FormalPara Playbill

“Welcome to Dongmakgol” (Welkeom tu dongmakgol); Bak Gwang-hyeon, 2005

“The Taebaek Mountains” (Taebaek sanmaek); Im Kwon-taek, 1994

“Jiseul” (“Potatoes”); O Myeol, 2013

“Taegukgi: Brotherhood of War” (Taegeukgi hwinallimyeo [“Raising the Korean flag”]); Gang Je-gyu, 2004

“A Little Pond” (Jageun yeonmot); Yi Sang-u, 2008

“Operation Chromite” (Incheon sangnyuk jakjeon [“The Inchon Landing”]); Yi Jae-han, 2016

“A Melody to Remember” (Oppa saenggak [“Thinking of (a sister’s) older brother”]); Yi Han, 2016

“Swing Kids” (Seuwing kijeu); Gang Hyeong-cheol, 2018

“The Last Witness” (Heuksuseon [“Black narcissus (flower)”]); Bae Chang-ho, 2001

“The Front Line” (Gojijeon [“Battle for the high ground”]); Jang Hun, 2011

“The Piper” (Sonnim [“The Guest”]); Kim Gwang-tae, 2015

“Spring in My Hometown” (Areumdaun sijeol [“A Beautiful time”]); Yi Gwang-mo, 1998

In perhaps the most memorable scene from the unforgettable “Welcome to Dongmakgol”, a mammoth wild boar suddenly rampages through a mountainside potato patch and terrorises villagers going about their work. Quick teamwork by a band of North Korean, South Korean, and American soldiers, who had separately entered this isolated community of Dongmakgol in the early stages of the Korean War, leads to the heroic killing of the fearsome beast, which then becomes devoured by the men that night. Within the symbolistic realm of the film, the boar, as an agent of destruction if not savagery and division, can represent a variety of threats, from modernity, the outside world, and American imperialism to nature, history, or indeed fate. But in the end, the animal suffices to stand for that which encompasses all those dangers: the Korean War itself. The scene thus well encapsulates the film while being set apart cinematically, with its slow-motion, three-dimensional highlighting (Image 1), which allows it to function as a fantasy within the larger fantasy that is “Welcome to Dongmakgol”.

Image 1
A photograph of a frightened man chased by a wild boar on pasture land with the mountain in the background.

Young North Korean soldier Taekgi chased by a wild boar, from “Welcome to Dongmakgol”

Full size image

Strikingly, “Welcome to Dongmakgol” is one of two distinctly fantastic Korean War films released over the hallyu era, with the other being the newer and equally remarkable “Swing Kids”. The recent appearance of two such works says a lot about the continuing, comprehensive, and exhaustive (and exhausting) presence of the Korean War up to the present day. Counting just those treatments from South Korea alone, over 20 films set in the Korean War have been released in theatres over the hallyu era since the mid-1990s, with each attempting to capture a new interpretive angle or to highlight a particular, perhaps overlooked, feature, incident, or figure.53 They all have striven to join the growing list of box office hits—what Hyangjin Lee calls “division blockbusters” and We-jung Yi simply “Korean War blockbusters”54—that depict anew the origins and ongoing impact of that historical event of utmost importance. This prolific growth of Korean War cinema has thus occupied what Youngmin Choe describes as “a continuum across the popular South Korean filmic imagination, an increasingly complex depiction of national division and reunification”.55 The mega-crowd pleaser “Taegukgi” (2004), for example, while offering a conventionally epic and perhaps risk-free (albeit very violent) run-through of the war while deploying traditional motifs and themes,56 muddles the customary moral picture in its storyline. Another release, “Operation Chromite” (2016), actually reinforces the received Manichean understanding from South Korea’s authoritarian past, but even this film’s relatively simplistic narrative gets couched in a full-blown Hollywood-style action movie; and just as importantly, it expresses the standpoint of the ageing but still clamorous generations that directly experienced the war in one form or another.

Such an extensive range of Korean War films, in terms of both memory politics and popular perception, thus reflects the continuing development of the conflict’s meaning and impact in South Korea. Still, the biggest divide in historical perspective, regarding the war’s ties to the onset and solidification of national division(s), appears firmly set, however skewed towards one side: As in the academic disputes and popular discourse revealed in political and generational differences, the balance has long tilted towards viewing the war, including the South Korean side’s actions, more complexly and often very critically.57 Furthermore, a major split appears between those Korean War films that view the war in its international context and those that insist—to the point of removing the foreign presence in their depictions—on its basic character as a civil war, one caused and fought by Koreans. This explains why the most consistent allegory in the storylines involves brothers or siblings caught up and separated in what was, at heart, a fratricidal conflict with roots dating back years, decades, or longer. The axis of fate dominated by the dark cloud of war thus hovers over the axis of blood ties represented by the family, which in turn lays bare the severed nation. These two frameworks overlap considerably, but they also clash when, as Koreans become swept up by the overwhelming power of destruction, individual characters seek to realise something of redemptive value amid the carnage.

Geographies of the Civil War

Not surprisingly, Korean War films tend to highlight the physical contours of the nation under contestation and frame the story with markers in the landscape: mountains and hills, valleys, islands, or seasonal changes. Unlike in the cinematic treatments of Koreans’ defence of their country against foreign invaders, as discussed in Chaps. 2 and 5, in Korean War cinema the territorial and natural features of the peninsula serve as the shared basis of contestation over which side—North or South, communists or capitalists—can claim the moral as well as geographical high ground. Here, too, however, the storylines focus on the human dimension of familial and communal relations, with the trope of separated siblings signifying most readily the tragedy of national division.

This motif is unmistakably at the heart of the earliest-released film examined in this book, “The Taebaek Mountains” (1994), still the best-known cinematic depiction of the turbulent 1945–1950 interregnum between the end of Japanese colonial rule and the start of the Korean War. At the start of this immensely decisive period, the victorious American and Soviet forces of World War II, having decided to divide their occupation of the peninsula, haphazardly entered Korea in late summer of 1945. As they did so, the two occupying armies promptly began to cultivate friendly governing orders that formally took form three years later, in 1948, as South and North Korea, respectively. Unlike the closing episode from 1949 in “Assassination” (Chap. 5), which pointedly connects the post- to pre-liberation periods in order to highlight the nearly insurmountable challenges of decolonisation, in “The Taebaek Mountains”, the turbulent formation of South Korea provides a bloody prelude, preview, and connection to the subsequent Korean War.

