봄 여름 가을 겨울... 그리고 봄

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring
Title (English)	Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring
Title (Korean)	봄, 여른, 가을, 겨을... 그리고 봄
Directed by	김기덕
Written by	김기덕
Running time	1 hour 45 minutes
Country	South Korea
Language	Korean

Plot

The film follows the story of a young monk with his Master living in an isolated floating monastery and shows the different stages of his life as told through five seasons

Spring

In Spring, he learns about respecting the living force of nature. And he also learns an important lesson that will echo throughout the film.

Summer

In Summer, he discovers love, lust and their pitfalls.

Fall

In Fall, he is forced to take responsibility for his actions- murdering his wife.

Winter

In Winter, arguably the harshest season; the apprentice becomes the master and he has to overcome both the mental and physical obstacles to take over the position that his master left.

... and Spring

And in the following Spring, he is now the master of the monastery, with a young apprentice who turns out to be as mischievous as him.

Cast

• Oh Yeongsu as the Old Monk/Master
• Kim Ki-duk as the Adult Monk
• Kim Youngmin as the Young Adult Monk
• Seo Jaekyung as the Teenage Monk
• Jong-ho Kim as the Boy Monk
• Ha Yeojin as the Girl
• Kim Jeong-yeong as the Girl's Mother

Awards and Nominations

Year	Award	Category	Nominee	Result
2003	Locarno International Film Festival	C.I.C.A.E. Award	Kim Ki-duk	Won
		Don Quixote Award	Kim Ki-duk	Won
		Netpac Award	Kim Ki-duk	Won
		Youth Jury Award	Kim Ki-duk	Won
		Golden Leopard	Kim Ki-duk	Nominated
	Blue Dragon Awards	Best Film		Won
	San Sebastián International Film Festival	Audience Award	Kim Ki-duk	Won
	European Film Awards	Screen International Award	Kim Ki-duk	Nominated
	Faro Island Film Festival	Golden Train Award	Kim Ki-duk (Jury Prize)	Won
			Kim Ki-duk (Best Film)	Nominated
2004	Bangkok International Film Festival	Golden Kinnaree Award	Kim Ki-duk/Best Film	Nominated
	Camerimage	Golden Frog	Bae Dong-hyeon	Won
	Grand Bell Awards, South Korea	Grand Bell Award	Best Film	Won
	Las Palmas Film Festival	Golden Lady Harimaguada	Kim Ki-duk	Won
	Pacific Meridian International Film Festival of Asia Pacific Countries	Grand Prix	Kim Ki-duk	Won
	Russian Guild of Film Critics	Golden Aries/Best Foreign Film	Kim Ki-duk	Won
	Satellite Awards	Golden Satellite Award	Best Motion Picture, Foreign Language	Nominated
2005	Argentinean Film Critics Association Awards	Silver Condor/Best Foreign Film, Not in the Spanish Language (Mejor Película Extranjera en Idioma no Español)	Kim Ki-duk	Won
	Association of Polish Filmmakers Critics Awards	Honorable Mention/Best Foreign film	Kim Ki-duk	Won
	Chlotrudis Awards	Best Movie	Kim Ki-duk	Won
		Best Cinematography	Baek Dong-hyun	Won
	Italian Online Movie Awards (IOMA)	Best Cinematography (Miglior fotografia)	Baek Dong-hyun	Nominated
2006	Bodil Awards	Best Non-American Film (Bedste ikke-amerikanske film)	Kim Ki-duk	Nominated
	Danish Film Awards (Robert)	Best Non-American Film (Årets ikke-amerikanske film)	Kim Ki-duk	Nominated
	Sofia International Film Festival	Burgas Municipality Award 'Silver Sea-Gull'	Kim Ki-duk	Won

Academic Analysis

Buddhism

Director Kim Ki-duk emphasized that he deliberately did not research about Buddhism nor consult any Buddhist experts prior to making the film because he did not intend for it to be received as a religious text. (Chung, 2012, 108) However, given the nature of the storyline, there is a tendency to discuss the film from a religious point of view. It is also significant to note that a significant amount of research focuses on the Buddhist aspects of the film.

The Role of Women in the Film

A. The Temptress

The highlight of the Summer episode is undoubtedly the teenage monk’s sexual awakening, where his thirst for sexual pleasure is aroused by an ailing young woman who arrives at the temple monastery to seek healing. Subsequently, he inevitably gives into his desires and forms an attachment with the woman which is an obstacle to his path to enlightenment. Given that the movie is generally presented from the young monk’s perspective, it is unavoidable that the viewers will perceive the young woman as a temptress and a distraction from his spiritual goal rather than just a mere love interest.

Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths teaches that life is suffering, and that suffering comes from thirst and desire. This teaching was evident in the film, with the adult monk ultimately murdering his wife after leaving the monastery to pursue her. According to the Sri Lankan Buddhist monk Walpola Rahula, the Buddha defines thirst and enumerates its different types:

"It is this “thirst” … which produces re-existence and re-becoming … and which is bound up with passionate greed … namely, (1) thirst for sense-pleasures … (2) thirst for existence and becoming … and (3) thirst for non-existence."*

With thirst as a hindrance to the path of enlightenment, the eradication of desire is important for monks and therefore remaining celibate is of utmost concern for them. Monastic codes in the Buddhist canon describe specific ways to remove desire, particularly by perceiving the body in itself as vile in order for one to detach himself from such physical and sexual desires. However, Sharon Suh (2015, 79) argues that in there is an inclination to think of “female bodies as dirty, loathsome, abhorrent, and by extension, material embodiments of the immoral” based on Buddhist canonical texts. Because of this, women are perceived to be representations of such desire and thirst that monks should eliminate [in order to achieve enlightenment].

Existing feminist literature on the film (Bartashius, 2017; Suh, 2015) argue that Buddhist literature not only views women lower than men, but more importantly, that women are characterized as evil. Sharon Suh (2015, 82) cites the tale of Sirima from the Dhammapada in the Theravada Pali Canon as an example. It tells the story of Sirima, a young former courtesan whose beauty arouses a young monk’s desire. He becomes so taken with her beauty that he seeks her out multiple times, finding her beautiful even when she fell quite ill. Knowing the situation, the Buddha decides to make a public display of her body after she dies (from her illness) as a way to provide a lesson in eliminating desire. Upon her death, the King was instructed by the Buddha to have Sirima’s body displayed in the cemetery. After three days, her body begins to bloat and decay with which the King announces that all should come to the cemetery to observe her body. The young monk rushes over to discover that her body is being sold for one thousand in cash, but no one is willing to buy her for any price. As the young monk meditates on her death, he realizes that the same woman who was the object of desire is now just a rotting corpse.

“Now there is no one who will take her even for free. Her beauty has perished and decayed.” Saying, “Monks, look at this diseased body,” he spoke the following verse [Dhammapada 147]: “Look at this decorated image, an elevated mass of wounds. This diseased thing is highly fancied, (although) it’s neither permanent or stable.”

The Young Woman in Summer

Although the young woman in the film did not intend to lure the young monk into breaking his vow of celibacy in the beginning through her actions, scenes succeeding their first sexual encounter evidently portray the young woman as a temptress. To cite some examples, there is a scene where she gestures to the young monk to come over to her side of the bed by lifting up her blanket to which he obliges, deliberately going over his master to get to her bed. And on her unknowingly last night in the temple, she leaves her room with a subtle but suggestive look towards the young monk which leads to their sexual encounter in the boat.

It is also important to note that it is only the woman and not sexuality in itself was portrayed as evil in the film. Suh (2015, 85) goes even further to argue that the film shows that “sexuality can be a profound teacher advancing the monk toward his spiritual awakening so long as he abandons the woman afterwards.” In the film, it can be seen that the Master does not explicitly condemn sexuality but actually suggests that it was cure to the young woman’s illness. However, similar to Sirima, whose deceased body was left to rot in public, the young woman is essentially abandoned by the young monk as well.

Wall-less Doors

The Young Monk's Trangression in Summer

The concept of wall-less doors is arguably one of the things that left the greatest impression in the film. For most of the story, the characters acknowledge the two doors for each “room” as the entry and exit points, consciously following the unwritten rule of passing through the door to arrive at the center room and subsequently leave the monastery. There is only one instance, however, where this rule was violated; in the Summer episode, the young monk deliberately ignores the door as he realizes that opening the door would wake his Master, thereby passing through the space beside it in order to move to the young woman’s “room”. With this, doors in the film can be seen as a representation of the rules or norms that society has. Furthermore, it can be said that the young monk’s conscious ignorance of such rule is evident of his transgression and deviation from the norm.

The Adult Monk in Winter

Francisca Cho (2014, 116-7) offers a more profound take on this arguing that the wall-less doors symbolize mental discipline and perception. The existence of these doors is constant reminder for the characters to be mindful, and therefore ignoring them shows unmindfulness and difficulty in maintaining one’s inner peace. Following this logic, the young monk’s deliberate ignorance of the door in the Summer episode not only shows his transgression, but how his mental discipline falters in the presence of women. This unmindfulness consequentially represents his “failure to maintain the clarity of one’s inner space”. However, the shift in the monk’s perception is evident in the Winter episode as he sits behind the door of his room, repeatedly opening and closing the door in order to catch a glimpse of the crying mother. In this scene, he now displays mental discipline as he mindfully glances at the mother.