LEE Man-hee

By MUN Gwan-gyu

LEE Man-hee has been called a "martyr of film," "a director who advanced Korean realist film," "a Korean film auteur armed with a fierce artistic spirit," and a "cinematic genius and experimenter." Based on his films and on the accounts of people who knew him, LEE's directing style can be characterized by two elements: an abundance of passion for film, and the tireless exploration of cinematic experimentation. The former led to both shadow―LEE's neglect of his family and sacrificing of a private life―and light, in that it produced the creative energy of a cinematic artist. The latter inspired the director to expand and deepen his cinematic language, as seen with his creative application of montage techniques, his aesthetic experimentation with sound and image, his eliciting of performances from deep within the actors, and his camera compositions using low-angle shots, bird's-eye shots and oblique angles.

Korean Film Directors

Created by the Korean Film Council, this series offers deep insight into key directors in Korean film, figures who are not only broadening the range of art and creativity found in Korean-produced commercial films but also gaining increasingly strong footholds in international markets.

Each volume features:
- critical commentary on films
- extensive interview
- biography
- complete filmography

• Language: English
• Publisher: Seoul Selection
• Release date: Nov 7, 2011
• ISBN: 9788991913912

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LEE Man-hee

Written by MUN Gwan-gyu

Translated by Colin A. Mouat

LEE Man-hee

Written by MUN Gwan-gyu

All Rights Reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the publisher.

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Korean Film Directors

The Korean Film Directors series is one of Korean Film Council’s projects to furnish an international audience with insight and analysis into the works of Korea’s most representative film directors.

The series aims to expand upon the existing body of knowledge on Korean film, educate the general public of the history of Korean film and Korean film directors, and draw attention to the significance of works that represent Korean film. Critics who share their insight in the series are leaders in their respective specialties. Each volume includes critical commentary on films, an extensive interview with the director, and a comprehensive filmography for reference.

Contents

Preface

On the Director

Interviews

Biography

Synopsis

Filmography

About the Author

Preface

A film director is like the captain of a cruise ship. Just as the captain is in charge of the whole process from setting sail to laying anchor, the director handles everything from the screenwriting stage through post-production. Unlike the captain, though, the director must also take responsibility for the finished product. The captain’s goal is simply a safe journey, but the director is judged by the public on the polish and commercial appeal of his or her films. Not all directors of outstanding artistry are able to win the public over, nor do successful commercial directors often receive recognition as great artists. Popularity and artistry are both values that a director must pursue, and in most cases, the director survives commercially at the expense of artistry. Too much artistic experimentation leaves them shunned by the public and by producers. The directors who find favor with the market are the ones who understand where to compromise between commerciality and artistry.

The director LEE Man-hee made films over a period from the 1960s through the 1970s. He considered film both as an art form and as life. His passion for film sometimes won audiences over; at other times, audiences and producers turned their backs. For him, though, film was the most important thing, and filmmaking more fascinating than any other form of activity.

In 1998, a number of Korean critics and film scholars, including this writer, came together to form a group called the Dialogue Association for Korean Film (Uri Yeonghwareul Wihan Daehwa Moim). Our main goal was to study Korean film history; we met with veterans of Korean film, listened to their accounts and recorded them. We also invited legendary Korean actors, directors and producers to give their stories. Their accounts included quite a bit of information not recorded in the annals of Korean film history. The first effort the group attempted was a verbal restoration of LEE Man-hee’s Full Autumn (1966). All of us tacitly recognized this film as a major work of Korean cinema, and LEE as a major director.

We heard about the making of Full Autumn from its producer, HO Hyun-chan. The lead actors, SHIN Seong-il and MOON Jung-suk, also offered their memories of the film and its director. SHIN shared that LEE’s nickname was Jjanggu, a reference to his prominent forehead. From MOON, we learned that the director provided instructions to his actors by explaining things in a low whisper. The film’s director of photography, SEO Jeong-min, also explained about LEE’s use of montage and described the director as having a strongly experimental spirit. Afterwards, screenwriters KIM Ji-heon and BAEK Gyeol told us about the differences between the original script and the shooting script for Full Autumn. The negative for Full Autumn may be lost, but the accounts provided by these veterans allowed certain significant scenes to be reconstructed from memory. They also recommended that we meet with the actress MUN Suk to hear more, but the star of LEE’s final film, A Road to Sampo was then living abroad.

