The Exorcism of Memories From his debut novel "Knock the Dog at the Door" (2000) to "Memories of Murder" (2003) was a decisive three years for Bong Junho’s directorial career. The transformation of commercial film directors with mature world views and creative ideas. In 1994, he graduated from the Korean Film Academy's short film "To Be Fragmented", and received an admiring call from Park Chan-wook, who was six years older than him. In the next five years, Feng Junhao achieved nothing, was unemployed for a long time, and was also facing tremendous pressure in life due to getting married and having children. The first feature film "Kidnapping a Dog at the Door" was finally released after several hardships. In the film, the university lecturer who was not good at interpersonal communication and had no chance of promotion was almost a portrayal of Feng Junhao himself. At that time, he was at a loss for the commercial film production system of Zhongwu Road. Feng Junhao recalled the situation of the premiere at that time. Before the subtitles were finished and the theater lights turned on, he fled from his seat. "Dog at the Door" failed miserably at the box office, and it did not arouse the attention of critics. Bong Junhao asked himself, why did he want to make such a film? He made a mistake that newcomer directors usually make, which is to make movies for themselves rather than movies that audiences want to see. At this time, Feng Junhao thought of his favorite type of movies since childhood, that is, suspenseful crime movies. why not? Feng Junhao recalled the situation of a family sitting in front of the TV when he was a child and watching the police drama "Search Squad Leader". In 1978, when he was 9 years old, he watched "The Sound of Music" in a theater in Daegu. Unlike other children, his most impressive impression of this scenic song and dance film came from the thrilling scenes of evading the Nazis at the end of the film. After the failure of "Dog at the Door", Bong Jun-ho began to find material for the idea of a crime film. He naturally thought of the serial rape and murder of Hwaseong-gun, Gyeonggi-do, which caused a sensation in Korea in the 1980s. This is the first serial homicide in South Korea's modern history. The murderer's methods were cruel and did not leave any humanity. The perpetrator has not been solved yet. Feng Junhao visited the victims, the residents of the place where the incident occurred, and the police officer in charge of the case, consulted a large number of police records and newspapers, and accumulated enough material for thirty TV episodes. However, it is not easy to come up with a clue to the script. Fortunately, he was assisted by the stage play "Look at Me" (played by Jin Guanglin), which was also adapted from this case. The show focused on the three main suspects and came up with ideas for finding clues through radio broadcasts. These were all used in Feng Junhao's script. However, the atmosphere of the times in the movie is not touched by the stage play. Feng Junhao also read a large number of foreign books about serial killers. He created "From Hell" about the case of "Jack the Ripper" in London at the end of the 19th century. To this day, Feng Junhao often mentions Moore's name in interviews. "From Hell" interprets Jack the Ripper from the perspective of royal conspiracy theory, connects major historical events, historical figures and cases in the Victorian era at that time, and verifies the identity and motives of the murderer by presenting the entire era. Under each page of the comics, Moore left a lot of textual evidence and theoretical footnotes. At the end, Jack the Ripper uttered the famous saying, "This is just the beginning. For better or worse, the twentieth century is about to be born. I delivered it." Alan Moore’s holistic view of history-that the trend of the times is irresistible, and the individual just conforms to the trend, this kind of individual sins transformed into the sins of the times, and the social metaphorical creative technique that focuses on stories has given the then Feng Junhao's direct inspiration. Looking back in the 1980s, Bong Junhao smelled the dead silence on the streets on curfew days. When researching the data, he noticed that the date of death of the last female student in Hwaseong City was November 15. "In the lives of our generation, the 15th of each month is the day of military exercises. Every household and public places are all covered. There was a black light. I was filled with anger when I thought that the girl died in such darkness." The story of "Memories of Murder" does not focus on the murderer, he is just a "Mugffin". It was not the murderer who killed the girl, nor was it the village policeman who was inefficient like a clown and flew around wherever he went, but the darkness of the times. What Bong Joon-ho did through "Memories of Murder" was to uncover the scars of the collective memory of the Koreans and carried out a psycho-analytic exorcism. The film ended in 2003. Song Kanghao gave up his role as a police officer and switched to a business career, moving into an apartment in Seoul to live a well-off life. However, as he passed by the rice field, he couldn't