overt intertextuality in JSA (& in the Sopranos incidentally)

Well, it's amazing how complex the poetics of a film are--and how many elements just stick in your mind. So here's another post on JSA. (The first two are here and here.)

In today's post, I'm going to talk about a very complex link made in JSA by the use of a repeated piece of the dialogue, and how this causes us to re-evaluate the perspective of an earlier scene. I'm calling such clear uses of repetition "overt intertextuality". I'll explain more later on.

(Just as an aside, I can't imagine why people worry about spoilers, given how much is actually left out in any basic review. Unless the movie is drivel, with little more to offer than some implausible deus-ex-machina at the climax, rewatching a film repays itself. Anyway, enough moralizing.)

One of the oppositions in JSA that I think I didn't do enough with in the other two posts, is that between the official story and the view of the soldiers. This is actually nicely worked out by Ch-WP (Chan-Wook Park): the soldiers don't see their enemy necessarily in the same way as their territory-jealous leaders do, at least not all the time. And, they can become confused by the contradiction between the official stance, and their own ability to befriend the soldier across the border. For example, the North Korean soldier, Sgt Oh, while eating the South Korean moon cake, asks why the (North Korean) republic can't make moon cakes like this. The South Korean soldier, Sgt. Su-Hyok, is tempted to ask him at this point if Oh wouldn't like to live in South Korea. Oh spits out the moon cake momentarily and states in good dogmatic fashion that he awaits the day that the Republic makes the best cakes--but until then, he'll have this one, and finishes it off. Nice stuff, and that's only one good example. As I expressed in the earlier posts, the other pole, the official tension, is rather poorly developed thanks to some bad acting and scripting.

So this exploration of the tensions of the border, often signaled by overhead shots depicting characters standing on the border, or other kinds of shots of soldiers at the border, leads Ch-WP to some interesting study of soldiers trying to live up to their ideal of soldiering. The soldiers are, after all, on the most heavily armed border in the world, and thus, represent their country's ideal image of itself to the familiar other across the boundary.

Sgt. Oh is the only one of the four friends to survive to the end, and is the most experienced soldier, having lived through overseas assignments. He is the cool-headed one who defuses the mine that Sy-Hyuk nearly sets off. He is the cool-headed one who nearly defuses the tense situation when his commander, Choi, walks in on the four friends during a friendly visit. That is, he is the one of the four friends most able to live up to his own soldierly ideal.

Throughout the sequence of shots where the soldiers are shown to become better friends, we see a focus on how soldiering and masculinity draws them together. They have arm wrestling and other strength competitions or perform other soldierly activities, as well as some general conviviality.

So, if soldiering and masculinity are the basic ideal for all these friends, and Sgt. Oh shows it, it is the inability to act according to such an ideal that eventually leads to Su-Hyok's suicide. This is partially because, from the S. Korean side, he is admired as being a brave soldier (esp. by Shun-Shik, who idolizes Su-Hyok), and Su Hyok feels undeserving. The S. Korean general and soldiers all praise Su-Hyok, supposedly a hero, when Maj. Jang arrives. This torment Su-Hyok. He knows its undeserved: he cried when he was left standing on the mine and couldn't find a way off--everyone back at the base admires him, b/c they believe he defused it himself. He breaks down in the failed "cross-examination," where Sgt Oh gets up in manly fashion, knocks over the table and goes into a high-falutin' rant of pure dogmatism (in the DVD extras, there's a wonderful scene of him rehearsing this). That's not all that torments Su-Hyok. He isn't able to think quickly when the shit hits the fan upon Choi's arrival, whereas Oh almost defuses the whole thing.

(I don't know anything about S. Korean popular depictions of the North vs the South , but I can't help but wonder if this film doesn't play with a (common?) perception of Northerners as poor yet not spoiled, somehow proud and ascetic, without the worldly goods that make the Southerners a little soft.)

I now come to my point. One of the moments where Su-Hyok feels his inadequacy uses a device I called above "overt intertextuality". Generally speaking, "intertextuality" refers to how different kind texts (like films) incorporate aspects of other texts. By "overt", I mean that the auteur, in this case Ch-WP, uses a high degree of resemblance for us to recognize the source. In the case at hand, a character repeats something significant said to her/him by another character (elsewhere), but without necessarily acknowledging the source.

