Evergreen Tree (Shin Sang-ok, 1961).
Produced during South Korean cinema’s so-called Golden Age, Shin Sang-ok’s classic film Evergreen Tree (상록수, 1961) is about an idealistic young teacher, Chae (Choi Eun-hee), who teaches Korean Hangul to provincial children in defiance of the Japanese colonial authorities. The plot, a tragic love story, expressed Koreans’ desire for national self-determination after 40 years of Japanese domination. After vocational school, Chae and another student fall in love and decide to return to their rural hometowns to teach, only to be physically and psychologically defeated by local collaborationists.
The movie, a propagandistic but potent adaptation of a famous independence novel of the 1930s, shows that hatred of Japanese colonialism was, in 1961, one of the few subjects that could unite the people of the North and the South in agreement. It was admired by both the South’s nationalist dictator Park Chung-hee, who seized power in a coup d’état while the film was still being edited, and the 18-year-old Kim Jong-il, a cinephile who enthusiastically recommended the film for educational purposes to all senior officials in the DPRK’s Workers’ Party. The film sealed the place of Shin and Choi—a married couple—at the highest levels of the South Korean film industry.
By 1978, the pair had separated and Shin had fallen out of favor with the regime. The two went missing: Choi first, abducted by North Korean agents while in Hong Kong, then Shin six months later while looking for her. Five years later, they resurfaced in Pyongyang. In the meantime, they had been compelled to make films for Kim Jong-il, then head of the North’s film production and future Supreme Leader. These included the Godzilla rip-off Pulgasari (불가사리, 1985) as well as Runaway (탈출기, 1984) and Salt (소금, 1985), for which Shin and Choi won prizes in Karlovy Vary and the Moscow International Film Festival.
At the Viennale last October, Evergreen Tree was featured in a program of twelve Korean films from 1940 through 2016, “Haunted by History: The Image of the Japanese Colonial Era in Korean Cinema.” The series, curated by Gerwin Tamsa, a Dutch independent curator formerly of the IFFR, and Kim Hong-joon, director of the Korean Film Archive, traced a thematic thread—the scars left on the Korean psyche by Japanese imperial domination—through its national cinema, turning up various points of connection in the shared history of Japan and Korea, whether the results of inspiration, appropriation, or forced assimilation.
Between screenings, I would go to take notes in a room reserved for press on the ninth floor of the InterContinental Wien, the hotel that serves as festival headquarters. In 1986, Choi and Shin stayed at the InterContinental with a gaggle of North Korean bodyguards in tow, in search of European investors for a new epic about Genghis Khan. Departing the hotel one morning, Choi and Shin shook off the North Korean agents accompanying them, hailed a cab, and surrendered themselves at the US Embassy, seeking asylum. In room 911, just a few doors away from the press room, they had very likely plotted their escape before making their daring dash across Vienna into CIA custody.
Tuition (Choi In-gyu and Bang Han-jun, 1940).
From the end of the war or even earlier, Korean filmmakers were engaged in the project of cultural decolonization, with varying degrees of sophistication or self-awareness. In most countries, colonialism had a catastrophic effect on the development of a national cinema, torching the soil in which the seedlings of domestic filmmaking might otherwise have taken root. For a variety of reasons, Korean cinema has proven unusually resilient. It quickly bounced back, first after Japanese occupying forces retreated in the face of their defeat and again after the devastating Korean war fought along the postwar lines demarcated by the Allied and Soviet forces. “At that point [in 1953], the two Koreas were perhaps the poorest countries in the world,” as Tamsa put it in an introduction for one of the films. Their industries were completely extinguished, with every studio, every piece of filmmaking equipment completely destroyed. And yet in the South, domestic filmmaking returned and even flourished within only a few years. By the end of the 1950s, it was producing highly modern films venerated around the world, as well as a truly prodigious number of popular works. It was common for Korean filmmakers in the 1960s to make several feature films a year. Evergreen Tree was one of four Shin Sang-ok directed in 1961; Im Kwon-taek, who directed his first film in 1962, churned out 31 features by the end of the decade.