Based on the best-selling multi-volume novel of the same name by Jo Jeong-nae, the film’s title refers to the geological spine of the Korean peninsula that runs from the northeastern tip down to the southern coastal areas, where at one point it becomes Mt. Jiri. The area surrounding Mt. Jiri, the setting of the film both physically and symbolically, was one of the main sites of leftist guerrilla activity in this period. The story is fictionalised—interestingly, by using the name of an actual town in the vicinity, Beolgyo—but it begins with the real communist-led uprising against the newly established Southern state in October of 1948. This was known as the Yeosu-Suncheon Rebellion, in reference to the two main towns captured by leftist insurgents before they were chased back up to the mountains. Thereafter Mt. Jiri serves in the storyline as the base from where these guerrillas recruit more partisans and battle landlords, the rightist local constabulary, and the South Korean army until the eruption of the Korean War in the summer of 1950. The mountain thus stands for the territory of Korea itself, with the higher elevation areas serving as a retreat for communist forces, and the lower reaches home to the anti-communists.

Multiple characters and relationships—originally all drawn from the locality but eventually joined, decisively and jarringly, by the Southern and Northern armies—are swept into the increasingly vicious back-and-forth between the two sides, a preview of what was to come in the ensuing civil war. This dynamic allegorises the destructive intervention of ideological contestations, together with their accompanying political and military forces. Such forces trigger, inflame, inflate, and radicalise towards horrific violence the localised disputes based originally, according to the film, on the class division of landlord and peasant engendered by Japanese colonial rule. However powerful these tensions were, however, the story suggests that they could have been contained if not for the intervention of the rigidly institutionalised “centres”, the South Korean and North Korean states recently formalised in the summer of 1948. Both of these internalised external forces make their way into this town of Beolgyo. The South Korean politicians and right-wing thugs, with their cruel cynicism and disregard for local particularities and sentiments, are eventually matched, even outdone, by the conquering North Korean army that arrives in July 1950, just after the start of the Korean War, to bring an end to the story. Actually, the film concludes with the sudden and vandalising retreat of the Northern army and the disillusioned local communist guerrillas in September of 1950. They leave behind a devastated town, countryside, and population with no one to turn to aside from a surviving local shaman who, in personifying the persistence of Korean cultural identity, continues to carry out her rituals for the departed.

The shaman also contrasts sharply with the foreignness of the divisive ideologies, and perhaps of even the political brutality and modern weaponry, which pressed Koreans to commit horrible acts on each other, even before the Korean War formally began. This reality is visualised geographically, over the opening credits, as an enormous flock of swallows in the mountains that sways in tandem, then suddenly changes directions as if pushed around by the whimsical shifts of a natural or heavenly force.58 War itself is this force of fate, however, and its material origins are most acutely signalled, in this case, by the landed basis of class conflict, which drives the inclinations and grievances weaponised by those wielding both ideals and hatred. Regular people simply have little choice but to choose a side. The many characters in “The Taebaek Mountains” represent this dynamic in their own ways, but they are all encapsulated by the estranged brothers at the centre of the storyline: the older, educated Sang-jin, who leads the local communist guerrillas, and his under-educated and brutish younger sibling Sang-beom, who carries a thick regional accent, a professed loathing of communism, and a murderous resentment of his big brother. But even such a terrible blood feud can be overcome, the film suggests, if, like the shaman, the warring sides return to their grounding in local communities and national traditions. This stance is perhaps represented by the third main character, a middling mediator attacked by all the warring parties. But he is largely irrelevant in the face of the determined forces instigating bloody revenge and summary justice, as demonstrated all too well by the two brothers and their partisans in the throes of ferocious recrimination. They are shorn of not only their humanity but even their will by the domineering war.

This sense of unrelenting, inexorable brutality pervades another film depicting the months just before the formal outbreak of the Korean War, “Jiseul” (“Potatoes”; O Myeol, 2012), set in late 1948 in the snowy winter of Jeju Island, where earlier in the year—on April 3, 1948—a rebellion began against the nascent constabulary sent from Seoul. By the end of 1948, the South Korean armed forces, backed by the US military that still remained in an advisory role despite the Southern government’s inauguration in August, were undertaking a terrifying punitive operation across the island. This campaign would eventually result in the indiscriminate killing of tens of thousands of residents. The most awful event of a cascading wave of viciousness that preceded the outright outbreak of the Korean War in June of 1950, the Jeju Island massacre—known simply as “4–3” in Korean—epitomised the prewar moment when the post-liberation occupation’s violent politics descended in full force over the newly established Republic of Korea, sweeping up communities into the building conflagration leading to civil war. Jeju Island, in the furthest corner of South Korean territory, served as a detached but all-too-proximate cauldron upon which the fiercely anti-communist Southern state would unleash its monstrous might.

The sense of an island as a separated space that traps its residents, which helps conceptualise the murderous dynamics of the event,59 appears in this black-and-white film’s opening shot looking down from a plane flying above the clouds. (This actually mimics a notorious propaganda film of the time from the US army that touted its suppression of communist rebels.) However, this motif does not appear again in “Jiseul”; rather, the dominant geographies are the high plateaus surrounding Mt. Halla, which contain the claustrophobic caves to which many islanders fled to hide from the soldiers sent on their predatory scorched-earth campaign. Given these grim realities, the scenes of barbarity are actually tempered, however shockingly suggestive, and instead, many visuals appear of the inseparable connection between the (is)land and its people, as represented especially by the life-sustaining potatoes from the film’s title. Potatoes in a pot or basket are replicated in numerous shots of desperate villagers crammed into a cave or foxhole, of scattered skulls and brassware, and most arrestingly of the boulders that make up the distinctive walls surrounding Jeju Island houses. Another main agricultural staple, the Jeju black hog, also appears several times, usually as a carcass carried and cooked in a pot to signal the islanders themselves being hunted down and ravaged like animals. In place of a distinct plot or dominant characters, the white/greyish background of blanketing snow, as well as of smoke, fulfils the dominant tone of fear and foreboding—for the desperate villagers wandering how to survive amid wartime misery before the oncoming war, and for the viewer anticipating the extension of these horrors in the months to come.

