Flame in the Valley originated out of a play by Cha Beom-seok that was first performed at the National Theater in 1962. The play, like the film, is set in a southwestern rural village during the Korean War in the early 1950s. Partisan soldiers fighting on the side of North Korea are hiding out in the mountains. Meanwhile the village is filled with widows and single women, having lost the entire male population to war or forced conscription. One day, a deserter from the North Korean People’s Army begins hiding out in a nearby bamboo forest. A widow Jeom-rye (whose husband fought for the South) brings him food, and they start a sexual affair. However, another widow Sawol (whose husband fought for the North) soon discovers their secret.
The play, without showing any battle sequences, indirectly expresses the damage wrought by war, and poses the question: can these women, who symbolize the victimized populace, ever hope to return to a normal existence? Through the characters of Jeom-rye and Sawol an anti-Communist message is also woven into the story, as was common in the 1960s under the military government of Park Chung Hee.
When a few years later the very talented and idiosyncratic director Kim Soo-yong set out to make a film adaptation of the work, he introduced a shift in its focus. Moving away from the social commentary and realism of the original, and deemphasizing the ideological elements of the story, he focused instead on the more universal themes of human desire and nature. The village and the bamboo forest especially are depicted as isolated, disconnected spaces in which primary instincts take over. The result is a visually stunning, dramatically tense work that quickly established a place for itself in the cinematic canon.
Shot in widescreen with sharp, black-and-white visuals, the 80-minute film is in part simply an exercise in cinematic inventiveness. Although working with very limited resources, director Kim and cinematographer Hong Dong-hyeok were able to create images of striking depth and beauty. The bamboo forest in particular is a location that seems made for cinema, and Kim makes the most of it. He also makes good use of his cast, including Shin Young-kyun (the focus of a retrospective at the Busan International Film Festival in 2012) as the soldier, Joo Jeung-nyeo (who plays the wife in Kim Ki-young’s The Housemaid) as Jeom-rye, and the inimitable Do Geum-bong (A Happy Businesswoman) as Sawol.
It’s somewhat incredible to think that Flame in the Valley is only one of 10 feature films that Kim Soo-yong released in the year 1967. Pushed on by the government, South Korea was turning out more films than ever in this era, and Kim was one of the industry’s most in-demand directors. Also included among those 10 works was the masterpiece Mist, based on a famous modernist novella, and other highly praised works like Confession of an Actress and Children in the Firing Range.
Given the visual qualities of this work, it’s a particular pleasure to be presenting this newly remastered DCP at the Udine Far East Film Festival. It marks an exciting opportunity to view this undisputed classic in a new, cleaner format.
Darcy Paquet