Im was born in 1934 in Jangseong, on the southwestern edge of the peninsula. At that time, Koreans were officially subjects of the Empire of Japan. Annexing the territory of the short-lived Korean Empire in 1910 accelerated a formal colonization process that Japan had started in 1905. As a schoolchild from an affluent family, he may have had the opportunity to see a film like the popular Tuition (수업료, 1940), about a gifted eleven-year-old boy who cannot afford to pay for schooling (education and its relationship to nation and language was a frequent subject of colonial and postcolonial Korean cinema). In that film, gifted but pitifully poor Yeong-dal becomes the sole caregiver for his sick grandmother after his parents have left to try to make a living elsewhere. But in a feat of determination, Yeong-dal defiantly walks for days to his aunt’s village to borrow money to pay his teacher. To cap it all off, his beloved parents return from their long travels to discover a son really worth being proud of.
The young Im would have understood the Japanese dialogue spoken in the classroom scenes from his own schooling under the colonial administration, though his family spoke Korean at home. The film depicts the Japanese as saintly types in typical propagandistic fashion, but the presence of the suppressed Korean language was a subversive touch for the time. Like Tuition’s protagonist Yeong-dal, and despite his wealthy background, Im also dealt with domestic trouble caused by tensions within the occupied nation.
The Genealogy (Im Kwon-taek, 1978).
In the same year Tuition was released, the Empire instituted a “Name Change Order” (sōshi kaimei), forcing Koreans to trade their surnames for Japanese ones. In 1940, Im’s family, targeted for his father’s socialist beliefs, had been subject to this colonial policy. Im came of age during the war and spent the first decades of his career laboring intensely on popular cinema. In 1978, he announced his artistic rebirth with a film that returned to the colonial period of his youth. The Genealogy (족보) is about the collaborationist head of an old family clan who refuses to adhere to the Name Change Order, wielding a documented genealogy that extends 700 years into the past as a point of pride. As usual, Im was working with minimal resources, and the film is cheap-looking despite its expansive widescreen frames, which suggest something of the epic historical treatment this episode is given. But as a melodrama it is rich and expressive, exploding in one moment into soapy histrionics and in the next evincing the inherent complexity of the social and personal considerations of the characters. Yet this second “first” film, an adaptation of a novel by a Korean-born Japanese writer forcibly repatriated after the end of the occupation, wasn’t by any measure a popular or critical success, playing only one week in Seoul and receiving no press coverage. (Im would have more success a decade later with the colonial era-set The General’s Son, 장군의 아들, 1990, about a famous anti-communist gangster, Kim Du-han, who discovers he’s the son of a renowned general and anti-Japanese independence fighter.)
Unlike Tuition, the Japanese authorities are not benevolent in The Genealogy: they act harshly, disregarding existing social complexities, refusing all compromise, and dutifully pressing forward with imperial abandon. Im’s protagonist, Tani (Hah Myung-joong), is among them, a provincial administrator who must enforce the policy, forcing an ancient clan whose history he respects to abide by its strictures. In the great tradition of melodrama, he is torn between national allegiances and matters of the heart (he is also, of course, in love with the chief’s daughter), between colonial dictates and social realities. That Im chose a popular, melodramatic form for such ideas, knowing their potency among the Korean audience, is significant.
The Sea Knows (Kim Ki-young, 1961).
In surveying eight decades of Korean film history in the course of just twelve titles, the curators of “Haunted by History” chose to mix auteurs and journeymen, well-known names and those that have been mostly forgotten. The program admitted both generic and self-consciously artistic efforts, showcasing the diverse visions of these artists and craftsmen, each grappling with the omnipresent national trauma. And it was precisely the unifying theme of this trauma—the colonial specter haunting Korean cinema in various forms—that gave it shape, despite its limited size. National retrospectives not only point to significant movies worthy of discovery, but should, in their ideal form, give expression to more general cultural hangups and abiding frames of reference that would otherwise be lost on a foreign audience. The thematic thread that stitched together the different patches of this program did just that, showing how varied artists and craftspeople contended with their history as subject matter, how they rendered it as genre.
