Shin Sang-ok, 1926 - 2006.

Director Shin Sang-ok, a household name during the 1960s and 1970s, passed away at 11:39 pm Tuesday at Seoul National University Hospital due to complications following a liver transplant.

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Shin was extremely prolific throughout his career, pulling along the fledging Korean film industry during the 1960s and 70s. He directed 68 films and produced 169, in addition to working on other productions as a cinematographer. Some of his best works include Chunhyang, Evergreen Tree, Yeonsangon and Red Scarf.

Yet none of these classics of Korean cinema quite matches his masterpiece, My Mother and Her Guest, which blends Shin's eye for composition with his painstaking attention to detail to showcase traditional Korean lifestyles framed against eye-catching backdrops.

Chosun Ilbo.

Certainly one of the most influential directors of the 60s, when Korea enjoyed an incredible wave of popularity, a so called Golden Age.

X, Twitch.

It's hard to overestimate Shin's impact on the Korean cinema of the fifties and sixties. He not only directed at least a dozen top-notch films that can knock your socks off, but he founded the biggest film company of that time period and was a huge influence on younger filmmakers.

Darcy Paquet, Koreanfilm.org.

If Shin's name is known abroad at all, it's for what happened later in his career when, while working in Hong Kong in 1978, he was kidnapped by representatives of North Korean president (and massive movie fan) Kim Jong-Il, who wanted the director to revitalize his own country's flagging film industry.

Martha Fischer, Cinematical.

He modernised movies at a time when people hungered for art, for escape, following the Korean war. He and his wife, the well-known actress Choi Eun-hee, were among Seoul's celebrity set.

John Gorenfeld in a feature for Salon and the Guardian in 2003.

There has been some speculation that the two of them defected, but nothing was ever proved.

Grady Hendrix, also pointing to Donato Totaro's appreciation of two films in Offscreen.

Posted by dwhudson at April 12, 2006 1:09 PM