Chapter Four. Facing the End of Days: Crises and Potential in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

The nineteenth century represented historically both the demise of the Joseon dynasty and the birth of a new era full of promising but dangerous influences. Its standing in Korean historical lore continues to be dominated by a consciousness of what happened—and failed to happen—when the country faced the loss of national sovereignty, a cataclysm that arrived in the early twentieth century. Feature films set in this period—bookended by “Blood Rain” (2005), backgrounded in the nineteenth century’s opening years, and “Chihwaseon” (2002), about a master painter whose difficult life parallels the century’s (and dynasty’s) end—invariably carry this consciousness of impending calamity. External threats understandably are highlighted, but mostly the longstanding internal patterns of social hierarchy and exploitation, plus the more recent crises of political corruption and unprecedented rebellions, depict the fateful forces of history. But these filmic treatments also accentuate the potential drivers of transformative r0065form, from Catholicism, popular culture, and scientific understanding to the compelling figure of the Daewongun, the royal regent of the century’s last monarch who appears frequently, if sometimes only as a minor character, in these films. His force of will and failures of principle stand for the promises and perils that marked this era.

FormalPara Playbill

“Blood Rain” (Hyeol ui nu); Kim Dae-seung, 2005

“The Book of Fish” (Jasan Eobo [“Black Mountain’s fish species”]); Yi Jun-ik, 2021

“Heung-boo—the Revolutionist” (Heungbu—Geullo saesang eul bakkun ja [“Heungbu—the man who changed his world through writing”]); Jo Geun-hyeong, 2017

“The Sound of a Flower” (Dori hwaga [“The Song of peach and plum flowers”]); Yi Jong-pil, 2015

“Map Against the World” (Gosanja: Daedong yeoji-do [“Kim Jeong-ho: The Great Map of Korea”]); Gang U-seok, 2016

“Feng Shui” (Myeongdang [“Fortuitous places”]); Bak Hui-gon, 2018

“Kundo: Age of the Rampant” (Gundo: Millan ui sidae [“Gundo: The Age of people’s uprisings”]); Yun Jong-bin, 2014

“Chihwaseon” (Chwihwaseon [“Drunken painting immortal”]); Im Kwon-taek, 2002

In a short scene combining dream and flashback at the midway point of the film, the protagonist of “Blood Rain”, Yi Won-gyu, finds himself in the bottom of a well. Although it appears that way at first, he has not fallen into the well but rather was placed there as punishment. As Won-gyu realises that he is trapped, he looks up and calls for mercy to his father, who is closing the well’s lid (Image 1). As shown in the remainder of the story, set mostly in 1808, this disturbing paternal presence has determined the life of Won-gyu, now a constabulary officer investigating a series of grisly murders on an isolated island off Korea’s west coast, in ways that the son could not have imagined. The familial angle is one of many intriguing strands in this film’s skilful foreshadowing of historical emblems from the early nineteenth century that eventually would bring national ruin. The apocalyptic feel comes also from the foreboding mood hovering over the scenes, as suggested by the film’s title of “Blood Rain”, an image repeatedly visualised by streaky red lines and some gruesome images. Blood also invokes the film’s other main symbol, water, and more pointedly the process and effect of falling into water, as in a well. This motion, scenes of which both begin and end the film, is replayed in various forms throughout and underscores the frightful condition of an accursed society plunging into the abyss.

Image 1

Yi Won-gyu calling out to his father from the bottom of a well, from “Blood Rain”

The nineteenth century indeed witnessed both the turbulent demise of the Joseon dynasty and the appearance of unsettling forces in the guise of enlightenment and reform. This era’s place in Korean historical lore likewise continues to be dominated by a consciousness of how the country responded to existential hazards. Feature films set in the 1800s—bookended by “Blood Rain” (2005), set in the nineteenth century’s opening years, and “Chihwaseon” (2002), about a master painter whose difficult life parallels the century’s (and dynasty’s) end—invariably reflect such a sense of building calamity. Highlighted as fateful drivers of history, understandably, are external threats, but even more prominent are the longstanding societal norms, as well as the immediate crises of rampant corruption and explosive popular revolts. Indeed, a major rebellion erupted in the northwestern region of the peninsula in 1811, and an even bigger conflagration closed the century in 1894. This was the Donghak Uprising, which began in the southwest and spread fiercely enough to unleash political and even geopolitical forces that would soon finish off the Joseon dynasty as well as national sovereignty itself. In the middle of this era, in 1862, came another enormous disturbance in the south-central coast, which, among other things, led to the execution of the founder of the native Donghak religious movement that later drove the mass rebellion of 1894. Such religiously inspired unrest, including from Catholicism, seems both at the time and in cinematic depictions to have captured the broader, indeed eschatological unease emerging from inside and outside the country.

