Trailer

Hello, my name is Yu Young Lee. I am currently a sophomore attending Georgetown University in Washington DC, and I’m majoring in English. 

Hearing David Rubin talk about the casting process as an unapologetically creative one has made me appreciate just how experimental and unbound the whole filmmaking process is. And how in this freedom that is so intrinsic to this artistic endeavor, there is just so much possibility. Now more than ever, we are going beyond these questions about who best fits a mold, and we’re starting to think about the mold itself. What kinds of stories are we telling? What kinds of stories are we listening to? Whose voices have the mic? And whose voices deserve to have their turn? 

Rubin’s experiences with an array of genres, actors and stories, his advocacy for all sorts of films, especially those outside the quote unquote “mainstream”, resonates deeply with me. I was born in Korea, and I have spent most of my life outside of it, growing up in Indonesia, the United Kingdom, Singapore, and now, the United States. I can’t really say that I have a home in the most conventional terms, but I find one on the bridges intersecting all these facets of myself and the art I immerse myself in. 

Rubin mentions how he takes pride in the changing of the name of the “Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film” to “Best International Feature Film.” and I too believe it’s an important change, a critical one even. 

To some, one word is a subtlety that hardly makes a difference but the bridge of “inter” in internationalism is not lost on me. The abrasiveness of such a word like “foreign” isn’t lost on me either. “Foreign” is akin to “alien.” and to have a concept like “foreign” in such an innately diverse world of film is to demarcate the scopes of the human experience. 

When Parasite won Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay this year, a lot of people asked me what I thought. How did I feel, as a Korean to see a Korean film have such a victory? Was I proud? Well, yes, of course I was. But I was more hopeful of what it represented. Later on in this interview, David Rubin says, “people fundamentally want to be heard and want to be seen,” and in that global moment of Parasite’s recognition, it felt like I was seeing into a peephole of the future where Rubin’s words ring truer than ever.  

It was a victory of art, for art. Because the real success of Parasite is not a translation of the Korean language, although this in itself is not to be dismissed, but rather a transcendence of film as an shared experience. 

When you see a good film, you know. It’s hard to put this universality and power into words, but I’d like to share a short prose poem that I wrote in my attempts to describe it. 

<Trailer or trying to describe what good film is in the span of a shortening minute>

Only in this instance is time measured by your inability to grasp it. The slippage, like porridge through your fingers, only it tastes better. When in the 5th grade, they talked about synesthesia, you didn’t really understand how the senses eloped together and transcended one another, how it could all muddle up so decidedly in your brain. Like you could have taste buds on the soles of your feet, the ground you tread made a palatable palette.

But here, your eyes are eating the moving pictures up like breakfast. Each frame and frequency add up to instances, one heralding the next, and the next thing you know, you are watching many instances; you have forgotten what an instance is. 

They all disappear into one phantasmic feeling that leaves your gut shivering and your heart quaking. 

Photo by Jake Hills on Unsplash

On cinematographer Matthew Libatique

In learning about cinematography, through the eyes and lens of Matthew Libatique, what’s illuminating to me is the conscientiousness that permeates his work.

It’s not to say that that other filmmakers are thoughtless in their creative direction, that every shot is serendipitously stitched together — that most definitely isn’t the case, with so many breathtaking films and renowned cinematographers. It’s more that the depths of Libatique’s thinking and decisions with light and his camera speak to his immense love of the form and awareness of the effect it holds on viewers.

Our attention only goes so far — and yes, although a film dictates our gaze in the first few minutes, this flighty and easily lost thing must be earned throughout the rest of the hour. And it seems that the threshold into focus, a sharp kind of engagement where the moving pictures have an audience pinned in place, is blurrier and difficult to reach, in practice. I’ve noticed that many times, the best films only feel like one after the credits roll. It’s like the idea that I’m actually watching something, that what I’m watching is a movie, disintegrates and the parts only piece themselves together after.

The more films I watch, the more I see how subconsciously, good cinematography captures me. Flashy, pointedness in what’s captured in the frame is sometimes so striking and commanding that it is jarring. But to realize the frame’s holding power on the technical terms, on a very conscious level, rather than subliminally understanding its perfect manifestation within and of the story, is the difference between taking you out of it and drawing you that much closer, between distracting the story, even if it is a beautiful distraction, and ascending it.

It’s also intriguing to me how he talks about how conscious he is about history, legacy, and power — who wrote it, creates it, holds it, and most importantly, who shares and tells others of it and how. What has defined and dominated our artistic appreciation, is so intrinsically tied to a discriminatory curation, a red rope that has left countless voices, stories, visions and ideas go unheard.

So many — especially black and indigenous people, people of color, the LGBTQ+ community, women — have been disenfranchised in creative ways that seem insignificant alongside political and historical injustices, but are in fact, the truth and mark of the political and the historical.

When Libatique speaks about Spike Lee and his first time seeing Do the Right Thing, and how Lee awakened a new understanding of cinema for him, I could feel how monumental that moment was for him. And that realization that this was a possibility, took Libatique to where he is now, making films that hopefully are sparking the same fire in other young aspiring filmmakers and creatives.

Yu Young Lee is our Digital Media Coordinator and Co-Host The Creative Process’ - Poetry & Prose.