Cinemas have changed along with society. A double-feature movie house at the entrance of the local market used to be a kind of neighborhood cultural space, but it has been replaced by a multiplex built with big business investment. The age of the single-screen movie house is now long gone, and multiplexes offer a variety of choices in one place.

The now extinct Gukje Theater near Gwanghwamun, central Seoul, is crowded with movie fans during the Chuseok holiday in September 1962.

Just like an ancient Greek statue or a tortoise shell with early Chinese inscriptions excavated from deep under the earth after an eternity, memories uncovered from the past are prone to shed their darker sides and occupy brightly illuminated areas of the memory. Individuals and groups alike do not hesitate to edit or embellish bits and pieces of an ordinary life into more dramatic scenes. Thanks to this surprising flexibility of reminiscence, we all cherish our childhoods and some even go so far as to create their own sacred myths. Walter Benjamin’s well-known attempts to exclude the word “I” from all his miscellanies, except for personal letters, point to a strict and conscientious literary scientist’s frustrated desire to avoid such tricks of memories. On the contrary, I have no qualms about haphazardly going over my memories, which are neither special nor coherent, because my intention is not to reach the essence but to describe the atmosphere.

Light and Darkness
I remember the day I went to the movies with my mother for the first time in my life. Unusual for her, she wore a nice sky-blue hanbok (traditional Korean dress) and held a small parasol. We went over the hill and walked under the blazing sun along the narrow-gauge tracks of the Suwon- Incheon Line. Following my tall 39-year-old mother, I occasionally glanced at her, trying to hide my excitement and an inexplicable feeling of guilt. It was 1967, and I was in second grade, my summer vacation drawing to an end. That day, we saw the animated film “Hong Gil-dong” (a Korean equivalent of Robin Hood). My brief research tells me that the film premiered in January that year, attracting 100,000 viewers in three days, probably during the Lunar New Year’s holidays. The film was rereleased in August, and that was when we went to see it. I won’t tell you how much I begged and nagged my mother to take me. At the time, I was a devoted reader of Children’s Chosun Ilbo, which was running the cartoon series “The Hero Hong Gil-dong,” by Shin Don-wu. So, I must have known early on that it had been made into a movie.
I don’t remember the content of the film, but I do remember the theater. The thick, soft curtains brushing against my face as soon as I opened the door, the smell of sweat and mildew emanating from the darkness, the air lukewarm from the audience’s warmth. I stepped into the darkness, shuffling and groping along the wall. The dark hall had a stepped floor, and I could vaguely see a row of chairs on each level and the outline of a head on top of each. Nothing seemed to guarantee our safety in the darkness, but my mother had no difficulty leading me to an empty chair and seating me there. A ray of light passed over my head, and dust particles danced in the blue beam.
Even now, coming out of the theater after a movie, I always feel as if I were thrown out of my mother’s womb into the fierce brightness of the street. It always takes a considerable time for my dark and irregular heart to beat to the rhythm of the calm, strange street.

Wang Yu and Li Ching
After this memorable trip to the cinema, I started to frequent the neighborhood theaters with my friends. Generally, they were located in the markets. In their concealed halls packed with people, all kinds of bold crimes unfolded, as well as dramas revolving around people loving, betraying, and taking revenge. For boys who had nothing to do to amuse themselves but to dig up kudzu roots or watch trains chugging by, going to the movies was a pastime both irresistible and dangerous. We managed to avoid the brutish guards who would bully underage customers, but were always scared and puzzled by the presence of the “spot inspector’s seats,” reserved for policemen, on either side of the theater at the back. These special seats had been installed during the Japanese colonial period to censor films, and were retained long after liberation under the pretext of maintaining order in the theater. These seats, usually left unoccupied, made me wonder how such a haven for exciting entertainment could also be an improper place that needed surveillance and control.
Nonetheless, we were enthralled by Wang Yu (aka Jimmy Wang) in “One-Armed Swordsman” (1967) and shed tears over “Susanna” (1967) starring Li Ching. The former is about a man who loses his right arm in an unfortunate incident but trains himself to master a one-armed style of swordplay to avenge his father’s death and repay his teacher’s care. The story itself was interesting enough, but I was especially fascinated by the leading actor, Wang Yu. I held my breath when his shifty, steely eyes glinted in the darkness. Any boy who had seen this film would have tried to imitate his swordplay with his right arm tucked inside his shirt, defeating an imaginary enemy, on his way home.
At the 2013 Busan International Film Festival, Wang Yu received the Asia Star Award for Best Male Actor. Then 70 years old, the actor said in his acceptance speech, “Thank you for remembering me.” BIFF’s Executive Programmer Kim Ji-seok took the stage and said, “How could we possibly forget you? Almost every middle-aged Korean man probably remembers and appreciates you.” That was no exaggeration, I swear.
I was as deeply impressed by “Susanna,” but in a different way. I would go up the back hill overlooking the sea at sunset and think of Li Ching’s heartrendingly lovely eyes, playing on my harmonica the theme song that begins, “The sun sets down in the sky; the wind blows away the leaves.”

