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*With spoilers*
Kazakhstan, a land whose recent history has been defined by forces largely beyond its control, is a logical country of origin for a movie like the Kazakhstani Yermek Shinarbaev�s Revenge, an impressionistic Russian-language film with a largely Korean cast set in Korea, China, Sakhalin, and a wasteland that could just as easily be Russia as the Kazakh SSR. Oh, and the film was made in 1989, just as Kazakhstan was about to finally free itself from Russia for the first time since the 1800�s.
First off, a word about Koreans in Kazakhstan. There are Koreans in Kazakhstan. In the 1930�s, there was a sizable ethnic Korean population in the far eastern Soviet Union along the border with China and Korea, the latter of which was at that time a part of the Japanese Empire. As tensions between the Soviet Union and Japan ratcheted up, the Soviets began to fear that �their� Koreans� loyalties might lie south of the border (a foolish notion, given the brutal treatment inflicted on the Koreans by their Japanese overlords). But anyway, hoping to dissolve a potential fifth column within their territory, the Soviets forcibly relocated tens of thousands of ethnic Koreans from the Far East to the Kazakh and Uzbek SSRs. Nowadays, we would call this �ethnic cleansing,� and it set the pattern for future Soviet massive deportations of various ethnic groups, which they would perpetrate against the Crimean Tatars, the Ingushetians, and the Chechens near the end of WWII.Ok, so Shinarbaev�s Revenge, based on a novel by the Korean-Kazakhstani writer Anatoly Kim, is pretty densely plotted, but here�s a general outline: in a Korean village in 1915, a schoolteacher named Jan (the subtitles render the names into Romanized Russified Korean, so Jan is presumably Yan) goes temporarily insane and murders a little girl, the only daughter of a man named Caj (Tsai). Jan flees to China, where Caj tracks him down after a period of many years but, in the first of many weird mystical moments, fails to kill him, because a vaguely magical woman tells him not to. Caj returns to his wife in Korea; they�re both now advanced in years, but his wife tells him to take a concubine who can bear them a son who will grow up to take revenge. They do this. The son, name of Songun, has a great talent for poetry, but his father tells him that his destiny is to seek revenge on Jan. Caj tells him that he will neither marry nor have children until he�s fulfilled his task in life. Then Caj dies. Jan, hearing of Caj�s death, returns to the village, accompanied by the strange magic woman who saved him in China. Then time passes and WWII intervenes, after which Songun and his mother immigrate to Sakhalin (for some reason), where Songun becomes a worker amongst the Soviets.
Now, I�ve been giving this whole spiel so as to describe two powerful images that could easily serve to justify the whole movie, and we have now reached the first of them. While working in a lumber camp, Songun meets Elza the Romanian (as she�s called in the intertitles), who wants to have children with him and attempts to seduce him. Songun, forgetting his father�s injunction about putting off family life until he�s kill Jan, begins to undress to have sex with Elza. She recoils in horror, and the camera pans down to Songun�s crotch, which is soaked in blood. It�s never stated explicitly, but Songun�s penis is apparently dripping bloodbecause he attempted to defy the dictates of fate. Needless to say, he and Elza do not have sex.
Skipping ahead, Songun returns to the mainland; where exactly isn�t made clear, but there are Russian children around, so it�s probably not Korea. He comes to the village where Jan and his wife ended up, and there meets the wife, who tells him that Jan is already dead. How did Jan die? Jan, who lived in constant fear of Songun killing him, became an alcoholic and one day, after some punk kids harassed him and threw rocks at him, he sought refuge in a hay loft. The psychopathic children were also tormenting a rat, which they then set on fire, and the flaming rat darted into the hayloft, setting it on fire and burning Jan to death. Now, the image of the rat running around looked fake enough that I�m willing to believe some special effects were employed, but the initial tormenting of the rat looked pretty real, and the Soviet Union is one of those countries where I sort of assume that on-screen animal cruelty is real unless I hear otherwise (this is based in large part on the scene in Andrei Rublev for which Andrei Tarkovsky personally shot a fucking horse and pushed it down a flight of stairs). But anyway, that�s the second image, the flaming rat that brings death to Jan. It reminds me of Salvador Dali�s flaming giraffe, which he painted several times and which he believed to be an omen of an impending cataclysm (WWII followed shortly after he conceived of it).The workings of fate and the workings of historical determinism are largely indistinguishable, and they find their emblems in the bloody penisand the flaming rat.
On which cheerful note we would have concluded this piece, except I have a little post-script. I want to call attention to this Slate article, which states that prisoners at Guantanamo Bay have been denied access to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn�s The Gulag Archipelago, which pretty much tells you all you need to know about Guantanamo Bay.
