Bergsonian Critique

• This post is dedicated to my cousin, who has graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in film production from SIU this Saturday.

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and Spring, is pretty much a film about the forces of nature as it is a depiction of human’s frailty, and the consequences that follow when childhood innocence gets tainted with the lust of adulthood. Renowned South Korean film director and extraordinaire, Kim Ki Duk, has masterfully guised his meditative picture with a Buddhist’s stern scrutiny; it is not quite loquacious in judgment, though subtle in wisdom, harsh in discipline, and profuse with quaint imageries. Despite his hypnotic, naturally visualized storytelling, Kim’s message in his feature is critical, intense, and rather pervasive. While it is easy to conclude that the film is an elaborative domino effect (and possibly it is), the themes and the intricate progression of human’s growth are doubtlessly successive.

Spring

The description of first season in the film, “Spring”, sees the untroubled consciousness of childhood getting awry when it is stained by blood and death of the innocents. The child Buddhist apprentice (Jong-ho Kim), after he goes out to the nearby woods to pick up herbs as a mean of daily exercise, begins to torment three forest creatures (a fish, a frog, and a snake) by tying them up with a small rock and then giggling impassively to their struggles. Meanwhile, the child’s master (Yeong-su Oh) observes intently and quietly behind the scenes to the absurdity of his humor, and waits until he’s asleep during the night and ties him with a rock in a similar fashion. All perplexed and ashamed, the child monk receives a severe and brief scolding from his master in the morning, and that he should return to the woods and unburdens the animals he harmed while the he carries the load of rock on his back. Of course, even the physical impediment doesn’t outweigh the consciousness of guilt, as the master warns the child monk that if any of the creatures dies he will “carry the stone in his heart forever”. And indeed he does, after he discovers that the snake didn’t survive his childlike cruelty, the child sops heartily due to his committed crime against the innocent of nature.

It is here that Kim, the storyteller of this affectionate tale, paints a familiar picture of discipline, which also remains to be unlike anything we have seen before. He conveys that even when humankind is closely surrounded with nature (the boy and his master lives on a floating monastery in the middle of a crystalline lake, surrounded by lavish green forest) he is still a being of destruction, regardless of the triviality of his conducts. The spiritual punishments, which the older monk distills into a set of lessons throughout the course of the film, are self-evident and enigmatic. While they are severely constructed, they embody the obdurate notion of responsibility. They also reflect aspects of Buddhism not always amply appreciated in the West: often witty and occasionally austere.

Summer

This lesson continues to be carried out in the next cycle of ten seasons or so, when “Summer” and its licentious freedom drifts on the monastery, and when a beautiful young girl (Yeo-jin Ha) joins the master monk and his adolescent apprentice (Jae-kyeong Seo) in their solitary confinement to seek a treatment from a nameless, feverish illness. Aroused and infatuated, the young apprentice, while fighting his own sexual impulses, caresses the breasts of the young girl while sleeping in front of a Buddha statue, which she wakes up and slaps him for his indiscretion. In a guilty panic, the mortified monk beings to pray ceaselessly, something his master notes as strange. The girl quickly forgives him however; and no sooner they let their sexual desires overwhelm them completely. The master is perspicacious of course, and catches them sleeping and floating atop of the boat after they have committed their act. Rather than a physical admonishment, the master portends his apprentice that “lust leads to desire for possession, and possession leads to murder”, and orders the girl to leave. The young monk consequentially reacts, and driven by his youthful emotions, runs away from the monastery at night in pursuit of the girl, taking the monastery’s Buddha statue with him.

While it is easy for anyone to accuse Mr. Kim of being antisexual, or to nauseate at the Buddhists’ adherence to celibacy, in actuality, he is simply reiterating the same principles from the first segment: that straying from the path of spiritual commitment might produce terrible consequences to those who don’t comprehend the functions of the real world. After all, the young monk isn’t yet acquainted with the material world the young girl belongs to, nor he has mastered the mystical competence and maturity obtained through the practices of traditional Buddhism. In fact, by taking the Buddha statue upon his escape, the sexually submerged apprentice deludes himself that he is capable of achieving spirituality without the necessity of incarceration. Either that or he is so ashamed that he took the only witness that caught him on his intrusion with the young girl.

