1961 Seoul, South Korea 1

Young Sook Kim
Born in 1945
Seoul, South Korea
Interviewed on September 21, 2019
by Jinny Choi

The first ever movie I got to watch was after I came to Seoul. I grew up in Sangju, Gyeongbuk, a rural part of Korea. Nobody had televisions back then – although I think there might have been one shared TV in the town hall. I traveled all the way up to Seoul alone when I was 17, and found a job in a factory near Gwanghwamun. There was one famous theater called, “Gwanghwamun International Theatre,” near where I was living. Watching a movie at a theater was definitely not something people did on a daily basis. A movie ticket price was a couple ten wons, which may seem like nothing now, but it was considered to be very expensive during the time. You really had to make up your mind to go watch a movie, and usually it would be on a special day. I watched my first movie, The Tale of Chunhyang, on Chuseok (Korean Thanksgiving day) of that year. Usually families gather together during Chuseok, but people in Gyeongbuk celebrated the holiday a few weeks later than those in Seoul, because they waited for grains to fully ripen, so I didn’t have to go back home that day. One of my friends, also from the countryside, and I decided to go to Gwanghwamun International Theatre for the first time that day, full of excitement.

I remember the weather was very nice and I was wearing a dress full of floral patterns. Back then, we didn’t have any watch or device to keep track of time. However, we were able to estimate time by looking at where the sun was at during the day. Although the movie was scheduled to start in the afternoon, we went to the theater early in the morning, which seemed to be around 10AM, to buy our tickets at the ticket booth. The concession stands definitely had sugarplum candies, which I am pretty sure I ate during the movie, but I don’t exactly remember what else they sold. After buying the ticket, we hung out and had fun looking around the theater for a couple of hours, then got in line when people started to form a line. Even waiting in line was exciting. Honestly, everything was new and fun.

The Gwanghwamun International Theatre, which is now gone due to the city redevelopment project in 1985, was one of the biggest buildings during the time. The theater was very spacious and it looked like a stadium. It had a huge screen and many more seats than normal theaters that we see in multiplex cinemas today. Of course we didn’t have air conditioning, soft chairs, or high quality speakers, but that did not bother me at all. I sat in one of the middle rows in the theater. Before the actual movie was screened, we had to watch the so-called “Korea News” for about 30 minutes. The Korea News was basically a political broadcast informing people about the great accomplishments made by the former President Rhee. The Korea News played the national anthem too, so we all paid tribute before watching the movie. It seems very manipulative now, but this was normal back then.

I remember how beautiful and handsome the main actress and actor were in The Tale of Chunhyang. Since The Tale of Chunhyang is one of the best known love stories and classical folk tales of Korea, there are many different screen adaptations of the story. The one I watched was starred by Eunhee Choi and Jingyu Kim. They are both very famous stars now, but I didn’t know who they were back then. The movie was in black and white, and the voices came from dubbing artists. Although the story is about the love between a Courtesan’s daughter, Chungyang, and a Government official’s son, Yi Mongryong, there were no scenes with explicit signs of love, such as holding hands, throughout the movie. But even without any skinship, which was banned from screening during the time, I was able to tell that there was love between Chungyang and Yi Mongryong by looking at how they gazed at each other. I remember the most symbolic scene of The Tale of Chunhyang was when Chunhyang is on a swing and Yi Mongryong falls in love with her at first sight.

The story was of course a happy ending. Most stories in Korea during the time reflected the four-characters-idiom called, “勸善懲惡,” which means the promotion of virtue and reproval of vice. Korea during the 1950s was going through a tough time: many people had died from the Korean War, families have been separated, the economy wasn’t great, and people were generally poor. Because of these already prevalent hardships, nobody wanted to feel sadder than they already were; instead, they sought for happy endings in stories which helped them cheer up and overcome their hardships.

You know, now I kind of want some sugarplum candies.