Digital Spurs Movies, but Long Way Ahead

A scene from the movie “My Mother, the Mermaid” which utilized cut-out technique so that the two women actress Jeon Do-yeon played could appear in the same frame. / Courtesy of Cineseoul

By Lee Hyo-won
Staff Reporter

Film industries around the globe are fast capitalizing on the benefits of digital technology. In late 2004, American entertainment giants Disney, Fox, MGV, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Paramount, Universal and Warner Brothers joined hands to launch Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI), for the research and development of digital movies and infrastructure. The Society of Motion Picture and Television (SMPTE) also set off DC28 in 1999 in order to standardize the technology and boost the digital film industry.

According to the Korean Film Council, most multiplex movie theaters possess digital projectors ― when you're in line for the ticket box, you will notice something like ``Public Enemy Returns'' and ``Public Enemy Returns (Digital).''

Megabox has 51, Lotte Cinema houses 21 and CGV owns 14 of a combination of Barco + Qubit, CGD and Doremi models (Korean Academy of Film Arts). Digital film solves problems inherent to analogue film, which is prone to stretching. In other words, the audiovisuals of a movie is much better when it's just released than when it has been playing for several weeks. Digitally stored data eschews such problems and also makes film distribution much more efficient. The reason why big theaters faired well is because of their state-of-the-art projectors that do justice to the original film. Digital film, on the other hand, ensures the same quality of visuals whether it's in a small rural one-screen theater or a multiplex.

``As the analogue film industry becomes digitalized, an economic effect worth tens of billions of dollars is foreseen, and the effect upon the infrastructure and all market size of the film industry will be even greater,'' write the authors of ``Digital Cinema: All About Digital Cinema from 10 Korean Movies'' (Communication Books, 2008).

Roger Fidler, a program director at the Missouri School of Journalism, says the future of the media will be a product of ``co-evolution, convergence and complexity.'' As film critic Chung Sung-ill said, digital film does not mark the death of analogue. Rather, it will open up new artistic means for filmmakers.

Here, the Korean Digital Cinema Forum was launched in August 2004 and the Digital Cinema Vision Committee took off a year later. However, South Korea still lacks a coherent system or standard for developing, producing and distributing digital movies. Yet, given Korea's IT power, there is great potential.

In the meantime, digital technology is mostly limited to enhancing the visuals of commercial movies. But this has given birth to a host of creative activities and boosted the overall quality of homegrown works. One example is ``My Mother, the Mermaid'' (2004) where award-winning actress Jeon Do-yeon doubled for the roles of a mother and daughter.

Digital Movies to Catch
Cinema Digital Seoul's Summer Jam

The Cinema Digital Seoul Film Festival (CinDi) will screen selected works from last year July 1-2 before its official event opens Aug. 20. Moviegoers who missed 2007 CinDi can watch six critically acclaimed pieces at CGV Apgujeong, southern Seoul.

For film buffs, last year's opening piece ``Inland Empire'' (2006) is not to miss. It is the first digitally shot movie by celebrated director David Lynch (``Mulholland Drive,'' 2001). It is a zany and surreal story about a deeply troubled woman. It imaginatively combines snippets of different situations and settings, and even the film's heroine, actress Laura Dern, is said to have been clueless about her role and the storyline. Be warned, however, it is an unforgettable experience lasting three hours.

Also to be shown are ``The Last Lumberjacks'' and ``The Elephant and the Sea,'' which both won the Director's Award and Crtitics' Award. The film festival provided a platform for discovering emerging Asian filmmakers, and after their screening in Seoul, the movies made their way to other international film festivals including Vancouver, Canada and Turin, Italy.

``The Last Lumberjacks'' captures the difficult lives of woodcutters who flirt with death as they toil with trees, while ``The Elephant and the Sea'' represents new Malaysian cinema as it traces the harrowing downfall of teenagers.

The pre-movie festival will showcase other critically acclaimed works, which appeared in world premiere film events like Cannes and Sundance either before or after CinDi 2007. It will be a rare occasion to see ``Campaign,'' which was shown at the Berlin International Film Festival and competed at Nantes; ``Ma Wu Jia'' which was seen at Vancouver; and ``Perfect Couple,'' which won a special jury prize at Locarno.

In the Box Office

In multiplex theaters across Korea, moviegoers can enjoy digital movies. Among them is ``Life Is Cool'' (aka. ``She Was Pretty''), the country's first ever rotoscoped film. The movie was digitally shot and then traced over scene by scene to create a ``real-action'' animation. It is a friendly love story about three 30-something-year-old friends who fall in love with the same woman.

Currently in theaters is a small-budget movie starring some of Korea's top actors ``Like Father, Like Son.'' Familiar face Kim Sang-joon stars as a former rock star that did time for drug abuse. He meets his son for the first time in 15 years and tries to be a father again. However, drug addiction begins to cripple his life and relationship. Apart from the father-son drama, the movie takes on a quirky twist as a young woman indebted to the son starts living with them and a strange family is born.

The 1960 classic ``The Housemaid'' by Kim Ki-young is of course not a digital movie. But the black and white film was digitally restored and shown at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival classic section, with the ardent support of Martin Scorsese.

The story revolves around a rich woman and her husband, who has an affair with the housemaid. The love triangle gives birth to suffocating psychodrama. Scorsese said that it was an accident in the history of cinema. The movie is only known by a few diehard film buffs in the West.

The movie now can be seen on the big screen here for the first time as part of the Korean Film Archive's Kim Ki-young Retrospective. It is currently ongoing in Sangam-dong through Sunday in time for the 10th anniversary of Kim's death.

hyowlee@koreatimes.co.kr

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