I'm sorry if anyone has mentioned this film before; I missed some of the
earlier postings.  A recent movie from Korea which deals with photography
is "Christmas in August" (1998) by Hur Jin-Ho which screened in one of
the smaller sections at Cannes last year.  The hero of the film is a
photographer who runs a small shop in Seoul.  In several scenes we see
him photographing his clients, including a poignant scene where an
elderly woman arrives at night, asking him to take her funeral picture.
The photographer (who has a fatal disease) takes a self-portrait in a
later scene, at which time the shot dissolves into his own funeral
picture and pulls back to reveal the funeral.  The final scene in the
film centers around the posthumous gift of a photograph to the female
lead.  It was both critically acclaimed and very popular in Korea, and is
one of my personal favorites!

[In the category of life imitating art, the Korean film industry rallied
in Seoul recently to protest U.S. government pressure to abolish Korea's
screen quota system.  Many of the top actors and filmmakers in the
country marched through the streets with their own funeral pictures,
complete with diagonal black sashes, draped around their necks]

And finally, Alexei Balabanov's 1998 feature "Of Freaks and Men" (Pro
urodov i ljudej) follows the shady dealings of an S&M photographer in St.
Petersburg who gradually insinuates himself into an upper-class family.
The entire film is shot in black-and-white and tinted to resemble an old
photograph.  The cinematography in this film is simply amazing!

--Darcy

_____________________________________________________________________
Darcy Paquet                                   [log in to unmask]
The Inst. of Foreign Lang. Studies
Korea University, Seoul   KOREA

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Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the
University of Alabama.