help but leaned down and looked under the stone slab where the victim had been found. From 1986 to 2003, South Korea experienced great economic soaring and social changes. A generation of bloody memories of the democratic movement during the military dictatorship were buried and washed away. However, there is still a haunted house in people's hearts. Just like the phrase "I don't know" by Douman (Song Kanghao), who finally admitted that the case is unsolvable in the same film, is full of frustration and powerlessness. Individuals have no choice but to be swept forward by the rolling wheels of history. When a movie like "Memories of Murder" appeared in the genre, Korean audiences were caught off guard by its rich metaphors. Not only did it fail to catch the murderer, but it was even full of confusion and mistakes from beginning to end. And the constant repetition of frustration, but important It's that period of history like those girls who died-"mentioned" by later generations. At the end of "Memories of Murder", this act of uncovering scars has a hint of Freudianism of rescue and sublimation. Even Bong Joon-ho, a passionate young man who participated in the student movement and suffered from prison, showed the lost right leg of Yonggu (Jin Luohe) in the film, which was once used to trample on the right leg of suspects and demonstrators. With sympathy, history and its people have been melancholy reconciled. Bong Junhao’s films are a mixture of expressionist exaggerated emotional expressions and realist lens styles, which are popular among Hollywood genres such as Sam Pekinpa, John Frikind and John Carpenter in the 70s and 80s. The influence of the master, and his film also has a Korean temperament that cannot be ignored. In the long shot of the famous crime scene in "Reminiscences of Murder", the funny images of the characters who enter the screen constantly slide to complement each other with the ridiculous investigative methods of the police. In the later "Han River Monster", the French "Cinema Manual" specially gave the comedy effect of the protagonist who always dropped the chain at critical moments called "piksari's art" (piksari means "broken sound" in Korean). The worldview that pays attention to the bottom and the broken side of society can be formed after birth, which is inseparable from the experience of participating in the democratic movement during the university years of Feng Joon-ho. However, his ability to transform reality and concepts into composition language is natural. Growing up in a family of intellectuals, his father later became the dean of an art and design institute in Seoul, and his mother was the daughter of Park Tae-won, a famous stream-of-conscious writer in modern Korean history. The family lost contact). The young Bong Joon-ho is friends with the book (he used to read 20 volumes of the Korean Encyclopedia Britannica in his father's study), and he showed his talent for painting very early. Watching foreign movies on TV, he always interprets the violent and pornographic scenes cut out in the film in his mind. At that time, the Korean US Army TV station would broadcast a large number of English movies without Korean subtitles, and Bong Joon-ho was also fascinated, although he was purely watching the screen, and the plot was supplemented by his brain. When preparing the key scenes in the movie, Bong Junhao will accurately design in his brain in advance, and can draw stunning sketches of the lens, with few modifications during shooting. He always brought books about Hitchcock lens creation with him, wondering how to make an ordinary transition scene full of drama. At the end of "Memories of Murder", the female student who described the suspect as "normal-looking", Douman repeatedly emphasized that he could judge the murderer by looking at the suspect. These plots are all carefully designed puns and echoes to the theme. The basements, ditches and tunnels, which are common and somewhat mysterious images in daily life, have become elements that appear repeatedly in Bong Junhao's films and have been endowed with metaphorical value. Although he did not embark on the road of artistic design like his father, elder brothers and sisters, but what Feng Junhao did in the film was to organize the fragmented image materials in a creative way, so as to achieve a kind of allegorical effect of "saying one thing and another". It is also a superb design art. Concluding Remarks "Memories of Murder" has greatly affirmed Bong Joon-ho's ability as a storyteller, and it is still recognized by the Korean media as the top film history of the country. The success of this film is also an exorcism to Bong Joon-ho’s own psychology. As a result, he finally got rid of the self-doubt during his debut (he even suspected that he was not capable of writing a feature film script, or that he could only be John Ka Independent film directors like Savits), and found the best balance between author’s style, popular psychology and commercial methods, and then he explored genre films in works such as "Monster" and "Snow Country Train" Be bolder and firmer in pursuing business. (Originally published in "Popular Movies")
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