2024-02-04 11:05:00
▲Movie “Spring in Seoul” that attracted over 10 million viewers / NEWSIS
That was a while ago. My son, who is in the 6th grade of elementary school, went to see “Spring in Seoul” with his friends. Even the children jumped in and said, “Did you think it was interesting? We should see it too,” which made us realize once again the power of a movie with 10 million viewers. An acquaintance who has been in the film industry for many years says that if we are aiming for over 10 million viewers, once we reach around 5 million people, we need to have repeat viewers who will see it twice or thrice. It has become a “phenomenon” that involves even young people.
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▲Movie “Spring in Seoul” that attracted over 10 million viewers / NEWSIS
That was a while ago. My son, who is in the 6th grade of elementary school, went to see “Spring in Seoul” with his friends. Even the children jumped in and said, “Did you think it was interesting? We should see it too,” which made us realize once again the power of a movie with 10 million viewers. An acquaintance who has been in the film industry for many years says that if we are aiming for over 10 million viewers, once we reach around 5 million people, we need to have repeat viewers who will see it twice or thrice. He said that it has become a “phenomenon” that even young people are involved in. That’s exactly what happened. What’s more, this movie had a lower age limit, allowing viewers over 12 years old to watch it, and it looked like it would be able to do a lot of business with the “elementary school audience” during the winter holidays.
It was the evening when I came back from watching a movie. The children were excited. He said it was cool to see the soldiers carrying out operations against the rebel forces. He was referring to Lee Tae-shin (Jung Woo-sung) in the drama. I told the children that although the character in the play was modeled after the late General Jang Tae-wan, he never actually led his troops to Hangju Bridge or Gwanghwamun. . After the coup d’etat was successful and the new military took over the government, he also served as a representative of a public company, and later became a member of the opposition party’s parliament. I did a kind of “fact check.” “Dad, I know that reality is different from the movies.” I was relieved to see the child speak so innocently. However, I continue to be wary of the possibility that the fiction in the movie will take root in my small heart as if it were a fact, and I will continue to watch over it.
I once conducted an experiment in American academia to examine the effects of history in movies on memory. After showing the university students some scenes from six movies with historical backgrounds, such as “Amadeus” and “The Last Samurai,” they had them read a document that pointed out errors in the videos. When tested after a certain period of time, an astonishing one-third of the participants remembered the false information in the movie as fact. Correcting this was never easy. Memories were easily contaminated by exposure to videos. The New York Times introduced this in an article in 2015 titled “Why movie “facts” prevail,” stating that historical information in movies should not be accepted at face value. , argued that it should be accepted critically. However, the film genre is characterized by its constant interference with this.
South Korea is a country where there is intense hegemonic conflict over the authority to interpret history. The Korean film industry has been an extremely active player, especially in the field of modern history. Before “Spring in Seoul,” there were “Gwangju 5.18” (2007), “Namyeong-dong 1985: 22 Days of State Violence” (2012), and “Taxi Driver: Promises Across the Sea” ( There is already a long list, including “1987: The Truth about a Struggle” (2017). It’s as if South Korea is conducting a “memory experiment” on all Koreans through movies, and there are a lot of movies that take place in the 1980s.
Once a movie is made, since it is not a documentary, it is inevitable that facts will be edited and dramatic elements will be added. In this process, the film freely sacrifices and undermines history. Statements such as “The fiction in the movie has no relation to real people or events” have little effect. Fiction mixes with reality in people’s memories, reconfiguring the “collective memory” of an era. Here, young people and even those who were not yet born at the time can experience what it was like back then through movies.
As movies like this continue to appear, the worldview of a particular generation represented by the 386 generation (those born in the 1960s, went to college in the 80s, and reached their 30s in the 90s) is It is through this method that cultural genes are passed on to future generations. Nowadays, sensitive topics of modern history cannot be brought up properly in schools, and movies have become the “site of history education” about the 1980s. We must seriously consider ways to preserve our rich cultural assets so that the next generation is not exposed to the biased worldviews of these people.
Reporter Shin Dong-hoon
Chosun Ilbo / Chosun Ilbo Japanese version
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