Screening Log

This new site feature is a collective effort to summarize our viewing habits. Occasionally, you will find titles here that are coming to a theater near you, in addition to films viewed on television, and even films viewed in piecemeal. The screening log is archived each month; to view past entries select a month in the menu below.

September 2005 activity

Total Log Entries: 21

Total Comments: 9

Full Archive

Advertisements

Stray Bullet / Obaltan / South Korea / 1961

Before the 1980s, South Korean cinema was subject to rigorous censorship and government control, and so Stray Bullet survives as one of its few pieces of social commentary. Also known as Aimless Bullet, the film was completed after the student uprising of April 19, 1960, and released before the military coup of May, 1961, when it was quickly censored. It is remarkable and quite fortuitous that so excellent a film as this should have managed to emerge from this brief period of relative artistic freedom.

With touches of social realism and expressionistic film noir, the film artfully summarizes the feelings of desperation and alienation that marked the decade following the Korean War. And if the denouement is rather over-the-top (insofar as it enumerates every variety of misfortune for its protagonists), Stray Bullet still stands as a powerful interrogation of a moment in South Korea’s history. Still more intriguingly, the film also ponders the legitimacy of cinema as an ideological force and as a means of portraying the ordinary lives of Koreans.

by Leo Goldsmith | Source: CineKorea DVD
26 Sep 2005 5:30 PM | Submit Comment

Submit Comment

Please note that your email address will never be displayed on this page.

HTML is enabled; line breaks (<br />) and paragraphs (<p>) are automatically converted. Apostrophes, ellipses, em- and en-dashes, and quotes are also automatically formatted.

Recent Updates