Synopsis
What most surprises the viewers of "Chonggak" is the fact that it differs very much from the Korean films we know. There is a certain absence between the Korean movies of the 1950s and our times. In other words, Korean movies have not developed on a straight path, improving the cinematic languge. Instead, they faced numerous hillocks and curves that moved the focus by detouring or balancing through other styles. It was not a simple difference in technology nor a change in cinema rhetorics, but the method of connecting the images and sounds of cinema with the real world. Contrary to the present-day movies that go into the inner structure of everything that forms them, "Chonggak" spans between the beginning and the end on the strap of time. "Chonggak" is built in a way different from the way our contemporary films render the visual codes showing our sentiment and emotion. When we meet "Chonggak," we, as the imaginative audience, have to resort to other problems through other ways. "Chonggak" can be explained to us not through the artistic cause and effects in our territory but through the difference in the ways we and the movies of 40 years ago see the world. Here, the two characters have the relationship of telling and listening. The bellmaker who thinks he can repay the love he received from a woman devotes all his life to the work. Then, another woman comes into his life. This woman means a change in his attitude of meeting the world and the maturing of his life. The film consists of flashbacks and the story unfolds as the sick old man and a young woman who doesn't have parents first meet each other in a small room. Their memories hover around at a different time and in a different space, but the faint line connecting the two can be traced despite the difference. Until the last moment, the movie doesn't say if the two are a father and his daughter, although it implies the possibility. Thus, the spectators are left to connect the story, divided into two, by the fictional imagination stemming from the time. Placed in the center of "Chonggak" is the changing meaning of the bell. The sound of the bell is the most impressive aethetic instrument in this film as it begins the relationship between the bellmaker and the woman. Sound constitutes aestheticism of this movie. The only time when we can understand the meaning of the bell is when it rings. The only way the two persons' memories may go into each other is when they tell and listen. Everything in this movie is made up of what is said and what is listened to. It moves from the acoustic ground to a visual image in memories. Therefore, Director Chu-nam Yang goes ahead of the present movies that give a predominant power to the image. He inherits the tradition of modern cinema by adopting a method of telling the story through the acoustic power and then reverting to the image with the mediation of time. In other words, this film could stand ahead of Alain Reasnais's Hiroshima, mon Amour made one year later. Maybe, Seoul and Hiroshima were places of aesthetic simultaneity in film. The impression "Chonggak" gives does not stop here. Through the dialogue of the two persons, Director Yang says that not only the acoustic image but the heart to listen enables people to hear the sound of the bell. The bell sound unifies the divided times in life not by logical cause and effects but by the heart and sentiment of the people involved. So, the bell sound is enhanced from a sensuous thing to a sentimental thing. The panorama of the bellmaker's life featured in the last scene doesn't mean the movement of a camera but a sad drama presented by the remains of time. This movie departs from the tradition of cinema that defines the world by the completion of the given incidents. Instead, it shows the lives of people who have to live their destiny in the ever-changing world, searching for the immortality of the art through the sad longing for the by-gone things. This movie presents one of the most beautiful moments in the history of Korean cinema. "Chonggak" is a film of "discovery" that was a child of its time but went beyond the time. (Song-il Chung)