For cinephiles with a predilection for East Asian cinema it would be almost impossible to not know the name “Tony Rayns” and if you’ve been at all invested in Korean cinema since the 1990s you’d probably be aware of the linkages between Rayns and the nation. For the uninitiated it’s worth pointing out not only has he been programming and writing about Korean cinema for decades, he also wrote a book on Jang Sun-woo for KOFIC’s Korean Film Directors series and made a palindromic documentary about the maverick, The Jang Sun-woo Variations in 2001.
(Film Comment readers may also remember the global stir Rayns caused in the mid-2000s when the magazine published his barbed analysis of Kim Ki-duk’s films which helpfully exposed Kim’s shortcomings at a time when many were still fawning over him and championing his films on the festival circuit’s biggest events.)
Whether subtitling the works of Asian auteurs (his name shows up in the end credits for Jia Zhangke’s latest, the superb Caught By The Tides), appearing in lengthy interviews or commentaries for some of the more esteemed boutique Blu-ray labels, programming at film festivals or writing in film publications (Sight and Sound, Film Comment, Cinema Scope), Rayns’ name is synonymous with a passion for promoting and thinking seriously about cinema across multiple genres, eras and geographical regions.
To get some sense of the depth of cinema Rayns has covered and promoted over the years, a fun little game used to be to take the chunky double phone-book sized Time Out Film Guide, close your eyes and then randomly open a page. More often than not you’d find a short review by “TR” on classic Hollywood, European art cinema or Asian films (I think only “GA” had more entries than him in total). Do the Time Out Film Guide game I suggested above and you’ll see Rayns really is the master of concision in his reviews and he can speak volumes about a film’s spiritual or formal core in one tiny review, meaning that eludes some critics all together.
The focus of the KOFIC-published Just Like Starting Over - A Personal View of the Reinvention of Korean CInema, is his experiences in South Korea over the decades post-1988, as he witnessed (and occasionally played a key part in helping) Korea’s cinematic culture blossom and transform into the gargantuan powerhouse it’s commonly accepted as today - a key Asian production hub birthing globally successful films and streaming content, and a nation that spawns winners of Oscars and A-list festival accolades.
Cannily fusing memoir, film criticism and historical analysis, it’s clear from the outset the parameters of Rayns’ concerns over the 200 or so pages: this is not an exhaustive overview of Korean cinema history to understand how pre-1980s shaped the post-80s period (so there’s no real coverage of older, now familiar in the west, Korean directors such as Kim Ki-young, Shin Sang-ok, Yu Hyun-mok, Lee Man-hee, Lee Doo-yong), nor an academic deep-dive into Korean cinema from the 1980s to the present.
This is also not a text that really grapples with the modern Korean psyche, the nation’s ids or its often stiflingly rigid social codes, but there’s enough references to some of Korea’s less than desirable socio-political features and turbulent post-WWII history throughout that the casual reader will be able to connect the dots on how the films reflect the society in which they’re made.
Rather, Rayns frames the book in part one as a journey exploring the “how” behind Korean cinema’s explosive growth and popularity, which inevitably means spotlighting the role Korean and international film festivals played in supporting the movement.
 |
| Tony Rayns (with Mary Stephen) |
Given Rayns’ own heavy involvement in the festival scene in Europe, Asia and North America, his first hand tales of discovering new Korean filmmakers and programming their work abroad is invaluable testimony of the mechanics of film festival operations in the days when programmers would have to set off for faraway lands with little more than a few phone numbers in the hopes of discovering unknown cinematic treasures.
This aspect of the book is a treat. Rayns’ anecdotes uncover some fascinating history of Busan’s festival (and its eventual messy political struggles) as well as BiFan and Jeonju (and there’s some juicy gossip on the filmmakers who enriched themselves off the back of Jeonju’s digital film omnibus project). Filmmakers who have been on the wrong end of a Tony Rayns review will be well aware of his capacity for a venomous bite, and there are flashes here and there that this is not a man who forgets a slight easily.
Elsewhere Rayns renders a clear portrait of western film festival culture in the 1990s as it embraced Korean cinema. There’s an overview of how Vancouver’s Dragons and Tigers* competition came to be from its initial conception to its championing of directors such as Lee Chang-dong and Hong Sang-soo, as well as how efforts in London, Berlin, Japan and Rotterdam to unearth new voices were instrumental in building awareness. Along the way we get analysis and information about Korean “New Wavers” like Jang Sun-woo, Park Kwang-su and Lee Myung-se, key filmmakers who were the subject of the Seoul Stirring focus back in the mid-90s in London.
