Movie Night at the OACC

A monthly film screening featuring selections and introductions by invited speakers. Organized by Jackie Im and hosted by the Oakland Asian Cultural Center.

Not a good-bye, but a see you later…

Hello! 

As you may or may not have noticed, this past Tuesday would have traditionally hosted a screening at Movie Night at OACC. Due to ongoing and emerging projects, I have found myself with little time to organize these monthly events. It is with sadness that we are announcing the end of Movie Night at the OACC. 

I am extremely grateful to all of our speakers and to everyone who has attended. This series began as a way to expand my knowledge of Asian cinema and share that with others. I’m so excited that so many people took part. I am also very very grateful to the Oakland Asian Cultural Center and their staff for all of their help. 

Please follow Et Al. on Tumblr or like us on Facebook for updates on other projects. 

Thank you!!
Jackie Im

November 27: The Housemaid

Join us for the last Movie Night at the OACC in 2012!

After a short break, we’re back! This month we will be screening The Housemaid (하녀) directed by South Korean filmmaker Kim Ki-young. The 1960 film is the first in Kim’s celebrated Housemaid trilogy. The Housemaid follows a family as they hire a housemaid (Lee Eun-shim) to help. They soon discover that the strange girl has more nefarious plots. In a review of the film for AFI, Tom von Logue Newth says of Lee:

She appears repeatedly at the night-time window with the frightful intensity of Kathleen Byron in Black Narcissus, committing atrocious acts of violence, but also manipulated by the couple into a terrible act of self-harm and imbued with just enough humanity that she cannot be written off as simply a nut-job. The melodrama runs high, the hysterical horror of the hothouse atmosphere ratcheted up with generous use of thunderstorms and sinister symbolism, and the presence throughout of a bottle of rat poison.

The film will be introduced by Ben Furstenberg. Furstenberg is a sound designer and musician who lives in San Francisco.  Current activities investigate the intersection of art and radical politics.  He likes to discuss cinema history, among many other subjects. 

The Housemaid

1960

108 minutes

7pm Tuesday
November 27, 2012

$5 suggested donation, no one is turned away due to lack of funds. 

Visit the event on Facebook!

Oakland Asian Cultural Center
388 Ninth Street, Suite 290 (btwn. Franklin and Webster Street)
Oakland, CA 94607

Movie Night at the OACC is sponsored by the Oakland Asian Cultural Center. For more information about the OACC, please visit www.oacc.cc

Movie Night at the OACC is a monthly screening night organized by Jackie Im.

NOTICE: Due to some unexpected and semi-unforseen circumstances, tonight’s screening of “In the Realm of the Senses” has been canceled (Tuesday, October 16, 2012). We’re very sorry for the short short notice, please stay tuned for updates on a reschedule and/or future screenings. 

Thank you!
Jackie Im
Organizer, Movie Night at the OACC

October 16: In the Realm of the Senses

Join us for Movie Night at the OACC!

This month we will be screening In the Realm of the Senses (愛のコリーダ) directed by Japanese filmmaker Nagisa Oshima. This controversial and still censored in Japan film is a fictionalized account of an infamous incident from 1936, involving Sada Abe (played by Eiko Matsuda). This sexually charged film depicts the destructive relationship between Abe and hotel owner Kichizo Ishida (Tatsuya Fuji) in Imperial Japan, challenging notions of obscenity and socio-sexual alienation. As Oshima has stated in his essay, “Theory of Experimental Pornographic Film”: “The concept of ‘obscenity’ is tested when we dare to look at something that we desire to see but have forbidden ourselves to look at.” In a Tiny Mix Tapes review of the Criterion print of the film, David Harris states: 

By including scenes of hardcore sexuality, Oshima graphically illustrates the all-consuming love raging between Sada and her lover. But Oshima is not trying to arouse his audience. Despite all its nudity and countless shots of penises, vaginas, and semen, In the Realm of the Senses is decidedly unsexy. Rather, Oshima is allowing us to watch two individuals completely lost in one another. This film is not about giving us an erection. It is about challenging a society that is embarrassed for having an erection in the first place. 

The film will be introduced by Gerald Santana. Gerald Santana is a writer, filmmaker and musician and founder of the Berkeley Underground Film Society. BUFS is an all ages club for film collectors, researchers, and enthusiasts in the East Bay and San Francisco area, where Santana serves as a projectionist and host for the weekly screenings held at 708 Gilman St. in Berkeley, CA. 

