#477 - Korean Cinema’s Golden Decade: The 1960s

This week we’re excited to present a conversation which recently took place as part of our new series, Korean Cinema’s Golden Decade: The 1960s, following a screening of Yu Hyun-mok’s 1961 South Korean classic, Aimless Bullet. Film critic, lecturer, and author Darcy Paquet and series co-curators, Korean Film Archive's Young Jin Eric Choi and Subway Cinema's Goran Topalovic, lead a discussion of the film.

Banned in 1961 for its scathing critique of postwar reconstruction but now widely hailed as one of the greatest Korean films ever made, Yu Hyun-mok’s breakout feature was this unrelentingly bleak, noir-tinged melodrama set in the aftermath of the Korean War. The film follows the tragic bond between two brothers living with their surviving family in a Seoul slum called Liberation Village. While Cheol-ho, an accountant suffering from a toothache he can’t afford to treat, struggles to scrape together a meager existence, the senseless consequences of the war gradually tear at the seams of his family and push his younger brother, Young-Ho, to a desperate measure. An on-location tour through the traumatized atmosphere of Korea’s capital, Aimless Bullet artfully blends expressionist and neorealist styles within a grimly introspective portrait of a nation left shattered by hatred and fear—touching on everything from military prostitution and economic inequality to the exploitations of the film industry itself. Restored in 2015 by the Korean Film Archive.

Korean Cinema’s Golden Decade: The 1960s is sponsored by MUBI GO.