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Timeless Bottomless Bad Movie
Institute of Contemporary Arts
Timeless Bottomless Bad Movie, dir. Jang Sun-woo, South Korea 1997, Korean with English subtitles, 144 min.


Book tickets

An underground classic, Timeless Bottomless Bad Movie offers a unique and unprecedented variation on chaos, approximation, confusion and rebellion while sketching a feverish portrait of a group of runaways and young marginals as they roam the city of Seoul. Part-documentary, part-fiction ; shot in a wide array of formats, spanning 35mm, 16mm and DV ; composed of spontaneous interviews as well as improvised fictional situations, the film eludes all cinematic conventions in order to develop its own language, or as scholar Nicole Brenez has very justly stated: 
 
Timeless Bottomless Bad Movie revindicates a plasticity of the draft or sketch, and raises it to the level of an aesthetic ideal. Not for any reason of mere formal provocation, but at the level of a moral exigency: to invent a plasticity of precarity. Bad Movie represents a triumphant event of liberatory formalism. In the face of what it depicts – misery, death, loss, cruelty, youth wasted in pure loss – the film elaborates this demand: that cinema either go mad from anguish, or crazy with energy.” – Nicole Brenez, From Traitement du Lumpenprolétariat par le cinéma d’avant-garde (Paris: Seguier Archimbaud, 2006), pp. 72-75.
 
Book tickets
06:00 pm
Sun, 03 Aug 2025
Cinema 1
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Cinema 1
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