Over the course of this effort, we heard many of the same things about LEE Man-hee, which can be summed up in a few basic areas. First, they said that he had an exceptional passion for film. He was assisted in his film efforts by BAEK, SEO and MOON, who were collectively referred to as the LEE Man-hee Association. Whether attending film company meetings or going out to drink, the director spent his time in the Korean film capital of Chungmuro; in every case, filmmaking occupied center stage in his life.

Second, the people interviewed talked about the efforts LEE made to realize his cinematic aesthetic, how he would use whatever means necessary to get the scene he wanted. In order to give his war movies a greater sense of reality, he sought to use live rounds and actual bombers. In his camera angles, he aimed for originality; he wanted to avoid using the same angles seen in foreign films or the works of other Korean directors, instead looking for angles that were creative and difficult to achieve. In the 1960s, the system of Korean film was one of mass production. A director would produce some ten films within a single year. Even under these circumstances, however, LEE did not abandon his experimentation with cinematic aesthetics and grammar.

Third, they said that he had the support of his colleagues, who held deep affection for him. These supporters—cinematographers, actors, screenwriters, producers, lighting technology—were his partners in the filmmaking process. Going by the name the 1.7 Club, they were centered around the core forces of the aforementioned LEE Man-hee Association.

Fourth, they talked about the constant presence of actors who represented the director’s own personae. Actors like JANG Dong-whi, KIM Jin-kyu and SHIN Seong-il gave expression to his interior qualities, as did actresses like MOON Jung-suk, who was his lover in real life and starred in half of the director’s total filmography, and MUN Suk, who was featured in his final works. In the films, these actors conveyed the director’s own voice and ideas, and so he maintained close relationships with all of them.

Fifth, they said that his dedication to filmmaking led him to neglect his family. As a father, he was rarely home, and his family members have few memories of him.

Finally, his films indicate the director’s conflicts with the system and with producers. The range of his creative expression was constrained by censorship under the military dictatorship; he was arrested for The Seven Female POWs (1965), and screening of Holiday (1968) was halted by a court ruling. He wound up on bad terms with government forces due to his refusal to make anti-Communist films and his making of anti-war films. A creative artistic spirit always chafes against the system and the times, and LEE was no exception to this rule.

Our research into the work and life of LEE Man-hee began with the recording efforts for Full Autumn and ultimately led to the writing of this volume. Encountering a director means encountering the films and culture of an age, and understanding a director connects with an understanding of art. Examining the works of LEE Man-hee led to an encounter with the aesthetics of Korean film, and the same time shared the experiences of a director’s self-consciousness, suffering and creative struggle in the 1960s and 1970s.

The information recorded for Full Autumn was previously published in a book called Full Autumn, LEE Man-hee, which was issued to commemorate a retrospective on the director at the Pusan International Film Festival. A collection of still photographs from the film was also published at the same time, along with the script. However, one task in the Full Autumn restoration effort remained incomplete: interviewing MUN Suk. My June 2009 interview with her for this book still lingers strongly in my memory. We met on a rainy Sunday at the Laughing Stone, an art village in the town of Anseong. She had already written at length about LEE Man-hee in a book entitled The Last Year (Majimak Han Hae), and over the course of the interview, she gave a detailed explanation of the content of that book and of her own feelings. When I reread the book after meeting with her, I could see the activity of LEE Man-hee in the 1970s come to life as if in a movie.

This book was written as a recapitulation of existing opinion on LEE Man-hee. A significant amount of previous discussion of the director has been included by way of an introduction, while some of this writer’s own appraisals have also been cautiously inserted. LEE Hye-young and MUN Suk were interviewed by the author, while interviews with LEE’s staff members have been excerpted from the Korean Film Archive’s The Genius LEE Man-hee (Cheonjae LEE Man-hee) with some minor revisions. This choice was made in the interest of aiding understanding of the director. I offer my thanks to those who allowed their work to be printed here.

