in my imagination

muteness

It has been an exciting week with Korean Cinema Blogathon. Thanks to Martin and Rufus! I just want to wrap up our blogathon by myself with my one of favorite scenes in Korean Cinema. 

Eloquently muted moments - Christmas in August (1998) by Hur Jin-ho

Jung-won is sitting by window at a cafe. Da-rim is filming of traffic violators on a street as usual. (She is a policewoman.) Jung-won doesn’t run to outside to catch her. He doesn’t call her. He is just sitting and watching her through the window. He touches the window with his finger. He touches her/her image seen through the window. He moves his fingers carefully as though he touches her in reality. When the film ends, audiences come to realize that this is the very last glimpse which Jung-won catches her in his life. In that sense, his finger movement in the scene becomes more memorable, as Brooks asserts the mute scene and gesture are the most impassioned movements of the soul. (Brooks, 65) In addition, the scene is very symbolic. Jung-won and Da-rim exist close between the window only a few steps away, yet Da-rim never finds he is watching herself. Although Jung-won can touch her, it is only her image. It says as though they live already in a divided and different world, so not to be able to reach each other. The image of window is overlapped with photographs, which an important “psychic” sign in the film. Jung-won is a photographer, and photographs catch a certain past moments to remember. As taking a photograph, we can remember the past moments and can maybe “touch” them, but it is only images, and we cannot, indeed, grasp them. I assume the sign of photographs evokes melodramatic emotions, arousing the feeling about “passing-by” time and memories in the film and the photographs function “emotional medium” as melodrama does.

Jung-won takes a picture on himself at his photo studio. Subsequently, the frame of his figure becomes to the portrait of his funeral. Without any cries, the shot of his portrait connects with next scene of a snowy playground. In the next scene Jung-won’s father locks the photo studio and leaves with Jung-won’s motorcycle. At that time, the camera is fixed in a distance, so as to show the whole view of the scene. Soon after, as Da-rim appears in front of the photo studio, the camera approaches her. In the final scene, Da-rim finds out her photograph is set up on the studio through a window, and she smiles. She never knows Jung-won’s illness and moreover his death. At this point, Jung-won’s voice-over narration starts. “I knew that someday love would become nothing but a memory, like the countless photographs left behind.” Brooks writes about a narrative voice, “The narrative voice, with its grandiose questions and hypotheses, leads us in a movement through and beyond the surface of things to what lies behind, to the spiritual reality which is the true scene of the highly colored drama to be played out in the novel.“ (Brooks, 2) Indeed, the Jung-won’s narration makes the viewer encounter his spiritual reality. His voice over ends with the line, “I leave these words to thank you for letting me depart with your love.” This is the moment his unspoken love is spoken, but ironically, only to the viewer, so as to evoke too late-feelings which melodramas often adopt, but in a “muted” way.

Christmas in August has, particularly, typical Korean melodramatic elements: the death of a protagonist.  It functions as an obstacle for a romance. However, the film describes in a peculiar way: the protagonist’s suffering and death are depicted in a “mute” tone, through silent scenes and quiet gestures, based on his every day life. Brooks writes about wordlessness, “the text of muteness suggests expression of needs, desires, states, occulted imperatives below the level of consciousness.” (Brooks, 80) Also, he states that mute gesture is an expressionistic means, and some gestures exist wholly in the medium of ineffability, as marks of an appalling significance beyond the power of interpretation. (Brooks, 76) I agree with his assertion, and I argue the muteness plays a crucial role of making unusual melodramatic elements in the film and it opens up a new dimension of Korean melodrama. 

Bibliography

Brooks, Peter The Melodramatic Imagination (1974; repr. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). 

Filmography

Christmas in August (Hur, Jin-Ho, South Korea, 1998)