In March of 2012, the Japan Society of NY hosted a
groundbreaking film series titled Love
Will Tear Us Apart. Programmer Samuel Jamier selected films about twisted,
obsessive, and unconventional love from Korea and Japan to underscore the historically
tenuous relationship between those cultures, while highlighting this past
decades’ emergence of a collaborative artistic rapport. The fact that the Japan
Society, under Jamier -- himself
Korean-born, but raised in Brittany, France -- is responsible for an event of
this dynamism, complements the bi-cultural collaborative by both presenting it
and also embodying it. “Ultimately revealing a similar visual grammar and inclination towards the
emotional violence that flows beneath the quiet surface of societal restraints,”
Love Will Tear Us Apart articulates a
bodily cinema, asking aloud, with visceral pronouncement… Why is it so
difficult to be happy? (japansociety.org)
Prior to his work at the Japan
Society, Jamier worked with the Korea Society (“I was running the corporate, policy, and cultural programs,
which at the time were called ‘contemporary issues’ -- interesting designation,
when you think about it.”) He also participated in the programming of the 2007 New York Korean Film Festival,
where he “placed a
few titles here and there. Retrospectively, I would say it's easy to guess
which ones!” (He considers his choices of gangster films a
"specialty"). But he does not feel that his transition from that
agnecy to the Japan Society informed his curation of Love Will Tear Us Apart. “If anything, it was a very personal
choice. I basically started off with a few Tsukamoto and Kim Ki-duk titles,
then everything took shape from there. The young Tokyo-based Korean actress
that I brought to introduce the series, Hyunri Lee, also influenced some of the
picks, and the general aspect of the series. Initially, I had this grand (and
retrospectively a tad pretentious) vision of a series covering East Asian
cinemas: Hong Kong, mainland China, Taiwan, Korea. Japan of course. At some
point, I even thought of having a European cinema component. Overall, I got all
the films I wanted.” The resulting bi-cultural vision for Love Will ear Us Apart was concise, and for that reason, powerful.
Love Will Tear Us Apart marks a unique moment in a rather homogenous
film-curatorial history (for the Japan Society in particular). When it comes to
curating film for a cultural institution - the freedoms and constraints –
Jamier says, “I do like to think what I curate and program has a unique,
non-institutional edge to it. Typically, the ‘societies’ or ‘institutes’ promote
one national culture. The logical consequence is that your focus necessarily excludes
everything else. In the case of Korea and Japan, I think the cross-cultural
link is almost blindingly visible, not just because of direct collaborations
between actors, directors and producers, but also visually, narratively.
“Institutions specifically
dedicated to film have constraints of their own. The usual approach is to
organize a director-focused or actor-focused retrospective, or a national
cinema-based festival or series. In the past few years, I've tried to go for a
more multi-faceted, plural approach, combining elements of all three approaches
I've just mentioned, seamed together by one concept and one narrative.
“One of the things that I enjoy
the most at Japan Society is that I do benefit from a fairly wide margin for
maneuver. On the other hand, being the only film person in an institution of
this size can be a very lonely experience. Explaining what you have in mind can
be extremely challenging. When it comes to cinema, and Asian cinema in
particular, people have a lot of prejudices; they just assume they know a good
film when they see one.”
When it comes to future
programming, Jamier says, “My hope is that caution be thrown to the wind! I
think we're going through a time of conservative programming, overall.
Risk-taking has really fallen at the bottom of the agenda….Frankly, if cultural
institutions don't take it as their duty to show things that the audience
doesn't know, who will? In the age of quasi-absolute accessibility, people have
become lazy, and tend to stick to what they already know...
“I don't consider myself an
example, far from it; as a matter of fact, maybe I could even be taken as a
counter-example in some circles. When I program, I try to think creatively, as
if I was actually making a film, in a way. These days, the kind of mentality in
cultural programming in New York is: money first, then the event takes place.
‘Oh, if we do this, we'll get corporate sponsors’... at the expense of a
genuine artistic vision. Perhaps it's a bit naive on my part, but to me, the
"vision" comes first. Then you make it happen -- and do you best
doing so.”
Introducing Ki-duk Kim’s Dream, Jamier referred to the film as
the festival’s “most emblematic”, in terms of the Japan/Korea collaboration. In
Dream, Japanese and Korean is spoken
by its protagonists respectively, yet mutually understood. Dream presents a cultural dichotomy and diffuses it in the same
stroke, which seems to be at the heart of Love
Will Tear Us Apart. *See
Korean Quarterly’s Fall 2011 issue for an article on Dream* And
Jamier is aware how significant his own cross-cultural personal status plays
into his identity here in America. “Obviously, it's important in this country!
People often refer to themselves, using hyphenated epithets and such….There’s
actually not a whole lot of Asian programmers that program Asian cinema. In
that sense, my ethnicity comes into play, to a degree. I'm also often told that
the programming I do is very French... well, if people say so, maybe they're
right.”
Discussing the festival’s
featured film Villian, made by
zainichi (Korean-born Japanese) filmmaker Sang-Il Lee, Jamier muses: “What kind
of debt does the film owe to the origin of its creator? On a formal level, at a
surface level, one's tempted to answer: ‘not much’, but at the same time, the film
focuses on one outcast character, a loner full of resentment towards society,
filled with violence... It's the kind of narrative or character that easily
brings to mind some rather notorious Korean narratives... the Kim Ki-duk films,
in particular, who's himself a bit of maverick in the Korean film industry. On
the other hand, you have films like Blood
and Bones by Yoichi Sai, another Zainichi director whose work in Japan is
very well known. And well, that's clearly a film that owes a lot of its substance
to the director's ethnic background, to say the least. When it comes to
problems of identity, the answer is never a simple one.”
In an age where -- thanks
largely to the Internet, as well as increased travel and communication -- boundaries of information and
"experience" seem to be disappearing, Jamier says, “I think every
time you bring down some kind of barrier, you find yourself with some new form
of partition or partitioning. In the end, people themselves build these
barriers. Probably it's a defense mechanism; there's been such an all-out
assault on the viewer/spectator in the past few years. Technically, there are
so few things that are not available one way or another. One consequence
of that is that audiences become more a tad more local, and refocus on what
they're already familiar with. The positive side… is that it draws some
adventurous souls to territories and realms they'd probably have no idea about.
And cinema is an excellent gateway to that.”
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