"Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring"의 두 판 사이의 차이

2022년 12월 22일 (목) 01:48 판

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring
Theatrical release poster
Title (English)	Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring
Title (Korean)	봄 여름 가을 겨울 그리고 봄
Directed by	Kim Ki-duk
Produced by	Karl Baumgartner Lee Seung-jae
Starring	O Yeong-su Kim Ki-duk Kim Young-min Seo Jae-kyung Park Ji-a Ha Yeo-jin Kim Jong-ho
Release date	19 September 2003
Running time	103 minutes
Country	South Korea Germany
Language	Korean

Plot

This film is divided into five chapters which are the four seasons – spring, summer, fall, winter, and spring again. It depicts a cycle of karma, and a cycle of life.

Spring

An old monk and his disciple – a child monk live in a monastery floating in the middle of a lake surrounded by mountains and woods. The only vehicle that takes the two to the surrounding mountains and the gate, yet freestanding, to the outside world is a rowboat. One day, the mischievous child monk goes to the woods alone and mercilessly ties a fish, a frog and a snake with small stones and strings. He then returns them to the nature and giggles when he sees them struggling to move freely. The omnipresent old monk witnesses the wrongdoing but doesn’t stop the child. Instead, he ties a large piece of rock to the disciple when he is asleep. When the child monk wakes up the next morning, he complains about the great burden from the rock and begs to be released. His master then tells him to go back to the woods to release the animals he mistreated yesterday, with the rock on his back. If any of them die, he will ‘carry the stone in his heart for the rest of his life’. In the end, only the frog lives. The child monk remorsefully stares at the dead snake and fish and the regretful tears teaches him a great lesson.

Summer

The child monk has turned into a 17-year-old boy. A mother and her teenage daughter visited the isolated monastery because the daughter is mysteriously ill and she hopes the old monk can cure her during her daughter’s stay. The arrival of the girl arouses the sexual desire of the boy monk. Fail to resist the temptation, the two copulate on the rocks near a stream and inside the rowboat. The forbidden affair and lovemaking are eventually discovered by the old monk. The stern-faced master warns his disciple that ‘Lust leads to desire for possession, and possession leads to murder’, which becomes a foreknowledge of the disciple’s fate. The old monk dismisses the girl since she has been ‘healed’. Heartbroken, the boy monk furtively puts the stone Buddha statue into his rucksack and leaves the temple for the secular world, following the girl.

Fall

Years have passed and the boy monk becomes a young man with beard and fully grown hair. He retreats to the monastery from the outside world with new identities – a murderer and a fugitive. He has killed his disloyal wife, presumably the girl he met in Summer, with a knife. Attempted to atone, he uses the same knife to tonsure and tries to commit suicide by covering his sense organs with thin papers written ‘shut’ in Chinese character. However, the attempted suicide is in vain as the old monk said “though you can so easily kill, you yourself cannot be easily killed’. The old monk dips the tail of his white cat in black ink and writes the Heart Sutra on the wooden deck of the floating monastery. He orders his disciple to carve every character out which will drive out the anger from his heart when he completes. Two detectives from the outside world track the fugitive to the monastery but the old monk persuades them to wait until the disciple finishes the carving. The overnight carving restores his emotional equilibrium, and he follows the detectives back to the outside world and faces the lawful punishment. Upon his departure, the old monk sets up a pyre on the rowboat, covers his sense organs with papers written ‘shut’ and self-immolate.

Winter

The uninhabited monastery is fixed in the middle of the frozen lake. The disciple, who is now a more mature adult, returns to the monastery and replaces the position of his late master. The man retrieves the relics of his master from the incineration site, wraps them in a red paper and secures them in the ice Buddha he carved. His solitary life is disturbed by the visit of a veiled mother with a baby boy. The mother’s face is not shown but the tears oozing from the veil show her sorrow. She leaves the baby behind but loses her life when she flees overnight as she falls into the hole in the lake carved by the protagonist for fresh water. Guilt-ridden, the adult monk treks up the nearby mountain while dragging a grinding stone and carrying a statue of Pensive Maitreya Bodhisattva. He struggles with the steep slopes and cold weather but eventually made a successful ascent of the mountain and attains enlightenment. The monk sits with crossed legs alongside the Bodhisattva statue, gazing the monastery in the lake.

…and Spring

A new cycle of season starts with spring again. The baby boy left by the veiled mother has grown to be a child monk. Similar to the protagonist’s old self, the boy enjoys cavorting tiny animals and torturing a fish, a frog and a snake by stuffing pebbles into their mouths. A new cycle of karma commences and the film ends with the Bodhisattva statue at the mountain top overlooking the monastery and the lake with a transcendental gaze…

Cast

O Yeong-su as Old Monk
Kim Ki-duk as Adult Monk
Kim Young-min as Young Adult Monk
Seo Jae-kyeong as Boy Monk
Ha Yeo-jin as The Girl
Kim Jong-ho as Child Monk
Kim Jeong-yeong as The Girl’s Mother
Ji Dae-han as Detective Ji
Choi Min as Detective Choi
Park Ji-a as The Baby’s Mother
Song Min-young as The Baby

Release and Reception

Awards and Nominations

The film achieved gross box office of US$2,380,788 in the United States and Canada and gross worldwide box office of US$8,945,072.
감독의 최고작

Academic Analysis

Animals

Animals appear consistently throughout the film and they each carries symbolic meanings. In spring, the child monk plays with a puppy on the wooden deck of the floating monastery. Spring is the first seasonal chapter of the film. The appearance of a puppy symbolizes innocence and childhood of the child monk. The child monk mistreats the small animals with strings and stones with a naïve look and only after the punishment of the old master, he learns what he did was wrong.

