Night Journey
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Korean Cinema’s Celluloid Fever: The 1970s
May 15 - 26
Rare in 1970s Korean cinema for treating its female protagonist as a full subject, Kim Soo-yong’s film about the psychological unraveling of a restless bank clerk pushed Korean cinema’s expressive range into new territory.
A bank clerk—Yun Jeong-hee (Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry), with Shin Sung-il as her complacent lover—drifts through a life of accumulating restlessness: an affair that leaves her unsatisfied, late-night wandering, desires the world around her has no category for. Rare in 1970s Korean cinema for treating its female protagonist as a full subject, the film embeds her psychological unraveling within the broader symptoms of the era—Vietnam War fallout, the hollowness of Yushin-era social conformity, ordinary people who need alcohol just to feel alive. Kim Soo-yong uses editing, cinematography, and sound not simply to carry a story but to render interior states, pushing Korean cinema’s expressive range into new territory. Made in 1973 and suppressed by censors for four years, it was finally released with dozens of cuts. Quiet, elliptical, unsettling: a film out of time, waiting for its time. Restored in 2011 by the Korean Film Archive.
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