As a writer, Santana wrote the metaphysical blog nowhappened.blogspot. As a filmmaker, Santana has worked with various local East Bay musicians, artists, and galleries including Thee Oh Sees, George Chen, and Studio Quercus. As a musician, Santana played with the San Francisco-based rock band So So Many White White Tigers. 


In The Realm of The Senses by MyMovies_International

In the Realm of the Senses
1976
108 minutes

7pm Tuesday
October 16, 2012

$5 suggested donation, no one is turned away due to lack of funds. 

Visit the event on Facebook!

Oakland Asian Cultural Center
388 Ninth Street, Suite 290 (btwn. Franklin and Webster Street)
Oakland, CA 94607

Movie Night at the OACC is sponsored by the Oakland Asian Cultural Center. For more information about the OACC, please visit www.oacc.cc

Movie Night at the OACC is a monthly screening night organized by Jackie Im.

Ian Dolton-Thornton Introduces Vive L’Amour

Some thoughts about Tsai Ming-Liang’s Vive L’Amour

By Ian Dolton-Thornton

This movie was released in 1994, is Tsai Ming-Liang’s “breakout” film. It won the Golden Lion at Venice Film Festival and the Best Film at the Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival.

The film is set in Taipei, the capital of Taiwan. A 1980s real estate and stock-market boom led to overdevelopment, and by the mid-1990s there were many empty houses and apartments in the city, despite the city’s population density[1]. Although vacancy increased, housing prices didn’t fall, so there was a profitable business in finding occupants for these buildings. A 1995 housing survey found that about 40% of houses and apartments were less than 15 years old. In 1994, there were more than a million empty housing units in Taipei, and approximately 6.5 million people living in the greater Taipei area. 

In the numbers I was looking at for this, a unit was determined to be vacant if the amount of electricity it used was below a certain threshold. Beyond what this implies about different forms of low-level squatting or itinerancy, it also reveals the market understanding of urban space. There are empty pockets, livable units, which are occupied when enough energy from the overall circulation is put in or through them for long enough.

The opening moment of this movie sets this up simply: commercial movement into living spaces, human bodies as carrying this momentum. Through their spinning existence, an existence in which they have no place, they keep moving. This is the condition of all the objects in the movie: they must keep moving. Quiet illegality offsets the pressures of the rules to which the objects overall still conform. You jay-walk to your meeting with a potential buyer.

The words of a game in the film are shouted: “WHO WANTS TO MOVE? EVERYONE HAS TO MOVE!”

Throughout the film the characters have things with them: keys, cigarettes, cups, bottles of water, a melon, a purse, a knife. These objects have functions, impart pleasure, open doors, but always are outside of the people we see. The characters in this film are basically unable to connect with the world outside of themselves, to stop their own floating by the friction of contact. But this isn’t because they are lost in a rich and engrossing interior life, blotting from view the world encircling them. The cigarettes and cups in their hands just bring the boundary of what they can’t cross closer to the body. The real estate agent crouches and embraces the for-sale sign just as she does her anonymous lover. 

The sex in this movie functions basically congruently to how people interact with the non-human objects. There is not talking and sometimes not even recognition. The body moves through the city and experiences itself as another object it has not and cannot choose. The world is all there already, full of pleasures and frustrations. Like the pilfered time in the empty apartment’s bathtub, soaking: it is just there for someone, and while it isn’t you, the bath at that moment isn’t exactly not for you either.

Thus the way of interacting with the other objects is to try to attract them to you, to create yourself like all the other objects and to make other objects congregate around you. The draw between two objects replaces the exchange between two subjects. 

There’s a literal absence of communication throughout most of the movie, except for the language of commercial transactions. Social interaction is brought into this but as the attempted attraction of the sales pitch: let’s get coffee, I am waiting for you, I really love it. When the characters do meet up, it is inside or alongside commercial transactions.

The movie is filled with empty but delimited spaces. These are already-determined places for people to go: the apartments and houses that one tries to entice buyers inside, the shelves for urns (the finally resolved object-form of a human body), a soft rug for romance. The characters in this movie all seem weirdly placeless. There are spaces into which one is asked to come. The selling of these places implies a narrative into which one can step: resting forever with your loved ones, a nice home with a good school nearby. In the constant whirling of bodies, there are positions one can be placed.