Korea as a whole is hardly known for its social progressivism, inclusivity and diversity (especially so in older generations), so Rayns’ coverage of the nation’s LGBT filmmakers and gay-themed films is a welcome and necessary corrective to a sometimes overlooked aspect of the nation’s cinema by western film journalists. It’s a testament to Rayns’ commitment to the promotion of radical voices that a gay filmmaker like Kim Kyung-mook gets his fair share of coverage as much as a mainstream figure like Na Hong-jin.
Part two of the book is a collection of mini-essays on filmmakers and film-related matters, plus the author’s own experiences making The Jang Sun-woo Variations. While delivering praise on major figures like Bong Joon-ho, Hong Sang-soo and Im Kwon-taek, Rayns also takes the opportunity here to stick the knife (or should that be use the hammer in Park’s case) into Park Chan-wook and the late Kim Ki-duk.
Rayns’ opinion aside, there’s a compelling case that Park is not the equal of a gifted genre technician like Kim Jee-woon, and the author’s contention that Park is all bark and no bite is credibly argued. Park’s supporters will probably roll their eyes at Rayns’ slightly bitchy take on Park’s contribution to the Three…Extremes omnibus and the speculation on the director’s potential self-hatred. It also can’t go unnoticed that earlier in the book Rayns helpfully points out, when surveying the 2003 If You Were Me omnibus, that Park’s contribution N.E.P.A.L. has “the distinction of being the director’s only known endorsement of a leftist position”.
(This essay on Park is useful context for people to see that even when confronted with a very good film like Decision to Leave, Rayns still has to frame his “praise” accordingly: writing for Sight and Sound, he said of Park winning the Best Director prize for Decision to Leave, “Probably a fitting a reward, since it’s hard to imagine that any other title in competition was more insistently directed,” and also pointed out Lee Myung-se got there first in the 2000s in terms of Decision’s abstract narrative approach.)
At the start of this review, I wrote in passing about the Kim Ki-duk article in Film Comment and in the decades since that publication, Rayns’ stance on Kim hasn’t softened judging by the essay in the book. Rayns still maintains Kim’s sexual terrorism (in his films [although he can’t help but mention Kim’s own problems during Korea’s #MeToo movement]) helps explain his success with western audiences, as well as the general lack of critical function by some westerners to know their shit from Shinola (or in Rayns’ parlance, knowing their Ugetsu Monotagari from Yang Kwei Fei). Maybe most fascinating here are Rayns’ anecdotes about his early interactions with the director and what Krzysztof Zanussi had to say about Kim at the Busan film festival. The following year after Film Comment published Rayns’ article, they published a letter of complaint from a disgruntled film programmer who insisted that Kim was (at the time) “one of the most important filmmakers in Korea” and that Rayns’ article stuck in their craw. Back in the mid-2000s, the claim that Kim was one of the most important filmmakers in Korea was contentious to say the least, but in 2024 the idea is ludicrous.
Other highlights of the book’s second half are a survey on Korean/Chinese master Zhang Lu’s work that runs all the way up to his most recent film, the brilliant The Shadowless Tower, that notes that film’s linkages to Chinese independent cinema; information about a curious film project, Tales of a City, that never came to be; and a sober assessment on the good, the bad and the weird of Kim Jee-woon’s filmography (Cobweb is not considered though).
To the best of my knowledge, Rayns has little-to-no command of the Korean language but despite this, his piercing insights into the contours and narrative textures of the films and their overarching connection back to Korean history and society should demonstrate why he’s considered such an expert the world over - he understands how the films ‘speak’ to audiences and their national identity. Reading his essay on the work of Hong Sang-soo and the evolution in style and thematic focus from his early work to the current onslaught of Hong titles (we get maybe two or three a year now), is a clear example of Rayns’ lucid and erudite analysis that avoids the swamp of academic jargon to get to the heart of a filmmaker’s ideas and formal strategies.
It’s also worth mentioning that if Just Like Starting Over is read as an elegy for a global film culture that ran from VHS to the earliest stirrings of the social media age, then it’s fairly tragic on a couple of fronts if we reflect on what we’ve lost.