A major moment in JSA uses this device. It occurs when Maj Jang interrogates Su-Hyok, as she is trying to get him to load his gun (to see if he puts an extra bullet in the barrel). After she threatens to show him pictures of the dead bodies (btw, I made some notes on the use of photos in my last post), he agrees. She asks him if its true, as the other soldiers say, that he is very fast with his gun--thus explicitly addressing the issue of whether he deserves admiration as a soldier or not. He answers (from English subtitles): "What's important in battle isn't speed. It's carrying yourself with composure and bravery."

Only later, when we get the extended sequence of flashed back story, that shows us the four soldiers becoming friends, do we find out that this sentiment was expressed chronologically earlier to Su-Hyok by none other than Sgt. Oh. In that earlier moment, Su-Hyok and Shun-Shik were visiting their N. Korean friends, and Su-Hyok boasted about being quick with his gun. Oh replies to him that speed isn't important, composure and bravery are. Eventually, of course, Su-Hyok's (and Shun-Shik's) inability to act with composure in the heat of battle, to be brave, that leads to their downfall. Obviously there's an allegory here. (Please don't get me wrong, I'm not interested or dazzled by the bravery and composure shtick, but in the device used to signal a major development of character).

This use of overt intertextuality does two things. First, it marks a moment of character development. By crying to Sgt Oh to get his help with the mine, Su-Hyok already knows that he can't keep up the facade of soldierly ideal versus the more experienced Oh. The use of Oh's words by Su-Hyok to Maj Jang enables our auteur to show the affect Oh's reply had on Su-Hyok.

The second thing it does is enables us to re-interpret Su-Hyok's words from earlier in the movie, by drawing a parallel between the two scenes. When we watch Maj. Jang sitting across from Su-Hyok during the interrogation, we still have no way of evaluating Su-Hyok's resistance to her questions. Is he just being a South Korean chauvinist warhawk like the general who so praised him a bit earlier in the movie? It is only later, when we hear Oh challenging Su-Hyok's about speed as a soldierly ideal, that we know how Su-Hyok was taking Maj. Jang's question as a parallel moment. Only later can we appreciate that Ch-WP is presenting Su-Hyok as troubled by his rash actions during the heat of the tragic incident. That is, only later do we understand that Su-Hyok was using Sgt. Oh's terms for a good soldier to judge himself--he wasn't really being uncooperative with Maj Jang as he was upset by his own actions.

In short, it is only later that we as the audience can come to understand something about that interrogation from Su-Hyok's perspective, and it is the soldierly ideals of Oh, correcting Su-Hyok about his mistaken belief in speed, that reconstitutes Su-Hyok for us towards the end.

This unbelievably complex twist of narrative perspective is achieved by a little overt intertextuality, all internal to the movie. (A kind of double-voicing, as Bakhtin would call it.)

This isn't the first time I've run across this device. After years of ignorance, I've become a bit of a Sopranos' fan. And, this kind of overt intertextuality is used frequently. But never is the source revealed by the character when they repeat it. Usually it's character A saying something to B in the midst of a disagreement or as part of persuading him/her. Then character B finds him/herself in a similar discussion with C, and uses A's words to express the sentiment. But B won't say, "As A said..."--because that would constitute the little bit of text as reported dialogue. It's just said as if B invented the bit of dialogue him/herself.

At the beginning of the series (in Season 1, I assume), Tony repeats one-liners he's learned in therapy from Dr. Jennifer Melfi in other contexts. Of course, he would never attribute them, because he doesn't want to be discovered as a captain who sees a shrink. But it is used with different degrees of overtness in a variety of situations.

Just as Ch-WP's use marks the contradiction b/w knowing soldierly ideals and being able to act according to them, the overt intertextuality often marks a contradiction in the Sopranos. It often signals the tension between a working class and gangster upbringing and the upper middle class practices that the Sopranos are trying to espouse (sending the kids to private schools and university, etc). Every time Tony does it, every time he puts the sophisticated discourse of the psychiatrist into his own voice, his character potentially develops. One of James Gandolfini's many achievements with the character is his ability to pull off this little bit of discursive incorporation without it sounding contrived.

Ok, there's always more to say about a movie, and Chan-Wook Park is an interesting auteur. But enough about JSA.

new useful link to some analytical masters

Well, it isn't a surprise that Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell's blog was added to my useful links. Two scholars of film studies, steeped in the history of film in various traditions, who do some very nice formal analysis of what I assume to be work in progress on their blog. Besides the blog, David Bordwell's site is a very rich resource for Film Studies. I just read David's post on some little-known Japanese action movies from the 20s & 30s, and the innovative use of cuts in a fight scene. Truly sophisticated analysis.

