The Jeonju film festival closed on Friday after another interesting and successful festival. Jeonju continues to screen many difficult and obscure films that cannot be found at other venues, and also attract large audiences for these films. All of the weekend screenings were well attended (most were sold out), as were showings on the Children’s Day holiday on Wednesday. Daytime screenings on Thursday were understandably more sparse, but the evening attendance remained high. By this time, audiences know what to expect when they come to Jeonju, and there are enough hard-core cinephiles plus the cinematically curious to keep the festival popular. There are more traditionally audience friendly films available as well, and this mixture of new and old, popular and experimental and everything in between has come to define the Jeonju formula. On Wednesday and Thursday I was able to take in seven more films. Here are my thoughts on those films and my overall impression of Jeonju 2010.

Most of my screenings of the last two days were contemporary films. There were two Korean films released last year: A GOOD RAIN KNOWS (Hur Jin-ho, 2009) and POSSESSED (Lee Yong-ju, 2009). Hur’s first feature film, CHRISTMAS IN AUGUST, is a truly great work, a melodrama that is able to avoid most of the cliches and deliver a true emotional experience.  A GOOD RAIN KNOWS is not as successful, but is still a fine movie. The plot revolves around Korean businessman Dong-ha, who on a trip to Chengdu, China meets his former love May. The first two thirds of the story is quite conventional and at times awkward, partly because of the difficulty of having the two leads each communicating through a  second language. It reminded me of a less successful take on Richard Linklater’s  BEFORE SUNSET (2004) or a failure along the lines of Wong War-Wai’s first English language feature, MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS (2007). But the final final third manages to work very well, showing the depth of emotion and ability to effectively convey loss that Hur can do so well.

POSSESSED was released last summer and performed poorly at the box office, being overwhelmed by the massive success of HAEUNDAE, which is unfortunate because it is an effective horror film. Like many movies in the genre, it deals  with the tension between reason and the supernatural through the subject of religion. It is very well crafted and performed, and while it doesn’t offer anything really original, it is a worth checking out for fans of the genre and/or those interested in the theme of religion in Korea. There was also a “Cinetalk” Q & A afterward with the director and four of the actors, moderated by film critic Darcy Paquet, and English translation was provided. Lee Yong-ju discussed both the film and his unusual career path, having been an architect and quitting in his thirties to start directing. That sense of design and precision is apparent in the strong widescreen framing and compositions. Hopefully Lee will get a chance to make another film after the box office failure of this one.

This year’s JEONJU DIGITAL PROJECT  featured films by veteran American experimental director James Benning, as well as two younger, less well-known filmmakers, Denis Cote and Matias Pineiro. Benning’s PIG IRON was easily the best of the three. It consists of a single, static shot as we observe, in long shot, as pig iron is moved  from the furnace to the steel plant, and can be easily dismissed as not being a film at all. But if one pays attention, everything about the framing is alive, from the small experimental film taking place in the puddle where the fire is reflecting to the massive weight of the trains and trucks moving in and out of the space. The conclusion, where the space opens up and we are again given the visuals of the furnace, is particularly beautiful. Cote’s THE ENEMY LINES is the least successful of the three, an obvious and heavy-handed war allegory that is not specific enough to carry any real meaning. Pineiro’s ROSALIND features actors rehearsing Shakespeare while also dealing with their real-life relationships. There is great energy to the performers and their readings of the text, but we are not invested enough with these characters and their relationships to really care much about the narrative.

Thomas Arslan’s IN THE SHADOWS was a very effective crime drama featuring the character of Trojan, just released from prison and moving back into Berlin’s underworld. We follow this character and eventually become attached to him purely because he is solid professional criminal in a world populated by corruption, both within the underworld itself and amongst those within the world of law and order. Arslan has a very good eye and the location shooting adds enormously to the atmosphere. From the opening credit static, long take shot where we see the city through Trojan’s point of view, Arslan makes Berlin an important aspect of this story, both narratively and visually. He also manages to mostly avoid melodrama and focus without sentiment on these characters and this world. A very solid, tight  genre piece, something of a throwback to the noir films of the past but with a contemporary look and feel.