In taking up this temporal progression, the film “Taegukgi” (Yun Je-gyun, 2004) follows two brothers from the outbreak of the Korean War, in June 1950, to some time in the middle. The signs of fraternal conflict are even more starkly presented than in “Taebaek Mountains”, tracking the degradation into hateful confrontation of such a relationship in line with the course of the conflict itself. In “Taegukgi”, it is the older brother, Jin-tae, who is less educated and changes the most, showing how war, and especially civil war, unwittingly can fill empty vessels with steely hatred and beastly savagery. Jin-tae, working as an itinerant cobbler in Seoul when the film begins, epitomises the wayfaring openness implied by shoes, while a sturdy pen signifies his younger brother Jin-seok, a student bound for university and upward mobility. Both everyday items also reinforce the elemental bond between the brothers and thus represent the steadfast unity of the nation that aspires, against the odds, to peaceful coexistence with a threatening modern world.

This world storms into their placid lives in Seoul on the morning of June 25, 1950, the date of North Korea’s invasion. The two brothers hurriedly gather their widowed and mute mother, along with Jin-tae’s fiancé and her younger siblings, to join the flood of refugees streaming south, just ahead of the advancing Northern army. Soon, however, both brothers are violently drafted into the South’s forces, and thereafter the film tracks them as the front moves down, then back up the peninsula, before it moves down again to the middle, all in line with the sudden turns in fortune between the sides. The first half of the film covers mostly the vicious combat of the shifting front suffered by the brothers before transitioning to scenes of Jin-tae’s fiancé getting caught in the horrific retributions that ravaged localities, including Seoul, after they changed possession. From the suffocating heat of the Naktong River battles in the summer of 1950 to the bitter cold later that year in the north, the landscape changes dramatically, but the atrocities committed by all sides have a terrible uniformity to them, as if scenic variety were being decimated by a singular giant storm.

The inescapable heaviness of this presence makes for a typically frightful war film, backed by shattering music, loads of fighting sequences, and large-scale stagings of battles, but the epic feel comes even more from the film’s ambition to show all the intricate manifestations of the war’s brutality. Unavoidable in this regard is the lesson that not only is war hell, but the Korean War was a special hell inflicted by Koreans on their own. As shown by Jin-tae, whose loyalties switch more than once, the formal sides almost did not matter, for the ideological and political justifications paled in comparison to war itself soon becoming the overwhelming, self-enclosed rationale for Koreans savagely killing each other. Furthermore, although in reality the main turning points in the conflict came at the behest of foreign interventions—the South Koreans joined and led by the US-led UN forces, and the North Koreans by the Chinese “volunteer” army—hardly any foreigners appear in “Taegukgi”, notwithstanding its expansive canvas. Two conspicuous exceptions prove this rule: a (computer-generated) swarm of countless thousands of faceless Chinese soldiers crossing over the snowy boundary into the peninsula in November 1950, and flying American warplanes, which had made a brief appearance also in “Taebaek Mountains”.

These American planes, among the earliest jet fighters used in combat, feature prominently also in a film that appeared not long after “Taegukgi” but with far less fanfare and box office success, despite its impressive array of accomplished actors: “A Little Pond” (Jaegeun yeonmot; Yi Sang-u, 2008). The title of the film is that of a folk song by master singer-songwriter Kim Min-ki (Min-gi), an instrumental version of which plays over the ending credits, and whose nature-bound lyrics can easily be taken as a parable of the Korean War. An actual small pond figures in the film’s deployment of visuals drawn from the sweeping landscape, which like in so many other hallyu-era Korean movies represents national identity. This time, however, the beautiful countryside, in both summer and fall, is usually foregrounded by a long string of peripatetic members of a single village who are heading southwards as refugees. Set in late July of 1950, a month after the outbreak of the war as US and South Korean forces were still in retreat, the film depicts the killings committed by American soldiers who suspected Northern soldiers hiding among the villagers. Towards the end of the film, this horrific mistake is visualised by clustered shell casings of spent machine gun fire on a hill overlooking the rail underpass where the Koreans had been gathered while being shot, a mimicking of the scenes of villagers huddling in their move southwards.

The juxtaposition of a lone, small community against the American military borrows considerably from the groundbreaking Korean War film from 1998, “Spring in My Hometown” (see below). Without a main character, the protagonist is the entire group of villagers, or indeed the village itself, standing for the nation as a whole. Also like the earlier film, “A Little Pond” highlights the village’s children, who are shown singing together—a motif revisited by “A Melody to Remember” (below)—at both the beginning and end of the film in real and fantasy sequences, respectively, that evoke innocence and communal joy. Another fantasy sequence, appearing twice, is an oddly disquieting superimposition of a mother whale swimming with her calf. This animation seems to signal the generational stakes of this horrible event, whether the Nogeun-ri massacre, the cluster of such killings in the early stages of the war, or the entire Korean War itself. And towards the end of the story comes an appearance of a North Korean child soldier discovering, among the bodies, a surviving child of the gunfire, with the two of them staring at each other in stunned silence, wondering what comes next. For both, the prime antagonist, in borrowing again from “Spring in My Hometown”, is the American military, whose rampaging vehicles rumble through winding dirt paths and streams. In doing so, these machines completely disregard the specifically Korean environment (as symbolised here by a sacred boulder) on their campaign to take command over the villagers’ life setting, which is represented by, among other things, a swimming hole, the “little pond” of the film’s title.

