[Cine feture] Korean hiking features showcase a certain kind of leadership

Posted on : 2016-01-03 09:11 KST Modified on : 2016-01-03 09:11 KST
Perseverance in the face of great danger

As new hiking drama The Himalayas makes a final climb up the end-of-year box office charts, it’s a good time to look back at the history of expedition films in South Korean cinema. While only a handful of films focus predominantly on hikers and their exploits (it’s a small subgenre after all), comparing them offers some curious insights into leadership (in these cases exclusively male) in Korean society.

A Leader, a Teacher and a Comrade

Lee Seok-hoon’s The Himalayas features superstar Hwang Jung-min, fresh off the number two and three all-time hits in Korea (Ode to My Father and Veteran), as famed Korean hiker Um Hong-gil. Um is known for being the 11th person in the world and first Korean (along with Park Young-seok) to claim the Himalayan Crown, a distinction given to climbers who have conquered the only 14 peaks to cross the 8,000 meter threshold. He is also the world’s first person to climb the world’s 16 highest peaks. The film details his burgeoning friendship with younger hiker Park Moo-taek (played by C'est Si Bon’s Jung Woo) and his subsequent expedition to retrieve his friend’s body when Park perished atop Mount Everest.

Much of the narrative deals with Um and Park’s relationship as the former reluctantly trains the latter. Various acts of hazing follow, including carrying stacks of boxes up Korean hills and sleeping in a tent in Um’s backyard, which are more playful than challenging (particularly as Um softens in the face of Park’s persistence). Far be it from being a stentorian teacher, Um gently chides his protege and is presented as a fair and wise character, as well as a family man. Yet, following Park’s death, he puts himself (and his team) in great danger to retrieve a man’s body in an area that is called (with good reason) the ‘Death Zone’ on Mount Everest. And he does so despite having retired from major expeditions due to an ankle injury.

His quest is not borne out of greed but out of self-sacrifice and responsibility. While the expedition was not successful, it comes from an attitude starkly different to that of hikers from other countries. Many have fallen on the upper slopes of Mount Everest, but due to the inherent danger of retrieving bodies from those areas, they are left there and often seen by climbers making their way to the top. And this attitude of self-sacrifice and responsibility, in the face of great danger, seems to extend to other Korean climbers. Han Wang-yong, another hiker who has claimed the Himalayan Crown, has led various expeditions up Mount Everest and K2 to clean up trash left by other climbers.

Madness and Love in Mountains

On the opposite side of the emotional spectrum is Yim Pil-sung’s feature Antarctic Journal (2005). Starring Song Kang-ho as Do-hyung, the leader of an expedition trying to reach the South Pole of Inaccessibility, considered the hardest point to reach Antarctica, this is a tale of hubris gone wrong. Yim was inspired by a news report of a Korean expedition in 1999 which was forced to turn back when one of its members fell ill.

In this fictional story, the expedition, featuring a team of six members, gets off to a good start and once again, a younger character (played by Yoo Ji-tae), is clearly shown to look up to the group’s leader, inspired by his achievements and awed by his mysterious grit. Yet it isn’t long before someone in the team falls ill and finds it increasingly hard to keep up. Do-hyung acknowledges the illness and tries to encourage him, but rather than jeopardize the trip by going back, he presses forward. Even when the ailing man disappears, he urges the team to continue going ahead. Soon rifts appear in the group and Do-hyung, slowly losing his mind, puts people in danger and sabotages any opportunities to return, at first eating the batteries of their radio and later loosening his grip on a rope while another team member dangles perilously over a precipice.

A psychological horror that juxtaposes wide shots on humans on a flat expanse of ice and snow with claustrophobic close-ups of the group members heads, one behind the other, casting glancing in every direction, in their tiny tents, Antarctic Journal presents a leader who is just as determined and willing to put himself in danger (though even more so for those around him), but his motivations are purely personal. His quest to achieve a grand result, irrespective of the safety of his team, is what drives him. Despite being a team leader, Do-hyung often leaves the tent to muse by himself under the never-ending sunlight at the Antarctic summer. And since he does not follow goals for the sake of his comrades or family, his willingness to put his team in danger is manifested through horror genre codes and explained away as madness. Though UM’s actions in The Himalayas are only a little less severe, as far as the danger his team faces is concerned, his moral judgement is presented as impeccable, in what could be boiled down to an alpine melodrama.

Beyond these examples, another Korean mountaineering film is Kim Eun-sook’s Ice Rain (2004), a love triangle between three climbers that alternates between dramatic scenes in Seoul and the stranding of two romantic rivals on an Alaskan mountain as they wait out the night. A critical and financial bomb that uses hiking as a way of heightening the emotion of its core story, a typical romantic melodrama, Ice Rain doesn’t feature as much hiking as the aforementioned titles, yet its dramatic deaths scenes, as acts of self-sacrifice that haunt those left behind, do fall in line with tone of The Himalayas.

Love for Mountain and Climbing

Predating all of these is the huge success of the Sylvester Stallone-starring drama Cliffhanger, which was an unexpected hit in Korea, drawing well over a million admissions to Seoul alone in 1993.

While that may or may not have been a fluke, hiking is an enormous hobby on the peninsula and the sport often features in Korean films as characters go on dates in the many mountains in and around Seoul or lose themselves in the mountains of Gangwon-do, such as in the Hong Sang-soo features Oki's Movie (2010) and The Power of Kangwon Province (1998), respectively. It’s also hard not spot middle-aged Koreans wearing expensive hiking gear around the country, a marketing phenomenon (that relies heavily on endorsements) which is briefly poked fun at The Himalayas.

Sometimes, mountains embody greater themes, such as in Jang Hun’s Korean War action-drama The Front Line (2011), which sees platoons of North and South Korean soldiers battling day after day as they swap control of the same hill in the waning days of the conflict, or currently in Park Hoon-jung’s period epic The Tiger, which features Choi Min-shik as a hunter stalking a great feline adversary in the Jirisan Mountains of Southern Korea.

Then of course, in a small country like Korea, there’s the allure of the grand outdoors, and the outdoors are seldom grander than the Himalayas. Choi Min-shik lost and found himself there in Jeon Soo-il’s Himalaya, Where The Wind Dwells (2009) and viewers marvelled at Tibetan fathers making the treacherous annual trip to school with their children high in the mountains in Lee Kyung-mook’s documentary The Road To School last year.

By Pierce Conran, Cine21 reporter

- See more at:http://www.koreanfilm.or.kr/jsp/news/features.jsp?pageIndex=1&blbdComCd=601013&seq=281&mode=FEATURES_VIEW&returnUrl=&searchKeyword=


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