버튼 홈즈(E. Burton Holmes)의 서울 여행기와 영화

Abstract

This paper examines the context of Burton Holmes’s visit to Seoul, his film production and screening in Seoul, as well as his 1901 travelogue. Burton Holmes is widely known as the first foreigner in Korea who photographed and screened a moving picture, and his film print of Seoul was donated to Korean Film Archive by William Cartwright and Genoa Cardwell in 2004. However, there has been an assumption that Holmes’s trip to Seoul was in 1899 and his filmmaking and screening occurred in the same year. This paper first clarifies that he visited Seoul in 1901, after his trip to Russia and Peking through Trans-Siberian railway to observe the Russia’s eastward influence, and that he showed the Korean royal families a portable Mutoscope or Kinora that he brought with him to Seoul. Burton Holmes’s travelogue on Seoul illustrates the following: first, the author’s desire of vivid report-Koreans’ daily lives-, similar to visual newspaper that was prevalent during and after the American-Spanish War. Second, Holmes adopts a political point of view to observe the close competition between Russia and Japan for supremacy in Korea, which is partly influenced by his trip through Trans-Siberian railway. It reflects Holmes’ experience of the emerging power of Russia that substituted Chinese dominance in the Far East. Third, Holmes describes the state of Seoul as in transition of Americanization while exemplifying trespass by trolley of the traditional places such as major Gates. He expresses the feeling of mourning towards the vanishing tradition as well as the hatred towards the ugliness of the cityscape inscribed by the violent construction of Western infrastructure. In sum, Holmes’ travelogue shows the contradictory visions that illustrate the passivity and savageness of Korean government and culture, and the activity and violence of Western and Japanese civilization as a regretful but inevitable process. But unlike other travelogues written by westerners who visited Korea at the same period,Holmes’ portrays the incoherence between literary document and visual newspaper that resonates influences of the new apparatus of moving picture in the beginning of the 20th century.