“The cinema is always as perfect as it can be”

Starting on Thursday, June 12, Pitt’s graduate student organization The Cinematheque will present a Thursday night film series called “The Imaging of Contemporary South Korea: Memory, Wandering, Resentment, Violence.” All screenings are free to the university community and will begin at 8pm in Room 120 of Pitt’s David Lawrence Hall. Here, Via a .PDF flyer that also includes extensive film descriptions, is an introduction to the event:

The Cinematheque for Summer 2008 introduces the South Korean (SK) Film Festival. SK cinema today is one of the most successful local film industries. It was not until recently, though, that the widespread belief in its impending demise in the face of an overwhelming influx of foreign films in the globalizing era has turned out to be misled. Its development had been continually stultified by political, cultural suppressions of military rule; only after the fall of the authoritarian regime in the early 1990s, SK filmmakers could start addressing and commenting on unspoken histories. Ironically, however, the newfound freedom alone could not revitalize SK. In fact, the social shift rather left SK cinema with new, tougher issues to solve; along with democratization came the rapid decline of the interest in previous collective imperatives, official or oppositional, which forced SK filmmakers to search for new ways of articulating, and resonating with, emergent and multidirectional discontents obscured by/deepened under the illusion of the victory of democratization. Metaphorically put, SK cinema awoke into darkness, preoccupied with mournful, horrific, violent stories and images. Screening seven films produced around/after the democratization (the late 1980s to present), the Cinematheque expects them to clue us in on a complicated, paradoxical evolution of a new film culture in the local niches.

And here’s the schedule:

June 12: The Host (2006)
June 19: Chilsu and Mansu (1988)
June 26: A Petal (1996)
July 10: Sopyonje (1993)
July 17: The Day a Pig Fell into the Well (1996)
July 24: I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK (2006)
July 31: Secret Sunshine (2007)

I’d really like to see some of these films (especially the last two), but unfortunately I have a class on Thursday nights that I really can’t skip. Maybe I’ll get out early one or two times.

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