harrylimetheme

(Kim Ki-duk: seeking a Korean translation of Film Comment urgently)

It's long been the case that the Western cinema industry, by which I mean everything from film festivals to remake-happy studios, needs to endlessly feed off and 'discover' cinema from Other sides of the world - far-flung and exotic places where anything might be possible. European and American product is on the doorstop, it's here, it holds few surprises because we know too much about it; but Asia is a vast and mysterious landscape where the cinematic maps are still being drawn up, and any film festival director casting his eye towards the Orient is going to need a guide.

Fulfilling this curiously 19th Century Colonial logic of exploration into the unknown are various movers and shakers, critics and producers, know-it-alls, cultural brokers and passionate evangelists who are constantly on the look-out for the 'next big thing'. Western film festivals don't just programme auteurs like Tsai Ming Liang, Wong Kar-Wai, or younger ones like Jia Zhangke and Park Chan-wook, because they watched a submitted VHS tape and thought it was great - they are kept carefully informed about these directors by sources. Usually, but not always, these sources are themselves American or European, ex-pats or nomadic festival-hoppers, professional networkers existing out of suitcases and room service. Hot tips are their special currency. They keep their ears to the ground, searching for the right movies, the right film-makers and crucially, exactly the right moment to place that call to Cannes, Venice, etc.

One of the best-known of these chaps is Tony Rayns, avuncular British film critic-curator and a man whose critical enthusiasm for East Asian cinema has spilled over into collaboration with those he has championed - a script for the best-forgotten Christopher Doyle film Away With Words, and more productively he has helped with English subtitles on many films, most recently 2046 . In East Asia, the name 'Tony' is almost totemic in film-making communities, it is a powerful name - a signifier of acceptance into film festivals, and therefore film culture, the world over.

Approval from Rayns means plane tickets to Rotterdam, London, Vancouver (and that's just to start with). It could mean TV sales, limited distribution, and even the next film deal. As a result Rayns is greeted with a certain kind of awe by those young (and not so young) film-makers he encounters in this part of the world. Like the Man From Del Monte in a series of classic Orange Juice commercials from my youth, they are all waiting for him to say - "Yes".

Rayns cannot take sole credit, but he is certainly a key factor in the sudden rise and rise of the late Japanese helmer Takashi Miike in English-speaking parts of the world. But it goes both ways. For instance, he is not known to be a big fan of the Japanese director Kinji Fukasaku. A programmer I know who organized a season of his films in the UK a few years ago found that Fukasaku's studio was charging an extortionate rental for each print. To cut costs, the programmer tried to tie-up with a major art cinema in London, but they passed on it. "Why?" I queried at the time, "Because they listened to Tony" came the weary reply. The Man From Del Monte said No (Although, the season went ahead).

Of course Rayns needs to be critical, he is a critic after all, and I'm the last person to chastise him for not praising everything that he comes across, but people like him are in a very unique position of responsibility.

Regular film critics have a marginal influence on careers these days, but when you can regularly decide whether or not a particular film-maker's work will travel to key festivals in Europe or America, or whether they will remain unknown outside Japan, South Korea, Singapore, etc for another year, then you are in a very powerful and significant role indeed. The roles of critic and curator blur and maybe you need to think beyond simply your own critical prejudices and peccadillos.

One film-maker who Rayns very much dislikes, but who has 'broken-out' to his obvious displeasure, is South Korean auteur Kim Ki-duk. I was aware of Rayn's antipathy towards Kim a few years ago when I noticed the press-book for Kim's film Address Unknown featured a quote in which Rayns begrudgingly acknowledged the visual beauty of Kim's work, but the tone was disdainful. In the latest Film Comment, Rayns has gone one step further and written an extended hatchet job on Kim that I suspect reveals a lot more about 'Tony' than it does about his target.