Kim Ki-young’s The Housemaid (하녀, 1960) is today probably the most celebrated Korean film of the classical era. Kim, like many of the directors in the program, had spent a formative period in Japan; he studied dentistry in Kyoto, and it was there that his cinephilia flowered thanks both to Japanese cinema and imports of foreign films. Even in a film not included in this program, The Sea Knows (현해탄은 알고 있다, 1961), the mixing of the two cultures, Japanese and Korean, and the sources of friction that arise from it was a subject that obsessed Kim. In his great war movie, a Korean soldier dates a Japanese woman, heightening tensions within his mixed Japanese-Korean troop and also, ostensibly, stirring the emotions of the Korean postwar audience. In one scene, the protagonist, Aroun, is forced to lick dogshit off his Japanese sergeant’s shoe and swallow it (“I am an educated man, and my first taste of Japan is shit!”). In the end, the Japanese army massacres the Korean soldiers and informs their widows that their bodies will be burned en masse, without first checking if any of them have survived in an effort to suppress the bad publicity caused by the massacre. As the corpses are doused in fuel and the flame is lit, Aroun rises, messiah-like, from the dead, stumbling toward the women and children watching awestruck from behind barbed wire—a figure of national irrepressibility, disgraced and left for dead but able to summon the strength to rise again.
Goryeojang (Kim Ki-young, 1963).
Kim is represented in this program by Goryeojang (고려장, 1963), which transposes an ancient Japanese legend to feudal Korea, making it the only film in the program not set in colonial times. The mythic practice of abandoning village elders in the mountains on their 70th birthdays had been the subject of The Ballad of Narayama, a popular novel by Fukazawa Shichiro and later a celebrated 1958 film by Kinoshita Keisuke.1 Kim’s version depicts a superstitious populace manipulated by a witch doctor, who deliberately keeps them impoverished and fighting amongst themselves as a method of control. At the top of the mountain there is a massive ditch full of human skulls where the old people are left to be picked at by vultures. The image is potent and terrifying, especially for its artificial, even decorative quality. The viewer is aware, as is often the case in Kim’s films, that we are looking at an intricately designed film set. The skulls are papier-mâché; the paper skylines behind the characters quiver ever so slightly with the performers’ movements. Kim himself painted all of those skulls in his garage-workshop, a sign of the director’s fanatical attention to detail and to the ornamental aspects of his cinema.
The parable of a population enslaved by a devious and scheming master, of course, would apply to colonial Korean life under the Japanese authorities, whose brutality, indifference, and social neglect would have still been fresh in the minds of the older members of the audience. But it is also unmistakably directed against the new Korean political elite. In the anachronistic opening radio broadcast that opens Goryeojang, representatives of the intellectual ruling class are shown discussing the necessity of combatting postwar “overpopulation” through austerity policies. This sequence gives way to Kim’s baroque vision of a grim, superstitious, but only marginally less liberated past.
That Goryeojang, which is not set in the colonial era, but resonates with its memory, was included in the Viennale program over The Sea Knows, which makes that era’s contradictions the very subject of the drama, epitomizes the curators’s expansive approach to cinematic historiography. Cinephile culture is dominated by list-making, by familiar constructions and deliberate deconstructions of the canon. Rare are the programs that give space to imperfect or marginal works, or to charting connections between popular taste, historical consciousness, and artistic merit. Even before the pandemic, the Korean Film Archive made waves by uploading many feature films to their YouTube channel, and the inventory is consistently refreshed and expanded with new 4K scans and restorations. It is thus possible for the enterprising home viewer to descend into the labyrinthine mines of Korean film history, pickaxe in tow, and prospect for treasure without the weight of received wisdom on their shoulders. At the same time, such abundance can also have a paralyzing effect, and there’s quite obviously great value in curation that maps out a path leading to the mother lode. Recent curation of classical Korean cinema has tended to play the hits, a gesture of considerable value at which I certainly do not intend to sniff. But thematic programs that connect work from disparate corners of a national cinema allow us a semblance of what it must have felt like for audiences at the time—including the program’s filmmakers—to encounter the subject anew, after seeing it filtered through a variety of generic contexts time and again.
Public Cemetery Under the Moon (Kwon Cheol-hwi, 1967).
