If You're Going to Make Art, Make It Properly

Today a student was reading a book about film. Film is a captivating medium. Filmmaking, especially, is all the more captivating. When I recall how I once struggled in my college days trying to shoot a film, and how that memory lingers even now, I think filmmaking is something worth attempting. Of course, these days vlogs have become so widespread that film can look like an easy medium. But making a credible film — capturing a single story within the span of roughly two hours — is at the very least not easy. Perhaps that is why the book the student was reading looked so crude to me. I felt that film could not possibly be treated this simply. And so I disliked that book.

Since ancient times the genre we call art has always been learned through apprenticeship, so describing film so briefly felt too much like a 'film learned the easy way,' which I disliked. Of course, not everyone is like that. There are geniuses from childhood, like Mozart. There are those, like Steven Spielberg, who achieve great success as directors while still in university. But because not everyone is so gifted, apart from those few with such talent, the rest entered film schools or art schools through apprenticeship; in the past they joined court-run groups that patronized musicians, or groups that patronized painters. In Joseon-era literature this showed up in works like An Min-yeong's 'Maehwasa,' and in England it was the paintings of William Turner.

But that student folded the book after only a few pages, so in truth he did not even manage that. It seemed like a book worth reading, but that was just my judgment, and when he came back holding a different book instead of the one that had seemed necessary, there was nothing more I could say to him. All that remained was to say that this was fine too. A pity.

Art is so intuitive that, once you have seen something, it is clear whether the work reaches you artistically or not. For me, Nam June Paik's 'The More the Better' — which I photographed long ago and placed as this post's image — was one such work. Both then and now, this work was 'the real thing.' So I came to think that if people who want to make art are too uncultured, it ends up as mere sentimentality, while at the same time, if they lack skill it looks too crude — and weighing that, I thought one truly has to become the real thing.

Indeed, one of my biggest regrets this year is not having run a filmmaking club. Next time, without fail.