Skip to main content

The Secret of the “Perfect Montage” at the Heart of Parasite, the Korean Film Now Sweeping World Cinema

For nearly as long as mankind has tried to commit the perfect crime, mankind has tried to tell stories of the perfect crime. Both endeavors demand intensive planning, the story of the crime perhaps even more rigorously so than the crime itself. No less obsessive a teller and reteller of "perfect crime" stories than Alfred Hitchcock knew that well, and so he remains an icon of such storytelling in cinema. Hence the visual reference, albeit a vanishingly brief one, to the master of suspense in Korean blockbuster auteur Bong Joon-ho's Parasite, which has run victory laps around the world ever since winning the Palme d'Or last year. Or so Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter, tells it in his new video essay on Parasite's "perfect montage."

This montage comes at the end of the film's first act, about 40 minutes in, at which point Bong has clearly established the plot, both in the sense of the sequence of events that sets the story in motion, and of the devious plan devised by the main characters. Those main characters are the Kims, a poor family in Seoul who, one by one, ingratiate themselves with and obtain employment within the household of a rich family, the Parks — all while pretending not to be related. After the father becomes the Parks' chauffeur, the son becomes their English tutor, the daughter becomes their art therapist, the Kims all work together to get the mother hired as the housekeeper. But this requires the displacement of the rich family's existing housekeeper, who's worked in the home ever since it was first built.

That displacement is the subject of the montage, which over five minutes relays to the viewer both how the Kims devise their plan — which involves turning the old housekeeper's peach allergy into a seeming case of tuberculosis — and how they pull it off. Puschak underscores "how balletic everything is, helped along by a classical piece from Handel's Rodelinda," as well as the "mesmeric" quality enriched by Bong's use of "both slow-motion and linear camera moves." Presenting new information in each and every one of its 60 shots, the montage also foreshadows coming events and references previous ones within itself, inspiring Puschak to compare it to a conversation, and later to "an organism all its own."

All well and good as a demonstration of cinematic technique, and indeed "a testament to Bong Joon-ho's control of his craft." But unless form aligns with substance, no art can attain greatness; what makes this a "perfect montage" is how its very perfection reflects that of the Kim family's machinations — at least at the point in the film at which it arrives. As with most stories of the perfect crime, things start to fall apart thereafter, though even as they do, Bong's hand (as well as that of his editor Yang Jin-mo) never falters. This sequence, and Parasite as a whole, would surely command the respect of Alfred Hitchcock. But Hitchcock would also recognize, as Bong himself must, that a montage can always be more finely tuned. There may be no such thing as the perfect crime, but it remains a promising thematic vehicle for getting ever closer to perfection in cinema.

Related Content:

How Sergio Leone Made Music an Actor in His Spaghetti Westerns, Creating a Perfect Harmony of Sound & Image

How David Lynch Manipulates You: A Close Reading of Mulholland Drive

Martin Scorsese Introduces Filmmaker Hong Sangsoo, “The Woody Allen of Korea”

The Five Best North Korean Movies: Watch Them Free Online

A Crash Course on Soviet Montage, the Russian Approach to Filmmaking That Revolutionized Cinema

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

The Secret of the “Perfect Montage” at the Heart of Parasite, the Korean Film Now Sweeping World Cinema is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/2GsV02r
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

Howard Zinn’s Recommended Reading List for Activists Who Want to Change the World

Image by via Wikimedia Commons Back in college, I spotted A People’s History of the United States   in the bags and on the bookshelves of many a fellow undergraduate. By that time, Howard Zinn’s alternative telling of the American story had been popular reading material for a couple of decades, just as it presumably remains a couple more decades on. Even now, a dozen years after Zinn’s death, his ideas about how to approach U.S. history through non-standard points of view remain widely influential. Just last month, Radical Reads featured the reading list he originally drew up for the  Socialist Worker , pitched at “activists interested in making their own history.” Zinn’s recommendations naturally include the work of other historians, from Gary Nash’s Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early America (“a pioneering work of ‘multiculturalism’ dealing with racial interactions in the colonial period”) to Vincent Harding’s There Is a River: The Black Struggle for ...
Post a Comment
Read more

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, personally, still require convincing on that point, just have a look at Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants , the drawings of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Elizabeth Blackwell’s  A Curious Herbal , and Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to mention the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe — all previously featured here on Open Culture. But those works concern themselves only with plant life as it exists above ground. What goes on down below, underneath the soil? That you can see for yourself — and without having to pull up one of our fine flowering (or non-flowering) friends to do so — at Wageningen University’s online archive of root system drawings . “The outcome of 40 years of  root system excavations in Europe,” says that site, the collection contains 1,180 diagrams of species from  Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christmas t...
Post a Comment
Read more