I learned from Hahn Dae Soo that his friend Lee Ik-tae (Rhee Iktae), an artist, director, and actor he first met in Seoul in 1974 whom he remembered as a “fun-loving deep thinker,” had passed away. Having been working on an article for RAS Korea’s Transactions 99 about the rise and fall of ‘happening’-based experimental artists in Korea between 1967 and 1970 and their influence on the first crackdown on men with long hair in August 1970 (a topic I lectured on here), I recognized Lee Ik-tae’s name immediately, as he directed and acted in Korea’s first independent feature film, “Between Morning and Night,” in 1970, and later that year joined The Fourth Group, the short-lived collective of experimental artists that provoked the 1970 crackdown on youth culture.
A search in the Naver News Archive reveals that he worked in a variety of media. In the spring of 1973 he directed the play “Le Voyage de Monsieur Perrichon” (by Eugène Labiche, which premiered in 1860) performed by French literature students from various Seoul universities, in the summer he screened his short films “The Whereabouts of Light” (빛의 행방) and “A Trivial Afternoon” (시시한 오후) (more on the former here), and in the fall he put on a watercolor exhibition. In 1974 he won an honorable mention for his scenario “The Vacation When No One Was There” (아무도 없었던 휴가) in the Dong-A Ilbo's New Spring Literary Contest, and the next year he received an honorable mention for his scenario “Requiem” (진혼곡).
This article reveals more about his later career, one that was similar to many of the prominent experimental artists of the late 1960s in that he moved to the US after Park Chung-hee’s Yusin dictatorship grew harsher. Arriving in the US in 1977, he turned to painting and then founded the performance group Theater 1981, “where he performed plays and experimental performances focusing on sound and visuals.” A number of performances in the 1980s in L.A. were based on the Gwangju Uprising, while another was inspired by the shooting down of KAL 007. As well, he commemorated the first anniversary of the L.A. riots with a large-scale installation art and performance titled ‘Volcano Island.’ After returning to Korea, his performances (including the "Ice Wall" series that featured massive ice blocks stacked on the Unification Bridge and Seogang Bridge) focused on the division of North and South Korea. Living for years in Muju, and later Seoul, he focused on a calligraphy style of painting on hanji, or Korean traditional paper.
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‘Film 70’ and Lee Ik-tae
The trend of underground cinema has landed in our country as well. Last year, a group called Film 69 made a 40-minute film titled Between Morning and Night, which became, in a sense, the first spark of true underground cinema in Korea. The leader of this group is a young man named Lee Ik-tae, who gives off a somewhat eccentric impression and is very monastic in manner. He not only handles the megaphone but also appears in the film himself. He even performed nude in Between Morning and Night, taking on the role with intense dedication.
This film has virtually no plot. No - having no plot is only natural. That is because the world that Film 69, a group of young filmmakers, sought to pursue was one that boldly destroyed all the existing conventions of cinema.
A film without a plot
It is a film that captures, through imagery, the inner psychological landscape of a young man as he wanders from morning until night. At times he enjoys sex, at times he strolls along desolate railroad tracks, at times he has meaningless conversations with unfamiliar women… and these dull incidents unfold dully within dull hours, becoming visualized and given form. It is what one might call a private film. The very act of making a film with no consideration at all for commercial success is, in itself, a remarkably admirable undertaking.
After graduating from S University, Lee Ik-tae entered the film world with a certain sense of purpose. He worked as an assistant director, chasing after sets and locations. But what he gained from the ready-made film industry was nothing but disillusionment. Cinema, corrupted into a one-track commercialism concerned only with box office results… Lee Ik-tae wanted to discover new images—images freshly charged, blazing like sparks.
A solitary task
Thus, a group of like-minded but unknown young filmmakers formed Film 69. Now that the year has become 1970, it has, in a sense, been automatically renamed Film 70. The direction Film 70 pursues can be summarized in a single phrase: the private film.
“Hasn’t that so-called ‘fountain-pen film theory’ been around for nearly ten years now? Cinema should long ago have been liberated from commercial trickery. In Korea, the world I am trying to pursue still feels like a solitary task. There’s no one who feels any sense of connection with my work,” he says, smiling a lonely smile. Because a private film is like an act of self-expression carried out from a place shut out beyond any system or structure, loneliness, in a sense, is inevitable.
Film 70 seeks to uncover the sincere truth hidden deep within the interior of everyday life, as was expressed in Between Morning and Night. Whereas hippies and the Beat Generation often attempt rebellion against the everyday, Lee Ik-tae clings instead to everydayness.
Cinema is a rite in darkness
“The established order must be destroyed”
There are times when the films they make depict sex scenes quite bluntly. Of course, this may be possible precisely because these works are extremely private, like poets sharing mimeographed chapbooks, viewed and critiqued only within the group called Film 70.
But the dense sex scenes they depict are not sex scenes for the sake of sex. Just as the notion of “man separated from sex” cannot exist, they aim to reveal, exactly as it is, the image of sex hidden deep within the veil of everyday life.
It is said that in the United States, especially around New York on the East Coast, many underground filmmakers work in this way. In other words, the term underground cinema arose from the idea of rejecting the conventions of society - the surface, the system, the organization - and slipping down into the underground.
“Isn’t cinema, in its essence, a kind of ritual in darkness? It’s not something sunlit, like a sport held in open daylight. In the dark movie theater… there, an intimate dialogue takes place between each individual viewer and the screen. It’s an image that belongs to the dark, the underground, rather than the bright world above.”
Always describing film as something underground, Lee Ik-tae argues that only private film is truly essential cinema.