by Yang Yonghi, Japan: 2005 (International Forum)
(shomingeki No. 18, October 2006)
Another film I can´t get out of my mind, Dear Pyongyang by Yang Yonghi.
This
film reminds me in some films which are in its reduction of the
image-making gadget and in its transparency it is winning intensity
through the lack of a big distance between the vulnerable individual who
films and the spectator.
It is the story of the filmmaker which begins
with a historical introduction on Koreans living in Japan. After the
Korean civil war, this comunity is divided in followers who identify
themselves as North Koreans and those who consider South Korea as their
homeland. Encouraged through the economical growth in North Korea, a lot
of "North Koreans" living in Japan went to Northkorea, or in other
words "returned". Yangs father sent his three adolescent sons to
Pyongyang. They can be visited there but they can never leave the
country.
The film is now focusing completely on Yangs family
where history occurs in small details of an average family and finally
about Yang Yong-hi herself. Since he was a young man, Yangs father
remained a communistic activist and whenever he talks about Northkorea,
he talks about a mythic paradise. The films presents every day
situations and the travels of the family to the now adult sons.
The
filmmaker (we learn from her off-commentary) was for a long time trying
to lead a different life, without serving her "homeland"
unconditionally.
The long conversations between her and her father
are seemingly banal at the first sight, sometimes even funny. But after
some time we feel the drama beneath the surface of seemingly harmless
little quarrels between father and daughter. The first impact arrives
when Yang interrupts these long conversations with a serial of shots of
family photographs. On one of these photographs, we see the very young
Yang Yonghi beside her brothers during her first visit in Pyongyang. Her
face looks sad and she must have cried. The separation from her
brothers must have meant to her a very traumatic experience. She can´t
even talk in the off-commentary about all what moved her. The
traditional parental love and her worries about the brothers who live in
a country where every small contact with outside is observed with
mistrust hemmed in her a more open rebellion. There is also the fear of
lack of love when she doesn´t conform the expectations of her parents.
When
I saw the film the first two times, it took place in closed press
screenings. Just the third time, I saw this film in an open
Berlinale-screening. At the beginning I still found the small quarrels
between her and her father amusing.
While seeing the film third time, I could not laugh anymore.
Except
her hands we see Yang Yonghi only on children- and youth photographs
and listen to her voice. Everything we see, we see through her eyes. For
me, the leaps through time forth and backwards seem the essential
accents which gives the film a kind of poetry. It seems to me the
aesthetical form of some one who tries to tell about herself on
different levels what is difficult to put in only in words.
This
kind of insight into the intimate sphere of a family which doesn´t work
for me in every documentary, evokes the feeling that someone tells us
confidential things. The film develops an unique drama between her
discomfort not to fit in her parents expectations in her commentary
contrasts with her fine observations of her family every day life. Yang
is part of this family and at the same time an outsider.
A sudden
cut and we see a hospital. Yangs father has suffered under a heavy
stroke. There is an intense moment of helplessness which is burnt into
my memory. Yang Yonghi goes wit the camera to her father´s bed whose
body is connected with tubes and lines to medical machines. It looks bad
for him. He is totally defenceless exposed to her daughter´s views and
ours. At the same time we know through the film that the father made
decisions (even without bad intention) under which her daughter suffered
a lot. Then she holds with one hand her fathers hands while his voice
makes uncomrehensibles noises and at the same time her other hand serves
the the small video camera. When I saw the film the first time, I
wasn´t sure if someone should get as far. But nevertheless this moment
moved me deeply.
This moment is very close to the undefinable
feeling to be left alone with a personal sad event, like I experienced
on that terrible day in 1997 when I visited my seriously sick mother at
the emergency station of a hospital in my hometown Bochum. The feeling
of discomfort about the power parents had at least for a special period
in our lives is contrasted with the helpless fragile body of the father.
What makes this scene even harder to bear is that the filmmaker is
exposed too even if we see only her hands. I even think, I heard her
crying, but I don´t know for sure.
I don´t know anything at all anymore.
I
forgot the big screen and the seat where I was sitting. I was totally
divided in the terrible memory of my mother and the awareness that here
in this recorded moment, the invisible filmmaker Yang Yong-hi
experienced one of the most terrible moments of her life. Because of the
fact we can´t see her face, in my imagination she is metamorphosed back
into the sad young girl which we saw on a photograph.
Rüdiger Tomczak
an english text on Yang´s second film is here
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