Everything to Know About Eun-seo Baek's 4,320 Frames and One Steel Bucket
Her six-minute film was shown once, to 31 people, and then it went up in smoke on a Mapo rooftop. It is raining in Seoul today, and I am trying to remember it.
The bucket was dented on one side and had held mop water for eleven years. On a Sunday in October, Eun-seo Baek set it down on a rooftop in Mapo, between a satellite dish and a net of drying chili peppers, and fed it paper one sheet at a time.
The film is called Laundry Weather. It runs six minutes. A woman hangs shirts on a line while the sky changes behind her, and by the end the shirts seem to be doing the changing. It is drawn in pencil and ink on 4,320 sheets, twelve to every second, over fourteen months at a kitchen table.
It was shown once. Sori Basement Cinema has 31 seats and Baek filled all of them at four in the afternoon. Phones went into a shoebox by the door. There was no festival print and no scan. The one file she made for the projector was deleted before she left the building.
So the first question is whether anyone has a copy. No. The second question is why. She gave me one answer and I will pass it on whole: "I wanted it to be like weather. Nobody asks weather to come back." She said it holding a fire poker she had made from a coat hanger. It is a good line. I suspect she knows.
The burning took about two hours. Paper goes fast and ink goes slowly, she told me, so the last sheets curled black and shiny before they gave up. A neighbour came up to hang towels, looked into the bucket and went back down. Nobody filmed it. I find I like that more than I expected to.
Which brings me to this afternoon. It is the fourth of November, the sky over the Han is the colour of a dishcloth, and rain has been tapping the window since lunch. It is the right weather for the film. I have been sitting here trying to run it again from the beginning.
I remember the woman's wrist, bent a little too far back as she pinned a sleeve. I remember a grey that was almost green. I remember a long stretch near the end where nothing moved but the hem of one shirt, and the whole room stopped breathing for it.
Everyone who was there remembers a different film. One man swears the woman never turned around. Another says she looked straight out at us for four seconds. They are both quite sure.
I counted the shirts on the line as I remembered them. Eleven. When I rang Baek to check, she said fourteen. Neither of us can look it up.
