Rituals are used to tie together communities, to reinforce identity. They are necessarily meaningful and repetitive. Often times they are associated with spirituality and with the intangible – intangible rewards, intangible bonds. They are particularly important in the establishment of a “nation” – as in, a group of people who share commonalities, esp. a common history – thus, the nation as an “imagined community” (Benedict Anderson).
Still, there is a possible negative aspect of rituals. As the Strictly Film School blog says in reviewing Kim Ki-Duk’s Time: “the metaphoric collapse… of humanity itself, where identity is reduced to the reinforcement of meaningless social rituals”. So when rituals lose their meaning, they lose their emotional power, even though society may still require them to be enforced. Rituals might lose their meaning if they lose their relevance – if the external world changes too much, and the once-potent rituals become backward. This plays a role in the loss of traditions. Other times, rituals may be meaningless because they never had a meaning to begin with (but were reinforced in order to uphold, say, market capitalism or a totalitarian government). Rituals can also be directly harmful to certain members of society, and as a society’s values change, these rituals are increasingly seen in a negative light – in order to reduce their social power, these “negative” rituals are seen as “meaningless”. Time, about the evils of plastic surgery, (too) blatantly criticizes Korea’s social norms. Most critics saw Time as overwrought, too moralistic in its condemnation of the Korean plastic surgery trend.
Spring, Summer, however, is criticized for not being critical enough of these negative social rituals, but celebrating them instead, even if it means “selling” “authentic” Korea or reinforcing Korea’s patriarchy (“the killings are all forced upon animals and women… Why doesn’t Mom get to carve through her so-called ‘sin’?” – Adam Hartzell).
Spring, Summer is a very meditative movie. It is an example of “a historical, situated film: a body that intends in relation to the world and other films… ethically-invested. The materiality of the (non-metaphorical) film-body claims its world – the vagaries of time and space are brought together, are synthesised in its experience… active cinema allows us to see film-intention in action” (Daniel Frampton, Phenomenology). Likewise, as Amos Gitaï (director of Kadosh, a movie about Judaism made by a nonreligious Israeli, and has been criticized as demeaning Orthodox Jews – an interesting common experience he shares with Kim Ki-Duk) says, “cinema often has a ritualistic element. You have a fetish, a very powerful fetish, and that is the camera. Sometimes it is too powerful. [The camera] moves, circling objects and human beings. In a way, that is what [religious] ritual was always about.”
Everything in Spring, Summer is deliberate, and makes ample use of both time and space in order to create a kind of intangible order and structure. The cinematography is ritualistic: every season opens with the ceremonial doors at the edge of the lake opening through no human power; the slow repetition of the animals held down by stones.
Spring, Summer is full of ritualistic performance too – scheduled prayer, walking through doors when there is no wall, because the division between rooms must be somehow upheld. However, these rituals are not static: in Spring, they are respected and taught; in Summer, they are broken, with the result of the young monk leaving the temple for the “material world”. At the beginning of Fall, we learn that the young monk has killed his wife. If critics stop here, it is easy to conclude that Kim Ki-Duk is both orientalizing Korea (by stressing the traditional rituals as good, pure, natural), and reinforcing social norms (because not following the social norms of walking through doors, not sitting on Buddhas, listening to your elders results in murder; women are the bringer of men’s corruption).
However, penance and correction of the balance are not associated with a complete return to the norms of Spring. While carving the sutras is a form of Buddhist spiritual therapy, painting them multiple colors is not (neither is using a cat’s tail to paint the sutras). The ritual is embellished. Nor does the “spiritual cleansing” of the cops (they participate in painting) result in the young monk escaping punishment – the modern world cannot be ignored, and its laws must be enforced. The world has changed; the ritual changes with it. Unlike the old monk who sleeps through the night as if disturbances in the temple don’t exist, in Winter the young – now adult – monk consciously acknowledges that the wall to the bedroom does not exist and watches the crying woman through the empty space, although the door is still respected. The ritual is altered. The ritual of final penance of dragging the stone up the hill and meditating at the top of the hill is one Kim Ki-Duk invented. A ritual is invented.
So what is the ethical intention of this reconfiguration of ritual? Maybe it has to do with the reconfiguration of norms -> the subtle reshaping of social norms. Social norms and politics are in dialogue – as one changes, the other must adjust, however slowly. Spring, Summer doesn’t reflect a reinforcement of social norms, but a subtle shifting of them, as seen through changing rituals. By adapting to changing external contexts (namely political contexts), the temple neither gives in to the force of change nor completely retreats from the force of change.
In Kim Ki-Duk’s 3-Iron, a similar evolution occurs. A man breaks into houses when no one’s home to eat their food and drink their tea; when a married woman turns out to be home, they fall in love, and try to create a home-like atmosphere that has to be conscious of existing social norms and try to get around them by being subversive.
Cynthia Fuchs writes of it: “Together they live as pseudo ghosts, unmoored to any address or community, losing and also finding themselves in the shadows of others.”
So as Korean cinema is reined in by censorship, rituals are re-imagined, reconfigured, reborn (rebirth is a theme that Spring, Summer meditates on) in order to survive in the new political environment while still maintaining space for another vision of the world, whether it is traditional/Buddhist/Christian/something else entirely.
Seen another way, this process might reflect the nation-state’s efforts to survive the wave of globalization. Some scholars view the fates of nation-states as either: 1) becoming absorbed into a homogenized world/Western culture; or 2) becoming anti-modern and degenerating into local identities and conflicts, tribal warfare. But there is a third path – the nation-state can adapt to the social, cultural, economic, technological, military changes that globalization brings and survive.
