[The Walrus will be reviewing films at this week's Hot Docs festival in Toronto. More reviews to follow.]
Emma Franz’s first documentary, Intangible Asset Number 82, records the life and work of a very rare commodity—Kim Seok-Chul, a reclusive Korean shaman and musical grandmaster. Seok-Chul is introduced to us through Simon Baker, an Australian jazz drummer widely regarded as his country’s best. Baker’s obsession with rhythm and musical force finds an idol in eighty-year-old Seok-Chul—the music he produces is nothing like anything Baker (or the viewer) has heard before. He embarks on a quest to track down Seok-Chul and learn from him. It proves to be a nearly impossible task, considering the shaman’s age and illness and his stature in Korean religious life. But Baker perseveres, and Franz follows him.
What follows is an account of Korean musical traditions that continue to resist the force of modernization. On his way to Seok-Chul, never sure that he will meet him, Baker encounters some people and practices so extreme that they are hard to reconcile with any notion of normalcy: one shaman, a bubbly, round-faced, boyish singer, spent seven years living on wet rocks by the side of a waterfall, singing (or shouting) seventeen hours a day, learning his craft from the flow of the water. Incredibly, he and Baker become fast friends.
The film can feel, at times, like an anthropological account—something you’d be shown for university study—but when Franz focuses on character the results are quite moving. She is clearly a dedicated documentarian, with the ability to suss out narrative in a complex story and the sense to exclude herself (she is also a musician, and so likely has her own opinions on Baker’s take on music) from the piece. It will be interesting to see how her work develops.
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