Friday | March 1, 2019 7:00 pm

Joint Security Area A.K.A JSA
(Gongdong gyeongbi guyeok JSA)

Introduction by Carter Eckert

Directed by Park Chan-wook.
With Lee Yeong-ae, Lee Byung-hun, Song Kang-ho .
South Korea, 2000, DCP, color, 110 min.
Korean, English and German with English subtitles.
DCP source: CJ Entertainment

Park Chan-wook’s career was launched with the blockbuster success of his timely and taut thriller set on the tense demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea. JSA (Joint Security Area) follows the urgent investigation of the mysterious death of two North Korean DMZ guards and the South Korean soldier immediately suspected. Park’s meticulous attention to accuracy extends to the film’s expanded set of the DMZ—recreated at tremendous expense just miles away from the actual site—as well as the methodical procedures of the Swiss Korean UN investigator tasked with untangling the complex web of friendship and betrayal uncovered as she learns more about the soldiers and the strange symbolic space they inhabit and dutifully guard with their lives. With its questioning of dehumanizing military authority JSA recalls classic military dramas such as The Caine Mutiny (1954) or Breaker Morant (1980). Park, however, brings another more intimate and poignant dimension into his depiction of the soldiers themselves whose loneliness and confusion embody the strange miasma and ominous immobility of the Cold War stalemate still dividing the Korean peninsula.

Joint Security Area A.K.A JSA introduction by Haden Guest and Carter Eckert. Read transcript

Audio transcription

For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Collection page.

Screening of Joint Security Area A.K.A JSA with introduction by Haden Guest and Carter Eckert. Friday March 1, 2019.

Haden Guest 0:12

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Haden Guest. I'm Director of the Harvard Film Archive and I want to welcome you all to this special screening of Joint Security Area, from 2000, by Park Chan-wook. Joint Security Area or JSA was one of the first of a wave of blockbuster thrillers, with a sharp political edge that had a really transformative effect upon the Korean film industry, the Korean cinema, in the early 2000s. Shiri, a film from the year before by Kang Je-gyu, was arguably the first of that wave. And that was a thriller about a North Korean spy mission that proved to be a massive critical and popular success. And like that earlier work, Park’s film also boldly uses a big-budget canvas to explore a red-hot political topic. But Park chooses to re-examine the tense situation between the two Koreas through an at times strikingly intimate lens, one that looks closely at the lives and conditions of the actual soldiers stationed upon the border. JSA was the breakthrough film of Park Chan-wook, and his tremendous success gave him the freedom and possibility to seek out even more personal projects such as, of course, his celebrated Vengeance Trilogy. Park’s career has continued to flourish to this day, as evidenced by his remarkable latest film, The Handmaiden, which we’ll be screening here tomorrow night. These two films by Park Chan-wook, JSA and The Handmaiden, were selected to accompany a class being taught this semester in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations called “Frames in Time, Korean Cinema as History and Filmmaking.” And it's being taught by two professors in that department, Alexander Zahlten and Carter Eckert. Both films are meditations, of sorts, upon key moments in modern Korean history, the division of the Korean Peninsula in tonight's film, and the long colonization of Korea by Japan in The Handmaiden. Now, we're really thrilled that director Park Chan-wook will be joining us next Tuesday at 5 P.M., in this room. This is going to be a conversation between Park Chan-wook, Alexander Zahlten, and Carter Eckert, and it is a free event and open to the public. But it is nonetheless ticketed, and tickets are going to be available starting at 4:15 on Friday. So if you're interested in attending what promises to be a really exciting and insightful conversation about Park Chan-wook’s films and career, I encourage you to come, and to come early. I want to give very special thanks to the Korea Institute, here at Harvard. Every time we present Korean cinema, it's thanks to our partnership and our friendship with the Korea Institute. And I want to give a very, very special thanks to the lovely executive, and talented executive director, of that Institute. And that's Susan Lee, who is here, Susan Lee Laurence, who's here tonight. And I want to please ask you to join me in thanking Susan Laurence, as well as her assistant, Chris Beomhee Lee.

[APPLAUSE]

I also want to thank, oh, there you go! There you go. All right, big, a big thanks. I also want to thank CJ Entertainment. They loaned us the two copies, beautiful copies of the films that we're going to be screening here. And I'm very happy, as well, that we have with us tonight, to offer some words about the film, and about its historical context, the very same Carter Eckert, who is the Yoon Se Young Professor of Korean History in the East Asian Languages and Civilizations Department. And while you join me in welcoming Carter Eckert to the podium, I'm gonna remind you to please turn off any electronic devices that you have, and please refrain from using them. And now join me in welcoming Carter Eckert.

