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영어

During the colonial period, Korean film-making business drawing on classical novels started with Ch'unhyangjŏn, a 1923 movie by a Japanese director, which received enthusiastic audience responses and was soon to be followed by other movies, Changhwahongnyŏnjŏn and Shimch'ŏngjŏn. The number of movies cinematizing classical novels was only about a tenth of the total number of movies produced during the colonial period. Nevertheless, their significance in the history of Korean films far exceeded their numerical weight, given their substantial contribution towards attracting the audience. The popularity of the movies based on classical novels can be attributed to the huge popularity of the classical novels that continued well into the twentieth century, in Seoul as well as in the provinces. In other words, the enormous popularity of the original novel translated itself into the popularity of the movies based on them. This means that, unlike other types of movie making, cinematization of classical novels succeeded in encouraging active audience participation, leading to enhanced movie consumption and interpretation. While, that is, novels in the written form could only exist in the memory and imagination of the reader, those novels that are vividly filmed naturally invited the audience's active participation, strengthening their reception of the text by way of various visual effects. Such an active participation 'liberates' the recipient, so to speak, from the standardized and stereotyped way of communication of the printed media, which have been considered to be of the first-class culture. In contrast to the author-centered, one-way communication structure of the printed media, early movies had an effect of decentralizing the text into a two-way communication structure. This effect could be maximized in the movies materializing classical novels. This is how the cinematization of classical novels elicited the maximum participation of the audience, consolidating them into an emotional community in times of crisis in the history of Korean film.