One of the seminal artists driving the renewal of the Korean cinema that began in the 1970s and reached full flowering in the Korean New Wave of the late 1980s and 1990s, Lee Jang-ho (b.1945) is among the most influential filmmakers of his generation. A mentor to such luminary directors as Park Kwang-su and Jang Sun-woo, Lee received his formative training working as an assistant to the great Shin San-Ok. Lee's long and impressive career as rebellious spirit pushing always against the constraints of draconian government censorship and the dominant tradition of commercial genre formulas began in earnest in the mid-1970s when he banded with a group of like-minded artists and critics to helped launch Young Sang Shi Dae, Korea’s first authentic film art movement. Translated literally as "The Era of the Image," Young Sang Shi Dae, was the name Lee and the UCLA-educated director Ha Kil-chong gave to the influential film journal that began shortly after the group formed, publishing articles and editorials calling for a new brand of art film able to awaken the unrealized potential of the Korean cinema. Forging a tight network of young filmmakers, screenwriters and actors in their 20s and 30s, Young Sang Shi Dae also brought together performers and artists from the theater and art worlds, creating an unprecedentedly rich cross-pollination among the new generation who would not only witness but participate actively in the profound transformation of Korean cinema and culture after the fall of the military dictatorship.

In key films such as his visionary The Man With Three Coffins, Lee embraced a bold mode of free narrative, exploring as much an elusive mood as the haunting theme of dislocation and profound loneliness that informs the best films of the period. Largely unavailable and unseen in the US, the films of Lee Jang-ho remain difficult to see even in Korea due to complexities of copyright and prints, the vestiges of the upheaval that took place in the film industry in the Seventies and Eighties. In defiance of the obstacles placed in the way of a larger retrospective, the Harvard Film Archive offers a suite of three seminal films in Lee's oeuvre as an intervention, a tribute and an urgently needed introduction to one of the Korean cinema's most influential voices.

The Harvard Film Archive is proud to welcome Lee Jang-ho here for all three evenings.— Haden Guest