Park Chan-Kyong

Belated Bosal

Park Chan-Kyong’s otherworldly film Belated Bosal primarily follows two women as they navigate their way up a spectral mountain and through what appears to be a history museum or nuclear disaster bunker. They converge to jointly perform a funeral rite in a shipping container, which a group of artisans temporarily convert into a makeshift Buddhist temple, replete with traditional paintings. Shot in crisp and densely detailed black-and-white negative, each frame is lit by the format’s spooky incandescence: shadows are white and the sun is black, as if the world were being viewed through X-ray, infrared camera or a plutonium-sensitive film. 

Both the imagery of the film as well as its title reference a specific account of the philosopher Siddhartha Gautama’s death (who later became known as the Buddha), as well as the notion of pursuing a path toward enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings, which is a foundational element of Buddhist faith and philosophy. By situating classical religious ideology and modes of visual representation against and within a frame of impending (or past, or present) disaster, Park seems to point toward the always-already present nature of catastrophe, as well as the possibility of non-dualistic and relativistic logics of Eastern philosophical systems to guide our approach to both scientific development and ecological catastrophe.