Like the village, then, the pond, too, stands for Korea, and this sense of territoriality accentuates the American role as the prime aggressor. Early in the story, the locals are told to evacuate their homes immediately and head south, for their village would soon be the staging ground for a US military operation. The non-Korean man issuing these frightening instructions, while riding in an American jeep, shouts in Japanese (he is either Japanese-American or Japanese). This is a practical solution to the communication barrier but also a reminder of the historical connections between the just-concluded period of Japanese rule and the immediately subsequent experience of yet another foreign occupation. The villagers hurriedly pack up and throw everything onto their A-frames, but in their trek southwards they are repeatedly and menacingly told by American soldiers to get off the road, which was being commandeered for military purposes. They are thereby herded like animals onto the hills above or the streams and tunnels below, before eventually being stuck on railroad tracks and railway underpasses, where they are bombed indiscriminately by American planes and machine-gunned into oblivion. The film also portrays American soldiers themselves as victims, especially of faceless commanders ordering the massacre, while inter-titles quote such an order to kill anyone, including refugees, who passes a certain combat boundary. The overriding message, however, undoubtedly places culpability on the US.

In explicit contrast is “Operation Chromite” (Incheon sangnyuk jakjeon [The Inchon Landing]; Yi Jae-han, 2016), the latest cinematic dramatisation of the Inchon Landing of mid-September of 1950, which took place less than two months after the Nogeun-ri massacre. Though focused on the Korean characters and combatants, “Operation Chromite” unmistakably features as its near-cosmic force the will and wisdom of the US, represented by the dogged personality of General Douglas MacArthur. Played ham-handedly into caricature by the Hollywood revenge action star Liam Neeson, the MacArthur character comes across as an omniscient Zeus manipulating lesser gods to deliver his bolt of salvation to the South Koreans. While the playground is the earthly battlefield of Inchon, the source of intervention is the heavens, controlled by the determinant of the world order that is the US. This signification appears in the multiple shots of both the sky, sometimes with a rising sun that probably alludes to MacArthur, and American bombing. The latter motif takes on a very different valuation in “Welcome to Dongmakgol” (see below), but in “Operation Chromite” it reiterates that the modern mechanisms of fate, in meting justice, descend from the heavens.60

In this manner the film, with all its slick production values, feels like a more traditionally straightforward South Korean understanding of the war. Even with a fuller depiction of some North Korean characters and the intriguing cameo of Kim Il Sung engaged in dialogue, North Koreans are mostly shown being mowed down as cannon fodder in rousing, explosive action. Meanwhile, the death of each member of a South Korean commando unit working to secure an Inchon beachhead (Wolmi Island) is dragged out melodramatically with concerns over loved ones, as if North Koreans had no such familial attachments. If any historical film over the hallyu era explicitly represents the conservative view of modern Korean history, one shared by probably the majority of the oldest generations, it is this portrayal of the South Korean role as one of patriotic sacrifice under the Manichean guidance of paternal America. For both partners in this alliance, Inchon stands for (South) Korea itself, and its (re-)conquest foretells ultimate victory—if not in the Korean War, then certainly in the long game of history. That in hindsight the Inchon Landing might have fed a disastrous delusion that unnecessarily extended the war over the long term is almost inconsequential,61 for most of all, the film seems to proclaim, it rescued South Korea from communism and allowed the country to flower into what it is today.

Fantastical, Sheltered Communities of Nationhood

In the above scenario, then, Inchon, befitting its historical status as the gateway port to the capital, represents a Korea that welcomes and indeed thrives off the foreign (or at least American) presence. Needless to say, this has not been a preferred depiction for recent Korean War films, given the increasing recognition of the Cold War’s intrusion into the peninsula as the main cause of national division. Rather, as opposed to “Operation Chromite”, other films establish certain settings—a mountain village, an orphanage, and even a POW camp—as fleetingly protective sites away from external dangers. In this way these works present the nation attempting to stay safely separated from the commotions and daggers originating from the outside, if not from the entire modern world itself. The Korean War thus serves allegorically as a great struggle for the soul of the nation, which alas largely fails to remain independent and whole. This bleaker view of the conflict’s impact and outcome, however, also contains the strains of a possible escape from the unrelenting fatalism of the war.

The transformative power of rustic, primal simplicity, for example, seems to point towards such a solution in “Welcome to Dongmakgol”, set in a paradisiac community, Dongmakgol, so isolated in the high mountains that the villagers hardly know of modern change, much less the Korean War. Everyone therein seems blissfully unaware of what is going on outside their commune, with little need for anything, including formal schooling, beyond what is necessary for sustaining life a little bit above subsistence level. This naive purity, along with its secure ignorance, is embodied in a cheerful, unknowing, innocent girl named Yeo-il, who is the first to spot a damaged American fighter plane falling from the sky as the film opens. This initial intrusion by the Korean War marks the beginning of the end of this village’s peaceful existence, but before the altering of the community’s destiny takes its full course, Dongmakgol and its values exert a life-affirming effect on six outsiders, all soldiers who hobble into the village. The crashed American pilot, “Captain Smith”, is soon joined by three North Korean survivors of a firefight, as well as two South Korean deserters.

The fantastical distinctiveness, indeed strangeness, of this village, with its quirky basic material culture and matching cheery ethos, also returns the visitors to their elemental character as people (and as Koreans), in stark opposition to their assigned duties as killers. Upon being introduced to each other by the cluelessly friendly residents, the two groups of Korean soldiers immediately draw their guns into an absurd Mexican standoff in which they hold villagers hostage between them. This lasts until, after a few weary hours, the hostages start to walk off this ridiculous scene in order to return to everyday life. That begins also the thaw between the soldiers, including Captain Smith, who embraces a familial identification with the village that becomes important later in the story. In the meantime, the relationship between the two sets of Korean fighters becomes increasingly fraternal through common experiences of rural life, including the joint effort to bring down that ravaging boar. The villagers don’t eat meat, but furtively all the soldiers later that night consume the big pig, which they, with some comic difficulty, pass through their systems the next day. This amounts to another facet of the ongoing purification through bonding, which leads less to character transformation as much as to an awakening, including recognition of the real enemy. By the time the puncturing of their obviously protective shell comes, the soldiers have completely reoriented their priorities and are keen to sacrifice themselves as a united force to defend the village.

