THE POLLEN OF FLOWERS

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THE POLLEN OF FLOWERS

Feb 09, 2021

Writer by Pierce Conran
View2056

1972 | 85 MIN | Mystery

DIRECTOR HA Gil-jong

CAST NAMKOONG Won, KIM Ji-young, YUN So-ra, CHOI Ji-hee, HA Myung-joong

RELEASE DATE April 7, 1972

CONTACT Korean Film Archive

Tel +82 2 3153 2001

Fax +82 2 3153 2080

Email kofa@koreafilm.or.kr

Director HA Gil-jong was one of the great trailblazers of Korean cinema in the 1970s. Yet he wasn’t viewed quite so kindly during his lifetime, which ended prematurely when he succumbed to a stroke at the age of 37 in 1979, the same year that another person, whom he frequently found himself at odds with, also perished prematurely - President PARK Chung-hee.

Born into a family of artists, HA was orphaned at a young age and he and his younger brother HA Myung-joong, another important figure of Korean cinema as both an actor and director, grew up with relatives. HA mingled with many future counter-cultural artists in the early 1960s before heading to America to study at the San Francisco Academy of Art and then UCLA, where he made the mid-length film The Ritual for a Soldier (1969). Though offered a chance to stay on in Hollywood, HA opted to return to Korea with a knowledge of New Hollywood and avant-garde cinema and a desire to push against Korea’s oppressive military regime. The Pollen of Flowers, his 1972 debut, proved to be one of the most incendiary films of the decade.

The rich and powerful industrialist Hyun-ma (NAMKOONG Won) has installed his mistress Se-ran in a large hillside manor in the suburbs of Seoul named the ‘Blue House’, where she lives with her younger sister Mi-ran (YUN So-ra) and their maid. Hyun-ma visits the house one afternoon with his trusted secretary Dan-ju (HA Myung-joong), who is also his sometimes male lover. That same day, Mi-ran has her first period and is mocked by her sister, which prompts her to run away. Hyun-ma sends Dan-a after her, but little does he expect that the pair will fall in love and abscond across the country together.

The dogged Hyun-ma eventually tracks them down and returns them to the Blue House, where he beats Dan-a before locking him in a dank shed. Tensions in the home escalate following various nighttime visits to Dan-a’s shed, and things come to a head for Hyun-ma during a debauched party.

Despite being based on a 1939 novel by novelist LEE Hyo-seok, The Pollen of Flowers (1972) is often compared to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1968 classic Teorema, in which Terence Stamp is welcomed as a guest to a home in which he steadily proceeds to sleep with all of its inhabitants.

HA’s film certainly bears similarities (narratively, but also as a highly politicized allegory), yet what-ever influence he may or may not have received from Pasolini’s earlier film does little to minimize the impact of the film. His feature debut is a confrontational work that explores several contemporaneous social taboos and which is blunt and unrelenting in its evisceration of Korean power structures, from the residents of the real ‘Blue House’ (the Korean presidential residence) all the way down to the sycophantic vultures who prop up and profit from a corrupt system built on a foundation of corporate and political malfeasance.

The many sexual allusions of The Pollen of Flowers (1972) include one of the earliest if not the first representation of homosexuality in Korean cinema, while suggestive and steamy boudoir scenes bathed in neon red lights recall the groundbreaking work of KIM Ki-young, such as Woman of Fire (1971). In fact, the film also frequently calls to mind KIM’s The Housemaid (1960), not least when the maid throws a couple of rats into a red-drenched scene of passion between Hyun-ma and Se-ran, which soon turns deranged.

Beyond those rats, there are several allusions to animals in the film, each with a different symbolic import. Dead goldfish are found in the pond outside the Blue House at the beginning of the film, and later, in a fit of rage, Hyun-ma squeezes more goldfish to death, before smashing their fishbowl against the wall. Powerless, plentiful, and with nowhere to go, these goldfish recall none other than the disenfranchised subjects of PARK Chung-hee’s regime.

At the time, Korean citizens were about to shove into their own fishbowls, as they were promised social mobility through high-rise apartments which quickly became coveted, at the expense of tradition and culture. Dan-ju and Mi-ran’s ever-so-brief courtship partly plays out in a construction site, with a wall of identical monolithic structures towering behind them.

One of the film’s most scabrous but subtly introduced images is the replica of Gustav Klimt’s ‘Adele Bloch-Bauer’ (The Woman in Gold) which hangs in the Blue House. Klimt’s masterpiece was famously looted by the nazis and history repeats itself in the cynical conclusion of The Pollen of Flowers (1972), when looters and rapists descend on the fallen house, stripping it bare, down to the ring on Se-ran’s now severed finger. Collusion comes at a great cost.

The Pollen of Flowers (1972) is available to screen on the Korean Film Archive’s official Youtube channel (https://www.youtube.com/user/KoreanFilm).

Any copying, republication or redistribution of KOFIC's content is prohibited without prior consent of KOFIC.

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