Organizing the Vienna program around the “image” of the Japanese colonial period in Korean cinema both circumscribes the selection and offers a through line through a host of varied genres. Tuition was discovered in China in 2014 after long being thought lost, and adds a flavor of occupation filmmaking to the series. The excellent Break Up the Chain (1971) is a Manchurian western, a very cheap knock-off of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), in which spies, freedom fighters, and mercenaries race against the Japanese army to find a Buddha statue inscribed with a secret code.2 (By the end, the three mercenaries at the center of the action discover a sense of pride for the cause of Korean independence they never knew they had, because, of course, they enjoy clobbering the Japanese imperial army as much as the freedom fighters do.) Public Cemetery Under the Moon (월하의 공동묘지, 1967) is a Mario Bava–like horror farce, frenetically directed by a Seoul producer, Kwon Cheol-hwi, moving to the director’s chair for the first time: it is a tonal grab-bag of genres set in the first years of Japanese colonialism, shot in luxurious ’Scope color.
For the most part, these are well-known titles to Koreans, though they were for years dismissed as cheap, disreputable genre fare. Public Cemetery Under the Moon, for instance, was branded by middlebrow critics in Seoul “a disgrace to Korean culture.” As Kim Hong-joon, director of the Korean Film Archive, put it in his introduction to Kwon's film, "time has shown that they are the ones who have disgraced themselves.” The period setting in that film is more of a backdrop for a wild horror melodrama, replete with ghosts and gratuitous infanticide. In one scene, a man sees a woman walking at night beside a graveyard and assumes—correctly, it turns out—that she must be a ghost, and so swerves to knock her down just to be sure. Break Up the Chain, despite being the work of a more respected filmmaker (A Day Off’s Lee Man-hee), was made quickly and with a minimum of resources; in its supposed Manchuria of the 1930s, tower blocks are visible in the background of some shots. Other films are less frequently revived today because of the still-lingering effects of state censorship from those times. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and especially after 1979, when Park Chung-hee, the authoritarian president, was assassinated, political conditions remained difficult in South Korea, and the popular film industry was often in crisis.
Censorship in the final years of the “liberal” dictatorship, ultimately toppled by democratic protests in 1987 and ’88, meant that a film like Ha Myeong-jung’s Lifeline (1986), which was banned by the regime, remains largely unknown today. It is admittedly difficult to imagine this arty, beguiling historical drama, set on a remote island awash in fantastical colors and controlled by a scheming collaborationist chieftain, ever finding a wide audience. And no wonder it was censored: It is a film explicitly about political deception and collaboration. The chieftain-businessman is secretly engineering an artificial food shortage in cahoots with the Japanese authorities; he has been secretly exporting their fish to other islands via the colonial administration, and to evade detection he stokes their superstitions and petty rivalries with the help of a local shaman. The islanders’ descent into collective madness is captured mostly in epic wide shots, transforming its large cast of characters into an undifferentiated mass of bodies scrambling for power. Ha’s icy distance keeps us from closely identifying with the islanders as distinct characters—an eccentric choice for what is basically a plot-heavy, bloodthirsty melodrama.
The Handmaiden (Park Chan-wook, 2016).
Contemporary Korean directors have shown a renewed interest in the colonial period, with films such as Ryoo Seung-wan’s war epic The Battleship Island (군함도, 2017), Min Kyu-dong’s “comfort women” K-drama Herstory (허스토리, 2017), or Lee Joon-ik’s Anarchist from Colony (박열, 2016), a biopic about the anti-colonial independence activist (and would-be Hirohito assassin) Pak Yol. Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden (아가씨, 2016), the most recent and most famous film in the Vienna program, is fascinating for the way Park adapts a Victorian-set Welsh lesbian thriller novel—Fingersmith by Sarah Waters—to the colonial 1930s in Korea. Park’s magisterial and supremely entertaining work is unafraid of exploiting the painful tensions of living under colonialism, nor of exposing the aristocratic and administrative classes—Japanese and Korean—for their degeneracy. The treacherous male characters in particular all put on very self-conscious colonial airs, speaking Japanese out of a disgust for “Korea, which is ugly. Whereas Japan is beautiful.” Everything in this world—the world of the women, of the men—is a game, a card-trick, a pocket picked, an elaborate performance whose myriad interpretations are left for the viewer to divine.
