PERFORMANCE ART REVIEW : L.A. FESTIVAL : How Koreans Watched the Movies

“The Movieteller,” a film/performance piece that revived a forgotten Korean movie-house tradition, contributed a playful and arcane note to cross-cultural collision during the closing weekend of the L.A. Festival.

The technically ambitious multimedia production at the Inner City Cultural Center re-created the quaint old Korean pyonsa , a movieteller who would sit in the dark between the audience and the movie screen and interpret all the roles in foreign and silent films with his own fanciful dialogue, sarcasm and personal viewpoint that had nothing to do with the film.

The primary movie inventively dramatized by director-writer-narrator Walter Lew, in a show that featured film collages, slides, a live traditional Korean dancer and cutout animation, was the 1948 William Powell-Ann Blyth fantasy, “Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid,” precursor to “Splash.”

Lew (with major filmic contributions from Lewis Klahr) has a hypnotic voice that lulls you along a nominally lyrical, amusing path. But live theater takes a back seat. A big problem theatrically, with four screens hanging over the stage, is the sense of a silver-and-black void--Lew sits in the dark and you never see him.

In any event, the Pacific Rim is widened a touch: This is how Koreans watched American movies before talkies and even after World War II, when dubbing costs were prohibitive.