I had previously seen Spike Jonze’s WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE on DVD, but this was a chance to rewatch it in the theatre. It is quite a visceral film, right from its opening hand-held sequence where the young character of Max wrestling with a dog. The opening 15-20 minutes, which takes place in our reality, conveys the emotions of a young male childhood almost perfectly. After this prologue, we enter into Max’s fantasy world, where he becomes the king of an island populated by sad, childhood creatures who are clearly representatives of Max’s own world, transformed through his dream. The story concludes with Max returning to his mother, a short but wonderful coda that matches the prologue in quality. Ironically, though, the time spent on the island is not as compelling, possibly because Jonze and screenwriter Dave Eggers are coming at this material from an adult perspective and are in many ways aiming this film at adults more than children. Thus there is a certain schematic feel to the creatures and their interactions, a lack of dynamism that is especially striking compared to the prologue. A fine film, and I’m sure there are many who will love it, but not among my favorites of American films of 2009.

From a film history perspective, the major event of the festival was THE COMPLETE METROPOLIS. In 2008, over thirty minutes of Fritz Lang’s 1927 science fiction classic was recovered in a 16mm print from an Argentinian archive. Because the footage was quite badly damaged and scratched, it is easy to see which are the new scenes. The result is fascinating as history, as we can see where the cuts to Lang’s original cut were made, and speculate as to why. However, I’m not sure the result makes for a greater film. I think the 2 hour version plays just as well, and the extended cut has the same strengths and weaknesses of the original. This is a visually dazzling work, one with such a huge influence on the science fiction genre and films such as BLADE RUNNER that it is difficult to calculate. However, the narrative remains somewhat weak, and the finale is a basically a long action sequence that becomes rather tedious. Lang’s image of a future society can be seen retrospectively as a foreboding of the Nazi rule to come, but can also be seen as a reactionary tale itself, one that legend has it was admired by the Hitler and Goebbels. Although this may now be Lang’s most famous work, he has many better works in his filmography, both in Germany and when he emigrated to the United States. Still, this was a great experience in the theatre, and coming at the end of the silent era, certainly the power of Lang’s visuals had reached a peak. The DVD of this new cut will be released soon, hopefully with many extras examining the history of this landmark.

Finally, my favorite film of the festival was the 1969 Brazilian work ANTONIO DAS MORTES, director by the radical Cinema Novo pioneer Glauber Rocha, who is probably best known for collaborating with Jean-Luc Godard on VENT D’EST (WIND FROM THE EAST) (1970), the film that was the subject of Peter Wollen’s key essay “Godard and Counter-Cinema”. Like Godard during his Dziga Vertov period, Rocha wanted to combine radical politics with a radical reconsideration of cinematic form and its rules. ANTONIO DAS MORTES surely does this, as we are always aware of the cinematic apparatus and not completely sutured into the filmic world as in a Hollywood movie. But, Rocha is able to call upon traditional myths of Brazilian culture in order to make his political points within a grand, operatic style. He calls on the genre of the western, but the result of something unlike any western ever made, almost as if Sergio Leone was filtered through a radical political context. Some of the imagery here rivals anything in Leone in its hallucinatory power, particularly a murder sequence and a subsequent burial that is nearly necrophiliac in nature. The final shot is fitting: the legendary Antonio das Mortes walking on a modern highway beneath a Shell company sign. If more political cinema was an energetic and alive as this film, it would be much more effective.

Overall I saw a solid collection of films, lacking the highs of previous years but with no screening that was worthless (unlike Busan, where there were a couple of terrible films). The highlight of the festival for me was not a film, but Pedro Costa’s masterclass.

Here is my complete list of films seen, in order of preference:

5 Stars

Antonio Das Mortes

4 1/2 Stars

Colossal Youth

Police, Adjective

4 Stars

Metropolis

In the Shadows

Where the Wild Things Are

Pig Iron

My Way Home

3 1/2 Stars

A Good Rain Knows

Possessed

3 stars

Rosalind

2 stars

The Enemy Lines

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