SOUTH Korean cinema is hot nowadays in the country. You might say it has always been steaming in our midst for, at least, the last 10 years. But, no, this is not about that hotness. I am talking of the heat that the mention of South Korea and its films has generated among the shakers and movers in the industry.
The attention the Korean film industry and its films has been getting lately began from the house of politics itself—from the august halls of the Senate. Somehow, when the word “Senate” is mentioned, I always think of Cicero and Seneca. In this case, that is not the kind of Senate I wish you to imagine, but the kind of Senate we have. You know, the odd kind, the place that is capable of producing opinions, like, let us ban foreign films, i.e., South Korean films, as a solution to a local failure.
The local film industry has always been a favorite whipping boy of cultural observers, putative leaders and moralists. Filipino films have been blamed for crimes, such as rape and murder; to them have been attributed the low IQs and the distorted EQs of our people. Film directors, producers and writers have been placed on the same level as the educational institutions tasked with the pedagogy of the nation. It is as if producers come to the table and engage scriptwriters, cinematographers and directors in order to present lesson plans on good manners and right conduct. Naah.
If we are to understand film as an industry, and one that is connected to capital, then there is only one indicator necessary to measure the success and failure of the medium, and that is profit. Now, if we are talking of film as art, then we shift to other indicators. There is thus a need to disaggregate film and the film industry we are talking about. The issue is so dense that I cannot even decide where to begin as I track the dispute. Out of the blue (in the sense of the words coming from nowhere), a senator—a former actor whose career was not noted for good films—spoke of how the influx of Korean (I suppose, “South”) films has robbed local filmmakers and their films of opportunity. To what? To shine as a piece of art? To profit, as a business proposition? Or for the actors to be rich at the expense of the “fooled” audience?
When a film earns a lot of moolah in the box-office even if it is a piece of s%^t, does it mean it has falsified its way into the heart and mind of the audience? If so, can we have the same kind of dubious reasoning when it comes to any film that earns mightily from the box office?
The one position that we should think of having is this: never compare Filipino films with South Korean films, in the same way that when we talk of films and their power to earn millions, we cannot look to Hollywood. We can never be Hollywood. We can never be like South Korea. This position was tenable in the ‘60s when we had a bit of wealth and when our intellectuals were mentors to our Southeast and East Asian nations. Not now, not when South Korea has leapt into being a tiger and we have remained as cubs abandoned by our more forward-looking and forward-thinking neighbors like Malaysia and Thailand.
The greatest sin of those who are defending South Korea as a model for growth of our film and the industry to which it belongs is the sin of presumption, that if we only pay more attention to our local practices in film production and film distribution, then we can be like Korea. Wrong. There is more to South Korean films than sales and marketing, pre-production, production and post-production, as there is more to Korea when compared with the Philippines.
It has been a long journey of tribulations for South Korean films. There was a period under the Japanese when their films were subjected to censorship.
Where under the Japanese censorship was the norm, under their own leaders long after the Japanese had left censorship also became enforced. It was in the 1990s, though, when the first wave of successful South Korean films became popular. Observers point to the end of military regimes as one of the main reasons for these film ideations and productions. By the end of the 90s, the South Korea domestic box-office reported that they had exceeded the screening of Hollywood films. There was a reason for this commercial success, and this was the imposition of screen quota laws aimed at limiting the public screening of foreign films in South Korea. This so-called screen quota meant placing restrictions as to the number of days per year that a foreign film could be shown at a theater.
There was even a time when the screen quota figured in the free-trade negotiations between the United States and the Korean government, with the latter reducing its annual screen quota for domestic films from 146 days to 73, according to reports available online. The reduction of films allowed some 63 days for presentation, which allowed more foreign films to be shown. So, you see, South Korea had also experienced the same control either imposed on them or enforced by other industries.
With films recognized as having given help to trade, it might as well be supported by chaebols or large conglomerates. It was sometime in the ‘90s that this network of cooperation began with South Korean films and names like Hyundai, Samsung, Daewoo, etc. entered into our consciousness.
Like the expanded distribution of Japanese films, particularly anime, in Southeast Asia and in other parts of the world in the late ‘70s and ‘80s, South Korean films came with South Korean cars, appliances, fashion and cosmetics. It came with poreless, flawless skin. Once more, cinema or film—or art in general—has been employed as a “soft power” before the hard version comes, which is cultural colonization and economic domination.
At this point in our social and economic life, it is best we look at the good cinemas we produce from the peripheries, the so-called regional cinema. These are films that are not sponsored by multinationals because they critique the social and economic nexus in which commercial films locate themselves with material wealth. This could be our model. Enough of the comparison because such an act never produced beauty, only second-hand copycats even without trying hard. n