Change Your Image
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dahcima
Reviews
Nevertheless (2006)
Fearless young filmmaker opens up new possibilities for her medium
Brave World
October 4, 2008
by Yvette Pantilla
Fearless young filmmaker opens up new possibilities for her medium
Brave. Bewildering. It's been a long time since I saw a film by a young filmmaker that simply blew me away.
Somewhat unappreciated in her own country, and even by her own family, 21 year-old Dahci Ma from South Korea (we were told her name translates to "dry seaweed" in English) treads through familiar territory, in her own distinct way. If you are looking for something to wake people up from a cynical stupor, this one made the audience at Mogwai (Cubao Expo) one rainy Saturday night, sit up and pay attention.
She is straightforward and subtle at the same time. She explores ideas and approaches that even filmmakers twice her age have never dared to explore. Being young, she is fearless, but at the same time, she has none of the annoying arrogance that accompanies youth. Dahci Ma looks just like any other unassuming Korean student visiting the Philippines, but the work she produces is nothing like what one would expect of a typical 21 year-old.
While others timidly dip their toes into unfamiliar waters, Dahci Ma dives in and deals with the consequences later. See her short films made me believe again in the possibilities of filmmaking.
She attacks the issue of disability quite matter-of-factly, in Nevertheless. The great thing about the film is we come out the viewing experience seeing that instead of the actor being made into an object of pity (the Hollywood approach), one is happy to discover that there is a very straightforward way to answer the secret question we sometimes ask, "How do disabled people have sex?" We learn they have normal desires and needs, just like everyone else. We learn not to be patronizing. During the post-screening table discussion (over several drinks) many of us admitted we used to think that disabled individuals simply didn't, or couldn't, have sex.
More mature audiences would not need to ask what the importance of her work is. I found myself silently fuming at uninformed audience members who asked "What is the point?" and made ridiculous comments like, "I wish you had prepared us for this better."
As filmmaker Emmanuel Dela Cruz of UFO Pictures said to the group gathered later that evening, "We're not suppose hold your hand and prepare you to like this."
Such is the frustration of people who have educated themselves and sought out different forms of film other than the usual Hollywood fare. It is not unusual to hear some guest say, upon entering an art gallery, "I don't know much about painting or sculpture
but (here the viewer states his opinion anyway)."
Unfortunately with film, audiences do not offer an apology for not being educated enough or equipped with enough information on filmmaking to be able to give an intelligent opinion. We encourage young, talented people like Dahci M keep going, in the face of so many who previously dismissed her. It would tickle me to find out that the same ones who dismiss her today will have to eat their words in the near future.
* This article is published with permission from Yvette Pantilla.
The Mysteries of Nature (2008)
Dahci Ma's lyrical exploration of the three realms
THE MYSTERIES OF NATURE Dahci Ma's lyrical exploration of the three realms by Deborah Greenhut, PhD
THE MYSTERIES OF NATURE comprises a diptych portraying human beings' spiritual relationships with the sky and the earth. Through beautiful and complex imagery, the film relies on contemporary technology and cinematic capture to illustrate the interdependence of the three realms, sky, earth, and human, which is a core trinity of Korean religion. In the two parts of the film, the primitive and the modern find their complements in one another. Dahci Ma, the director, collaborated to assemble the essence of yin and yang through a careful progression of mirroring images and repetitions of movement and image in the different realms—cinematic quotes that signify their interrelated, yet mysterious, essences.
At one end of the film, the dancers appear to merge with the sky as the climb a minimalist tower; at the other, they build reverential piles of stones. In both sequences of the film, viewers are compelled to strive with the dancers. Ma arranges and shifts perspectives and colors between the blue of the sky and the ochre of the earth. Viewers can easily empathize with the exertions of the dance. That all is interrelated is a point reinforced by Ma's frequent quotations of the film's own narrative. A strategic huddle of humans resembles the earth. The frame divides, offering a witty play on parallax view of the sky through the tower. This filmmaker is always thinking; her portrayal of a multi-layered dialectic is fluid and compelling. The ascent to probe the sky is powered by the angles and lines of the dancers' skeletons, mirrored in the rods of the tower; the corresponding dancers' delve into the earth is accomplished by burrowing their round parts in the dirt
.heads, buttocks, musculature, the ball of a foot echo the hard stones so laboriously lifted into the center.
On first viewing, it may appear that two films have been joined together, linked by brief footage of black on white negative imagery in which the poles reverse from modern to primitive. The first sequence, primarily entailing blue-robed dancers' ascent to the sky, includes elements of the second, which depicts "grounded," earth-rubbed dancers probing the earth with every pore. A flock of pigeons, who have access to both sky and earth, seems, at first, to be all that ties the two beautiful halves together. But an attentive look reveals the intense interdependence of the first five minutes on the second. The capture begins with a lingering look at the shadow of a tower on the land, and then the following minute of the film surveys the entire landscape, high and low. The breathing of a single earthbound dancer captures the eye, and the pattern of dirt on his back and shoulders seems to replicate the structural pattern of the tower. One realm is never far from the other; always interrelated. This dancer's earthbound exertions echo the climbers on the tower just as the percussion of his breathing echoes the wind in that structure. By locating echoes of the sky on the earth, the filmmaker profiles the dancer's ascent to the sky. The mysteries are linked, and human efforts to understand or be immersed in them run a similar course. At about two and a half minutes, the film depicts two dancers at the same level of its' lattice work, presented to appear as a two-way mirror image of one another, revealing an idea that repeats in exciting variations throughout the film. Following this mirror, we see the sky reflected on the earth reflected back into the sky as the tower is captured from a new angle that depicts the dancer as a spider patrolling its web. The cranes and wires that enable these striking images are not visible to the viewer, but the impossible positions are another reminder of humans' attempts to merge sky and earth. In the fourth minute, we return to the ground, the sky-draped body curled opposite an earth-covered human around a circular pile of stones, and the ochre color is introduced. The two parts of the film are both divided and linked by a brief black and white sequence that comprises a yin and yang-like assembly of birds, rocks, and humans into the previous image. What we see for the next four or so minutes is the humans' achievement of that circular pile of stones.
In Korean philosophy, a deity can inhabit such a form. Shaky and intense, these dancers climb about the earth and in the dirt with the same passion of the dancing climbers in the first half of the film. In this primal ooze, the dancers exhibit jerky, uncertain infantile motions, contrasting with the agility of the sky dancers, and the image is often framed by fingers of light in the outer corners as if someone is looking down on and perhaps photographing or capturing the scene. This exhausting merger with the earth parallels the climb in the first half. The dancers complete the pile, rest, and then move to another part of the earth to begin moving rocks again. As they start to merge with another hill, there is a blackout, which concludes the film. We can assume the actions will recycle in time beyond the film.
While the film has been related in two parts, there is, finally, little division between the realms apart from the (limited) vocabulary we have to describe them. Ascent. Descent. Exertion. Release. Air. Earth. Birds. Humans. The fluidity of this film is all one verb: Dance. Which is also a noun.
* This article is published with permission from Dr. Deborah S. Greenhut.
Dr. Deborah S. Greenhut teaches writing at New Jersey City University. She serves on the board of Jennifer Muller/The Works, for whom she is developing a film on technique.