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Korean cinema has brought us to many places in 2016, from the countryside shaman rituals of THE WAILING and the collapse of a mountain passageway of KIM Seong-hun’s Tunnel to the gothic manor of PARK Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden, but the most memorable location to surface has surely been the inside of a train, which has set the stage for many of the year’s major films. Whether the thrilling central set piece of KIM Jee-woon’s The Age of Shadows or almost the entirety of YEON Sang-ho’s global smash TRAIN TO BUSAN, moving carriages have brought us through several emotional highs and lows this year.

 

Yet trains have for a long time been a potent symbol in Korean films. In its modern incarnation, one of Korean cinema’s most enduring images has been of actor SUL Kyung-gu, arms outstretched on a train track, screaming “I want to go back” before ending his life. LEE Chang-dong’s A Peppermint Candy (2000) opens where its narrative ends, with this striking scene of its main character committing suicide. The rest of the film unfolds in reverse, through several long sequences, each connected by the image of the same train rolling along the tracks in reverse, highlighting the character’s final words.

The train provides a clear chronological image of moving backwards through time but is also a symbol of a society’s social and historical progress. For decades throughout the mid-20th century, westerns frequently presented images of trains as metaphors for the greed, industrialization and cannibalization of the American Frontier, such as Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). 

Similarly, LEE employs the train as a negative image. He forces the viewer to travel back through the past on this train to witness the sacrifices that have been made for Korea to arrive to the developed economical status it was beginning to enjoy on the cusp on the 20th century. A train only goes forward, never looking back, yet LEE pushes his train backwards, making viewers remember the terrible events of the Gwangju Massacre in 1980 and the oppressive military regime that followed throughout most of the subsequent decade.

Three years earlier, LEE cast his gaze on Korea’s rapid urbanization in his debut Green Fish, once again kicking off his film with the image of a train. A young man rides a train home, having completed his 21-month mandatory military service. He will barely recognize his town, which has become swallowed by Seoul’s swelling borders, but before then he sees a girl on the train. On separate cars they both lean out the door and she loses her scarf, which flies over and covers his face. He tries to return the item, only to get caught up in a fight with men who harass the woman. The train once again serves as a negative symbol for the passage of time and here also provides a small allegorical microcosm of Korean society.

Going even further back director HA Gil-jong briefly used a train for the last scene of his masterpiece The March Of Fools (1975). After fighting against the system through the narrative, one of the film’s protagonists is compelled to toe the line, shave his head and sign up for military service. He boards a train with fellow recruits and just as it’s about to leave the station, the object of his affection arrives on the track. A military officer who prevents her from boarding by the man opens a window, allowing to share a kiss before he disappears for three years. This powerful scene is full of symbolism, crying out against society’s heavy hand on the futures of its youth, and is backed by the melancholic strums and crooning of singer-songwriter SONG Chang-shik’s As Days Go By.

 

 

Before this year, the big train film of Korean cinema was also high on allegory, as BONG Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer (2013) featured the remnants of a future human civilization subdivided into class throughout the carriages of a long locomotive perpetually circumnavigating the globe. Based on a French graphic novel, BONG’s film offers a metaphor for our world’s capitalist economic system, where the rich feed off the poor. The dystopian narrative follows a revolution attempted by the low-class passengers of the back carriages as they seek to topple the system and replace it with their own, only to have their leader tempted by the train’s mysterious engineer when he reaches the front engine car. The train represents a society which cannibalizes itself in order to survive and its annual trips around the globe show us the cyclical and repetitive passage of time.

This year, YEON Sang-ho, for his live action debut TRAIN TO BUSAN, also presented us a cross-section of society, though one more focused on the contemporary fears of Korean citizens. Though ostensibly an entertaining genre film, TRAIN TO BUSAN is also an effective commentary on how Korean society at large reacts in the event of a crisis. 

Beyond their political motivations, both Snowpiercer and TRAIN TO BUSAN use the interior spaces of trains to dynamic effect, exploration new stylistic avenues within their claustrophobic confines. Another filmmaker who recognizes the visual potential of trains is director KIM Jee-woon, who first brought his attention to trains in the opening showstopper in his ‘Kimchi’ western The Good, The Bad, And The Weird (2008). A train robbery with several factions careening through or alongside the train’s whole length, the set piece was a dazzling combination of set design, rushing steady cams and swinging crane shots. 

Yet it proved only to be a dry run for the significantly more involved central set piece of KIM’s latest film The Age of Shadows. This time focusing exclusively on the inside of a train, a nail-bitingly tense search by Japanese officers for hidden Korean resistance fighters, while several double agents feed information to each side, plays out in the train’s limited and linear space. Suffused with a sense of inevitability, the sequence calls to mind Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Circle Rouge (1970) among others. 

Looking beyond the year’s more iconic films, trains featured prominently in other works. The KTX high speed express train from Seoul to Busan was not only seen in TRAIN TO BUSAN, but also in a pair of mainstream melodramas released at the beginning of the year. 

Both Mood of the Day and A Man and A Woman feature potential romantic partners meeting on the train. They seek change or escape, and meeting a new person in this common yet constantly moving space is symbolic of both the fear and their desire for something new, while their hesitancy to engage in a relationship that goes against their established order, demonstrated by a professional rivalry in the former, and a marital affair in the second, highlights the shackles that they feel bind them to their social status.

Between these examples and others, such as ZHANG Hang-jun’s comedy Break Out (2002) and KIM Dong-bin’s horror Red Eye (2005), trains have been a popular setting in Korea, where many use trains every day, unlike the United States, which these days features comparatively few train sequences in its cinema. Beyond the familiarity of the train, its unique symbolic potential for Korean historical and social themes, not to mention its stylistic value, has proven a big draw for many of Korea’s top filmmakers.