12.12: The Day — Kim Seong-su [NYAFF ’24 Review]

“In the end, they swallowed up the nation as a whole.” The last lines of the epilogue intertitle of Kim Sung-soo’s 12:12: The Day roll on top of a faded, real black-and-white photo of the men behind the South Korean military coup d’état of December 12. The spotty and sickly monochrome image inserts the film’s events into both reality and the past — a distant past that can only be remembered without color. Of course, 1979 wasn’t that long ago and color photography had been around for several decades (even if it wasn’t the norm for photojournalism), and we know precisely the hues of general Chun Doo-hwan’s skin. Even the men enacting the coup are slightly removed from reality: Hwang Jung-min plays Chun Doo-gwang, not Chun Doo-hwan; Jung Woo-sung is Lee Tae-shin rather than Jang Tae-wan; the list could go on. The point of 12:12: The Day seems to be not to rehash the historical happenings of the fateful day, but to supplicate an image of the soul of Seoul as a resilient, brave, and honorable city with a population that fights for each other.

12:12: The Day begins with the news of the assassination of dictator president Park Chung-hee and a declaration from the bad guys that “the world is the same” as it was before, a comment that leans into viewers’ historical knowledge of what will happen: Major General Chun Doo-hwan will successfully stage a military coup and hold control of the lower half of the peninsula until 1988; his dictatorship will in short time lead to the Gwangju Uprising (a favorite democratic movement of Korean cinema (A Taxi Driver, 1987: When the Day Comes, & even the film that began the Korean New Wave in Peppermint Candy); and his tyranny will ultimately inspire the final push for a full democracy in South Korea. Kim’s film traces the change of the world as a line of continuity through President Park’s assassination and President Chun’s 1987 concession and to the democratic end that South Korea now enjoys. Brilliantly, he alludes to this in what might be the film’s lone shot of a civilian mass, one of cinema’s longest, strongest symbols of democracy, as the title card imprints. The bright sun grants the faces of the crowd anonymity, and through the anonymity, guides the viewer to see themselves in the crowd and see the Seoul of today as emerging from the political war that follows the title card.

Continue reading at In Review Online.