In this blog post, I will use Director Im Kwon-taek’s film ‘Festival’ as a case study to analyze the various documentary elements embedded in the work by category.
First Impressions and Background of the Film ‘Festival’
When I watched the film ‘Festival,’ I was left with a strong impression that I had watched a documentary about a funeral rather than a feature film. That is why I chose Director Im Kwon-taek’s ‘Festival’ from among countless feature films. First, ‘Festival’ garnered attention because it was the first work in Korean art history where a novel and a film were created simultaneously, and because it took funerals as its subject matter. The film deals with funeral rituals in the Namdo region and, more broadly, Korean funeral customs. Its basic structure aligns with the funeral process, and the narrative unfolds around events occurring at the funeral venue. It also makes active use of subtitles to explain the funeral procedures, their meanings, and the rituals in detail. Below, I will examine the documentary elements evident in ‘Festival.’
Analysis by Documentary Type
Poetic Documentary
Poetic documentaries move beyond the concrete sense of time and space inherent in sequential editing or events, instead exploring patterns and connections formed through temporal rhythms and spatial juxtapositions. By drawing on historical reality as raw material and transforming it in specific ways, poetic documentaries tend to emphasize fragmentation and ambiguity. Due to these characteristics, the poetic approach seeks to convey meaning through the rhythm of emotions or a sequence of images rather than through a direct representation of events.
Expository Documentary
Expository documentaries appeal directly to the audience through subtitles and voice-overs that present a particular perspective, make arguments, or provide detailed explanations of history. It primarily uses authoritative narration to explain abstract information or complex actions and events that are difficult to convey through images alone. Its purpose lies in providing technical or informational explanations or conveying specific arguments, and it is a method commonly used in classical documentaries and TV documentaries. In ‘Festival’, the opening segment “Grandmother’s Story of Dementia” and “Jun-seop’s Perception of His Mother’s Grace” are narrated via voice-over. Additionally, the fairy tale segment titled “The Grandmother Flower Is the Hide-and-Seek That Counts the Days of Spring,” which is divided into seven parts and inserted throughout the film, is also presented via voice-over, directly highlighting the theme of filial piety. Therefore, it is clear that ‘Festival’ employs the style of an explanatory documentary.
Observational Documentary
Observational documentaries are characterized by their attempt to directly recreate and present “snapshots of life” or specific events. The director minimizes intervention to maintain a detached stance, adopting a neutral and critical attitude devoid of voice-over narration, intertitles, or interviews. This is known as Direct Cinema. If we view ‘Festival’ as a documentary, this approach can be seen as predominant. In other words, it gives the impression that the director is filming the funeral scene from an observer’s perspective without imposing any particular intent, and the characters appear to converse and act autonomously and independently rather than following a script or the director’s control.
Participatory Documentary
Participatory documentaries stem from the desire to clearly reveal the director’s perspective and are based on interviews. The presence of the director or production team becomes apparent as they participate in the events, and this is primarily expressed through interviews. In ‘Festival’, the scenes featuring reporter Jang Hye-rim’s interviews fall into this category, demonstrating the process through which this participatory quality emerges. These include scenes where Jang Hye-rim interviews villagers to gather information, such as stories about the elderly mother’s past, accounts of dementia, and evaluations of Jun-seop. In this way, Jang Hye-rim takes on the role typically played by the director in a conventional documentary, acting as a journalist and serving as an intermediary between the audience and the subject. This participatory quality is significant because, along with voice-over narration, it constitutes the majority of the documentary techniques used in ‘Festival’. In other words, ‘Festival’ achieves its documentary effect by combining explanatory voice-over narration with the interview format.
Lifestyle, Reflective, and Performative Documentaries
Lifestyle documentaries reveal the conventions of documentary representation to the audience and do not conceal the director’s presence. They challenge the attribute of objectivity in documentaries and expose the subjective choices involved in filmmaking. Reflective documentaries reveal not the events or figures themselves, but the way they are filmed, showing the entire production process to the audience. This results in the reflexive approach questioning the documentary’s ability to reveal the truth. Performative documentaries evoke the styles and atmospheres traditionally found in fiction films.
In addition to these general characteristics, ‘Festival’ stands out for its active use of subtitles. From the perspective of the film as a whole, the flow of the funeral proceedings, the names of the rituals, and the relationships between them are revealed in detail through subtitles from beginning to end. In a sense, the documentary nature of ‘The Funeral’ becomes particularly clear through these subtitles. Therefore, this can be seen as a unique characteristic of ‘The Funeral’—a technique specific to director Im Kwon-taek that is not found in existing documentary genres.
