SEOPYEONJE

DATABASE
Archive

Archive

DATABASE

SEOPYEONJE

Aug 05, 2019

Writer by Pierce Conran
View3522

1993 | 112 MIN | Drama, Epic/Historical

DIRECTOR IM Kwon-taek

CAST KIM Myung-kon, OH Jung-hae, KIM Kyu-chul

RELEASE DATE April 10, 1993

CONTACT Taehung Pictures

Tel +82 2 797 5121

Fax +82 2 797 5125

Widely considered the crowning achievement of Korea’s most widely respected filmmaker, IM Kwon-taek’s Seopyeonje (1993) encapsulated the Korean experience and the pain of its modern history in a story about the dying musical art of Pansori that avoids historical landmarks as it glides through several decades of the early 20th century.

In the 1960s, Dong-ho (KIM Kyu-chul) gets off a bus and visits a pansori singer as he begins his search for another pansori singer, Song-hwa (OH Jung-hae). Decades earlier, Song-hwa was an orphan who was taken in by the travelling pansori singer Yu-bong (KIM Myung-kon). Though the art form was already dying in favor of more popular musical styles being brought in from Japan and the West, Yu-bong puts Song-hwa through a rigorous training regime, even as he struggles to make ends meet and drinks his pain away. In the present, Dong-ho, who was also taken in by Yu-bong as a child and taught to play the accompanying percussion in pansori performances, continues his search for Song-hwa, learning more about what happened to her, including her eventual blindness, which occurred after he ran away from Yu-bong many years earlier.

Seopyeonje was released shortly after President KIM Young-sam took office, the first civilian to do so since the early 1960s. KIM is known for his ‘segyehwa’ (globalization) policy, which sought, among other things, to usher Korea into the global era by exporting its cultural products. Though IM’s film appears to be far more traditional than the Korean films which are more familiar to Western viewers, the way it engages with Korean cultural concepts, notably that of ‘han’, left a mark on local filmmakers that can still be felt today. SONG Kang-ho’s wandering former detective at the end of Memories Of Murder (2003), still seeking answers, or any number of the vengeful women of Korean cinema, in Sympathy For Lady Vengeance (2005) or Bedevilled (2010), to name a few, may not have existed the way we know them today without the archetypal characters of Dong-ho and Song-hwa.

A notoriously difficult concept to explain, ‘han’ can perhaps best be described as a deep-seated feeling of pent-up and unresolved grief or resentment which was first used during the Japanese Colonial Era. The character of Song-hwa, who has hardships forced on her in order to become a singer more capable of expressing emotion in her voice, regularly comes up in discussions of ‘han’ in cinema.

IM started out as a filmmaker in the early 1960s, and although he made over 60 films in the first 15 years of his career, it wasn’t until the mid-70s, by his own estimation, that he began to take a more active interest in artistic and social themes. Following that turning point, he made score of classics which often explored traditional arts (Chihwaseon, 2002) and beliefs (Mandara, 1981) in the country, as well as the effects of the Korean War (The Tae Baek Mountains, 1994), the separation of the peninsula (Jagko, 1983) and the changing role of women in society (The Surrogate Woman, 1987).

Seopyeonje was IM’s 93rd film and became the first Korean feature to cross the one million viewer mark in Seoul. The legendary filmmaker’s most recent film Revivre, his 102nd, debuted at the Venice International Film Festival in 2015.

Any copying, republication or redistribution of KOFIC's content is prohibited without prior consent of KOFIC.

Related People