And the Moon Sets Over the Temple That Was

A journey to find the headless Buddha statues scattered across a mountain in South Korea. People stroll along the river, the sea, and mountain paths, taking photographs, where images from the past and the desire for excavation overlap.

A few dozen metres offshore from a pebble beach, a small cluster of rocks juts out from the water. At first glance, there is nothing here worth stopping to look at, yet young Koreans arrive and strike a series of poses. But when a hand places an old photograph of the same spot over the scene, you begin to think that this place might be worth a closer look. The film won’t tell you that this is the location of the underwater tomb of the King of Silla, who unified Korea in the 7th century. The nature of the mounds that dot the landscape of the neighbouring city of Gyeongju; the structures rising there in the form of calabashes and pagodas; the reason you encounter so many decapitated Buddha statues there; or even the origin of the photographs superimposed over the landscapes, remain just as implicit. All the more so as the texts that appear on screen deliberately lead us down other paths: those of world exhibitions, creationist myths, the history of photographic techniques, and even archaeological digs.

Justin Jinsoo Kim, an experimental filmmaker trained in animation techniques at CalArts, is shooting his first feature film here, in his hometown, clearly relishing the slight sense of dissonance he is creating with the narrative form he has chosen, which undermines the meditative calm of his shots and the tranquillity of the soundtrack. This environment, composed of figures carved into the rock, majestic tombs with slumbering curves, temples and military fortifications, indigenous beliefs absorbed into Buddhist practices, ancient wars and colonial rule, gradually reveals a space saturated with heterogeneous temporalities. A historical palimpsest; or, to borrow Claude Debussy’s Orientalist title, and the source of the film’s title: an image that is at once simple and verbose, transparent and layered.

Antoine Thirion