And a blog I shall frequent.

"truth, you can't handle the truth" ends JSA

Okay, I was pretty far along when I stopped watching yesterday. And so I'm not surprised that my notes on the movie were dead on. Major Jang's zeal in getting at the "truth" (i.e., objective reality) only leads to the end of her investigation, and then her unofficial "truth"-finding leads to more suicide. (Fairly overdone for my taste, but I've a very low tolerance for cheese/predictability.) But moreover, the horribly acted Maj. Gen. Bruno Botta (general/armchair anthropologist) gives us the line that sums up the not so subtle message about the relation of North and South Korea at this border. Speaking to Major Jang, after dismissing her, he says: "You haven't learned much about Pumwanjung yet [poorly overplayed significant pause], here the peace is preserved by hiding the truth." Well, that couldn't be seen from a mile away. (Whoever cast Christoph Hofrichter in the role of Botta...poor choice. It feels like they had maybe one day to shoot with him, he clearly didn't figure out the movie). Of course, even after those wise words--perhaps a better actor would have convinced Maj Jang?--she is relentless in her pursuit, and so Su-Hyok has to blow his own brains out when he is confronted with the memory of killing his (N Korean) friend Jung--and on Jung's birthday! Chan-Wook Park does like to lead us down the dark side of memory and psyche, does he not?

So, to narrative perspective. There's an interesting use of photos to cue the reason for Major Jang's dismissal from the case. After a "cross-examination" gone awry, as Jang tries to confront both Oh and Su-Hyok with evidence that undermines their deposition, Botta hands Jang her plane ticket home. It turns out the S. Korean general (who was supposed to be Jang's nemesis from the outset) has discovered she is the daughter of an exiled N. Korean general of the Korean War in the early 50s. To cue the historical flashback, including footage presumably of the war, Botta hands Jang pictures that apparently the S. Korean general amassed showing that Jang's father was a N. Korean POW. The pictures are grainy, and from (presumably) the 50s. This cues the cut away to the war footage, and Botta's voice-over explaining how Jang's father came to marry a Swiss woman in Argentina. Along with the voice-over is music that signals the motif of "realization"--unbeknownst to the character, there was something else going on, and he/she was actually involved in the action in ways that s/he didn't realize before. This music, if I recall correctly, is also used when the pangs of conscience bring forth a repressed memory, that changes the course of action (like Su-Hyok shooting himself as he remembers shooting Jung).

This issue of objective reality--as a historical chronotope, and not just biographical one--as a deep imprint on memory is widespread in the Chan-Wook Park movies I've seen so far. Think of Oh Dae-Su seeking out the weird parapsychologist who used to hypnotize him during his captivity at the end of "Oldboy". He wants her to help him erase the discovery that he fell in love with his own daughter, in a paternal form of the oedipal (also perspective of the father, rather than the daughter). How to get the truth to not reach her ears, so she can continue to be innocent of the poison started by his comments regarding Woo-jin Lee and his sister. Of course, like Sophocles Oedipus (who poked out his own eyes to punish himself at the discovery of truth), Oh Dae-Su cuts out his own tongue. A more appropriate metonymy for how speech can kill.

Ok, but I wander. So the photos cue the historical sequence. It really doesn't do much work, apart from explain Jang's sudden dismissal--Jang is untouched by this realization, and continues to be the intrepid hunter of truth. The next flashblack occurs when Jang confronts Su-Hyok with some facts she has picked up. They are in one of the NNSC (neutral nations security committee) offices, and Jang explains how she has figured out that the four soldiers were friends: she saw a sketch of Su-Hyok's girlfriend in Jung's sketchbook ("he liked to sketch his friends' girlfriends", we learn earlier in the movie). Then she pushes him to tell the rest of the story of the tragic incident by promising not to turn in her evidence--and she forces Su Hyok to spill the beans as a means to save Oh (Kang-Ho Song really held this one together with his play of Oh). Cut to Su-Hyok's face, and we get the final piece of the "truth" about the incident. Except for the little part which leads Su-Hyok to kill himself--Chan-Wook Park has to draw that out a little more.

So where I feel vindicated is that yesterday I had a sneaking suspicion that the cut to Major Jang's face before the cut to Shun-Shik's to the flashblack might be a way to compose a perspective that showed the dawning of the truth for Maj Jang. And it seems to have turned out that way.

