During the latter half of the 1920s, a genre of avant-garde/experimental filmmaking emerged devoted to capturing the modern, urban city’s bustling movement of people and machines. Regarded as ‘city symphonies,’ films such asRien que les heures (1926, Alberto Cavalcanti), Berlin: Symphony of a City (1927, Walter Ruttmann), Man With a Movie Camera (1929, Dziga Vertov), Rain (1929, Joris Ivens/Mannus Franken), and their precursor Manhatta (1921, Paul Strand/Charles Sheeler) present poetic impressions of a city, with the city and oftentimes its industrial development as the main character over individuals. They are also driven more by a visual musical rhythm, formal experimentation, and lyrical tone than explanation or rhetorical persuasion.

Dream of Iron, multimedia artist Kelvin Kyung Kun Park constructs a veritable visual symphony of steel and iron at work with and without humans at the shipyard, to address the country’s history of modernisation via these heavy industries. 

A Dream of Iron nods to the tradition of ‘city symphonies,’ only this time the famous Hyundai shipyard that stretches along Mipo Bay in Ulsan, South Korea is the focused city space. Not to be confused with his 2010 debut film Cheonggyecheon Melody: A Dream of Iron, multimedia artist Kelvin Kyung Kun Park constructs a veritable visual symphony of steel and iron at work with and without humans at the shipyard, to address the country’s history of modernisation via these heavy industries. The film’s subject announces itself rather clearly with archival footage of surveyors, machines, trucks, construction, and turning over the earth during the opening credits, followed by an overhead tracking shot of the shipyard’s massive grid of industrial buildings and roads. Park blends the poetic and the observational in his presentation of large-scale machines at work, frequently set to a mix of classical music, downtempo, and dissonant sounds. Such an audiovisual tapestry lends the film a sci-fi, post-apocalyptic undercurrent, as if one were inside a megacity ruled by machines.

In fact, Park constantly contrasts bodies and machines and explores the kind of relationships to be had between them. The enormity of edifices and machinery is so striking that human bodies appear seemingly powerless next to them, even when we see people operate some of the equipment. Moreover, one of the few people with whom the film converses is a woman who works at the shipyard like her husband and compares the past and its sense of community among people with the present, colder, more distant, and more compartmentalised. She remarks, ‘People keep taking care of only what’s theirs,’ which is somehow in keeping with the aforementioned sci-fi feel.

But A Dream of Iron is more than just another documentary that falls in the category of a ‘city symphony’ film in its exploration of the relationships between humans and machines. Accompanying intermittently the footage at the shipyard with its factories and machinery is a voiceover that dictates letters to his former love Seung-hee. In truth, the voiceover addressing a letter to Seunghee begins the film over images of a Buddhist rite at a temple. Seunghee had left in search of a god, leaving the narrator to do a search of his own, something in this world. This narrative point of departure enables Park to speak in mythical terms of the ancient and modern histories that literally mark the city of Ulsan. On the one hand, petroglyphs (rock carvings) by Daegokcheon stream speak of an intimate connection between humans and nature. Park implies the breaking of this connection first with the creation of a dam in the 1960s, which has resulted in yearly floods that threaten to erode the petroglyphs. The construction of the Hyundai shipyard in the 1970s fully ruptures the humans-nature connection. This rupture brings about the coming of a new god, Park’s metaphor for South Korea’s modernisation project.

 A Dream of Iron is more than just another documentary that falls in the category of a ‘city symphony’ film in its exploration of the relationships between humans and machines. 

Steel is the new god, the one that removed the people’s hunger pangs and replaced them with hopes and dreams. Park then transitions to the funeral ceremony of Park Tae-joon, who played such a crucial role in the development of the steel industry in the country through his company POSCO. While a colleague gives a eulogy, Park pairs it with images of factory smoke bellowing in the wind, inviting the reading that Park Tae-joon’s death is like a sacrificial offering to the new god. Still following the metaphor of a new god and rituals, Park also includes footage of labour strikes and protests at the shipyard during the 1970s and information about more recent strikes in the 1990s. In particular, he provides information on the ‘Battle of Goliath,’ so named since the strike took place by the immense red crane known as the ‘Goliath crane’ and led to a nationwide strike as a symbol of the labour movement. ‘High altitude battles’ like this strike continue to this day as a popular form of labour protest. In the context of Park’s mythicisation, these strikes are popular, communal rituals of celebration and unity; taking it further, the crane is a modern-day steel version of the ‘wicker man.’

The film’s most striking scenes are precisely those at the factory presented as rituals, which contrast with footage of actual Buddhist rites: images of machines and men finishing a huge propeller with a soundtrack of Buddhist chants and percussion; the extended shot of lifting a huge piece of steel and turning it to its side to release water from it, with one or two workers in the frame somewhere below it, with Buddhist chants again on the soundtrack; transferring heavy steel materials from one spot to another, suspended in the air, like steel clouds passing through. Ritualistic choreography of steel and human skill.

[notification type=”star”]90/100 ~ AMAZING. Park blends the poetic and the observational in his presentation of large-scale machines at work, frequently set to a mix of classical music, downtempo, and dissonant sounds. Such an audiovisual tapestry lends the film a sci-fi, post-apocalyptic undercurrent, as if one were inside a megacity ruled by machines.[/notification]

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