With a quiet grace, and the kind of childlike innocence in its narration that lays bare the adult melancholy all around, Shin Sang-ok‘s My Mother and Her Guest (1961) sneaks up on you. It’s a far cry from the violent, Occupation-era love triangle of his A Flower In Hell (a previous Counter-Programming entry released just 3 years prior), though both star Choi Eun-hee.
Twenty three years before Billy Idol crooned its title while disconcertingly staring at music video audiences, Eyes Without A Face was a horror masterpiece.
Georges Franju’s unsettling meditation on the uncanny still haunts our films. (Pedro Almodóvar had fun reprising it earlier this decade.
There is no moment in Shin Sang-ok‘s A Flower In Hell in which the American post-war occupation of Korea is absent. It is the film’s focal point, even when the soldiers aren’t on screen. Even when lovers are rolling around in the grass.