The universality of cinema is frequently discussed, in optimistic terms, as a way to bridge cultures and help bring people together. Often, though, that saying is only viewed through one of two lenses — that of highly sentimental dramas rooted in family or romantic problems that have a common relatability, or that of purely commercial success, a box office hit in one country or region that enjoys a sometimes unexpected breakthrough in other territories.

It’s rare, the number of filmmakers of truly international consequence whose work consistently incorporates and addresses more complex social and class themes that in and of themselves transcend national borders. Bong Joon Ho is one such director — funneling unique portraits of economic inequality, societal and environmental anxiety, governmental critique and social malaise through genre lenses that are often darkly humorous, but just as frequently unsettling.

After a quartet of fairly modestly budgeted and very well received domestically produced films to begin his career, he has, over the last decade-plus, vastly expanded his profile with three films told largely in English and another, 2019’s Parasite, that became both an awards juggernaut and far and away Bong’s highest-grossing movie, making over $258 million in theaters.

The arc of this impressive career, still very much in bloom, receives a loving tribute at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles with the new, recently opened exhibition Director’s Inspiration: Bong Joon Ho, which highlights not just the 55-year-old director’s celebrated filmography, but also his creative process and cinematic influences. The first exhibit wholly dedicated to Bong’s work, the collection features more than 100 objects, most sourced from Bong’s personal archives. Among some of the most recognizable pieces on display are Parasite’s suseok rock (or scholar’s stone) and family portrait, an unnerving creature model from The Host, the so-called “stuffy” puppet head of the giant pig title character in Okja, and prop bullets and military medals from Snowpiercer.

In parallel with the showcase, which is scheduled to run through January 10, 2027, a special retrospective of Bong’s films screened in the venue’s state-of-the-art theaters during the first three weeks of the exhibition’s booking. Sprinkled into this mix as well were a couple of his personal favorites, like a 4k restoration of The Thing, where Bong appeared in person alongside director John Carpenter at a post-screening Q&A and made a handshake deal with the 77-year-old legend for Carpenter to provide the score for a horror film Bong is planning to soon make.

The Energy of Bong Joon-ho's Archive Although it’s housed in Los Angeles, the inarguable capital of the American film industry, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures has, ever since its 2021 opening, been dedicated to showcasing filmmakers from a broad kind of spectrum of backgrounds and nationalities. Its Director’s Inspiration series represents a clear extension of that overarching philosophy, with its two previous celebrants being American-born director Spike Lee and French director, photographer and multimedia artist Agnes Varda. While renown and distinction are of value in choosing subjects, the museum is also invested in focusing attention on film artisans who have synthesized their own antecedent inspirations while staking out bold new narrative terrain, and who have made a profound impact on other filmmakers and young artists.

For Michelle Puetz, Exhibitions Curator at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, Bong checked all of those boxes, and thus made perfect sense as the third selection in the Director’s Inspiration series. “I feel like his global importance and significance is certainly undeniable,” she said. “He has a special relationship to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences because of the historic, significant multiple wins with Parasite in 2019. But with the series, what I really think is important for us to do as an institution is to represent him beyond the film that many of the public may know him for, and to look at all of the films that came before, to look at early career materials and to contextualize how he got to be the Oscar-winning filmmaker that he is today.”

The suitability of Bong’s selection is further affirmed with a quick glance on social media on virtually any day. In October 2019, Martin Scorsese first made remarks comparing Marvel movies to theme park rides, and saying that they were “not cinema.” This sparked a firestorm and provoked much online debate, both amongst hardcore cinephiles and those with less strongly held opinions. Rather quickly, memes developed using the quote “This is cinema.” Sometimes this was meant as a form of ironic response, but just as often it was used as a shorthand way to celebrate the piercing beauty or moving artfulness of some piece of short-form video.

