<The Empty Dream (Chunmong)> (1965)

Director : Yoo Hyeon-Mok
Production Company : Seki Trading Co.
Date of Rate : 1965-07-03
Running Time : 100 min.
Opening Theater : Myeong Bo Theater
Genre : Melodrama

Staff :
Screenplay(Adaptation) : Kim Han-Il
Producer : Woo Ki-Dong
Executive Producer : Cho Kyu-Jin
Director of PhotoGraphy : Shim Jae-Heung
Gaffer : Kang Yong-Sin
Music : Kim Yong-Han
Art Director : Jeong Wu-Taek
Editor : Yoo Hyeon-Mok

Cast(Actor/Actress) :
Shin Seong-Il, Park Su-Jeong, Park Am

Synopsis

A man (Shin Seong-il) goes to the dentist and has a chance encounter with an actress (Park Su-jeong). Lying on the examining table, he falls asleep under anesthesia. In his dream, he sees the actress and the dentist (Park Am). The dentist, who looks like the devil, abuses the actress both mentally and physically under the pretext of love. He tries to rescue the actress and run away together, but their attempts fail every time. Waking from his dream, the man exits the hospital. He shakes hands with the actress, and the two part ways.

Notes

"The most pretentious and overweening of director Yoo Hyeon-mok's films, but also the most experimental" (Cho Young-jeong)
Classified by the director himself as an experimental film, The Empty Dream most clearly reveals Yoo Hyeon-mok's interest in cinematic forms. As indicated by its title, the movie depicts a dream world. The contents of the dream are visualized through images, and because such images are impossible to narrativize in a linear, progressive manner the film is composed of disjointed images. Although the dream features a diabolical man and a young couple who are trying to get away from him, it is impossible to impose a causal relationship on what transpires among them. The Empty Dream firmly maintains its center of gravity on cinematic form, rather than on storytelling. What stands out in this formal experimentation is the influence of Soviet Montage editing and the mis-en-scene of German Expressionism. Such Western modernistic forms had the greatest impact on Yoo Hyeon-mok's films since he first debuted. The spaces featured in the dream reveal an especially strong debt to German Expressionism. They virtually recreate the sets of Expressionist films: the slanted buildings and screens crisscrossed with intricate angled, vertical, and horizontal lines stretching all the way to the floor directly recall such Expressionist classics as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The film also experiments overtly with montage. For instance, the scene in which the protagonist, played by Shin Seong-il, has his tooth drilled is juxtaposed with the image of drilling at a construction site. It is all but impossible to find a commercial film in Korea from the 1960s to the present day that has so boldly faced the problem of form as The Empty Dream. In this sense, The Empty Dream is a film that marked a rare moment in Korean cinematic history.

Afterword:

- At the time of the film's release, the director was charged with making an "obscene picture" and given a sentence of probation.

Director Bio: Yoo Hyeon-mok (1925- )

He is the most prominent figure in Korean realist cinema and is considered the heir to director Lee Gyu-hwan's realistic nationalism. He realistically portrayed Korean society with Aimless Bullet (Obaltan) (1961), which is considered one of the greatest works in Korean cinema. His works include works which show a critical attitude toward society such as The Extra Mortals (Ing-yeo Ingan) (1964) and The Seizure of Life (Insaengcha-ab) (1958), and works which explore themes of God and salvation such as The Martyrs (Sungyoja) (1965) and Son of a Man (Salam-ui adeul) (1980). Aside from those works, he directed works in many genres including comedies, horror films, period films, melodramas, and anticommunist films. His other important works include Kim's Daughters (Gimyakguk-ui Ttaldeul) (1963), Descendants of Cain (Cain-ui Huye) (1968), Flame (Bulkkoch) (1975) and Rainy Days (Jangma) (1979).