The Silence of Love

(Nimui chimmuk)

Directed by Han Okhi

South Korea, 1991, digital video, color, 36 min.

In this later work, director Han Okhi returns to her origins as a scholar of Korean poetry to transform the verse of Han Yong-un (1879–1944)—popularly known as Manhae—into a collage of stunning “cinepoems.” Han’s short film features fifteen poems from the eponymous The Silence of Love, the only collection of poetry left to us by the iconic Buddhist, poet, and revolutionary. Since the collection’s publication in 1926, the subject, object, or identity of its central love has remained widely debated. As scholar and translator Francisca Cho discusses, these fluctuations in meaning—a lover? Manhae’s beloved homeland enduring Japanese colonial rule? Buddhist enlightenment?—resound in the malleability of the titular nim, a word that evokes love, lover, beloved, or, as Manhae proposes in the preface to his work, “everything yearned for.” Director Han Okhi takes on the formidable challenge of visualizing the manifold meanings of Manhae’s poetry through her signature experimental style. Utilizing digital effects and associative montage, her film creates a lush homage to the interconnectedness of the natural world and the human body, exploring the vitality and mortality running through both. The Silence of Love demonstrates a shift from the more pointed feminist interventions of Han’s earlier works with Kaidu Club, both in medium and in subject matter. Still, her devotion to cinema’s visceral ability to defy language manifests in this experimental collection of “cinepoetry.”

The Harvard Film Archive’s screening of The Silence of Love is accompanied by translations of the original Korean from Francisca Cho’s collection Everything Yearned For: Manhae’s Poems of Love & Longing.