A funny thing then happened, though. A clip and screenshot of a May 2021 interview with Bong, in which the filmmaker says, “To me, that’s cinema,” was seized upon by cinephiles and then younger members of the broader public — far eclipsing all memes using the original Scorsese quote. Bong’s rhapsodic rumination and quote became an enormous viral sensation in its own right, even amongst people who might have only ever otherwise glimpsed him onstage at the 92nd Academy Awards, if at all. Bong, not unlike Quentin Tarantino, is a director who utterly lives and breathes movies. Him becoming visually synonymous with cinema for millions of only casual movie-watchers is a wonderfully delightful development.

Planning on the Director’s Inspiration exhibition started almost two years ago, not long after Puetz arrived at the museum. She traveled to Seoul twice to meet with Bong, and described his office space as a lively hive, buzzing with creative energy. Storyboards from The Valley, the animation project that he’s currently working on, line the walls, while beloved novels, VHS tapes, DVDs and CDs share space alongside old notebooks, research materials, drafts of shooting scripts and keepsake film props. “He’s his own personal archivist, in a way,” said Puetz, who saw in these items the chance to tell a compelling story about Bong.

A Commitment to Accuracy and Immersion The reaction from reporters to the exhibition has been largely positive, with many citing exactly this quality — the highly personal nature of its display items — as being the main attraction. The reception from a cross section of museum visitors on a balmy weekday visit by this author also highlighted the exhibition’s ability to connect across a variety of demographics, with one person even referencing the online meme above.

Several people interviewed were certainly avowed Bong enthusiasts, having seen three or more of his eight films. But a handful of out-of-town visitors had seen only Parasite, and were drawn into the exhibit by the promise of learning more about the life and other work of this curious filmmaker who they had watched score four Academy Award victories, including Best Picture and Best Director, for that film. “We saw Parasite and loved it,” said Marcus Ashwood, a postal worker from Nevada visiting with his wife Jenny. “So we wanted to come and see all about his other movies too. Now we’ll kind of know some of the backstories of what inspired him to make his other movies, if or when we watch those.”

Still other attendees were pulled into a visit by a friend or spouse, unfamiliar with Bong’s movies but open to exploring his work. “I think it’s interesting and pretty wild that he was influenced by so many American and even European movies that he saw on television when he was young, and absorbed them in such an analytical way,” said Taylor Mustow, an accounting supervisor from neighboring Orange County. “I guess it shows how deeply different art can really imprint on you when you’re open to and excited by it.”

Indeed, the exhibition feels like it serves as a revealing glimpse into Bong’s psyche, in ways both general and incredibly specific. Sketches and cartoons from his youth indicate a man very much plugged into and grappling with the political issues, societal shifts and everyday struggles he saw around him growing up. A research notebook from Bong’s debut feature Barking Dogs Never Bite, which featured some characters and details based on his own life, confirms his keen eye for detail, and refusal to judge his characters.

One of the biggest takeaways is just how meticulous of a planner Bong is. While many, many filmmakers utilize storyboards, Bong’s drawings often show an atypical level of detail, even at their earliest stages. Comic books were an early passion, and while enrolled at Yonsei University, he published a recurring cartoon strip in the school newspaper. That experience seems to help Bong not only plan shot angles but economically capture levels of specific reaction he can then communicate to actors during their performances.

“I have never had the experience of looking through someone’s materials, looking through notebooks, looking through storyboards, and then talking about revisions of storyboards — seeing how they go back, iterating a scene multiple times, seeing him sketching out storyboard revisions on the flip side of a script,” said Puetz. “This is someone who when he’s making a film is completely in that world and working with such dedication — he would say obsession — but with such precision and devotion to really getting things to be exactly the way he wants them to be.”

The other biggest illuminating element of the exhibition lies in discovering just how motivated Bong was in his younger years to understand his own emotional reactions to films. After a break serving his compulsory two-year military service, Bong returned to Yonsei in 1992, and co-founded the Yellow Door Film Club, which pulled together other film-loving students from nearby universities.