All the world, including one’s own existence, follows patterns one can see but not remake. Erotic excitement seems unable to puncture the surface of the individual. Like lying in a bathtub, this is a place for you to sit, but it will not change you, your closed eyes, feeling the body, heavy breathing and some rustling. The alienation of the characters in Vive L’Amour is not simply the frustration of an attempted act by an external limit, but rather the contradictory pulls of channeled drives. This is why they end up in these rooms and why they hide there: they can’t be found.

 



[1] The statistical information I reference here is found in Wen-Chieh Wu and Chin-Oh Chang’s “Taipei Property Market Before and After Asian Financial Crisis”, available at http://www.realestate.com.tw/duckhouse/Taipei%20Property.PDF

September 18: Vive L’ Amour

Join us for Movie Night at the OACC!

This month we will be screening Vive L’Amour directed by Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang. In his second film, Tsai follows three lonely individuals, who unknowingly share an otherwise unoccupied apartment: Hsiao-kang, a gay salesman of crematorium niches; Ah-jung, a street hawker of counterfeit designer good; and May Lin, a struggling real estate agent. An affecting portrait of Taipei, Vive L’Amour deftly explores isolation and urban disillusionment. In a 1995 review of the film, New York Times film critic Stephen Holden states:

Michelangelo Antonioni’s brooding meditations on urban alienation may not be fashionable in America right now, but they have exerted a powerful influence on modern Asian cinema. “Vive l’Amour,” Tsai Ming-liang’s haunting second feature, is a virtual homage to the Antonioni films “La Notte” and “Eclipse.” As in those early-60’s masterpieces, the gleaming anonymous architecture and thoroughfares of a booming metropolis (here it is contemporary Taipei) frame the blank spiritual lives of characters who drift through the city in a state of melancholy disconnection.

The film will be introduced by Ian Dolton-Thronton. Ian Dolton-Thornton is an artist living in Oakland. He is currently working on a series of texts on social value. 

In lieu of a trailer, please enjoy this excerpt of the film:

Vive L’Amour
1994
118 minutes

7pm Tuesday
September 18, 2012

Visit us on Facebook

$5 suggested donation, no one is turned away due to lack of funds. 

Oakland Asian Cultural Center
388 Ninth Street, Suite 290 (btwn. Franklin and Webster Street)
Oakland, CA 94607

Movie Night at the OACC is sponsored by the Oakland Asian Cultural Center. For more information about the OACC, please visit www.oacc.cc

Movie Night at the OACC is a monthly screening night organized by Jackie Im.

August 21: Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974

Join us for Movie Night at the OACC!

This month we will be screening Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 directed by Japanese director Kazuo Hara. A renowned documentary filmmaker, Kzauo Hara obsessively follows Takeda Miyuki, his former lover, outspoken feminist and radical. This extremely private film documents Miyuki’s relationship with an American GI, her subsequent pregnancy and birth, and emotionally raw discussions and arguments on Hara and Miyuki’s fraught relationship. In a 2007 review-feature on the films of Hara, Village Voice film critic Ed Halter states:

At first portending a sadistic macho trip, Extreme Private Eros proves to be an unexpectedly humanist, even feminist film as it chronicles Takeda’s later relationships with other women and black American GIs in the low-rent, gutter-tough world of Okinawa go-go bars. Hara himself never appears in frame, but remains present as a self-deprecating voyeur to his former lover’s ongoing life. 

The film will be introduced by Tooth. Tooth is an Oakland based artist and filmmaker. He is the initiator of the community-based film arts project known as Black Hole: a still evolving vehicle of what he terms a type of “perceptual activism.” Manifesting in a program of free weekly screenings, performances, workshops, and gatherings that have recently led to the founding of a still forming film resource center and free school, based in a West Oakland warehouse. 

Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974
1974
98 minutes

7pm Tuesday
August 21, 2012

Visit this event on Facebook

$5 suggested donation, no one is turned away due to lack of funds. 

Oakland Asian Cultural Center
388 Ninth Street, Suite 290 (btwn. Franklin and Webster Street)
Oakland, CA 94607

Movie Night at the OACC is sponsored by the Oakland Asian Cultural Center. For more information about the OACC, please visit www.oacc.cc

Movie Night at the OACC is a monthly screening night organized by Jackie Im. 