Notice that while the revelation about Major Jang's past doesn't really do anything to her--in fact, she's almost more jolly towards the end, having been vindicated unofficially at least--the revelations drive both Su-Hyok and Shun-Shik to suicide. Oh, on the other hand, can also remain the same. He goes back to being the career soldier, who knows how to handle himself under tension. The soldier that Su-Hyok was believed to be.

So after seeing 4 Chan-Wook Park films, I can safely say--he thinks that the truth is better left unrevealed, at least part of the time.

Final notes: according to IMDB, this movie is being remade into Joint Security America--and the tension is b/w US Marines and Mexican special forces!!! Oh yeah, no doubt people will easily buy into that one. After all, the Cold War backdrop of the civil war b/w Communist North Korea and Capitalist South Korea--which has now been the most heavily guarded border since 1953--is exactly the same as the relation b/w the US & Mexico. Hasn't the US-Mexico border region been more explored by, say Orson Welles' "A Touch of Evil", or the more contemporary "Traffic", or even "21 Grams" & also in one of the subplots of "Babel". Apparently there's also the 1949 "Border Incident", which I haven't seen. Is this remake anything more than a propaganda play for building a wall on the border, as the Bush administration and many Republican politicians are seeking? (I don't actually believe that). Wouldn't a sea-borne version between US & Cuba, perhaps even set during the Bay of Pigs crisis, be a little more workable? Or, will the issue be transformed into one of drug-smuggling or human-smuggling, which seems to be the general association with that border for most Americans? I wonder how the flashing back will be handled there...

IMDB also claims that the movie references "Rashomon" in its use of differing perspectives, and that the tense gun pointing scene is a reference to the "Mexican Standoff" of Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs".

First Day Excitement = Blog Updates

Well, I'm starting to make my way into the world of blogging. No doubt the first day is exciting for everyone.

I've started to look around the web for resources and blogs who do what interests me here. So far, most film blogs I've found are in the genre of "review," giving the story-line and some sense of how that story is achieved, and then a "thumbs-up" or "thumbs-down" kind of scale or impression on whether the whole thing works for the reviewer or not. I've also seen, but not really investigated, some technical stuff on the production side.

I'm after a tighter link between technique and effect, the poetics of the film, and in particular narrative perspective and Bakhtinian voicing. So I might be choosy for a while on what goes under the "useful links" section. I'm looking for real nitty-gritty analysis in the resource.

My first link is to Yale Film Analysis Web Site 2.0 (was there a Beta?), from which I have started to educate myself on the basic vocab of film studies. They do a nice job, because they give examples of how various techniques have been used to create particular effects paradigmatically by certain movies. The site doesn't seem to have been updated since 2002, but it's still completely functioning. I found it through this site, which seems to be mostly for the prof's coursework, and doesn't seem to be updated at the moment. But that site also put me onto this one, which also seems to be a course website, but has an interesting list of "Studying and Writing-About Film" which has a list of links which I'll try to check out. The list of links doesn't seem user-friendly, being that long...but this seems to be an inherent limitation in the blogging software. Which makes me wonder how long I'll be using this particular one.

By reading the Yale site, I am breaking my initial idea of not really educating myself about Film Studies, and just having fun. But, I promise to stay amateurish to the end.

My other set of updates for today were a site meter (which only measures my one visit prior to the ignore cookie), and, at the bottom of the page, posters from a couple of my favorite movies right now, to which I plan dedicating a post in the near future. I'll add more as I have time.

in the middle of watching Chan-Wook Park's "Joint Security Area"

So, this is my first post. I warn anyone who might stray here that I am an academic, and plan on paying a lot of attention to techniques for creating "perspective"--how a scene is conveyed as if from some angle on the events, whether that of the audience (us!), a character, an outside observer/narrator, or somehow blended. Having said that, my field has nothing to do with cinema, and I don't intend to treat my materials from any entrenched film studies tradition. I don't know any. This blog is to amuse myself.

Well, to the meat of the matter.

Btw, since I don't believe anyone will actually read this, I will not really do summaries or warn people about "spoilers." Sorry if you do, and you don't realize that.