The biggest enemy is war itself and its ambitions of fatalistic power, a force whose terrible manifestations come from all directions. The viewer might actually detect a pro-Northern stance, given the (justifiable) fear of outsiders expressed by some residents, or even a paean to communistic values, as expressed by the village headman to a question about the key to his “great leadership”: “You just have to feed them a lot”. But the question comes from the Northern commander who uses the familiar North Korean adjective for the leader, “widaehan” (“great”), which appears as a mocking wink if anything. Furthermore, North Korean soldiers, including the larger unit that was decimated at the start of the film, are not spared a realistically brutal depiction, and indeed some scenes reveal the exploitation of the Northern soldiers by their own leaders. Still, the clearest agent of this evil power is the US military,62 and there is little subtlety in the film about this, notwithstanding the Captain Smith character who undergoes a righteous makeover and joins the good guys. What results is a cascade of caricatures, some embarrassing acting, and laughable English-language dialogue straight out of a 1950s comic book, with a John Wayne character ordering an American-led attack on the village. (“They will not hesitate to kill us violently, so let’s be prepared to land on the ground with our rifles firing … May the Lord be with you all”.) Unlike some of the South Korean assistants in this retaliatory strike force, the Americans show no capacity for self-awareness or moral considerations, and indeed, in their robotic aggression they ape the ghastly portrayals of them in North Korean propaganda.

While it is doubtful that this cringeworthy depiction was done in the spirit of self-parody, far more sophisticated representations of the US do also appear, especially as part of a magical repertoire of visual symbolism that pervades the film. In opposition to “Operation Chromite”, for example, American planes do not materialise as a cosmic source of heavenly justice, but as part of a moralistic configuration of objects descending from the sky (Image 2). The US rains down devastation through paratroopers and indiscriminate bombing, and this contrasts with other things that drift down from above, including popcorn blown into existence by a grenade—the film’s version of turning lemons into lemonade—and butterfly swarms that disrupt the destructive intent of planes and parachutes. The wondrousness of the community is indicated by creepy grinning totems along the wooded path leading to the village: protective guardians that, one surmises, are supposed to scare away outsiders. Most notable is the signification of clothing. The soldiers, including the tall American pilot Captain Smith, shed their combat uniforms and endearingly don the villagers’ outfits after the boar episode, which marks the middle and turning point of the film. The viewer, however, also sees several subtle shots of intermingled grey (Northern) and green (Southern) army uniforms, whether worn or hanging on a laundry line, to show the integration of the two sides. Indeed, whereas the soldiers at the start find it difficult to explain to villagers (and each other) why Koreans were fighting each other, later in the story the matter becomes moot, both because it is hard to fathom and because such superficial loyalties are sublimated by the common goal of defending the village.

Image 2
A photograph of a bomb-ravaged landscape. Three soldiers are fleeing from the area, bombs are dropped from the sky, and the land is on fire.

American bombs being dropped on Korean soldiers in “Welcome to Dongmakgol”

Full size image

The village must be protected because it is the pristine version of Korea, uncorrupted by nefarious interests from an external realm that now includes the internal others. The original intruders, after having undergone purification in the village, must now sacrifice themselves to preserve its ideals and spirit if not its treasured isolation, even if this means turning against established loyalties and understandings. Appearing in the early years of the twenty-first century, during a surge in the reconsideration of South Korean history, expressed sometimes as anti-Americanism, “Welcome to Dongmakgol” reflected a widening public sentiment already made apparent in films such as “Spring in My Hometown” (1998, below).

The externally induced turmoil of modern Korean history made fantasies of pure national autonomy understandable, but the trope of a sheltered community separated from the fatalism of war found cinematic expression in other ways as well. “A Melody to Remember” (Oppa saenggak [“Thinking of (a sister’s) older brother”]; Yi Han, 2016), for example, is grounded in the true story of a harshly real phenomenon: the tens of thousands of children orphaned by the Korean War, only a fraction of whom found refuge in institutions that sprouted eventually into a major international industry.63 The film is set in a makeshift orphanage in Busan, the gritty capital of South Korea during the war, and here both the home and its children’s choir serve as the repository of unsullied and undivided (national) community, one ringing with hope. The heart-warming, beautiful music sung by the children gives voice to their longing for peace and unity, in stark contrast to manufactured propaganda songs, the singing of which actually leads to death in the story. The choir overcomes such cynicism through the achievement of harmony, as discovered, for example, by two boys from the same village whose fathers had effectively killed each other. As suggested by the Korean title of the film, “Thinking of [a sister’s] older brother”, the main characters embody the central trope of Korean War films, that of the forced separation of siblings. And like their counterparts in “The Fatal Encounter” (Chap. 3), “Assassination” (Chap. 5), or “Spring in My Hometown” (below), these child characters prompt thinking about the natural as well as social and familial factors determining the life of an individual, a family, and/or a people. The orphanage offers not necessarily a clean slate but rather a shelter in which children can maintain a modicum of innocence and accord by acting in concert.

For beyond this choir and orphanage in “A Melody to Remember” lies an unsavoury world of vengeful politics and terrible fates run by adults: a hook-handed man, led to criminality through his own victimisation, who controls the shantytown originally holding the children and their labour; his western-suited boss who represents capitalist exploiters and the wickedly privileged; and even (references to) the South Korean president Syngman Rhee, who is aped hilariously by the maimed man. The precariousness of keeping the orphanage separate from this unpleasant realm comes from its haphazard placement next to a POW camp, an outbreak at which plays an important part in the story. The grave connection between national division and civil war, on the one hand, and the fragile boundary between peace and savagery, on the other, could hardly be clearer.

Another prison camp, indeed the largest and most notorious one, underscores this reality both physically and metaphorically in the semi-fantastical but wholly visceral “Swing Kids”, a visual and symbolic tour-de-force. The US-run Geoje Island POW camp, which housed tens of thousands of captured North Koreans and Chinese and even some South Koreans, serves as both a cauldron for the war’s murderous divisions and a generator of dreams and freedom. The latter is realised by dancing, which on the surface seems absurd, but as an expression of desires and aspirations as well as ultimate limits, dance gets magically interwoven into an intricate story very much anchored in the savage circumstances of the prison compound and in turn of the Korean War itself. Unlike Dongmakgol village or the Busan orphanage, then, the POW camp, or at least the smaller spaces therein where dancing takes place, stands not as a sheltered community of joyous or harmonious innocence; it is, however, one of (fleeting) unity and even a little hope. In sum, the camp replicates the divided nation itself, with all its constituent elements, tragedies, and possibilities.

