work: he was a labourer before trying to start a business recycling US Army boots into shoes. He moved to Seoul in 1956, where film director Chung Chang-Hwa offered him work as a production assistant in exchange for board and lodging. Five years later Chung recommended him as a director, and he completed his first feature in 1962. He was a prolific director of films in various popular genres unitl the late 1970s, but felt a deepening urge to make more serious films that first found an outlet in his 1978 film Genealogy. Since 1981's Mandala, he has been considered Korea's leading director. He and his films have won every possible prize in Korea's three annual film awards ceremonies, and a growing number of international festival prizes too. His last film Sopyonje is the most honoured Korean film ever made, with (to date) 27 domestic and three international prizes; it was also an enormous success in the Korean market.
INTERVIEW
I'd been doing all kinds of mental jobs when I accidentally got involved with the film industry. It was the period after the Korean War, when everyone had to find work to survive. I was recommended for a job as a production assistant by a friend who worked for a film company. I found myself working as one of perhaps 20 assistants. Every morning the production manager would assign us duties for the day: bringing in food for the crew, things like that. It was watching directors at work that gave me the feeling that I'd like to direct myself, but there was no obvious way to become a director then and I never imagined I'd ever do it.
In my first ten years as a director, my only real motivation was to earn a living. My feeling began to change during 1970s, and I think that I began to find my own voice in the films Genealogy(1978), The Hidden Hero(1979), and Pursuit of Death(1980). Mandala(1981) was described as my breakthrough film by Korean critics, and it was my first palpable success as a serious director. I was determined to make it as soon as I read Kim Song-Dong's novel, and I fought to persuade the company to let me. (I had no special knowledge of Buddhism at the time, and the project forced me to do a lot of first-hand research.) Since then, I've had more and more freedom to choose my own projects. Government censorship has steadily relaxed and now that we have civilian government we have near-total freedom of expression. Actually, I've had more problem with pressure- groups blocking a number of my projects than I ever had with the government's Ethics Committee.
I feel very conscious of my Koreanness, and it had very much been my intention to deal with aspects of Korean tradition and culture. As far as I'm concerned, they are part if my own story, my own background. And it's not accidental tat many of the traditions I've explored are in danger of being lost. the Korean War and its aftermath did a lot of damage, but the incursion of western influences in the last forty years has been the single most important factor. Sopyonje has a flashback structure precisely because the tradition of pansori singers belongs to the past; the framing scenes in the present use the adult Dong-Ho as a representative of all present-day Koreans who have lost touch with their own roots. Several of my films stress that pure Korean culture (like pansori) is close to dying out.
Shamanism is a fundamental part of Korean identity, and Daughter of the Flames was a film in which I set out to put it back on an equal footing with Christianity. when Christianity was brought to Korea, it followed Japanese shinto in attacking shamanism - but, again like shinto, unknowingly assimilated some of shamanism's tenets and principle. Actually, Korean Christianity is deviationist in more than one way, but that is another issue. The point I'm making now is that Korean minds are infused by shamanism, consciously or otherwise.
The evidence for this is that there are just as many shamans in Korea today as there are Buddhist monks, despite the fact that shamanism (unlike Buddhism) has no schools or institutions behind it. Shamanism has actually been oppressed in Korea for the last 600 years: by Confucianism and Buddhism for the 500-odd years of the Yi Dynasty(1392-1910), and by the Japanese and the Christians for most of this century. And yet it survives. How come there are 20,000 shamans today? Nobody told them to become shamans. It was born in them.
Yes, foreigners sometimes find the themes of my films strange, but I think they'd find them less strange if they knew more about Korean culture. For example, Village in the Mist is based on something that really exists in Korea: the weight of Confucian morality, especially as it bears on women's sense of themselves. Sopyonje is a rather different case, though, because many Koreans were themselves ignorant of the pansori tradition; it was all but lost. That's been the most gratifying thing about the film's success. Of course, I'm very happy when foreigners respond warmly to the film, but the real delight has been to see Koreans reacting so strongly, especially young people. I feel that pansori brings Korean together, gives us a shared experience and a shared identity.
Son of a General and its two sequels were films that I wanted to make as a relief from the more serious-minded films I'd been doing. I was curious to see what would happen if I went back to the kind of generic film-making I did in the 1960s; there was no pressure at all from the producer, I made all three films because I wanted to. Some Korean critics told me they thought I'd lost my way, but I knew exactly what I was doing. But you're right, if you looked at Son of a General alongside the films I did make in the 1960s, it wouldn't resemble them much at all.