Lee Chang-dong: The Impossible Present (or, How to Reappear Completely)

Okay sike one more before I go - I had the great privilege of introducing In Review Online's retrospective of Lee Chang-dong's work--for my money, the world's greatest living filmmaker--with an essay stitching together his seven movies and placing them in conversation with individual essays by several other of InRO's frequent contributors.

"Along with Jia Zhangke, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Tsai Ming-liang, and Todd Field (when he feels like it), Lee Chang-dong stands among a group of filmmakers countable on a single hand who look at our impossible present and attempt to earnestly reckon with it using film form — which is to say, he is one of the greatest filmmakers in the world. With each film, he reminds us that human-centered filmmaking isn’t a thing of the past: it is alive, vibrant, and more important than ever. A similar practice can certainly be found elsewhere in cinema’s past, like in the social realism of the Dardennes Brothers or in the films of the Italian Neorealist movement (Lee himself cites Luchiano Visconti as an inspiration), but while Lee is cut from that cloth, he floats away from those traditions on the howling winds of the 21^st century. The films of Lee Chang-dong address the critical unspoken and unresolved question of our day: how do we move forward — how do we live at all — when the future has been frozen in amber by late-stage capitalism?"

The essay is here, but be forewarned! Spoilers abound, even for his latest film, Possible Love. I recommend watching the movies before you read.