The cinematic treatments of the nineteenth century also allude, however, to potential sources of transformative reform—from religion, populism, popular culture, commerce, and scientific understanding, to the compelling political figure of the Daewongun, the paternal regent of the century’s last monarch. As both a reformer and a staunch traditionalist before, during, and long after his reign (1864–1875), he represents the country’s ambivalent, ultimately inadequate response to the urgent challenges; likewise, the films depict both his force of will and failures of principle in light of the promises and perils of the time. Part of the ambiguity surrounding the Daewongun comes from his fierce rejection of foreign interaction, especially with the “western barbarians” who had already destabilised China and Japan. Examples of such hostility included his ordering of a major persecution of Catholics in 1866, which resulted in one of the two western incursions on the west coast that year and further deepened the Korean leadership’s siege mentality. But in the films set in the nineteenth century, Catholicism usually comes across as less a harbinger of imperialism than a conduit of enlightenment and reform, a challenge to the debilitating domination of Confucian orthodoxy and a model for other forms of popular religion, including Buddhism and Donghak. The mass appeal of these movements constitutes warnings amid impending cataclysm and heralds a powerful millenarian channelling of apocalyptic signals. Such omens appear clear, with hindsight at least, in these dramatisations of the inexorable movement in the nineteenth century towards a catastrophic end.

Unsettling Openings

As discussed in Chap. 3, for the purposes of historical ordering the death of the reformist monarch Jeongjo in the year 1800 of the western calendar makes it convenient to segregate his reign from the subsequent century of disastrous unrest. According to the now prevailing understanding in South Korea, King Jeongjo was on the cusp of finalising his efforts at implanting a systematic, comprehensive renovation of Joseon state and society, but after his sudden death, the floodgates of festering dysfunction seem to have burst open. Driven by political intrigue during a time when the succeeding monarch, Sunjo, was just a boy, in 1801 the first major persecution of Catholic followers took place, which ensnared people from many walks of life, including the authoritative scholar-official Jeong Yag-yong, or Dasan. As part of a reformist intellectual movement at the time, Dasan had championed fundamental changes in Confucian statecraft and an openness to Catholicism, for it was seen as a source of advanced scientific understanding and social reform.

Two hallyu-era films set in these opening years of the nineteenth century attempt to dramatise this anxious but pregnant historical moment, following Jeongjo’s death, when the legacy of the great king’s teachings and impulses crashed against the enormous inertia of long-entrenched interests. Interestingly, both stories are set on an island. The first work, “Blood Rain” (Hyeol ui nu; Kim Dae-seung, 2005), is an intricate, horror-tinted murder mystery set on a materially well-off insular community that in many ways cannot escape the ills ravaging the mainland. The islanders actually thrive on their proto-industrial paper mill that supplies tribute items to the court but also directly to China. The main time frame is 1808, although many flashback sequences also appear, mostly from 1801, during that first major state campaign against Catholicism. In 1808, the main character, Won-gyu, a deputy military investigator, has arrived on the island with his superior in order to investigate an arson fire of a ship that normally carried the paper tribute to the mainland. But upon disembarking Won-gyu quickly has to shift to finding the perpetrator of a series of elusive, gruesomely precise murders associated with that fire.

The film’s narrative sequence thereafter shows that this thick, elaborate mystery, which implicates nearly all the island’s inhabitants, actually had begun with a relatively mundane event back in 1801. Through flashbacks, we find a young man, Duho, rescuing a young woman, Soyeon, who had been swept from a rocky shore into the waves. But as Duho revives Soyeon onshore, he is mistakenly perceived as having violated her by her father, a merchant (gaekju) named Gang, the paper mill’s owner. It turns out that Duho is indeed smitten with Soyeon, after having grown up as an apprentice to the merchant, a forward-looking man who claims to treat people according to their talents instead of their birth status; indeed, Gang had taken in Duho as an orphaned boy. There is a limit to Gang’s enlightenment, however, as even after he admits his mistake in having falsely accused Duho of wrongdoing, Gang suggests strongly that any relationship between Duho and his daughter will not be permitted. This apparent hypocrisy and betrayal spark a murderous rage in Duho that triggers a chain of powerfully disquieting historical forces descending over the island, which eventually results in the levying of false charges of Catholicism against Gang and the grisly execution of not just him but his entire family. (The tearing apart of Gang’s body while being quartered, visualised through meticulous computer graphics, seems to offer a corporal metonym for Joseon Korea itself, with its pathologies leading to internal fragmentation.³⁵) Seven years later, in 1808, the reverberations from this awful event activate the murders that Won-gyu must solve and further prevent. Morally and otherwise, by the end of the story no islander and no historical marker at the time—including Catholicism, with its cult of blood sacrifice for the pursuit of redemption—escapes unscathed.³⁶ This includes even the main character Won-gyu, the earnestly upright detective who has come to the island to investigate, but also to illuminate and educate.