Liz Glass Introduces Destroy All Monsters

Destroy All Monsters - An Introduction

By Liz Glass

To introduce the film Destroy All Monsters, I would like to begin by talking about the American western. In her 1993 text, West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns, literary critic Jane Tompkins writes,

“From roughly 1900 to 1975 a significant portion of the adolescent male population spent every Saturday afternoon at the movies. What they saw there were Westerns. Roy Rogers, Tom Mix, Lash LaRue, Gene Autry, Hopalong Cassidy…In 1959 there were no fewer than thirty-five Westerns running concurrently on television, and out of the top ten programs eight were Westerns. John Wayne, the actor whose name is synonymous with Western films, became the symbol of American masculinity from World War II to Vietnam…The arch-images of the genre—the gunfight, the fistfight, the chase on horseback, the figure of the mounted horseman outlined against the sky, the saloon girl, the lonely landscape itself—are culturally pervasive and overpowering. They carry within them compacted worlds of meaning and value, codes of conduct, standards of judgment, and habits of perception that shape our sense of the world and govern our behavior without our having the slightest awareness of it.”

Throughout Tompkins’ text, she dissects the archetypes of the Western with the purpose of defining and describing a certain standard of American masculinity as reflected and learned from these on-screen characters. The ideal American man was the strong and silent type (a la John Wayne). He pursued his goals and ideals tirelessly, and was not adverse to using violence when it was well-deserved. The American West was a harsh world, but it was not without reason and order. It was fathomable, and though its huge expanses of empty space dwarfed the small figure of man, in the end it was not the landscape that was the adversary—it was the reckless bandit, the raucous Indian, and the renegade pioneer. Foes on a human scale.

 

The archetype of the American Western provides an interesting backdrop to thinking about more contemporary issues through the lens of the 1968 film Destroy All Monsters. Standing in for a broad genre—the monster movie, the epic though sometimes campy sci-fi film—Destroy All Monsters was the kind of film that the rest of the adolescent males were watching on Saturday afternoons during the 1960s and 70s. Presented on TV through programs like “Creature Double Feature,” Destroy All Monsters and other monster movies created quite a different vision of the world, and of conflict, than the Western. Though directly related to the aftermath of WWII, the monster movie provides, perhaps, a more realistic view of the conflicts that we face in our contemporary world.

I was first made aware of Destroy All Monsters, the movie, through researching Destroy All Monsters, the proto-punk noise performance outfit consisting of artists Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, Carey Loren and Niagara during the mid-1970s in the outskirts of Detroit. Lifting their name from this movie, Destroy All Monsters created films, noise recordings, drawings, and performances that would seem foreign to the watchers of the Western that Tompkins described. Anarchic, confusing, impossible, showy, and downright bizarre, Destroy All Monsters channeled the imagery and personality of the monster movie into their creative output. 

To tell you a bit about the movie itself: Destroy All Monsters is the ninth film in the Godzilla series, directed by Ishiro Honda and released in Japan in 1968. The film was dubbed in English a year later and released in the US in ’69. While there were many Godzilla movies that came before and after it (with 28 in total released between the original Godzilla: King of the Monsters! or Gojira in 1954, and Godzilla: Final Wars as recently as 2004), within the original Godzilla series, Destroy All Monsters is chronologically last—meaning that in the fictional timeframe developed by Honda, Destroy All Monsters happened after the others.

Set in the mysterious future of 1999, Destroy All Monsters opens to an idyllic moment. The monsters that had ravaged cities and terrorized citizens in the previous Godzilla films had been vanquished and subjected to human control. We see them living peacefully on an island in the Japanese archipelago called Monsterland in something of a monster-zoo (minus, we must imagine, the endless visitors and school groups). Godzilla, of course, is there, along with a host of other monsters—including the flying beast Rodan, the dragon-like Manda, and Mothra, who elsewhere appears, more logically, in moth form, but in this movie resembles a large caterpillar of sorts. The peacefulness of Monsterland is quite abruptly dissolved as some mysterious mind-control gas infiltrates the control unit on the island, where watchful Japanese scientists monitor the monsters’ actions. Soon enough, the monsters are out of control—attacking the world’s cities simultaneously: London, Paris, New York, Bejing, and finally Tokyo. The monsters and their masters have been taken over by aliens from the planet Kilaak, these once peaceful creatures are turned against earth by this threatening alien force. Battles ensue as they always do, and in the end, the nations of the world regain order over these otherwordly combatants, the monsters returning through instinct to aid the humans in battling the alien monsters brought in to do the Kilaaks’ dirty work.