During the summer which the sexual sentience of the boy monk ripens, a rooster appears. Its first appearance is shown when the mother and teenage girl visit the monastery from the outside world. Later, upon discovering the lovemaking of the boy and the girl, the old monk uses a leashed rooster to pull the rowboat, with the naked couple asleep, back to the monastery. According to the Buddhist Wheel of Life (the bhavachakra), a rooster symbolises one of the three poisons of life, locating at the centre of the wheel along with a pig and a snake, and embodies the lust and desire. When the boy monk decides to follow the girl to the mundane world, he leaves the monastery with the stone Buddha statue and the rooster. With the scene of the rooster walking freely in the woods, it indicates that the desire of the boy monk has left for the outside world.

With the absence of the disciple and the stone Buddha statue, the old monk brings back a white cat to the monastery as a company. The white cat is carried in a rucksack with its head out which resembles the scene of the stone Buddha statue taken away by the boy monk in the previous chapter (Cho, 2014). The cat also goes onto the altar where the Buddha statue used to be, as if it is a replacement of the Buddha. Interestingly, instead of using a brush pen to write the Heart Sutra on the wooden deck, the old monk makes use of the cat’s tail. As the old monk says carving the Heart Sutra can clear the rage in his disciple’s mind, the white cat can be treated as an instrument to transform despair to enlightenment (Cho, 2014; Pak, 2009). The cat is found on the rowboat when the two detectives and the disciple are leaving the monastery. It then casually climbs on a tree, presumably in the outside world, as if its substitution role of the stone Buddha has been completed, since the disciple has brought back the stone Buddha statue.

After the self-immolation of the old monk, a snake is seen gliding through the lake and back to the monastery. The snake sits on the clothing left by the old monk and is seen moving around the room when the new master of the monastery (the protagonist) prays, although winter should be its hibernation period. This convinces us that the snake is the incarnation of the master and observes his disciple even after his death. Winter is not the first chapter which a snake appears. In spring, a snake vomits blood and dies after the torture from the child monk. In summer, the teenage monk witnesses the sexual intertwining of two snakes, which symbolises the awakening of his sexual desire (Green, 2019). Snake has been portraited as a negative symbol across Buddhism and the Bible. Snake represents aversion, one of the three poisons of life in the Buddhist Wheel of Life. According to the Wheel of Life, a rooster, a pig (which represents ignorance) and a snake bite each other’s tail and form an unbreakable circle. To break the circle, we must let go of the desire, ignorance and aversion. In the Bible, the snake (the serpent) seduced Eve to eat the fruit of the tree in the Garden of Eden. Despite God’s warning, Eve failed to resist the serpent’s temptation and shared the fruit with Adam. In the end, Eve and Adam were banished from the garden, and the serpent was punished to crawl on the ground.

When the seasonal cycle recommences with spring, the orphaned child monk plays with a turtle by constantly knocking its shell and flipping it over. Turtle is an emblem of wisdom and longevity (Green 2019) which echoes with the enlightenment of the protagonist in the winter chapter. The three animal victims – a fish, a frog and a snake appear in the film three times – being tied with strings and stones by the young protagonist in spring, montage footage during his penance in winter, and being forcefully stuffed with pebbles by the new child monk. The repetitive appearance reflects the circularity of life.

The floating monastery in the middle of the lake is isolated from the outside world and the whole film illustrates a story in a timeless manner. Similar to the Aesop’s Fables, the animals symbolise different seasons and the director admitted that the inclusion of animal representation ‘delimits the passage of time’ (ref).

Buddha’s Gaze

A filming technique called shot-reverse shot was repeatedly used in the film. This technique is often used when two characters are facing each other and the shots show what they see from their angles (film ref). From the film, despite the lack of dialogues, shot-reverse shots demonstrated the interaction between Buddha and other characters. These shots allow audiences to see who come before the stone Buddha statue – first the old monk in spring, the sleeping teenage girl in summer, the anguish murderous man in fall and the sorrowful crying mother in winter. Everyone looks at the stone Buddha and their cries have been witnessed and heard by the Buddha, yet the Buddha does nothing.

When the protagonist is younger, he often climbs and stands on the shoulder of a huge Buddha statue and gaze from the same direction. However, at that time, the young mind sees only the matters in the mundane world – the boy monk spots the mother and the girl for the first time, symbolizing the desire he faces. In contrast, the iconic scene of the adult monk sitting with crossed legs and facing the lake along with the Pensive Maitreya Bodhisattva statue indicates that he has achieved enlightenment after asceticism. Maitreya is believed to be the future Buddha and the bodhisattva of compassion. He empathizes all living beings in the earthly realm and carries the great virtue of patience (buddhis ref). Cho (2014) suggested that the final overhead shot of the film implies that Maitreya Bodhisattva peers at the lake and the temple, as if he is quietly observing people’s suffering in the secular world in microcosm.

Four Noble Truths

Karma (with Wheel of Life)

Freestanding Gate Doors

Freestanding gate doors

Nio (인왕역사)

Wall-less Interior of the Temple

The White Line

Heart Sutra

Urna

Ritual Representation

Discussion

Is Spring a Buddhist film?

The director was raised as a Christian and mentioned that he didn’t seek technical advice from Buddhist experts or deliberately produce the film as a Buddhist film. However, film critics have suggested multiple theories and correlation between the film and Buddhism.

Same child actor in two Spring seasons

Correlation with other films / dramas

- Pachinko - 살인자의 추억

Bibliography

References

External Links