Such ambiguities and moral open-endedness make “Blood Rain” a compelling representation of the early nineteenth century, indeed of the nineteenth century as a whole. Just about all major historical forces at that time in Korea and over the rest of the century converge compellingly in this island and this story—from factional court politics and the tribute relationship with China to emblems of a new era such as Catholicism, opium, guns, mass consciousness, western science and technology, and, most intriguingly perhaps, capitalism. But they all also have a sinister side, including capitalism, as represented not by Gang the merchant but rather, following Gang’s horrific death after having been falsely accused of Catholic beliefs back in 1801, by his replacement as the paper mill’s boss, Kim In-gu. Kim also happens to be the son of the aristocratic senior figure on the island, Kim Chi-seong, the mill’s owner. While Gang had treated his workers at the paper mill, and indeed islanders as a whole, with compassion, Kim In-gu views them primarily as pliable, exploitable labour. But In-gu also grapples with the clutches of his own upbringing and longs for freedom, for himself, and for those whom he deeply cares for. Trying to escape the fatalistic confines of a domineering, morally compromised father is something that he has in common with Won-gyu. This in turn becomes embedded in the film’s larger exploration of the customary constraints of Korean social structures and mores, on the one hand, and their expression as corruption, abuse, and fear in the political body, on the other.

The “Blood Rain” of the film’s title, which coincidentally replicates that of a pioneering Korean novel from the early twentieth century, does not appear in literal form until the end—as an instrument of ghostly, perhaps also heavenly, retribution. But the symbolic meaning of blood rain and a profusion of its visual representations, mostly as gory lines, pervade the film and set the overriding tone. The brightly coloured neo-noir cinematography and the lush orchestral soundtrack, which curiously includes the opening theme of Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto, also make for a Hitchcockian thriller. Indeed, featured in the story is a psychological ailment similar to vertigo: a gripping fear of water. Water, usually meant to nourish and cleanse, here acts as a reservoir of danger, evil, death, and rot, reeking of aggrieved spirits and mass crimes. The numerous shots of people and things dropping into water visually reinforce this motif, as does the notion of being trapped in the bottom of a well, a metaphor for being fatalistically confined. Water, however, also provides the boundary and barrier with the mainland, hence serving as a means of escape through its capacity to conceal and dissolve.

This gulf between the mainland and the island, manifested through several “King Kong”-like shots from an approaching boat to a mysteriously forbidden realm, renders the island a microcosm of the territory of Joseon dynasty Korea as a whole. In response to Yi Won-gyu’s insistence on applying Confucian values of humanistic treatment on the islanders labouring in the paper mill, an irritated Kim In-gu retorts, “Don’t judge everything here according to [your] mainland ways”. He says this presumably not only to legitimate his strict disciplining of the mill’s workers but also to emphasise the island’s separate existence—an idealised world of advances driven by technology, efficiency, and commerce. But this place, not unlike the Korean peninsula itself, demonstrates also the baneful effects of isolation, as shown by mob behaviours and mentalities wrenched by dread, superstition, and self-interest. A female shaman, who invokes the dead Gang’s wrath in one of her ceremonies, supplies comfort but also instigates such group anxiety through her dispensation of charms to ward off the merchant’s vengeful spirit. Won-gyu wants to prevent the island’s agitation from spilling beyond its shores, but this is anything but straightforward.

Indeed, what Won-gyu discovers painfully is the incapacity of the island to distance itself from the woes besetting the mainland, especially Korea’s political troubles. The original military prosecutor sent to the island in 1801, who had levied the false accusations against the merchant Gang, was motivated by a desire to exploit the political persecution of not just Catholics but of members of the Namin (“Southerners”) party in court politics at the time. Following the death in 1800 of King Jeongjo and of the hopes for enlightenment and tolerance that his reign had represented (Chap. 3), the most visible victims of this factional fighting was the great scholar Dasan. This happened in the political vacuum of 1801, as if determined by the great king’s death and the subsequent lack of a stabilising adult monarch. That year, a secret letter smuggled by the Catholic Hwang Sa-yeong that begged the Chinese court for intervention in Korea was discovered by the government near the border, which provided the impetus to carry out the court’s Catholic persecution and a purge of the Namin party. In order to advance his political career, that previous prosecutor had taken advantage of the financial connection between a Namin official named “Jeong”—the same surname as Dasan’s—and the merchant Gang by framing the merchant, regardless of its terrible miscarriage of justice.