[APPLAUSE]

Carter Eckert 4:08

Thank you Haden. I'm very happy to be here tonight to watch one of my favorite all-time movies, for sure. And also to watch it on the big screen, which is, I think, where all great movies should be shown. And also to watch it in this new format, at least it was new to me, which apparently has the highest resolution, the gold standard in the business. And I also want to extend my thanks to CJ Entertainment, for providing us with these, these prints. I'm delighted to share a few thoughts about the film. I love this film! I love it for many reasons. First of all, it's got a great story. It's part a mystery story. And it unravels in the film in such a way that it gives you sort of tantalizing clues from the very beginning, and then throughout the film, and keeps you sort of guessing, and there any number of twists and turns, and you really don't quite put it all together, I think, until the very end. So it's a great mystery story. It's also a kind of thriller. I mean, it's set in the DMZ, one of the most dangerous and volatile places on earth, the Demilitarized Zone on the Korean Peninsula, which is jointly administered by the UN forces, headed by the United States on the one side, and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, also known as North Korea, on the other side. But as Haden was suggesting, it's also a very intense human drama, poignant human drama, with a cast of really fantastic Korean actors. And I emphasize Korean, because there are some foreign actors in the film but I don't think they're all that good.

[LAUGHTER]

They’re okay. And fortunately, they don't take up a lot of room in the film. As many times as I've watched this movie, and Susan Laurence, the Executive Director of the Korea Institute, was just asking, how many times have you seen it? I think about 10 times? Maybe more, because I show it regularly to my classes. But every time I watch it, and I'm going to watch it again tonight with great enthusiasm, I never fail to get engaged and moved by the film. And I have to confess, I also find myself, invariably, at the very end, wiping tears away, so get your handkerchiefs ready. I also love this film as a historian of modern Korea. As I said, I show it almost every year to my students, where I think it stimulates some of the best discussions we have in the semester. It might even be the one thing that the students take away from the course, that they remember, actually. It was released in the year 2000. And this was a very important historical moment in the history of the two Koreas. At the end of the Second World War, a line was drawn, quite artificially, across the Korean Peninsula, by the Soviet Union on the one hand, and the United States on the other, as an occupying line. The Soviets in the North, of course, and the Americans in the South. And this developed into the Cold War atmosphere that then created two separate rival and adversarial regimes, led to a terrible civil war, which we know as the Korean War, from 1950 to 1953, which ended in an armistice in 1953, with the boundaries largely where they had been when the war began in 1950. But with literally millions of Koreans dead and tens of thousands of others who have participated in the war, Americans, and also Chinese, as many as 900,000 Chinese who had fought on the side of the North. But the year 2000 saw a really unprecedented development on the Peninsula. The film JSA was released just several months after a historic summit meeting between South Korea's famous democracy leader, and then the President, Kim Dae-jung, with the North Korean leader at that time, Kim Jong-il, who is the father of the current North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, and this was the first such meeting of North and South leaders since the end of the Korean War, in 1953. And it led to a breakthrough, on many levels, actually, as the South Korean government pursued what was called at the time, the Sunshine Policy of peace and reconciliation.

The breakthroughs tended to lose their steam, after a few years, under more conservative South Korean governments. But the recent meetings, in our own time, this past year, between the two South Korean, or South Korean and North Korean leaders, Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong-un, can be directly traced back to that earlier first period of rapprochement. And they've also played an important role, I think, in the current U.S.-North Korean summitry that we've been watching. That first summit also represented, I should say, a generational shift in North Korea toward a more open and inclusive attitude, or sensibility, towards North Korea. In other words, looking at North Korea, not just as an enemy, demonized enemy, but more as a kind of long-lost brother. And this view tended to view the two Koreas as separated by, and suffering from, this larger structure, this cold war regime that had been in place since the 1940s, that had brought about this terrible war, and had actually turned national brothers, on the different sides, who spoke the same language, ate the same food, and had inherited the same culture, into implacable, if somewhat artificial, enemies. The director of the movie, Park Chan-wook, is part of this younger post-Korean War generation. I'm not sure of the extent to which he embodies this kind of new sensibility I'm talking about, and I actually look forward to asking him about that, next Tuesday when we all gather here again. But the film clearly incorporates elements of the sensibility, which were very widespread at the time. And it's safe to say I think that this movie, JSA, or any film like it, could not have been made before that time, with this huge political shift. In fact, a film made earlier probably would have been treated as a violation of the draconian South Korean national security law, and the director would have been quickly arrested. So the movie presents, actually, a fascinating time capsule, I think, for us, looking back to this first big political shift in 2003. But I think it's also really a very contemporary film, when you stop and think about, you know, what's going on today. The two Koreas are still divided. As I mentioned, no peace treaty has ever been signed. The armistice is simply an agreement, as it was then, to stop fighting. So while the Cold War is over, in a sense, in the rest of the world, it continues, in a very real sense, on the Korean peninsula, with all the old structures in place.

There's now a more liberal government in South Korea that, as I said, traces its political lineage back to Kim Dae-jung and this first summit. And once again, it's trying, struggling, I think, as in 2000, to find a way within this still existing cold war structure, for a new breakthrough, towards peace and reconciliation. In the meantime, however, young Korean soldiers, boys, really, like the ones you're going to be seeing in the film tonight, continue to face each other, literally, with guns and other forms of mutual destruction, on the DMZ, and not a few at the cost of their lives. So this is really as much a film for audiences of our own time, I think, as for the audiences of 2000, and I hope you enjoy it, and I hope that you will also think about the questions that it raises. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]