The compound is meticulously recreated onscreen for this role. As in the demilitarised zone between North and South after the war, barbed wire makes for a ubiquitous marker, separating the two groups of prisoners but allowing them to view clearly the other side as well as the surrounding countryside. The film opens with a black-and-white newsreel introduction to its unusual layout and circumstances: that thousands of the captured enemy combatants wished not to return to North Korea or even China. As insisted upon by the US-UN side, the principle of “voluntary repatriation” constituted a major sticking point in peace negotiations in Panmunjom, which had begun in the summer of 1951, and may have prolonged the war, resulting in hundreds of thousands more killed. This dispute, of course, was not so straightforward, as scholarship has shown,64 but an undeniable reality was that many Korean soldiers, on both sides, had been captured into combat, conscripted to fight for a country for which they held no allegiance or identification. As such, the design of the Geoje Island POW camp in “Swing Kids” serves as a microcosm of the war, as all the originally “communist” prisoners were separated into one of the two parts, with even a corridor, in mimicking the DMZ, between the two sections through which new prisoners were paraded while entering (Image 3).65 And likewise, standing watch on the panopticon as formidable sentry and intervening adjudicator is the US army, the ultimate lord over the prisoners. This spatialisation of the film’s only setting (aside from a few short scenes in the neighbouring area) is filled out by the interiors, including scrap-metal buildings in which a few prisoners on the “pro-communist” side could infiltrate the “anti-communist” areas that included the American soldiers.

Image 3
A photograph of a group of prisoners entering through a fence-enclosed walkway. Some of the soldiers with firearms accompany the prisoner. Several people are watching the prisoners from another side of the fence.

New prisoners entering the Geoje Island POW camp in the Korean War, in “Swing Kids”

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This sets the stage, then, for the introduction and interaction of the five main characters, the dancers eventually brought together into a performance team: a young man originally from northern Korea, Ro Gi-su, played convincingly by the K-pop star Do Kyung-su; a portly Chinese prisoner looking for stardom; a falsely imprisoned South Korean man looking for his wife; an enterprising and talented young Korean woman living in the local area who functions as an interpreter; and a black American serviceman, “Jackson”, assigned the challenging but edifying task of preparing the other four for a big performance ordered by the camp commander. Each of the five has arrived onto this odd mix through hardship and trauma, the common bond driving their individual interests and yearnings. Other characters include a malevolent young American soldier who is suppressing something; the sometimes malevolent and always stereotypically thick-headed, pompous American camp commander; his smiling personal assistant played dumb by a North Korean spy; Gi-su’s camp friend who, like the lead character himself, starts to question his received understanding of what’s going on; an old friend of Gi-su’s who is maimed into a frightening, screaming mouthpiece of the communist regime; and another latter entrant into the camp, a famously heroic North Korean soldier and Gi-su’s brother, Ro Gi-jin—a giant, infantile brute brutalised, scarred, and exploited by war, the exemplary unthinking killing machine expected from Northern soldiers.

Notwithstanding this impressive range of North Korean characters, the film highlights equally the American presence in the camp and, by extension, in the war and on the peninsula. Each of the three American characters—the commander, the hostile young soldier, and Jackson, all played by competent actors—embody the contradictory meaning attached to the US as a whole, not just to its army or its geopolitical role in Korea. In both reality and ideal, America stands as an ambiguous ally as well as antagonist, a source of tempting riches and dreams as well as of dread and danger. As in “Operation Chromite” but for the opposing message, the US displaces, or is conflated with, the war itself as the purveyor of fate. And the POW camp, like the rampaging wild boar in “Welcome to Dongmakgol”, is the fearsome expression of war, this time in the hands of American authority. But unlike the boar, American imperialism as presented in “Swing Kids” is so pervasive and comprehensive that it cannot be contained. This includes American culture but also American material comforts and capitalism, signalled by the appearances of US goods stored in the supply room that Gi-su encounters early in the story. There is even a Warholian shot of countless Campbell’s Soup cans stacked on a shelf, along with glimpses of plentiful sundry snacks like chocolate and cookies, which to Americans are disposable items but to wide-eyed Koreans are compelling lures for America at large.

Unmistakably, however, the predominant signification for America in “Swing Kids” is freedom, or at least aspirations thereof, and tap dancing represents the uninhibited freedom of movement and spirit, a means of escape—from ideology, family, poverty, national identity, bigotry, even imprisonment. The sheltered community, then, is not the camp but rather the five-member dance team. Jackson is himself confined by American racism in the camp at all turns, which makes him most fitting in training the motley group of pitiable performers that coalesce in front of him. Jackson also has to entice Gi-su to overcome his ingrained hostility to the others (and vice-versa) while nurturing Gi-su’s growing fondness for American dance. For this, not just dancing but, more tangibly, shoes become the pervasive symbol, appearing in countless close-up shots, whether worn or not, on feet that are dancing or not, alive or not. As in “Taegukgi”, shoes signal freedom but also a controllable destiny, a means of exercising individual agency and hence a marker of social identity as well as escape. As the young woman character tells Jackson at one point, her dancing boots are “magic shoes”: “When I wear them, war, food, miserable things, they all just disappear”. Other items do something similar—sticks and canes originally used as weapons being turned into performance accessories (more examples of lemons made into lemonade). A dance gesture like this, as “Swing Kids” shows repeatedly, can overcome barriers to communication and understanding by serving as a universal medium, a language all its own, in order to pursue happiness, establish connections, and mediate conflict. The most fantastic moment in this regard is the outbreak of a dance-off between the prisoner team and belligerent American soldiers in a scene straight out of Westside Story (Image 4).

Image 4
A photograph of 3 soldiers, 3 other men, and a woman dancing in an old dusty room.