His critique of the eccentric director ranges from bitchily personal (comments about his sex life, his pride in his gym-honed physique, and his supposed "harping on about class resentment" ), to box office gloating (Kim's films don't make any money at home in South Korea). A claim that all of Kim's films are autobiographical collapses immediately, especially when Rayns is reduced to admitting (probably with a wry smile) that, "To the best of my knowledge Kim doesn't beat up women or force them into prostitution". Rayns can do better than this - an onscreen alter-ego does not an autobiography make, and he knows that as well as anyone. After this mischievous warm-up, Rayns slips in some high praise (he can't help but admire Kim's occasionally bravura visual set-piece) but this is just a feint before the sucker-punches start flying. From then on the article soars to new levels of ferocity

He spends a paragraph archly puzzling over why the Venice Film Festival programmed The Isle in 2000 and thus transformed Kim into an art-house celebrity. "Was it because they were looking for cheap shock value and an easy source of controversy?" is the final and clearly his favourite option. Four years on and Rayns is still irked by Venice's decision. By openly questioning this pivotal moment in Kim's career, he seems to be wishing that Ki-duk had remained obscure, that no one in the West had ever heard of him, and to take that desire further, that Kim had been unable to continue making films (which given his lack of success in South Korea is a likely scenario). This is a worrying line of thought for any cineaste to take. Especially one who is so well-known for encouraging new talent. Is Rayns becoming like the killer in The Vanishing, who saves the life of a drowning girl and decides that if he has the power to do good than maybe he should also do some bad?

Rayns states as fact that after The Isle's reception at Venice "Kim quickly figured out that the best way forward was to play up sensation", then he sideswipes The Coast Guard as "repulsive", Samaritan Girl as "sexual terrorism", and Kim's latest, 3-Iron, as a blatant rip-off of Tsai Ming Liang.

He puts down Kim's success, particularly with Spring Summer Autumn, Winter and Spring Again to the "the blind spot that some Westerners have for East Asian films. It's as if they are so hung up on the 'otherness' of Oriental cultures that their bullshit detectors stop working". OK, I'm with Rayns on this, like when Crouching Tiger blew all the middle-aged English broadsheet hacks away because they thought Kung Fu was a series starring David Carradine. So, it figures that the festival juries castigated by Rayns for bestowing awards on Samaritan Girl and 3-Iron must be a bunch of ignorant white guys dazzled by Kim's 'otherness', right? Well, no actually - stand up Samira Makhmalbaf and Spike Lee.

Rayns has made his position clear - only people who don't know anything about Asian cinema would embrace Kim Ki-duk. Where this leaves Asian critics who admire him, and programme him into their film festivals, and the Asian audiences who admire his work, I have no idea...

In his absurd confidence about his own superiority in 'the strange case of Kim Ki-duk', Rayns seems to have developed his own "blind spot" when it comes to his accusations about Kim. Claims that Kim is just a cynical manipulator of controversy and that the festivals that programme him are looking for a cheap thrill - are all charges that could so easily be levelled at Rayns fave Takashi Miike. Kim certainly has an eye on the Western market, and when I interviewed him he admitted that his lack of dialogue was in part a deliberate strategy to allow his films to travel, but I cannot for a moment question the intense, extraordinary sincerity of his work (all of which was in place long before Venice made him famous). And Miike is surely a far more willfully provocative "sexual terrorist" than Kim has ever been, American and European filmfests have long used Miike's pervo-sadean-splatter shtick to placate the extreme cinema crowd.

So it all comes down to personal opinion, and with Kim we just have to agree to disagree. But the article left a sour taste. As a critique it doesn't convince, and its main argument - that Kim has somehow fooled people into believing his terrible films are good - reveals that Rayns' target isn't actually Kim himself, but rather all the critics, curators, programmers, juries and audiences who have apparently committed the ultimate, unforgiveable mistake. They didn't listen to Tony.


UPDATE: OK, so people don't post messages here, but they DO discuss this stuff in other places, join in the debate here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: And another critical response to Rayn's article here.

(19/01/05) YET MORE UPDATES: The debate is revived!