To appreciate Korean films at the beginning of the twenty-first century requires at least a passing understanding of the political, cultural and social obsessions that dominated south Korea over the last half of twentieth century and for the most part supported authoritarian rule until the late 1980s. Korean directors made some very good films, but such films never panned out with the Korean public whose appetite for Hollywood blockbuster seems insatiable. Only in the 1980s did Korean films gain recognition at the level of international film festivals.
Bong Joon Ho stunned the world by sweeping the Academy Awards with his film Parasite, winning Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best International Feature. It was truly a historic moment in entire history of cinema. Not only was it the first time a South Korean film had been nominated for an Oscar, let alone had won any. But it was also the first time a foreign language film won the award for Best Picture. The stories in Bong's films are grounded in the realities of the world and address issues that affect everyday lives. And these stories are always told from the perspective of ordinary people.
In certain ways, his films provide a cultural forum where important and pressing social issues are mobilized and discussed by the audience.
With seven feature films between his debut in 2000 and 2020, Bong has established himself as a rare film director who garners both critical acclaim and commercial success. Bong stands out among contemporary Korean film directors for his politically and socially conscious approach to filmmaking; perhaps alone among his cohorts, he maintains a critical gaze towards Korean society.
His works explore the problems of Korea’s social system, reveal political and moral corruption and social injustice, and indirectly address unresolved issues in Korean history. His films differ from those of other wellknown and critically acclaimed Korean directors, such as Lee Chang-dong, Hong Sangsoo, and Kim Ki-duk, whose film styles are more radical and whose works circulate mostly in the art cinema. Bong’s films are more realistic, both visually and thematically. Bong’s films are more sociological than philosophical. All of Bong’s films are about the plight of ordinary, disadvantaged people, and in the process of portraying the difficulties they face, his films reveal and suggest the audience the root cause of their predicaments. For example, Memories of Murder places the serial murderer and the incompetent police within the larger context of the 1980s military dictatorship; in The Host, the root causes of the tragedy of Park family are the postcolonial conditions of Korea: its subservient relationship to the United States and the corrupt authorities. The moral corruption of the protagonists in Barking Dogs Never Bite and Mother is not depicted as caused by the individual’s monstrous nature but rather by the harsh social and economic conditions forced upon the weak. In Snowpiercer and Okja, Bong’s cinematic sociology becomes more overtly political to indict the global phenomenon of neoliberal capitalism, which allows corporate greed to disregard dire issues of global warming and animal cruelty. Parasite brings a renewed attention to the issue of class, the polarization of the rich and the poor under a neoliberal capitalist society in which upward mobility is no longer attainable for those who have fallen through the cracks.
The late 1990s to mid-2000s were euphoric for the new generation of filmmakers to realize their new ideas about film without the harsh censorship that destroyed the creative energy of previous generations. Bong Joon Ho belongs to a generation of filmmakers who was lucky to have emerged during this period in Korean film history.
Bong considers director Kim Ki-young’s 1960 film The Housemaid as one of the films that inspired and influenced him. Many of his short films have unique features not seen in his longer works.
Among his later short films, Influenza (Inpeulluenja, 2004) and Shaking Tokyo (2008) merit special attention. Both films were made as part of an omnibus film and demonstrate Bong’s consistent interest in and observation of the peculiarities of a society.
His first four feature films and Parasite tell Korean stories with Korean characters in situations set in specifically Korean locations. The spaces, relationships between characters, dialogue and dialects, and symbols and iconic images all render a locality that is specific to Korea. Some scenes, such as the collective memorial altar in The Host and the dancing mothers in a tour bus in Mother, are scenes one would only see in Korean films. However, it is not only his stories, themes, and locations that are intrinsically Korean; the visual terms through which they are conveyed are also reminiscent of traditional Korean paintings. So the idea of Koreanness is abundant in his films.
Cinema itself is an art of manipulating space and time; however, in Bong’s films, space in particular plays a hugely significant role in the narrative construction. Space in Bong’s films gives the social ills in Korean society their geopolitical significance, and individuals’ stories play out within a larger sociopolitical context. Thus uniquely local stories are told in specifically Korean spaces.
From my observation, among his crime films Mother is different. It is a film that relies heavily on the performance of veteran actress Kim Hye-ja. In one scene she arrives at the concrete wall on which Do-joon ( son) is urinating, approaches him, and looks down intently at his genitals as if to check his urinary health. The angle and the frame are carefully calculated to show both the character’s trauma. This is a captivating image that conveys the futility of the mother’s extreme concern and overprotection.
Without any dialogue, the scene shows the nature of her relationship with her son and foretells her cover up of her son’s crime. covering up her son's urine is kind of covering his crime. I feel crucial moments in a film should be wordless.
In Mother, the murderers (Dojoon and the mother) and their victims, all of whom belong to the lowest of Korea’s social strata, are telling evidence that there is no social safety net for the poor. It depicts how the social absurdities that are particular to Korea are now part of everyday life and how they drive the socially weak to the fringe of society. Specifically, Bong exposes this moral anomie by setting up a narrative tension between motherhood and social morality.
Bong presents political allegories in a new way to his audience. Lee Chang-dong’s 1999 film, Peppermint Candy, one of the first films to depict the trauma of the Kwangju Massacre. But after that we must believe Memories of Murder is a crime thriller based on an actual unsolved serial- killer case in Korea.
Russian director Tarkovsky emphasises that “The director’s task is to recreate life: its movement, its contradictions, its dynamic and conflicts. It is his duty to reveal every iota of the truth he has seen-even if not everyone finds that truth acceptable.” Bong's films certainly take up that mantle of responsibility. Bong joon ho gives us a real sense of the Cinematic world that he created with his characteristically objective perspective and metaphorical lense.