Firstly, Rayns lived through eras where Asian cinema resembled unconquered lands for brave adventurers, just waiting for someone to carve out a niche in some national cinema or the other and promote exciting discoveries to western audiences. In the internet age of Letterboxd and Film Freeway, everyone’s a film expert of some kind and it’s rarer and rarer to find that undervalued auteur or gifted genre technician who hasn’t already been the subject of some retrospective somewhere in the world or rivers of digital ink on some forum or another.
Of course new filmmakers will be coming through the pipeline that warrant closer inspection for retrospectives and career focuses in the future, but the conditions, at least in Korean cinema, for radical, cutting edge and fresh movements ain’t what they used to be and it’s anybody’s guess how the nation’s catastrophic birth rate will impact the arts in decades to come. In 20 or 30 years will we still see indie filmmakers like the ones covered in the later sections of Part One come through and consider them worthy heirs of previous generations? I have my doubts, but anyone reading this or would care to hold me to account to that prediction will be dead by then.
The other glum reality to take away from Rayns’ book is that there’s still a large pool of Asian films that slipped through the cracks between DVD distribution and streaming attention, and are now virtually impossible to find in decent quality, even on cinephile torrenting sites. Rayns mentions Whang Cheol-mean’s Spying Cam but if you missed it during its festival run, good luck trying to see it now. The same can be said for other titles mentioned like Son Jae-gon’s The Man Who Saw Too Much or Kim Kyung-mook’s A Cheonggyecheon Dog.
Reading Zhang Lu’s section of the book had me yearning for somebody to collect his early works in a Blu-ray boxset which I doubt is happening this decade. I saw so many fascinating Asian indie films at film festivals in the 2000s but most are now distant memories whose only life will be on a homemade DVD collecting dust on some former programmer’s shelves.
Just Like Starting Over is not an easy prospect to obtain outside of Korea but maybe some western publisher might do a print run and spread the word. It should be mandatory reading for anyone with even a passing interest in Korean cinema or those working in film festival programming, and for aspiring critics it’s a masterclass in how to write clearly, intelligently and passionately about the cinema.
Thank you to Park Kiyong and KOFIC for making the book happen and adding an invaluable text on the subject to strengthen our understanding of Korean cinema. It’s infinitely more useful to hear from someone who was there on the ground knocking back soju with key players, not sitting in some western university office formulating ways to show off linguistic pyrotechnics while writing about Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter … And Spring.
*A brief note on VIFF
I visited Vancouver (VIFF) a couple of times during Rayns’ tenure as the East Asian cinema programmer and programming force behind the Dragons and Tigers competition, and each visit was a cherished experience, getting exposed to all kinds of cinematic voices, some commercial, some from the independent world.
I remember 2006 as a particularly great year to attend VIFF from a Korean cinema lover’s point of view: the line-up included Bong Joon-ho’s The Host, Kim Kyung-mook’s Faceless Things, Hong Sang-soo’s Woman on the Beach, Son Jae-gon’s My Scary Girl, Park Chul-hee’s No Mercy for the Rude, the Kim brothers’ Geo-Lobotomy, The King and the Clown and quite a few Korean short films. The festival also managed to bring Bong, Kim, Son, Park and others to the event!
Reflecting on VIFF in 2006 after nearly twenty years has passed and looking at their current slimmed down Asian cinema assortment that resembles something more akin to what you might see in a Sydney or Melbourne’s festival, what a privilege it was to witness such a wild diversity of films on offer and have many of the filmmakers there to present their works and interact with audiences. Those days look like they won’t ever be repeated, at least at Vancouver.
I was in Seoul earlier in the year and took the time to catch up with both Kim Kyung-mook and Son Jae-gon - two filmmakers I kept in sporadic touch over the years since hanging out at VIFF - and we reminisced over our first meeting in Vancouver and what happened to others at the festival since. Every man and his dog knows what happened to Bong Joon-ho after The Host but the Kim Brothers made the more commercial thriller On the Line in the early 2020s, the kind of film I would never have predicted in 2006 they would or could make having just seen their political horror indie Geo-Lobotomy; I don’t think Park Chul-hee made another film after No Mercy, Rayns already covers in the book what happened to Son and Kim.