Many of LEE’s friends and family members remember the man himself, while viewers remember him through his work. He was a director of his era in the 1960s and 1970s, but my hope is that he will henceforth be remembered as an artist with a legitimate place in film history.

MUN Gwan-gyu

written below Mt. Geumjeong in Busan, August 2009

On the Director

LEE Man-hee and

Korean Film in the 1960s

Korean film witnessed a boom in the 1960s in terms of the number of films produced. However, the autonomy of the director was subject to constraints by the institutional controls of the military government. The landscape of Korean cinema during the decade was therefore one of political restrictions coupled with quantitative growth. Among the masters of Korean film active during this time were YU Hyun-mok, SHIN Sang-ok, KIM Ki-young, KIM Soo-yong and LEE Man-hee.

LEE was active between the early 1960s and the mid-1970s, with the peak of his career coming in the mid-1960s. Historically, Korean film was going through a very dynamic phase. In 1961, the Korean Broadcasting System was instituted, ushering in the age of television in Korea. Meanwhile, the number of film productions increased dramatically; in 1969, more than 200 were made. Also increasing were the number of theaters and viewers: the era saw more than 100 million ticket sales per year. Meanwhile, the production and distribution systems were undergoing restructuring; film production was reorganized by the government to center on large-scale film companies. The military administration established a policy of protecting and fostering the national cinema—at least, that was the pretext, though the reality was closer to monitoring and controls. Measures were also set in place to limit the creative freedom of directors. Films were strictly controlled, going through a process of production reporting, preliminary script screening, and censorship of the finished work. LEE Man-hee would run up against censorship issues with three of his works. The controls both limited his experimentation with cinematic style and put him in conflict with the system.

To place this period in historical context, the film critic AHN Byung-sup has divided Korean film history into six periods. The first went from 1925 to 1935 and represented the silent film era, including NA Yun-kyoo’s Arirang. The second extended from 1935 to 1945 and featured both the birth of sound cinema and the dark ages of Japanese controls during the sound era. The third period was between 1955 and 1965, when Korean cinema made a revival and social realism took shape. The fourth was the second realism era from 1965 to 1975, including works by KIM Soo-yong and LEE Man-hee. The fifth period, from 1975 to 1985, represented an era of new recognition of what is meant by Korean in the wake of commercial films made by a new group of third generation filmmakers. Finally, the sixth period, which has continued from 1985 to the present, has constituted a new age of modern Korean film and a third phase of realism.

The period beginning in the 1980s saw the advent of filmmakers from the cinematic movement and those with an education in cinema. The films that emerged in the latter part of the decade came to be referred to as the Korean New Wave, a movement that continued into the late 1990s. The biggest change during this time was a shift in the funding sources for film production, from local sources to large businesses. The period following this change saw the production of so-called design films (gihoek yeonghwa) and an emphasis on marketing. Finally, figures from the film movement and directors from film schools would begin to emerge as major players.

The film historian LEE Young-il has categorized the directors of the 1960s as third-generation Korean filmmakers. The first generation is made up of directors active in the 1920s and early 1930s, most notably NA Un-kyoo, LEE Gyu-hwan and SHIM Hoon. These filmmakers ushered in the very first era of Korean cinema. As second generation directors, mention could be made of individuals active in the 1930s like PARK Gi-chae, CHOI In-kyu and BAEK Un-haeng (a.k.a. BANG Han-jun), filmmakers who participated in making both state-funded, pro-Japanese films and works of national cinema. Their main period of activity came before the time of these state-sponsored films, from the late 1930s through 1945, but they were unable to escape the shadow of pro-Japanese cinema. After this, the third generation is further subdivided into an earlier and later group. The earlier group included LEE Kang-cheon, KIM So-dong, YU Hyun-mok, SHIN Sang-ok and KIM Ki-young, while the later group included KIM Soo-yong, LEE Seong-gu and LEE Man-hee. Together, these directors carried out the task of reconstructing Korean cinema after the devastation of war, a postwar cinema that was developed amid the uncertainties of the age and the instability of the film market.

LEE Man-hee has been called a martyr of film (by