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WSWS : Arts Review : Film Reviews

Korean filmmaker Park Kwang-su:

"If something is wrong, we have to act"

By David Walsh
17 June 1996

Park Kwang-su is one of Korea's most distinguished filmmakers. Born in 1955, Park grew up in Pusan in the southern part of the country. After graduating from Seoul University, he founded and led the Seoul Film Group, a significant component of the Korean independent film movement and a major oppositional voice in the days of military dictatorship. His film, Chilsu and Mansu (1988), is considered the opening shot of Korea's "New Cinema." His subsequent work includes the highly acclaimed Black Republic (1990) and To the Starry Island (1994).

A Single Spark, Park's new film, is serious and moving. Jeon Tae-il--a real figure--was a poor kid in Seoul, growing up in the 1960s. He sold cheap umbrellas on the street, then got a job in the booming textile industry. Appalled by the atrocious conditions which prevailed, he attempted to organize workers into unions. He also tried vainly to get the ferociously anticommunist, US-backed South Korean dictatorship to enforce its own labor laws. On November 13, 1970 the 22-year-old Jeon, holding the book of labor statutes in his hands, doused himself with gasoline. He held a lit match to the book and burned himself to death, shouting, "Comply with labor laws!" "We are not machines!"

The film has two time frames. We see Jeon Tae-il through the eyes of (the fictional) Kim Yong-su, an intellectual and opponent of the government in 1975--Korea's so-called Dark Age--who is researching and writing a book on the martyr of the textile workers. Kim is on the run from the police; his pregnant girlfriend, a factory worker, is arrested and imprisoned.

Kim befriends Jeon Tae-il's mother, who explains how her son became radicalized. South Korea was in the throes of economic growth in the 1960s. The government insisted that an export-led economy was the path to prosperity. Workers were expected to make every sacrifice for the "national good." Jeon went to work in Seoul's Pyung-Hwa Market, an industrial building housing numerous clothing industry sweatshops. Young workers, mostly female, worked 15 hours a day in cramped and unventilated attics. Jeon would run to work rather than take the bus in order to buy food for his fellow workers.

In one memorable sequence, a young girl, suffering from tuberculosis, rushes out to the stairwell, coughing up blood which she wipes away with her hands. Desperate only to return to work and not be penalized by the employer, she cries in anguish, "There's nowhere to wash my hands."

Park obviously went to great lengths to recreate the conditions of the textile shops of the time. One cannot easily bring to mind other recent films in which the circumstances of toil have been so viscerally presented. In a conversation, Park explained that he spent over a year researching the conditions. "Workers who worked there at the time came to the film," he remarked. "They said, this is exactly what it was like."

A Single Spark is not a simplistic work. Like the Taiwanese films (Good Men, Good Women; Heartbreak Island) which it inevitably brings to mind, the film is a consideration of difficult moral, social and historical problems. Jeon Tae-il himself was a complex figure. A devout Christian, Jeon's self-immolation was apparently inspired by the protest suicides of Buddhist monks in Vietnam. Park explained that he had omitted his protagonist's religious convictions, "Because people might think that he was a kind of Jesus Christ, which would be a misunderstanding."

In his film Park wanted to compare Koreans--particularly the intellectuals--of the 1960s and 1970s with those of the 1990s. "In the 1970s," the director commented, "the intellectuals played an important role. It was students who began the labor movement. They went into the workers' quarters and helped organize unions in the textile industry.

"Nowadays the situation is changed. Two years ago there was a protest over some scandal involving the government. In response, a university official charged the student movement with being inspired by North Korea. Most of the intellectuals said nothing. Where are the Korean intellectuals today? For many years they were against the government. Now they say nothing. It started after perestroika and the changes in the USSR. Of course the Korean government has also changed. It is a civilian government. But the new generation likes money. They feel that money is good. Today people aren't as concerned with labor struggles and working class people. They have forgotten many things."

I mentioned to Park that his film contained a number of sequences of terrible loneliness and isolation, of people being left utterly alone. How conscious was he of this? "This is my intention. My other films conveyed this same feeling. Black Republic, for example." Park went on, "When Jeon Tae-il goes to work on a construction site on the mountain [after the failure of his first effort to organize the workers], this part I made up. I wanted to explain his philosophy, his thinking. He needed time to explore his decision. He has decided to die if necessary for those in the textile shops. At one point, on the mountain, he digs his own grave and lies down in it. It also has to do with his understanding of nature, that labor has to help nature, that labor is like nature."

The last sequence of the film, in which Jeon sets fire to himself, is extremely painful to watch. Park explained his overall purpose: "I would like to encourage more critical thinking. If something is wrong, we have to act."

A Single Spark has enjoyed great success in South Korea. Park said, "Real workers attended our film. Young textile workers. They had sent a letter to me: if you make this film, we want to participate--for no money, we'll do anything. When they saw it, they liked it. They cried."