Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring is a 2003 South Korean film directed by Kim Ki-duk. The story is about the life of a Buddhist monk as he passes through the seasons of his life. The film was released in the United States in 2004 by Sony Pictures Classics, in subtitle format.
About Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring in brief
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring is a 2003 South Korean film directed by Kim Ki-duk about a Buddhist monastery that floats on a lake in a pristine forest. The story is about the life of a Buddhist monk as he passes through the seasons of his life, from childhood to old age. The director himself appears as the man in the last stage of life. The film was released in the United States in 2004 by Sony Pictures Classics, in subtitle format. It is divided into five segments, roughly ten to twenty years apart, and the action of each takes place during the season of its title. The implications of the characters’ actions are silently commented upon by the presence of Buddhist symbols and iconography. In Buddhist art, this bird is the representation of desire and craving. The apprentice encounters a mother and daughter walking along the forest path, looking for the monastery. The apprentice silently greets them and rows them across the lake to the monastery, where a colorful rooster is now part of the household. A teenage girl has been brought to the Buddhist master by her mother, hoping that she will be healed. The master agrees to take in the teenage girl for a time, but the mother leaves.
Many years later, during the fall fall, the master returns to the local village, bringing a cat with him. He is wanted for the murder of his former apprentice’s wife. Unwilling to go on, he seals his eyes, mouth and nose in a ritual and sits in front of the newly returned Buddha statue waiting for the apprentice’s return. After the apprentice returns, he modifies the monk’s garments by hand, and soon afterward the adult apprentice appears in the spiritual room carrying the bloodstained knife with which he stabbed his wife to death, waiting for him in the front yard. He tells his apprentice that lust leads to desire for possession, and possession leads to murder and tells him that the girl will have to leave. He then runs away at night in pursuit of the girl, taking the monastery’s Buddha statue and the rooster with him, and returns in the fall to the village to run from the local cat. He returns the next day, bringing in his backpack and the cat. He also brings in a backpack with him from a supply village, and brings a backpack from a local supply village to bring to the master in the next fall. He later returns the cat to the store.
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This page is based on the article Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 15, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
