Director tells stories behind his films, censorship

Director Lee Jang-ho speaks during a preview event for the U.K. documentary film “The Lovers and the Despot” in this September 2016 file photo. / Courtesy of Atnine Film

By Park Jin-hai

• Published May 23, 2019 4:02 PM KST
• Updated May 24, 2019 11:10 AM KST

By Park Jin-hai

Director Lee Jang-ho, 74, holds a unique place in the Korean film industry. Of the 100 films selected by the Korea Film Archive in 2014 for their historical value and influence, Lee was the only director who had three films ― “Heavenly Homecoming to Stars” (1974), “A Fine, Windy Day” (1980) and “Declaration of Fools” (1983) ― make the top 10.

The director, fondly referred to as the director “with an eye of a child and power of a beast,” said it was because unlike other famous directors he didn't stick to a particular movie style. He just kept conducting cinematic experiments over time.

“All three of them are different genres. My debut film was a melodrama that I created in my late 20s, A Fine, Windy Day was a social realist film, and Declaration of Fools was a black comedy,” the director said.

With music video-like editing, a star cast and popular folk singer Lee Jang-hee's original soundtrack, his first film found huge popularity with the youth of the 1970s. Theaters bustled with moviegoers who stood in winding, long lines from early in the morning to buy tickets before they sold out at around 1 p.m. or 2 p.m., says Lee.

“It was a time when Korean culture was maturing. Young people, who used to listen to pop songs, started to enjoy Korean popular folk songs. Musicians active around the music hall C'est Si Bon earned popularity, while people now had the time and money to enjoy novels,” Lee said. “In this cultural atmosphere, my debut film, an adaptation of novelist Choi In-ho, made those young audiences look at Korean films.”

It gave birth to many youth-oriented films, telling teen romance stories, and a band of films where young women fall victim to men and lead tragic lives selling sex in the heartless city environment, including “Yeong-ja's Heydays” (1975) and “Winter Woman” (1977).

But from the mid-1970s under the dictatorship of Park Chung-hee and well into the 1980s under the Chun Doo-hwan government, the Korean film industry faced one of its darkest periods, suffering from excessive government censorship, Lee recalled.

Return to realism

In the name of cleansing lewd culture, the overall cultural products from newspapers to novels and songs were subject to stern government censorship. Following the nationwide enforcement of marijuana laws that hit Lee and the local entertainment industry hard in 1975, Lee ruled to stop making films indefinitely a year later.

The director said at that time when his hands were tied, he finally looked at his past films and other Korean films from a distance. “Looking at those films, I realized they didn't reflect reality at all. Korean society viewed on the big screen was always fancy. While people live poor lives in reality, those films based on literary works depicted only beautiful things. They didn't show social ills like corruption, poverty and bribery. Taking some time off, I realized that in my debut film I also showed the male lead, a teaching assistant from a rural town, living in an upscale apartment in Seoul and working in his own office at the university,” he said.

Although there had been many great realist films in the past like Yu Hyun-mok's black-and-white film “An Aimless Bullet” (1961) and Kang Dae-jin's “A Coachman” (1961), filmmakers no longer created realist films under the Park government.

“At the time, North Korean society was more affluent. Those realist films showing poor South Korean society could be used in Pyongyang's propaganda. So the government didn't support those realist-based films. Filmmakers then turned to literature and made films inspired by novels and poems. Although the very basis of filmmaking is realism, they lost the foundation,” Lee said. “What was dreadful to me was the fact that filmmakers adapted to the changed environment as the government wanted and didn't even think otherwise. Blindfolded no one raised their voice to tell the stories of the dark side of our society.”

Lee was allowed to return to the film industry in 1980 after the death of President Park the previous year, and he made “A Fine, Windy Day.” It told the hard city life story of three young men from a small rural town.

“The film was refreshing for young audiences, fed up with melo-romance stories. As a young and confident director, I also held an event that nobody had done before. I gathered a group of people who would only criticize my new film. The film and the event catered to the tastes of young people and they were a big success,” Lee said.

With Lee at the front, young directors like Bae Chang-ho and Park Kwang-su gathered and created realist films, ushering in the Korean New Wave era. The genre thrived well into the mid-1980s.

Making film to spoil career

Lee said his 1983 black comedy film “Declaration of Fools” was created from his wish to leave the Korean film industry. The screen quota was introduced in 1967, where theaters were required to screen a certain number of Korean films in order to show Hollywood films. The well-intended policy, however, only made the Korean film industry backtrack in terms of quality.

“Theaters could make money when they screened Hollywood films. But Korean films with low audience attendance didn't. So film companies demanded Korean directors to produce cheap films, in order to secure lucrative Western films. To cut costs, they divided the wide cinemascope in half, although it meant bad images for the screen. All of these measures resulted in bad quality Korean movies,” he said.

“After the success of my 1981 film People of Dark Streets, I had been under contract to make its sequels. But the censors rejected my scenario and didn't even allow it to keep its title, because it tells a tragic story of Korean society. I was disgusted by the Korean film industry and intended to leave. So I thought that if I make a really lousy film that nobody wants to watch, I could be naturally made to retire without paying damages to the contracted film company.”

The film was shot without shooting plans and each time they went out for shooting, actors and production crews worried and cautiously asked him what kind of scenes they are going to shoot for the day, he said. “I did exactly the opposite things that all other Korean filmmakers did. To my surprise, when looking at the scenes shot in different styles, the film editor later said he felt it was going to make a really unique film.”

Lee himself appeared in the film's opening scene as a director. From the very beginning, the film features Lee killing himself by jumping from a tall building.

But what the spectators gathered at the bottom of the building saw was a newspaper falling from sky, not the director's body. Then a little boy's voice narrated, “People had no interest in movies. They only cared about sports.”

“The death of the director was like declaring that I'm not responsible for this film. The falling newspaper was a metaphor of the death of the press. When it hit the local theaters, it turned out to be a huge box office success helped with strong support of many university student movie fans.”