Fantasy sequence of a dance-off between American soldiers and members of the POW camp’s dance troupe in “Swing Kids”

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Such suspensions of reality, however, seem all too brief, as ephemeral as the biting and amusing banter. Soon enough, the mood turns dark, along with the implications, as the visual cues pile up. And here, as frequent in appearance as shoes and just as wide-ranging in meaning is the spotlight, created by reflections, lamps, and sunlight through windows, as well as by stage lights. The spotlight refers to the highlighting of performance as well as the gaze of prison surveillance, but also the attendant hopes of fame and glory, even material comfort, that exert such a powerful pull but can be a ruinous temptation. For Gi-su and the other dancers, the spotlight, the stage, and the show that they are rehearsing also illuminate the tantalising path towards freedom, however momentarily, promised by (and in) America. And here, the blazing contrast comes as fire, the raging source of communist power depicted as hateful, menacing, and demanding of absolute submission. The orange-red glow of fire envelopes interior shots of the “communist” camp and fuels an uprising in the story, and hence alludes to something even more destructive than the enticements of American bourgeois life that drive the story towards the end. Navigating between these two sources of light—the communist inferno and the capitalist spotlight, both leading to destruction—is a dangerous exercise, but ultimately the larger, fatal constraints of the POW camp itself hold the most force.

Impossible Endings

The Geoje Island POW camp is the backdrop in another notable film, “The Last Witness” (Heuksuseon, “Black narcissus [flower]”; Bae Chang-ho, 2001), which in turn showcases the many dramatisations, especially in literary fiction (like the novel on which this film is based), of the penetrating, painful, and tangled reach of the Korean War in South Korea’s subsequent history. These novels, short stories, and films often feature extended flashbacks to reinforce this connection between the war, which never formally ended even after the Armistice of July 1953, and the myriad unresolvable matters that lingered or even emerged anew, down to the level of family and personal connections. These troubles accentuate the impossibility of achieving a lasting closure to the Korean War, whether in the 1950s or thereafter. Hence, it is not surprising that such cinematic treatments tend to be set in the latter part of the war, during the so-called “stalemate” of protracted truce negotiations and a non-moving battle front that nevertheless generated a lot of death.

Another film showcasing the physical geography of the Korean War, “The Front Line” (Gojijeon [“Battle for the high ground”]; Jang Hun, 2011), is illustrative in this regard: Like the middle of the peninsula itself over the final two and a half years of the confrontation—during which formal peace talks dragged on fruitlessly—one strategic hill stands for both the nation torn asunder and the horrifically pointless struggle over bits of territory that resulted only in abundant killing. The recurring shifts in possession of this ground actually lead to the contriving of a makeshift gift box through which the opposing soldiers establish a means of exchanging material goods and letters, thereby reconstructing their common national identity and humanity. The military demands from higher up in the command structures of both sides, however, insist on maintaining the slaughter, which the film shows in relentless fashion, indeed to an extent rivalling the intensity of battle scenes in “Taegukgi”. Also like that earlier film, one of the most extraordinary visuals in the “The Front Line” is a human wave of rushing Chinese soldiers, who this time suddenly and frighteningly appear in the night through flashes of lightning. (The strategic high ground in the film probably alludes to Baekma Hill near Cheorwon in South Korea, where a public memorial stands today for the legions killed on all sides, including thousands of Chinese soldiers.) The ghostly presence of hidden Chinese combatants, with their horns blazing, also reinforces the thematic centrality of sound in this film. As in “A Melody to Remember”, the singing of songs drawn from a common culture and language depicts the capacity of music to cut through the shattering cacophony of war. The latter part of the story in “The Front Line” is set in the war’s final days, and then the final hours, before the implementation of the Armistice on July 27, 1953. This is the day when, including after joyous news of the end arrived that morning, some of the fiercest fighting and killing occur in a last-ditch effort to claim as much territory as possible before the formal cease-fire at 10 pm that evening. The destructive waste of this pointless battle to the last death renders it a fitting emblem of the Korean War, with its utter futility in making a difference from what had been the case before the war began: a nation split at the 38th parallel, but now with heaps more bitterness and hatred on top of mounds of countless fallen bodies. The “high ground” takes on another, more horrendous meaning altogether in this regard.

The unshakable presence of death makes for classic horror, and not surprisingly—as if the battlefield carnage was not grisly enough—the Korean War has attracted treatment as the backdrop for a horror flick: “The Piper” (Sonnim [“The Guest”]; Kim Gwang-tae, 2015), which flips on its head the premise of “Welcome to Dongmakgol”. In “The Piper”, the isolated village in the midst of the war is not a paradise but rather the grim opposite: a community racked by deadly sins that stand for the many smaller-scale slaughters and recriminations unleashed by the civil war. Not quite zombies but the spirits of those unjustly killed hover over the village, which looks stable and fruitful when a limping recorder player and his consumption-stricken young son stumble in as the film opens. The only trouble that this village, controlled by an authoritative village headman, seems to experience is the occasional outbreak of a rat infestation. This mimics the durably appealing (and appalling) medieval German story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin,66 but the rats here allude not to the plague or to kidnapped children but rather vengeful spirits as well as perhaps enemy hordes in war. In following the customary plot, when the rats reappear, the “guest” of the film’s Korean title—presumably in reference to the wandering piper—seems magically able to use his wits and sounds to herd the rats into a cave, where they are sealed away. This takes place far too early in the film, however, to serve as anything more than a setup for the explosively clamorous resurrection of ugly prejudices from under the creepy veneer of village harmony, arousing echoes of terrible crimes committed earlier in the war on fellow villagers targeted as social outcasts. When folk religion is mixed into this witches’ brew, the resulting firestorm from the spiralling accusations and reprisals engulfs everyone, including the musician and his son. As a parable of the Korean War’s frightening terrors and long-lingering spells, “The Piper” does the trick in a creatively gripping way.

