(International Forum)
This is the eldest silent film from
Korea which has survived and unfortunately the only film at all by
Ahn Jong-hwa.
The try to explore he early history of Asian
Cinema is full of obstacles. Even what we know about the early
history of Japanese and Chinese Cinema is fragmentary, but what is
left to us from the silent film period of Korean Cinema is even
less. War, occupation, civil war and after that a carelessness about the
cinematic heritage has left only a few fragments and just an idea how
Korean Cinema in the 1930s would look like. This special screening of
Cheungchun-eui sipjaro is again one of the filmhistoric highlights
in the history of this film festival and like so often thanks to the
International Forum. Last year we got an idea about Cambodian Cinema
which is nearly wiped out through the terror regime of the Red Khmer.
During the screening, I had a likely
feeling like last year. It was not this beautiful melodrama alone which
moved me. The film is part of a performance with live music, singer
and a “pyeonsa” the Korean pendant to the Japanese Benshi (a
narrator) staged by contemporary director Kim Tae-yong.
Before the film began, a woman and a
man sang in Korean. Before I even entered the Delphi theatre, a
Korean pronounced the screening. The whole event was a staged journey
into Korean cinema culture of the 1930s.
As an European but familiar with old
Asian films, after a short while of acclimatisation with the
silent film traditions like narrator and singer, I was blown away. It
was an extreme experience. When I imagined for a moment sitting in a
Korean film theater there was always the awakening, the awareness
what I see is a relict from a lost world. The people who have seen
this film at its premiere have probably all gone. I had, I remember a
likely feeling with the Cambodian films last year.
For a moment this whole performance
combined with the screening of a cinematic rarity made me thinking of
all the personal feelings, the laughter and the tears of these
people who are now anonymous.
The decay of most of these silent films
from Korea or better my knowledge about the loss of them makes this
experience even more precious to me.
The film itself - a melodrama of a young
village man who goes to the big city and who has to protect his love
and his sister against a sleazy man - is full of stunning visual ideas
and as fragmentary the early Korean film history exists in film
prints, there remains a sadness in me that we probably never will
learn much more about this national cinematic period. This period is
not even 80 years old and in a strange way film seems as mortal than
a human life.
I know some purists would like to go on
my throat, but I never liked silent films without music, because they
were never screened without it in the period of silent cinema. And
the whole performance which is last but not least a reconstruction of
the silent film tradition in Korea is both, a film historian
scientific device to give an idea about a piece of lost cinema
culture and at the same time it is poetic. Two stories are told here
at the same time, the one the film is performing and the other, the
imagined story on an unknown day in a film theater in Korea which is
forgotten now, probably deconstructed and forgotten for ever. Kim
Tae-Yong´s staging is like a time machine. For me it seems more than
an exotic attraction and I rather think he does for a nearly
forgotten period of Cinema a work like so much photographer do in
transforming datas from space telescopes into images which makes worlds which are already gone visible
In the case of this special event which
deserves its term for more than one reason, I got a glimpse not only
about a lost chapter of Cinema, but also that this special period of
national Cinema that was once lived by men.
I don´t know if I will be able to
describe my feelings after I left the film theater today, dismissed
back in my reality like an awakening after a dream. We can try
analyze or try to categorize this film. We can try to put in in a
historian context, the Korean or the east Asian at that time. We can
make researches about the traditions of Korean melodramas of that
period. But what really moved me to tears was: I felt ghosts around
me, the ghost of the people who made such a film but as well the
ghosts of the Koreans who watched this films in full packed theaters
like the Delphi today.
I was unable to see any other film
today and feel as melancholic as the protagonist in John Huston´s
Joyce-adaption The Dead.
Rüdiger Tomczak
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