Kim Min-hee plays Hideko, a Japanese heiress living in a Japanese-style mansion with her Korean collaborationist uncle (Cho Jin-woong) in Korea. Over a lifetime of abuse, Uncle Kouzuki has forced his niece to perform erotic readings for an audience of braying Japanese and Korean aristocrats and businessmen; these readings come from books in his vast library of rare editions, paid for by a goldmine given to him as reward for helping the Japanese conquer Korea. In the meantime, a pair of Korean pickpockets and hustlers (Kim Tae-ri and Ha Jung-woo), adopt colonial names and manners, invade Hideko’s life, and try to fool her into marriage and thus surrendering a share of her fortune. Park’s treatment of the period, with all of the contradictions of Korean and Japanese identity, power, and colonial compromise or struggle, is equal parts goofy and sexy. His vision seems to encompass a history of representation of the period, drawing from a well-defined genre toolkit to play with our expectations of films about the Japanese occupation. That The Handmaiden takes place for the most part in one giant Japanese mansion—in reality, designed by a British architect and located in Kuwana, Mie Prefecture, but in the film, constructed in occupied Korea—allows for identities and allegiances to be swapped as easily as characters hurry from room to room, retreating behind sliding doors.
The Murmuring (Byun Young-joo, 1995).
If The Handmaiden is a postmodern entertainment that refracts, Tarantino-style, the more routine genre movies that inspired it, then perhaps the program’s Rosetta Stone is the one film that suggests what’s at stake in depictions of the colonial period: the nonfiction masterpiece The Murmuring (낮은 목소리 - 아시아에서 여성으로 산다는 것, 1995) by Byun Young-joo. In contrast to the other films discussed here, all fiction, it is a bleak and meticulous documentary portrait of the lives of several elderly women who were once kept as sexual slaves (“comfort women”) by the Japanese occupying army during wartime. Shot using equipment lent by the Japanese leftist documentary collective Ogawa Productions, the film’s starkness and formal simplicity complements the often melodramatic narratives of the rest of the program, tackling directly that which all the other films filtered through narrative craft and the trappings of genre. (The film, long available only in murky transfers, showed in a new digital scan based on a 16mm print recently discovered at the Cinémathèque française.)
Director Byun, in her first feature film, gradually won the trust of the women and asked if they would share their stories. At first they refused to speak about their experiences, but eventually, she won their trust. By that point, most were in their sixties or seventies. After many decades, the violence inflicted on them by Japanese soldiers and the shame they were made to feel thereafter remained unavoidable facts of life. Many were physically and psychologically scarred. Many lived in poverty. Many had survived a lifetime of abusive or broken relationships with alcoholic men they despised. All were sterilized against their will during the war. Some remained in China after Japan was defeated, refusing to return to Korea because they couldn't face the social stigma. Byun shows their testimonies alongside their downtime, their joking and monologuing, their garrulousness and their fatalism. She depicts the human cost of colonial policies with empathy and artistic restraint.
The Murmuring throws the rest of the program into relief, suggesting some of the darkness that lurks on the edges of both the more lighthearted genre fare as well as the regulated, propagandistic works. In recent years, there has been an increased interest in decolonial cinemas, as a new generation of critics has begun to reckon with film history and question the canon. Byun’s film, widely seen in Korea upon its 1995 release, helped to give voice to those silenced by colonial crimes and redefine the cultural perception of the occupation period. This film, which features fierce feminist political demonstrations as well as tearful private confessions, is also vital for what it suggests can never be repaired. It ends, unforgettably, on New Year's Eve 1994. The former “comfort women” are drinking heavily in the living room of the shelter where they gather, surrounded by the idealistic young feminist volunteers involved in the film, including Byun, and those who work at the survivors’ residential commune, the “House of Sharing.” These older women are now drunk and voluble. They speak too loudly. They are a little rough and impolite, grabbing the younger women and pulling them close. One particular woman commands the room's attention, drunkenly singing a sentimental ballad about how wonderful life is, in spite of all the horrors we have heard described in such detail. She registers that the younger feminists look on uneasily, at a loss for how to respond, and collapses in a fit of drunken laughter. Even when there is so much understanding and solidarity, this social divide—this aporia left by the colonial period—will endure until these women die. That particular ghost can never be exorcized.
The author thanks Gerwin Tamsa and Kim Hong-joon for speaking with him for this essay.