Sight & Sound March 2020

For this month’s issue, and for the very first time in our near-90 year history, we at Sight & Sound hand the reins over to a guest editor. And we couldn’t be prouder or more excited to say that the special guest in the hot-seat is none other than… Mr Bong Joon Ho, whose latest film, the worldwide critical and commercial smash Parasite, arrives in UK cinemas this week – and is also in the running for the Best Picture at the Academy Awards later this month. So, over to man-of-the-moment Director Bong to introduce the issue:

This is Bong Joon Ho, director of Parasite. I’m elated to have been selected as the guest editor for this issue of Sight & Sound.

I feel strange and dumbfounded that this moment in my life has come. I remember reading and studying Sight & Sound 30 years ago as a young college student aspiring to become a filmmaker. I was part of the cinema club, and we used to read the magazine, or a pirated copy, together at school. We would scour the articles and special features for information and later look up films mentioned in them. I have fond memories of seeing the illegal VHS copies of those films. (Note: piracy is bad).

Since then I’ve become a filmmaker, and this year will be the 20th anniversary of my feature film debut. And I am guest-editing the March 2020 issue. The numbers have obviously aligned for this opportunity!

I hope venerable film publications like Sight & Sound, Cahiers du cinéma, Film Comment, Japan’s Kinema Junpo and Korea’s Cine 21 will continue to persevere in the future, and I hope, as guest editor, I am able to contribute.

Thank you.

BJH

The S&S editorial team worked closely with Bong to shape the issue, and Bong hand-picked a selection of articles he wanted to see in the magazine. Alongside a major survey of Bong’s career to date by Asian cinema expert, and longtime champion of Bong’s work, Tony Rayns, Bong himself discusses some of the formative influences that first ignited and then shaped his love of cinema, including a profile piece on the great Korean director Kim Kiyoung, whose classic 1960 film The Housemaid is regularly voted the greatest ever Korean film in polls, and which was a key influence on Parasite. Bong also talks us through an exclusive selection taken from the more than 200 pages of intricate storyboards that he created in the pre-production for Parasite.

It’s now 20 years since Bong’s first feature, Barking Dogs Never Bite, which marked the first step on his own ascendancy. To mark the anniversary, Bong has selected 20 relative newcomer directors whose films he believes will shape our viewing for the next 20 years.

Away from the special material chosen by director Bong, the issue also comes laden with the usual riches. We talk to the great Portuguese director Pedro Costa about his luminous, award-winning latest feature, Vitalina Varela.

We also look back at the life and work of one of the greatest of all American filmmakers – and arguably its greatest ever director of actors – Elia Kazan.

And we talk to the French director Céline Sciamma about her masterful new period romance with a difference, Portrait of a Lady on Fire – a film with a lesbian romance at its centre, and taking place in a work almost entirely devoid of men.

Elsewhere, we review all the month’s new cinema releases, including Todd Haynes’s Dark Waters, Justin Kurzel’s True History of the Kelly Gang and Jessica Hausner’s Little Joe. And we catch up with the latest Blu-ray releases – including a terrific new release collecting together many of the films made by the American cult favourite Curtis Harrington. And spotlight the highlights from new TV and streaming, including a broodingly atmospheric adaptation of Stephen King’s ‘horror noir’ The Outsider.

In our book reviews pages we hail a magnificent new book about a magnificent film – Sam Wasson’s The Big Goodbye, about the making of Chinatown.

And we return to director Bong to round things off, as our Endings column looks again at the haunting closing moments of Bong’s influential 2003 thriller Memories of Murder – a moment that recent real life events have cast in a new light.

All this and more. As Bong himself would say, “gamsahabnida” – thank you for reading.