It's late, and I should be sleeping already, but Chan-Wook Park's movies compel comments. I've not yet finished watching "Joint Security Area"--a film not on par with his tour de force "Oldboy"--but I'm already intrigued by an element of storytelling. Here's an interesting review, by the AV Club's Noel Murray, if you want a general plot line, with some good comments about technique and Chan-Wook Park's source for the idea. (I didn't realize that the film was released in the States with English dubbing, which I assume is horrible. I'm watching it in the original Korean, with English subtitles.)

On to why I'm compelled to comment. Chan-Wook Park frames two (well, three) extended sets of sequences by taking the audience to the perspective of the (supposedly Swiss-raised Korean) investigator. First, the investigator picks up the deposition of the South Korean soldier, flips it open, and then we go into the sequence which make up the official South Korean version of the "incident." (Just as an aside, the opening scene where Major Jang, the investigator is taken to meet the head of the "neutral" observers, the Swiss-German "armchair anthropologist" is just appallingly bad. It almost feels like a low budget James Bond rip-off, "your mission is very very delicate, the whole future of the world is in your hands" type stuff. Things improve dramatically when the movie switches to Korean.) Then, in parallel, when Major Jang goes across to the North, she similarly flips open the deposition of Oh, and we go into the sequence of scenes that relate the official North Korean version of the "incident."

So, although there are two tokens of this technique, it really comprises one kind, just mirrored on both sides of the border. Of course, this mirroring is crucial to setting up how Chan-Wook Park builds up the muddy issue of the border separating "brothers" (South's term) or "comrades" (North's term), and how the border can still be crossed by an act of generosity (saving Su-Hyok from the land mine) and then some gift exchanges (music, a lighter, food from the South). I.e., the rank and file soldiers don't truly hate each other, and can get along...only when the power of the institutionalized struggle gets in the way does the shit hit the fan.

The next moment of this flashing back occurs when Sung-Shik throws himself out the window of the neutral army's building, and lands on the pavement (I don't know whether he ultimately dies yet, since I haven't finished watching the movie). Here again Major Jang (or Jean, according to IMDB) is involved in framing the oncoming sequences. Which show the "objective reality" of what happened prior to the incident, and which isn't contained in the previously mentioned, official "depositions." Major Jang hears the crash of the breaking window, and rushes to see Sung-Shik on the pavement, and then he goes into the flashback, and the events return to how the soldiers made friends prior to the "incident." (Sung-shik was being interrogated by Major Jang's host in the floor above where she was interrogating Su-Hyok, i.e., in exact parallel, as a pan out of the building and back in shows).

Now, in the first set of flashbacks, cued by Major Jang picking up the deposition and reading, the perspective is entirely the "official story" which will then be criticized by Major Jang as she finds facts inconsistent with it. Indeed, the whole movie is then strung along by the tension of not knowing how the incident occurred, and Chan-Wook Park's James-Bond like intro does give a small red herring, the idea of some great conspiracy or evil occurring...not the prosaic links of friendship between bored soldiers.

The second flashback technique--Major Jang looking down on Sung-shik, then cut to Sung-Shik looking upwards blankly, then cut to the "objective reality" of how the soldiers made friends--complicates the relation of the audience to objective reality infinitely. Because Major Jang, our guide into the discovery of objective reality, doesn't yet know the story, and Sung-Shik's face is the last to be seen. His face suggests that it is him remembering the next (quite long and elaborate) set of scenes showing how the soldiers became friends. And yet there are elements in the sequence that he didn't partake in, since they happened to Su-Hyok. So what is the perspective thus created? Is it Su-Hyok's, via Sung-Shik, once he has told the latter the whole story? Is it also not a bit of Major Jang's, as she is slowly coming to realize that there's more to the story?, and thus is continuing her quest for the objective reality--to the point that Sung-Shik throws himself out a window as evidence is compiled against him. Is it not also a bit of an omniscient story-teller, who saw the whole thing develop? We the audience are of course party to all of them.

In the end, the tension of the movie isn't what the awful intro, with the armchair anthropologist/general, set it out to be--it isn't the possibility of igniting war between the heavily armed Koreas, and possible other interested countries. The tension comes from the lack of knowledge about how the "incident" occurred, and the investigator's attempt to troll the memories of the shocked and troubled soldiers, who once spared each others' lives enough to befriend one another, and now went back to killing each other. It is the impossibility of sharing one's perspective that ultimately provides the oomph to this flick, and Chan-Wook Park's framings of flashback sequences are crucial to ratcheting this up.

From the midpoint of the film, the question is whether Major Jang's truth will actually help in any way to bridging past and present?

Stay tuned...