Born Korean, Becoming South Korean

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Category: Gallery

Gallery Talk and Film Screening

The Cinematic Golden Age and Cold War Culture

with

Han Joon Magnan-Park
Assistant Professor, Film, Television and Theater Department, Notre Dame University

Thursday, September 21, 2006

After the armistice, South Korean society rushed full-on towards economic development, soon pulling itself up to become one of the most advanced and dynamic countries in the world. It's a story with a happy ending, but Han Joon Magnan-Park, an assistant professor in the Film, Television and Theater Department at Notre Dame University, showed his audience that at the time, Korean cinema wasn't nearly as cheery about the country's prospects.

Using the 1961 film The Stray Bullet as an example, Magnan-Park noted how director Hyun Mok Yoo had consciously patterned the work on the 1948 Italian neo-realist film The Bicycle Thief.  The Bicycle Thief depicted an Italian family struggling to survive in the aftermath World War II; though masterfully sympathetic, the characters in the film only bring their family closer to disintegration as they struggle to save it.

So too in The Stray Bullet: The main character, a government accountant, sacrifices his meager salary to meet his family's needs—to the point of ignoring his own toothache rather than paying a dentist to fix it. But it's just not enough. Beset by chronic unemployment and despair, the accountant's brother turns to robbery and his sister to prostitution. Adhering to neo-realist strictures, The Stray Bullet leaves it to audience members to formulate their own "answers" to the problematic reality it displays.

More than just a philosophical exercise, the film expresses a deep and uniquely Korean unease: the feeling that the Confucian value system isn't up to the task of regulating an increasingly modernizing society. A pillar of Korean society for centuries, Confucian thought mandated clear duties for every individual. All the characters in The Stray Bullet perform these duties as best they know how, and still end up mired in poverty and chaos. With this in mind, Magnan-Park suggested, the film's lack of resolution can be read as a question posed to Korean society: What value system do we rely on now?

Produced during the brief flowering of South Korean democracy that followed the removal of Syngman Rhee, The Stray Bullet's question—and its depiction of a bleak, chaotic society-struck a nerve with viewers. When Park Chung Hee assumed power shortly after its release, the film was banned.

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