<아리랑>과 할리우드

Abstract

This paper examines the significance of the film Arirang in Chosun cinematic history. Arirang (directed by Na Woon-kyu, 1926) is the most important and controversial work in Chosun/Korean cinematic history. Although the film reel for Arirang has never been found and its existence cannot be verified, there survive appraisals lauding it as the best piece in all of Chosun’s cinematic history, and even after independence the film has constantly held a place of mention as a canonical piece of minjok cinema. But after opposing opinions were presented about these views, the flow of research on Arirang took on a new phase. Cho Hee-moon said that the director of Arirang was not Na Woon-kyu but a Japanese person, the film was an entertainment-oriented popular film without much relevance to the minjok, and the passage of time had exaggerated its meaning. Thus the mythology surrounding the movie Arirang, which had till then been maintained in a relatively solid form, encountered a crisis. A long fight on the discourse level had begun, surrounding a film whose existence could not be confirmed. But regardless of the results of these debates, such dichotomizing frameworks of opposition fundamentally comprise limitations. This is because within such frameworks, Arirang is only considered in terms of whether it can or cannot be considered a minjok film, and its background and the changes it wrought in Chosun cinematic history can easily be overlooked. This paper examines the problem of how Arirang embraced Hollywood film and how that was the movie’s distinguishing characteristic. Hollywood movies related to Arirang were usually understood as low-class popular art such as serial films. But a look at the cinema-related discourse of the time reveals that Hollywood films were not considered merely to have the simple appeal of lower-class genres. A great number of the movies that Arirang is considered to have drawn on were on a higher cultural plane than Japanese movies or Hollywood serial films. Indeed, the movies that Na Woon-kyu revealed to have been models for his work are Hollywood feature films, considered ‘high-class’ movies in the discourse of the mid 1920s. According to research on the Chosun movie scene of this period, the mid-1920s was a period in which the focus shifted from serial films to feature films. The new language of visual narration which Hollywood feature films provided allowed for a method of visually narrating the Chosun of that era. Of course reliance on unique screening methods such as the intervention of the byon-sa narrator persisted, but when the Chosun films themselves became models for future films, the images in the movies became a visual language, gaining significance in their own right. Although still imperfect, when cinematic images became a means for direct communication, films were able to discourse on contemporary Chosun, without being hampered by the original works of literature. Arirang was the first Chosun film that made all this possible.