Silent and Colonial

Korean cinema began while Korea was ruled by Japan (1910 to 1945), and that shaped everything about it: who owned the studios, what could be shown, and what a Korean film could mean. This chapter follows the story from the first cinemas to the wartime propaganda films, and it leans on one film above all, Arirang (1926), which almost nobody alive has seen because it is lost.

Before Korean Films: Cinemas and Cameras

Films were shown in Korea before Koreans made them. The Korean-cinema article says the American traveller Burton Holmes was "the first to film in Korea" and showed his films to the Korean royal family in 1899, and that a Dongdaemun Motion Picture Studio opened in 1903. Cinemas followed.

So the honest answer to "where was the first cinema?" is that it depends on what you count. What is not disputed is that Dansungsa became the best-known Korean cinema of the period, because the first two famous Korean films premiered there.

Righteous Revenge, 1919

On 27 October 1919 Dansungsa showed Righteous Revenge (Uirijeok Guto), directed by Kim Do-san, who the article says also wrote the script and played the lead; Park Seong-pil produced it. It was not quite a film in the modern sense. It was a kino-drama, "a stageplay with a film backdrop": live actors on stage, with filmed scenes projected as part of the show.

• The plot. Song-san defends his father's inheritance from his stepmother and other relatives. The article says this "has been interpreted as symbolic of" the independence movement. That reading is an interpretation, and the film cannot now be checked.
• The success. The article says it sold "100,000 tickets," and that this success led Park to pay for more kino-dramas and films.
• Lost. "The film and its script are now considered lost."
• Korean Film Day. The anniversary of the premiere is now marked as Korean Film Day.

The Studios and the Narrators

The Korean-cinema article says the studios of the silent era were Japanese-operated, and gives the example of Choson Kinema Productions, whose founder's name is spelled differently in different articles. Silent films were accompanied by live narrators, called byeonsa, who the article says were imported from Japan. Because a narrator spoke the story aloud, the article says they could add satire under Japanese rule "where authorities were absent". That freedom ended with sound, as the next section shows.

Na Woon-gyu and Arirang

The central figure of the silent era is Na Woon-gyu. The article on him says he is "widely considered the most important filmmaker in early Korean cinema" and "possibly Korea's first true movie star." Three details of his life frame his work:

• He was jailed for his part in the 1 March 1919 protests, and held in Chongjin prison from 1921 to 1923.
• He started in films in 1925 as an extra and villain at the Choson Film Company.
• He is credited with 26 acting roles and 15 directing credits in about ten years (the article's figures). He often acted, wrote and directed on the same film.

His birth date is given as 26 November 1902 in the infobox and 27 October 1902 in the lead, and the article does not reconcile the two.

Arirang premiered on 1 October 1926 at Dansungsa. Na directed, wrote and starred. The article gives the running time as about 135 minutes (nine reels) and the budget as 15,000 won. Its story, as the article summarises it:

• Yeong-jin, a student, is mentally ill after being imprisoned and tortured by the Japanese for his part in the 1919 protest.
• At home, he sees Gi-ho, who works with the Japanese police, try to rape his sister Yeong-hui. Hyeon-gu fights Gi-ho.
• In a vision, Yeong-jin stabs a man in his imagination, but the blow really kills Gi-ho. Police take Yeong-jin back to prison.

The article calls it "the first Korean nationalist film", hedged with "It is considered to be", and describes it as a critique of Japanese rule carried out through "metaphorical resistance". It also says Yeong-jin's arrest mirrors Na's own jailing. The film was, per the article, "a national sensation" and a commercial success.

The legacy is large all the same. Na made a silent sequel in 1930 and a sound sequel, Arirang 3, in 1936, and the article lists remakes in 1954, 1957, 1968 and 2003. A 1938 newspaper poll, it says, ranked the film first among the best silent Korean films, and the 2003 remake was "the first South Korean film to be publicly screened in North Korea" (the article's wording).

Na's own end was sad. He died of tuberculosis on 9 August 1937, aged 34 (36 by Korean counting). The article says his funeral procession was led by a band playing "Arirang". It also says his health was poor throughout life as a result of prison and torture, but it does not claim this caused his death.

Squeezed from Both Sides: Censorship and the 1930s

The Korean-cinema article says that more than seventy films were made in the boom of the late 1920s, then output fell to "only two or three per year" between 1930 and 1935, which it attributes to censorship and oppression. It also says a law described as "Korean General Law No. 40 of 1933" required foreign films to come in through Japan. I read only that single sentence, so I cannot say how the law worked in practice.

Na's 1929 film Salangeul chajaseo (with over a thousand extras) was banned at first and then released in a heavily edited form, and the failure of Beongeoli Sam-ryong the same year forced his studio to close. A 1932 film he starred in, A Ferry Boat That Has No Owner (director Lee Gyu-hwan), is called by "commentators" in the article "the last pre-liberation film" with a strong nationalist message. That is a hedged judgement.

Sound and Propaganda

• The first sound film. The article names Lee Myeong-woo's Chunhyang-jeon (1935) as "Korea's first sound film." Dansungsa's article lists it as the theatre's third famous premiere.
• Harsher censorship. The article says sound brought "much harsher censorship," because narrators could no longer slip messages in.
• The propaganda films. A Korean Colonial Cinema Unit was set up to promote Japanese culture (no date in the article). Two propaganda titles are named: You and I (1941), co-produced with the Japanese company Shochiku and directed by Hae Yeong, which promoted Korean enlistment in the Japanese Army, and Suicide Troops of the Watchtower (1943), promoting naisen ittai, "Japan and Korea as one body".
• Timing. The article hedges that total mobilisation of the film industry "would not begin until after Japan's full-scale invasion of China in 1937."

Where the Story Leaves Off

When Japan surrendered in 1945, the Korean-cinema article says freedom became the main theme of films in the late 1940s. Dansungsa, where Righteous Revenge and Arirang opened, is a reminder of how long the story runs: it was rebuilt as a ten-screen multiplex in 2005, went bankrupt, was converted to a jewellery shop in 2010, and a film museum opened in the building in October 2019.

Exercises

Next chapter: Division, War and the Golden Age, which follows Korean film from liberation and the Korean War to the boom of the 1950s and 1960s.