“It was a way for him and friends to get together and to both think about and analyze films, and then start working on shooting films together as a collective,” noted Puetz. “It was difficult to access films in Korea at that time, in the early 1990s, so they were circulated as VHS bootleg copies and Bong was in charge of that VHS lending library. We have a selection of those to really show the way in which he was starting to learn about and discuss film with other people, and the way film was circulated in an underground fashion through Korean cinephile culture at the time.”

Framed notebook entries illustrate the manner in which Bong studied and dissected the blocking and camera movements of films like Fargo and The Silence of the Lambs, breaking them down to their component parts. Years later, he would take inspiration from their stagings for his own impeccably composed shots. But this exhibition also make clear that his study then was also an inventorying of the emotional impact of various films upon him.

In Bong Joon-ho's Own Language Understanding that fact gives one a richer appreciation of Bong’s current-day methodical approach, and how and why he maps out both larger, complicated action set pieces as well as staged bits and pieces of visual humor. By stitching together moments small and large, Bong is able to help give his movies compellingly grounded emotional landscapes, and the feeling of a finely woven tapestry.

The exhibition is structured so that visitors can move almost chronologically through Bong’s professional canon, if they so desire. Various storyboards, shooting scripts and research notebooks for his eight feature films are accompanied by small props.

Off to the side, there’s a darkened room playing a video installation montage of Bong’s work, including some of his short films. At roughly 10 minutes, the non-sequential piece opens with Mother’s Kim Hye-ja dancing, and is edited together in an evocative, rhythmic fashion that indulges a couple match cuts (doorbells being rung in Parasite and Snowpiercer, for example), while mimicking both the commingled tone and elliptical editorial structure of many of Bong’s works.

Next to this room is a gallery of gorgeous posters in a couple different languages (including Bong’s own personal Psycho print) spotlighting 20 films, from Touch of Evil and Jaws to Barton Fink and Zodiac, that the director feels influenced him.

The large Okja puppet head, which Bong had created so that Ahn Seo-hyun’s Mija could interact with something physical on set, is quite striking. “It’s really a beautiful object, but I think it also represents the way in which, even when he’s working in a digital space with creatures that are created using CG, he’s thinking about the way people and humans interact, and about these connections that we make,” said Puetz. “There’s just a deep sense of humanity in all of his work, and it's a really beautiful representation of that.”

The beating heart of the exhibition, though, is a room lined with storyboards on three sides, and inset cubbyholes with key objects like the aforementioned suseok rock from Parasite, plus bootleg, Korean language copies of cinema texts from the 1990s. Prominently displayed in this room, under a side-by-side video presentation of schematics and the final, realized shots from several of Bong’s movies, sits a table that discerning film fans might find familiar. “That work table that he sat at when I first met him, where he does everything, it’s also a prop from Snowpiercer,” said Puetz. “So it’s like this beautiful metaphor of something from his past that he’s also creating the future on, as he does drawings for his new films.”

In the end, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures exhibition on Bong Joon Ho connects at an elevated level for cinephiles and still an interesting level for more casual moviegoers because it doesn’t present merely a collection of memorabilia. Rather, it shows the many influences and subsequent artistic progression of a young man — what first ignited his youthful passions, how he studied and dissected those inspirations, and then brought them to bear and incorporated them into his own work.

That’s rich and rewarding for anyone with avenues of creative expression in their own lives. But it’s also instructive just to see and think about as it relates to someone who grew up thousands of kilometers away from Los Angeles — how inspired he was by the universality in movies of other cultures, a universality now reflected back so deeply in his own work.

“I’ve never had an exhibition touch me so much personally,” admitted Puetz, when asked how her work on the exhibition impacted her perception of Bong. “I went into this a fan and I left with a different understanding of him and his creative genius. I see him as someone who recognizes and wants to celebrate the underdog. Like, (his characters) aren’t your conventional kinds of heroes. I think of them as unlikely heroes. But they are people who oftentimes face really difficult challenges in the midst of social structures and political structures that don’t necessarily support them, and I think there’s a profound resonance with that and our contemporary moment.”