Fall

Thus, one can imagine the harsh reality a person would face, who has lived in a spiritual confinement for many years, when he is suddenly plunged onto the material world so unexpectedly. Indeed, after a decade or more cycles, the prophecy that the master has foretold his disciple becomes true, and now the latter (Young-min Kim) is a wanted fugitive who has murdered his wife due to her infidelity. The master, even after he learns about the warrant arrest on his former student, allows him to stay in the monastery and even prevents him from committing a ritual suicide. Then, he instructs him to carve the Chinese characters of the Heart Sutra tradition after he paints them on the upside deck of the monastery using a cat’s tail dipped in black ink. Soon enough, as the former apprentice continues to carve and the master paints, two detectives arrive at the monastery and try to arrest him, but the master asks them to let him finish his task first. Seemingly influenced by the soothing presence of the master, the detectives help the old monk paint his apprentice’s carvings in orange, green, blue and purple. After the job is done, the detectives take the ex-student away. After they leave, the master, knowing he is at the end cycle of his life, builds a pyre in the rowboat. He seals his ears, eyes, nose and mouth with paper in the same suicide ritual and meditates, as he suffocates and burns to death, leaving behind traces of his tears in the paper seals as flames engulf him.

Conceptually, “Fall” usually represents decay and rebirth, a season where nature sheds its colors and past existence and reawakened anew, and also invites the emergent, younger forms of life to take their place and pass down their credos. Such imagery, perhaps, represents the precise implication that Kim is trying to convey in his visual narrative. Atonement, after all, is liberally accessible to anyone who wishes to endure it and then to emerge from it as pristine as human resolves can reach, a privilege that Kim consents to the former apprentice to undertake after his heinous crime. The master thereby acknowledges and respects the tenacity of his student, and the matter of taking his own life while leaving his belongings behind is his own way of showing this realization. He knows that he has nothing more to teach and that the time has come for his student to become a master of his own and of somebody else’s.

Winter

The apprentice, now middle-aged and wiser (played by Kim Ki Duk himself), returns to his former home atop the frozen lake, which has been drifting uninhabited for years. He finds his master’s clothes lay out just before his death, and digs his master’s remains out of the frozen rowboat, setting them to rest in the Buddha statue under a waterfall. It is here that the story completes its cycle of seasons, with the introduction of a baby abandoned by a mother to his care. The circumstances of this abandonment are horrific, and yet its beauty stands out amidst the stillness of “Winter”. In a similar fashion to his punishment when he was a young kid, the apprentice ties the monastery’s large, circular stone to his body and climbs to the summit of the tallest surrounding mountain holding another statue, which he places there.

The last strenuous trials of the graduating student represent his distinctiveness and emergence from the shadows of the former master. His acceptance to nurture a child signifies the transition of responsibility, marking off his duties as an apprentice to a full-fledged teacher. The portrayal of different human emotions and convictions thorough the four seasons is now complete, and the cycle of human circumstance beings anew thought not quite different.

…And Spring

Certainly, as the new master now lives in the monastery with the discarded baby (his apprentice), the boy is shown to torment a tortoise and, wandering into the rocky hills, echoes his predecessor, forcing stones into the mouths of a fish, frog and snake. The cycle of nature and human experience continue…

Ultimately, all of the elements in Kim’s film comes together and work with perfect synchronicity, and even if it must be said that this is never the most ambitious or original of pictures, the film’s sheer devotion to its story and images is stirring. Indeed, the film simply could have gone very wrong, whether by tipping into the maudlin or inflating into abstraction, but Kim’s artful and unfaltering imagery maintain an unfamiliar scrutiny of spirituality that evokes both curiosity and veneration. It is a work of transcendental experience and beauty that even the exquisite temple itself is a character, as well as a metaphor for the idyllic escape from weltering humanity everyone must crave at one time or another.