September 10, 2010 (the 35th year of the Toronto International Film Festival) I began my 16th year attending my home-city's film festival by seeing the North American premier of a Master from Korean cinema, Lee Chang-Dong's film Poetry. This film comes already heralded by many critics as a masterpiece and most recently a winner, awarded Best Screenplay at this year's Cannes film festival. Consequentially it found its way into TIFF's programming schedule, of course, I wanted to see what all this was for myself. I picked it in my advance ticket selections (which doesn't always guarantee you will get the ticket) and maybe by luck or inspiration ... it became my first film for this festival season.
The film opens with a beautiful sequence, shot with real sound. In other words, stripped of all music or film scoring. Only naturalistic sounds of the character's environment appear in the film's soundscape. In this opening, the screen lays out before us a wide vista of a ripping babbling river, hugged by green hills and banks speckled in the distance with small houses, roads, and shore trees. The camera's movement is motivated by children's voices and moves to search out their sound perspective at a distance, pans to the right to rest its gaze on them briefly before cutting in closer on them. The powerful effect of having no intervening music made me think instantly about sound design conventions that have developed over the course of film history, which has come informed the sound design and logic of this seemingly simple opening in these most elemental way. As well what I noticed is by not having music or intervening dialogue, for what seems to be a beat or two longer than what is conventionally allowed for in establishing shots has the immediate power of placing me within this place beyond the lens ... inviting me as a viewer into this verisimilitude, into this Korean country landscape so seemingly non-dynamically, but upon closer examination, extremely dynamic in its restraint.
In the wider shot, the sound of the river is more prominent because the camera's originating point of view situates it within the rippling water. When the camera cuts in on the children on the bank of the shore, the camera's point-of-view now (POV) is planted on solid land - the sound's POV logic has adjusted as well: the children's dialogue and play are clearly discerned and heard. The glory and pleasure of the cinema customarily defaults towards valorizing its visuals, which the cinematic experience can so specially construct for its viewers. But the unheralded humble champion that brings story to life and recreates a sense of place in that other special way cinema can occurs on the level of sound and its design. (See essay for a discussion that explores how important sound functions in filling out narrative logic in a analysis the aesthetics of a gladiatorial contest in Ridley Scott's Gladiator (2000), 'Narrative and Spectacle in Gladiator,' Richard Rushton, pg 34 - 43 CineAction Issue #56 - September 2001 ) It is through this under appreciated but holy marriage of cinematography and its images as animated through sound, which is presented to us to experience in this opening sequence in all its qualitative purity. Here Lee Chang-Dong establishes and gives us the parameters of style that this movie's narrative will enfold. A deft hand arranging elements with precision and restraint, this opening sequence - apart from putting forth its story's expository seed (the children discovering the dead body washing up off the river) - establishes the film's stylistic foundation from which a beautifully constructed film will be built.
In Poetry, Chang-Dong develops arcing themes of personal expression, individual agency, beauty, and moral-decision. All these are located and proceed through the main protagonist Mija (a beautiful performance given by the legendary South Korean actress Yun Junghee, who was without experience with simultaneous recording, revealed by the director in the Q&A after the screening). A grandmother who struggles to write one poem, while navigating the calamitous circumstances her grandson places her in the middle of while she raises him alone. We first come to meet Mija at the beginning of the film experiencing the awkwardness of early-onset Alzheimer's.
Here in the opening of Poetry, all the salient stylistic features of the film are set out for us. The narrative will be told and anchored to what I would like to call a "naturalism". This naturalism will give room to the viewers to observe and aggregate meaning themselves (or equally, gives us freedom not to). The director takes great pains to set the narrative one-step away from fully accessing Mija's subjectivity, so as the climax of the story's action descends we are not privy to the motivations and psychology of this grandmother. We are left to interpret these causes and consequences ourselves. Ambiguity is favoured instead of direct and clean closures. However, there is enough implicit cues for each viewer to develop their own theories of what this exquisite character has either come to achieve herself by her own choices and agency. Or, perhaps, the director leaves room to suggest where the story ends is simply a matter of timing, circumstance and fate for all the characters involved.
In a future post, I would like to spend some time discussing other features of the film. Explore the features that hold the emotional core, and true beauty within this film. The function of language or exploration of the creative process through poetry, and perhaps soon we can also delved into the feature of the screenplay, it was awarded best screenplay at Cannes.