 

I won’t say more about the plot—though I haven’t hidden much, as the narrative structure of the movie hardly has the ins and outs of a Shakespearean drama—but I would like to point out a thing or two about the Godzilla genre more generally, and to circle back around to the Western, where we began. First of all, to place this and the other Godzilla films within their context, we must note that Godzilla himself was created out of the aftermath of a nuclear explosion, given his monstrous form by way of radiation, and was brought into the fictional world just nine years after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Like the American Western, the monster movie relied upon the idea of a new frontier—but rather than the rugged open landscape of the American West, the territory here is made up of the possibilities (unknown still, but possibly more horrifying) of scientific warfare.

The adversaries within this new frontier don’t exist on the human scale of the Western; the monsters stand in for the more unwieldy dangers that became frighteningly real in the aftermath of World War II. Looking expansively—and perhaps this is takes it too far afield—it seems as though many of the world’s problems have increased in size, mass, and fiery possibilities since WWII and Godzilla’s subsequent birth. We may have conquered the West, ended the Cold War, and lost our fear of the bomb, but it seems that other international disasters have developed to fill the void: economic meltdowns, environmental disasters, ideological conflicts and stalemates that run so deep and complex that they are almost as unfathomable as the idea of confrontational beings from space. 

 

While both the Western and the monster movie remain, of course, fictions, recalling Tompkins’ idea of the cowboy-as-American man made me think about the way that we approach our conflicts as a nation and a global community. While maybe the monster movie supplanted the Western in the case of the artists of Destroy All Monsters and for many others who came of age during the Vietnam War and its aftermath, it seems as though the cowboy mentality still serves as our governing principle. If the American men who remain in power today were raised with the image of the solitary cowboy as their model, what does that mean for the way that we confront conflict and crises as a nation? Are we fighting space monsters with rifles, battling atomic-level problems with a horse and a rope? 

July 17: Destroy All Monsters

Join us for Movie Night at the OACC!

This month we will be screening Destroy All Monsters (怪獣総進撃) directed by Japanese director Ishiro Honda. A Toho production, Destroy All Monsters is the ninth film in the Godzilla series and stars Akira Kubo, Jun Tazaki, Yukiko Kobayashi and Yoshio Tsuchiya. In the film, familiar monsters from past Godzilla films - including Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan, Gorosaurus and Manda - escape Monster Island and wreck havoc on Earth. In a 2009 Cinefantastique review, Steve Biodrowski states:

[…] Destroy All Monsters is a true movie-movie. It takes itself seriously only in the sense that it does not adopt an attitude of campy condescension towards its monster-filled alien-invasion scenario. The events are presented in a straight-forward way that is an almost perfect realization of any ten-year-old boy’s dream of the most awesome movie adventure ever, loaded with heroic heroes piloting rocket ships to the moon and back while battling an evil race that has turned all of Earth’s monsters loose in one cataclysmic attack. 

The film will be introduced by Liz Glass. Glass is a curator, writer, and editor based in San Francisco. Her areas of interest include the crossover, liminality, performance, film, re-makes, archives, criticism, and avant-gardisms past, present, and furture. She is a huge fan of the twentieth century and isn’t quite sure yet about this new one. She is currently working on a forthcoming exhibition for the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, and as an editor, writer, and project curator for the online arts journal Art Practical. She holds an MA in Curatorial Practice and a BA in American Studies. 

Destroy All Monsters
1968
88 minutes

7pm Tuesday
July 17, 2012

Visit this event on Facebook

$5 suggested donation, no one is turned away due to lack of funds. 

Oakland Asian Cultural Center
388 Ninth Street, Suite 290 (btwn. Franklin and Webster Street)
Oakland, CA 94607

Movie Night at the OACC is sponsored by the Oakland Asian Cultural Center. For more information about the OACC, please visit www.oacc.cc

Movie Night at the OACC is a monthly screening night organized by Jackie Im. 

Jackie Im Introduces Mother

Mother – An Introduction

By Jackie Im

In the opening scenes of Bong Joon-ho’s 2009 film Mother, the titular maternal figure (a ferocious performance by Kim Hye-ja) is in the back of her shop, slicing herbs with something that resembles a large paper cutter. She looks up every now and then to watch her son, Do-joon through the front door. When a Mercedes grazes her son, she instinctually runs to his aid, slicing her finger in the process, frantically and hysterically checking on him – perhaps a twist on the urban legend of the woman lifting a car to save her baby. The blood from her wound becomes intermingled with the son’s wound and in part drives the following action. This hyper-maternal instinct frames the story of Mother as we follow Mother blindly defend her son – arrested for the murder of a young girl, perhaps falsely.