As for “The Last Witness”, which was the name of the original novel, the “black narcissus” of the film’s Korean title refers to a communist spy element associated with an uprising in the Geoje POW camp by North Korean prisoners, as in “Swing Kids”. And although no Americans appear in the scenes of the camp, “The Last Witness”, too, features lots of spotlights, especially those from watch towers, given the decidedly noir heaviness of the movie’s contrast lighting. Most of the storyline is actually set a half-century later, in turn-of-the-twenty-first-century South Korea, when ageing survivors of the POW camp are thrust back into the painful circumstances of their wartime survival by fresh crimes. The trigger is an elderly wealthy man found murdered in Seoul, and the young detective assigned to investigate the matter encounters a web of relationships and tragedies tracing back to the POW camp on Geoje Island during the war, the setting for the middle third of the film. Then and there, two local communists leading a violent escape from the POW camp face a brutal anti-communist constabulary officer who also happens to have been their childhood buddy, an allusion to the localised origins of much of the war’s viciousness. The two other primary characters are a wealthy young woman from the area, Ji-hye, a communist mole disguised as a Catholic nun attending to the prisoners; and her family servant, Seok, who has held a fiercely protective, partially romantic bond with her since their childhood.

This relationship, the centrepiece of the film, actually transcends normal social connections and reaches a cosmic level of connotation during the war, as well as for another 50 years thereafter. For both Seok and Ji-hye, separately, have spent that intervening half-century imprisoned in one form or another, unable to escape the events surrounding the prison camp that had determined their respective destinies. The film actually begins with a scene of Seok finally being released from his five decades of incarceration, thus also gaining his freedom, possibly, to exact revenge on those who had wronged him. These were the three buddies who had diverged in choosing sides when the war came, but whose actions reflected the larger political forces savagely at work, as enacted in the POW camp and its surroundings. The results of their conniving, in the 1950s, had tragically separated Seok from Ji-hye. The pair’s desperate attempts to remain together ultimately gave way to their sacrifices to save each other, as Ji-hye suggests in a voice-over from her diary entry: “Fate falls especially hard on those who resist it”. Their relationship had overcome the fateful barriers of hereditary social status—and Ji-hye always refers to Seok with the Korean term, oppa, for a sister’s older brother—in constructing something akin to a sibling relationship. But as we know, the determinative force of the civil war was based on the destruction of fraternal bonds, including those of the three childhood buddies who had turned on each other. That two of them had survived and even thrived in the postwar era by obscuring their past misdeeds, while their victims, Seok and Ji-hye, had to disappear from society, highlights the enduring injustices of the Korean War’s outcomes as well as, ultimately, the durability of the pair’s connected destiny.

If, through its absence of Americans, “The Last Witness” directs the spotlight to the crimes committed by Koreans upon each other, another film set in the ending period of the Korean War, the pioneering “Spring in My Hometown” (Areumdaun sijeol, “A Beautiful time”; Lee Kwang-mo, 1998), points an intensely still lens on the US as the main culprit. Indeed “Spring in My Hometown”, released in 1998, could be said to herald the brazen about-face in South Korean cinema, gestured at earlier by “The Taebaek Mountains” in 1994, towards a bluntly critical reconsideration of the American role in the Korean War as well as in national division, as shown also in later works such as “Welcome to Dongmakgol”, “A Little Pond”, and even “The Front Line”.67 Set in the conflict’s closing months and its early aftermath in a village close to an American military base, “Spring in My Hometown” does not depict any combat. It instead focuses on the community’s internal fissures based on the attachment to the US army, as well as to the ferociously anti-communist South Korean society that seems to be fully coming into its unforgiving self. Within this framework is a collection of local children caught in the retributions and exploitations from the war that would mark South Korea thereafter.

The two lead characters, adolescent boys who are best friends—once again a fraternal connection—come from families on opposite sides of this duality in relation to the American military. The father of the wealthier boy, Seong-min, engages in illicit activity for the sake of American soldiers, which constitutes the basis for his family’s privileges, while the father of Seong-min’s poorer friend, Chang-hui, has been arrested, tortured, and ostracised as a communist, sealing the poor socio-economic standing of Chang-hui’s family. The events leading to tragedy for Chang-hui are literally sparked by his discovery of his desperate mother’s incorporation into this loathsome order, which encapsulates the moral divide in the narrative between the innocence of Korean children and the severely tainted lives of adults bound to the US-led anti-communist system. The yearning for a legitimate, autonomous Korean destiny is visualised throughout the film by distance shots of Koreans walking down a winding dirt path, and at times we see a roaring, dust-kicking American jeep forcing children off the road, including when they are undertaking a ritual for their lost friend. To further reiterate this point, Seong-min’s older sister, after having established an amorous relationship with an unseen “Lieutenant Smith” at the base, becomes impregnated, then abandoned by Smith. The family’s father himself eventually gets discarded as well, with a scarlet mark of shame no less, by the Americans, who now consider his activities unacceptable. As metaphors for South Korea’s standing as a client and offshoot of American imperialism, these relationships’ implications for modern history become self-evident.

As opposed to “Swing Kids”, the portrayal of such shameful victimisation at the hands of Americans, including by the theme (or insinuation) of sexual exploitation, is not balanced by an equally stark depiction of communist brutalities. But also unlike the former film, “Spring in My Hometown” offers a path of national redemption beyond the fantastic or even the reliable appeal to familial bonds across the divided ethnos.68 As in “A Melody to Remember” or “Welcome to Dongmakgol”, only the realm of children, in standing for the nation in its salvageable form, can contain the legitimate basis of renewal from the ashes of civil war. This vision probably includes eventual reunification with the North, but it starts with a forthright revisiting of the historical origins of national division from the Korean War period. No subsequent film, not even “Welcome to Dongmakgol” or “A Little Pond”, goes as far as “Spring in My Hometown” (1998) in explicitly fingering the US as the prime antagonist of the nation. But a reconsideration of the war’s larger meaning is pursued even by a film like “Operation Chromite”, which otherwise seems to double down on traditional perspectives. Most other Korean War films, however, intervene in the ongoing process of national reflection not by offering black-and-white portrayals of the moral stakes or by revealing clear heroes and villains, but rather by pointing to Korea’s civil war itself, and war in general, as the fatalistic historical force to overcome.