The Film at Lincoln Center (FLC) and Subway Cinema are currently presenting the retrospective “Korean Cinema’s Celluloid Fever: The 1970s” from May 15 through May 26, 2026. The program revisits a peculiar moment in Korean cinema history, when the forward movement of time seemed stalled under the dual pressures of state censorship and the nation’s developmental drive. During this period, rebellious youth culture—symptomatically expressed through rock music, hippie trends, and the influence of the Hollywood New Wave—reached Korean shores, yet struggled to find outlets capable of sustaining its creative and anti-establishment ethos.
The selection includes Lee Jang-ho’s Heavenly Homecoming to Stars (1974), Kim Ho-sun’s Yeongja’s Heydays (1975), and Ha Gil-jong’s The March of Fools (1975) and The Pollen of Flowers (1972). The program also features Kim Ki-young’s audacious, genre-blending works Ieodo (1977) and A Woman After a Killer Butterfly (1978).
Taken together, these titles offer an eerie reminder of a decade defined by irony: the restriction of artistic freedom paradoxically opened pathways for the exploration of alternative themes and styles. Lee Jang-ho’s Heavenly Homecoming to Stars, one of the era’s most well-known hits, navigates nuanced female sexuality under the guise of traditional melodrama, where women suffer and persevere to prove their worth as mothers or devoted wives. It exemplifies how established forms could be manipulated to produce something new, subtly bending the contours of the controlling system.
Ha Gil-jong’s The Pollen of Flowers offers another such instance, delving into sexuality within the framework of a conventional family drama. Yet it marks a different threshold in that it ventures into same-sex desire. In doing so, however, it also participates in the construction of a particular formula of sexuality and its political mapping—a conceptual framework that would become increasingly problematic in the years to come.
The Pollen of Flowers is based on a novel of the same title by Yi Hyo-seok, one of the major literary figures who observed and fictionalized life under Japanese colonial rule. Across his work, Yi’s prose constructs a sensibility in which Korean identity emerges not as a fixed essence, but as something articulated through an intimate relation to nature and a resilient conception of human interiority. As seen in his 1936 short story When Buckwheat Flowers Bloom (also known as The Buckwheat Season), this sense of “being Korean” is less a matter of explicit nationalism than a mode of affect grounded in landscape and in a humanity that remains unshaken by historical adversity.
Published three years later, The Pollen of Flowers appears, at first glance, to diverge sharply from this trajectory. With its emphasis on unbridled sexuality, the novel was heavily criticized as an escapist indulgence in erotic excess, seemingly detached from Yi’s earlier investment in nature, tradition, and cultural resilience under colonial pressure. Yet this reading risks overlooking a more subtle displacement at work. Rather than abandoning his prior concerns, Yi relocates them: the site of an “unconquerable” essence shifts from nature to sexuality. In this sense, sexuality emerges not merely as content, but as a conceptual terrain—one that exceeds the regulatory reach of social and colonial structures.
From this perspective, Yi’s exploration of sexuality can be understood less as deviation than as reconfiguration. It signals a tentative but significant reorientation in the understanding of desire and human behavior, opening a space in which sexuality resists full incorporation into normative or ideological frameworks.
It is precisely this tension that Ha Gil-jong takes up in his film adaptation, his first project following his studies in the United States. In translating Yi’s text to the screen, Ha does not simply reproduce its thematic concerns, but repositions sexuality within a more explicitly structured grid of ethical and political values.
Ha Gil-jong’s Interpretation
The film The Pollen of Flowers follows the novel relatively closely in its basic narrative structure and character configuration. Hyun-ma, a middle-aged businessman, lives with his wife Se-ran and her sister Mi-ran in a suburban mansion called the Blue House. He employs a young male secretary, Dan-ju, whose presence unsettles the already fragile domestic order. The film unfolds through the shifting and increasingly volatile relationships among these characters, driven by desires that exceed the boundaries of social normativity.
It opens with Se-ran and Mi-ran seated in the living room of the Blue House, where Se-ran laments Hyun-ma’s growing obsession with his secretary. The scene then cuts to a car, where Hyun-ma sits in the back seat with Dan-ju, his arm placed intimately around the young man’s shoulder. The abruptness of this transition is striking. In bringing homoerotic desire to the foreground, the film breaks a longstanding silence in Korean cinema, rendering visible what had largely remained unrepresentable.
Yet this moment of visibility does not remain unframed. The film immediately situates this sexuality within a broader structure of authority. The name “Blue House”—shared by Hyun-ma’s residence and the presidential office—invites a political reading that exceeds mere coincidence. Through this doubling, Hyun-ma’s desire is not simply portrayed as personal or affective, but becomes legible within a symbolic economy of power. His infatuation is thus coded as excessive, perverse, and ultimately aligned with authoritarian excess—an interpretive move that resonates with the director’s broader thematic concerns.
The conditions under which this coding emerges are inseparable from the historical context of the 1970s. Ha Gil-jong’s career, which began and ended within the decade due to his untimely death, unfolded during one of the most restrictive periods in Korean film history. Censorship operated with full force, regulating both the production and post-production stages of filmmaking. Scripts were subject to prior review, and completed films were required to conform strictly to state guidelines. Within this system, cinematic expression was not merely limited but actively structured by institutional oversight.
This regime of control intensified following President Park Chung-hee’s 1972 constitutional revision, which consolidated authoritarian power and expanded mechanisms of surveillance and repression. The Blue House, as both a literal and symbolic site, thus becomes a crucial referent within the film’s representational logic. Against this backdrop, the emergence of youth culture—inflected by American countercultural movements—introduced forms of symbolic resistance that, while often indirect, nonetheless registered dissent. Ha’s cinema participates in this field of negotiation.
In The March of Fools (1975), for instance, authority is rendered through satire. Two university students, walking through central Seoul with long hair, are pursued by a policeman enforcing regulations against such appearances. The scene turns comic when the policeman himself is revealed to have similarly long hair. The moment produces a rupture in authority, exposing its contradictions while allowing a muted but perceptible articulation of critique.
Infatuation in the Blue House