Dharmaga tongjoguro kan kkadalgun

Now the words "Korean art film from the 80s" should be enough to get film snobs and Asian cinema fans to watch this film. And how many films are about monastics, to boot? I agree with the reviewers who say this film is slow and incomprehensible. The Korean art professor who made this seemed more interested in making a pseudo-profound art film than an actual good film. The Zen koan-like utterings from the monks seem just a bit cliched. There was even a monastery cat in the window sill. Does it get any better than that?

Art films, especially foreign ones, will get a lot of rave reviews from critics and audiences alike for simply being pretentious and artsy. New York Times raved about this way back in 1993. Actually, this reminds me of Ponette (1994) - another very slow-moving, boring foreign film from around that time.

Still, I give 5 stars for some beautiful cinematography, hot actor (why doesn't he have any other credits besides this film?), and the unique subject matter. The hot actor looks like Sang Woo Kim, the British Korean model/artist on Instagram.

I watched this streamed on YouTube, but had a really hard time following and keeping interested. Maybe it's better if you watch it in a theater. This is a very little-known film from the 80s, but I can see art film houses screening this these days. This reminds me of a more recent monastery film, Into Great Silence (2005), a German documentary that followed around Carthusian monks in a French monastery. That documentary had no narrative, just silent, and just followed the monks about their lives.

Anyway, this is a decent film to attempt watching (good luck) if you want to add to your tiny arsenal of monastery films. You'll learn about Korean stuff you probably didn't know about, like the purple rice (black rice added to white, turns it purple).

Yong-Kyun Bae is an art professor at a university in Korea. "Dharma" was virtually a solo effort by him and it took ten years to complete. The movie has little plot to speak of, and consists of a series of images, a slide show of moving images about a man's path to Enlightenment. They are strikingly beautiful and force the viewer to contemplate one's own life and existence. On the surface, all of the images are serene but underneath them lie deep power and a palpable spiritual yearning. As one reviewer aptly put it, "This movie is not about Zen, it is Zen."

Bae has made a second movie which was released in 1997. It is also very contemplative but unfortunately is nearly incomprehensible.

I first saw this film several years ago, and I was told that it was so hard to understand. Then I studied more about Zen Buddhism, and slowly but surely, I did begin to understand.

The movie is considered the best film about Buddhism, and rightly so. The director, a professor at the Buddhist Dongguk University in Seoul, took seven years to make it and used non-actors to play the parts.

He recently remastered the image and dialogue in a new DVD release, but unfortunately, no extras or featurettes. This film is one of the greatest made, and I feel sorry that it hasn't gotten the proper DVD treatment it deserves.

Nonethless, this movie is a meditation about Buddhism, life and death, and our raison d'etre. Definitely not to be missed.

This film is perhaps the most visually stunning piece that I have ever seen. While it runs incredibly slow, and there is perhaps 10 minutes of talking in the entire film, it is not likely intended to be excited. The plot follows three monks, an old wise monk, a young man who has sought him out for guidance, and a young child who the monk took in as an infant. The story, what little there is, shows the old man leading his two students on the path to Buddhist enlightenment before he dies. Again there is only about 10 minutes of speaking in the entire movie, which leaves a great deal to the imagination and interpretation of the audience. This film is highly visual, and stunningly so. For those interested in watching a film for it's artistic value, and for those who are patient enough to watch a film about Zen Buddhism, this is a great movie.

The first time I rented this movie, I saw it with a friend. We quit halfway through after groaning with boredom, then spent the rest of the evening making fun of it. A year later I tried it again, and have seen it five times since. It is extraordinary and is more gripping and absorbing each time I watch it.

There is of course no plot, only a loose story which illustrates, both in its whole and many fragmentary parts, core questions and ideas of Buddhism regarding the impermanence of all things and the corrupting nature of human desire. I know only a little about Buddhism, but what little I had read since the first unsuccessful viewing was probably what helped me see it subsequent times. Like Buddhism, it employs profound calm to upset some fundamental attitudes about the world and makes these disturbances fascinating: suffering, loss, the desire to hold on to things, and the vanity of intellectual growth.

This is however not by any stretch an "ideas" movie. It was made by a painter and remains very much a kind of tone-poem for the screen. I recommend it highly.