There is something interesting to this hyper-maternal Mother. Her voracious love for her son teeters on the edge of the uncanny: her devotion is recognizable yet at times amplified and warped to grotesqueness. Bong’s filmmaking too has a strange quality that intersects the deadpan and the surreal. Playing with the confines of the “wronged man” crime genre, Bong also treads on a common motif in film (particularly in thrillers, suspense and horror): that of the heightened emotional woman. 

I approached this edition of Movie Night at the OACC thinking of what was interesting to me in film. I had recently seen Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession (1981). In it, the virulent Anna’s (Isabelle Adjani) hyper-hysterical way of dealing with death and desire drives this strange and enthralling film, giving birth to a bizarre alien-like creature feeding off of perversion and violence. Similarly, Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011)conflates the end of the world with Justine’s (Kirstin Dunst) depression – the planet standing in for Justine’s despondency, only this time people can’t assuage her with remarks like “it’s not the end of the world!” In these three films (and of course, many others) I see a common thread of a “feminine” emotion becoming unwieldy and at times disastrous.[i] Maternal protection, post-partum, desire, and depression show their faces in these films and how these (coincidentally or conveniently) male directors grapple with the idea of ‘woman’ is through the language of disaster, horror, and the whodunit; likewise the abstract ‘woman’ is used as a lens to interrogate the unknown. These films are of genres already ripe with archetypes – something that horror-satires like Scream (1996) and The Cabin in the Woods (2012) exploited to comic effect – and perform as a type of mythmaking. Genre filmmaking is highly susceptible to formulaic conventions but there is also great opportunity to exploit those forms and upend the archetypes. Bong, von Trier and Żuławski each take genre film and stretch the forms and seams to a near breaking point, all while attempting to make sense of their unwieldy and fractured female protagonists.

 

In each film, the women are consumed by their emotional states, almost cartoonishly so. Adjani’s spasmodic writhing, Dunst’s near-catatonic listlessness are so all encompassing; they externalize the reality of such states while also stand-in for the larger hyper-real versions – the sort of consumption of being in it. Kim’s forceful performance as Mother contains within the semblances of real-life maternity, but it also amplifies that to a blindness that is alarming to see. Yet like Dunst’s and Adjani’s performances, Kim’s Mother is a fascinating exaggeration and it is precisely its familiarity juxtaposed with uncanniness that makes the performance so compelling. The moments when our own mothers are overbearing, a little too protective and invasive – Mother keys into these moments and combines them, making our uneasiness the product of a sinking recognition.

The seed of Mother came from a news story Bong had encountered on television. A 60-something year old man, living in an apartment with his 80-something year old mother, compulsively adopted young girls from China, molested them and sent them back. When the man was arrested, news agencies covered the story and the mother was interviewed – her voice and face obscured – she accused the young girls (8-9 year olds) as being ungrateful for the shelter, clothes and food they received and for framing her son. This gross example of motherly loyalty captured Bong’s attention and framed his thinking for Mother. This horrific incident seemed so unreal. It was something Bong could not wrap his mind around – how could this woman – in the face of overwhelming evidence – insist on her son’s innocence? With Mother, Bong explores and attempts to understand this extreme case of maternal protection, all the while prodding at the embarrassing and cringe-worthy moments we all suffer through with our mothers.

 

Very often in film we have two cases – the monstrous female or the virtuous woman coveted and abducted by the monster. In Mother we have a woman consumed by her desire to protect her slow-witted son. She stops at nothing, constantly prodding her son to remember the details of that night and trying every route to uncover the “real” story. Here Mother embodies both the unrelenting monster and the virtuous maternal figure, and through a magnification, Bong’s film explores the complexity of emotions and instinct of motherhood – how far can we go to protect and fight for someone at the possible expense of others? How much can we blind ourselves to the flaws of our loved ones? Through the language of genre filmmaking, Bong suitably embellishes his characters and narrative in order to examine deeper fundamental concerns – Mother is a personification of the very core of maternal care. 



[i] I use the descriptor “feminine” here not to categorize these characteristics as a strictly female trait. Rather that these emotional states are often deemed and/or dismissed as feminine. Depression and desire are by no means gendered, but through the lens of male filmmakers, artists, writers, etc., they are looked at as foreign and with the case of desire, feral.