The Ventures and the Spotnicks
It is not that I went to see only the commercially successful, well-made foreign movies at the time. I often giggled through a vulgar comedy or a tacky action movie, and also went with adults to watch propaganda films, clapping when everyone else did. One of them was “Mountains and Rivers of the Eight Provinces” (1967), featuring an elderly couple who travel all over the country to visit their married daughters. The purpose of this idyllic family drama was to praise Korea’s economic development on its way to industrialization, leaving behind the bleakness of war and poverty.
In the 1970s, I became an adolescent to whom the cinemas presenting obvious propaganda or banal high-teen movies were no longer a place of interest. Besides, television was introduced around that time and the weekend “Masterpiece Cinema” more or less quenched my thirst for “good movies.”
The small neighborhood theaters, the shabby landmarks in the alleys of outdoor markets, started to disappear one by one, and so did the boy who would whistle and holler with adult members of the audience every time the film broke in the middle of a show, plunging the theater into darkness. But in my mind, I can still see the scrawny boy with a serious face who would run to the cinema whenever he heard the instrumental hits of the Ventures or the Spotnicks, even when he had to break his piggy bank to buy the ticket. The Spotnicks’ “Last Space Train” and “Johnny Guitar” filled the double-feature cinema when the first film ended and the projectionist was getting the next one ready. Although I’ve always liked the cheerfully powerful rhythms of “Walk, Don’t Run” by the Ventures, the Spotnicks’ electric guitar sounds, as clear as the cold, bright Scandinavian sky and as maudlin as can be, have the power to instantly transport me somewhere into space, even now. And, oh, the unforgettable “Karelia”!

Gukdo & Garam is a 143-seat art cinema in Daeyeon-dong, Busan. Located in a quiet neighborhood, it is a stronghold for independent and arthouse films, which find it hard to break into mainstream multiplex cinemas.

Somewhere along the way, I realized I was more interested in the music than the story. The films that I saw in my teenage years, spent in a mysterious lethargy, are stored in my memory in the form of music rather than stories or scenes. Thinking of Ha Gil-jong’s “The March of Fools” (1975), I hear the husky, bluesy voice of the singer Kim Jeong-ho. Lee Jang-ho’s “The Stars’ Heavenly Home” (1974) is inseparable from Kang Geun-sik’s bittersweet guitar play. And Lee’s “It Rained Yesterday” (1975) reminds me more of Jeong Seong-jo’s flute melodies than of the leading actress with a pretty smile.
Steeped in anguish and sadness, these films portrayed, each from a slightly different angle, the struggles of young people wearing blue jeans and playing folk guitar in the dismal era of developmental dictatorship in the mid-1970s. Around the time this new trend in Korean film culminated in the genre known as “hostess films” (literary films featuring bar girls and sexploitation), I drifted away from the world of movies. Now, there were plenty of other forms of entertainment, and most of all, I was becoming an adult. Not that I have completely stopped going to the cinema, but films have never been more than a simple pastime or just another form of cultural enjoyment.
Around that time, my interest was directed toward poetry. Perhaps as the latent legacy of my earlier love of films, my first poetry collection contains a piece that goes, “If only music flowed in the moments of people’s lives, just as in TV dramas.” The last film that I went to great lengths to watch must have been Im Kwon-taek’s “Sopyonje.” With shoulders hunched and heart fluttering with expectation, I stood in a long line to buy my ticket in front of Dansungsa Theater.

Going to the Cinema with My Son
Recently, I began to return to the cinema with my son. Around 1998, movie theaters started to be transformed into multiplexes by big-money capitalists. The age of single-screen theaters, exuding the elegance of a tailored suit, had to make way for multiplexes offering a wide selection of films in one place, like ready-made clothes. Accordingly, the old method of film distribution — with the prints circulated around the first-run, re-release, and double-feature cinemas, consecutively — has become obsolete. Despite a now modernized system, not all titles are allowed to compete on a fair basis. While profitable films are assigned more screens to maximize their showings, obscure titles are presented only a couple of times a day, usually at odd hours, before disappearing altogether. That’s why my son and I sometimes had the luxury of a spacious theater all to ourselves, the only problem being that the films we saw were all of my son’s choosing — Japanese horror films.
A credit card company’s 2015 survey revealed that one out of four viewers bought a single movie ticket, reflecting the recent increase in the number of solitary moviegoers. The figures roughly correspond to the proportion of single-person households, which stood at 27.2 percent that year, according to Statistics Korea. Over time, the cinema landscape has evolved. But one essential thing has not changed: those who go to watch films, whether alone or with others, are people who cannot sit back at home and let the world pass them by. Their will to go out and see for themselves what lies beyond their limited private worlds compels them to sit next to strangers in a darkened theater, staring ahead. They are bored with their everyday lives and also curious to know what lies beyond. I hope they will not be thrown out, crestfallen, into the reality of our stuffy world again, after wandering around a land of illusion and deception for a couple of hours.