Im Kwon-Taek: The Making of a Korean National Cinema

9 In Defense of Continuity: Discourses on Tradition and the Mother in Festival

Han Ju Kwak CHAPTER 9 In Defense of Continuity: Discourses on Tradition and the Mother in Festival All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967), 83. The process of modernization in South Korea was so enormously extensive, intense, and violent that it became the major constituent core of the nation's collective experience during the latter half of the twentieth century. Like other forms of cultural representation in South Korea, cinema confronted the profound upheavals caused by modernization both directly and indirectiy, offering many forms of dramatization of the people's fears and pleasures, their anxieties and aspirations, during this unprecedentedly cataclysmic epochal shift. Director Im Kwon-Taek has been a prominent figure in representing Korea's social, economic, and cultural transformation. Spanning from 1962 to the present, his career exactly overlaps with its most turbulent phase, and he has consciously and persistently addressed the issues surrounding modernization, particularly in his later works. His major themes have been the effect of modernization on traditional Korean culture and the role of traditional culture in modern society. Im has clearly expressed this concern for traditional Korean culture in several interviews—for example: "My personal desire has been to capture 223 224 HAN JU KWAK elements of our traditional culture in mywork. . . . The fear is, of course, that those aspects of Korean culture that are not favored by the terms of this new international and more aggressive culture may be absorbed, and in the end, disappear."1 Of the films in which Im addressed the issue of the survival of tradition within the sweeping modernization process, two relatively recent works are especially important: the phenomenally successful Sopyonje (Sopydnje), made in 1993, and, three years later, Festival (Ch^ukehe), based on novels by the renowned writer, Yi Ch'ong-jun. In the former, tradition is represented mainly by the traditional folk opera, p^ansori, while in the latter it is represented mainly by the rituals of a funeral. Though it resembles Sopyonje in its general thematics, Festival addresses the role of traditional culture in the present in a very complicated way, and its attitude to tradition is radically different. Whereas Sopyonje describes the bitter defeat of tradition in the recent past, Festival represents its victory in the present. Whereas in Sopyonje tradition appears to be unquestionably opposed to modernity, in Festival the relation between past and present is much more complex. Sopyonje simply laments the disappearance of traditional culture, but Festival addresses the question of its contemporary meaning, presenting it as an important source of continuity even as it simultaneously examines its discontinuity. In this essay, I examine Festival in the context of other films about funerals, arguing that what I call its "tradition-discourse" posits the culture of the past in opposition to modernity, but that it also paradoxically attempts to restore premodernity in the modernizing present. The film is thus internally split to create a tragic nostalgia. This nostalgia is associated with and substantially mobilized by a cluster of metaphors assembled around the figure of the mother—what I call the film's "motherdiscourse ." Thus I read Festival as a dialectically masterful text that dramatizes an inherent ambivalence towards tradition in a modernizing society. To frame this reading, I begin with a preliminary discussion of the concepts of modernity and tradition and their relationship in the context of Korea's modernization. Modernity as a historically specific order is in essence a relational concept based on a periodization; only when viewed in relation to traditional order does a post-traditional order emerge in its entirety. Likewise, IN DEFENSE OF CONTINUITY 225 modernization designates the transition from an agrarian order to an industrialized society. Anthony Giddens characterizes modernity mainly in terms ofits dynamism, which is brought in by the industrialization ofthe economy and the rationalization of culture. Through its "disembedding mechanism," modernity reorganizes time and space, and by its "radical doubt" it creates circumstances of uncertainty and multiple choice. It is thus a much more open system, one in which new forms of risk are intrinsic.2 Conversely, tradition can be understood fully only in relation to modernity. According to Stephen Vlastos, the term has conventionally been used in two overlapping and somewhat contradictory senses. First, tradition is associated with the historical period preceding modernity; used in this way the concept aggregates and homogenizes premodern...