Meanwhile, In-gu’s father Kim Chi-seong presents himself as an aggrieved nobleman who acts like a lord on the island in the absence of real officials, as not even the hereditary clerks, or hyangni, reside here. Indeed, Kim complains that despite his stellar background as an aristocratic scholar-official, he gets treated no better than a hyangni underling because of the taint of that 1801 episode. But Kim himself had acceded in 1801 to the wicked plans pursued by the earlier prosecutor and his accomplices in framing Gang. Indeed, Kim admits to Won-gyu that he held no sympathy for Gang, because the merchant, with his accumulation of individual wealth and disregard for birth-based status hierarchies, had offended both the natural order of things and even the Joseon state itself. In-gu, Kim’s son and current director of the paper mill, calls attention to the evils of passing down such harmful Confucian values through fateful patrilineal identities, for In-gu himself suffers from this practice. Perhaps In-gu is a secret Catholic, but like Confucianism, Catholicism is also severely stained in the film. Although customarily associated in perceptions of nineteenth-century Korean history with science, equality, and western advances, the portrayal of Catholicism in “Blood Rain”, while muted, gets absorbed into the film’s spotlight on bloody retribution and the cult of martyrdom (allegorised as chickens getting slaughtered) for the sake of salvation and conciliation.

While adopting many of “Blood Rain’s” symbols and set in a similar time and place, “The Book of Fish” (Jasan Eobo [“Black Mountain’s fish species”]; Yi Jun-ik, 2020) is a far less gruesome and more encouraging complement to the earlier film. From master maker of historical films Yi Jun-ik, “The Book of Fish” is the title of a book about marine life written in exile by Jeong Yak-jeon, one of the three famed Jeong brothers at the turn of the nineteenth century who stood at the centre of the early network of Korean Catholicism. As noted above, far more celebrated than Yak-jeon in this regard was his younger brother Yag-yong, or Dasan, who like the main character was sent into exile instead of being executed for heresy, unlike their middle brother, who refused to recant in any way. Notably, the story begins with an audience between Yak-jeon and King Jeongjo shortly before the latter’s untimely death in 1800, in which the monarch, more tolerant than his ministers of the new religion spreading among his subjects, counsels the scholar about the primacy of survival. In addition to adding to the hagiographical treatment of King Jeongjo (Chap. 3), this scene seems to suggest that dying for an ideology (or religion) is of limited value to one’s society or country. Such a notion is put to the test when the three brothers are ensnared in the mass persecution of Catholic followers in 1801, and Yak-jeon stops short of insisting on enacting Catholic teachings that go against, among other things, the Confucian ancestral rituals.

Catholicism remains a central theme in the story of Yak-jeon’s long exile on a remote island off the southwestern coast. Upon his arrival he encounters colourful villagers and a particularly talented young man, Chang-dae, an expert fisherman who also seems to be the only inhabitant possessing something beyond functional literacy. A concubine’s child of a corrupt and powerful local aristocrat on the mainland, Chang-dae strives to imbibe the Confucian classics and even staunchly rebukes Jeong for the latter’s brush with Catholicism. Meanwhile, the aristocratic newcomer to the island grows increasingly curious about Chang-dae’s fish, as well as practical matters in general, while living among these salt-of-the-earth islanders. Soon the pair agree to exchange expertise—with the scholar training the young man in the finer points of Confucianism as well as other intellectual pursuits, and Chang-dae teaching Jeong about the fascinating varieties of sea life around the island, enough to inspire the latter to write a book about it.

This partnership of opposites is the motif for demonstrating the stirrings of western-inspired scientific learning and the more comprehensive turn towards practical sciences and knowledge—still only recognised by a very small slice of the learned population—that Catholicism began to inspire. Chang-dae’s striving, meanwhile, for the classic Confucian education (ironically, while being inspired by Dasan’s writings) seems bound for disappointment once he fulfils his dreams to become a local official, while Yak-jeon’s death before completing his Book of Fish symbolises the incomplete, aborted attempt at the time to push for a comprehensive change in the country. The corruption emanating from the aristocratic class and the court, with a dominating Queen Dowager wielding power in the place of a child monarch, is portrayed as a stumbling block. But so is the hold of Confucianism, and specifically Neo-Confucianism (Seongnihak), after four centuries as the Joseon dynasty’s official creed. Here the finer details in the storyline are worth considering as well, for Yak-jeon’s other counterpart-companion is his younger brother Dasan, who is serving his own exile on the fringes of the mainland. Over more than a decade in separated but simultaneous banishment, the two exchange long-distance letters that describe how the younger brother became extraordinarily productive in crafting books—based on his exile experience—that refined Confucian teachings towards the goal of cultivating better (local) officials, while the older brother remained relatively content with his less productive scholarly turn, at least in terms of writing, towards more earthly matters.

The wondrous qualities of motley sea life and their functional service to livelihoods thus serve as metaphors for interest in the people’s everyday lives—a true reflection of “practical learning”—as well as in the material realm in general. Panoramic shots of Yak-jeon and other individuals standing against the expanse of nature, whether the sea, the island, or the sky, reinforce this message, as does the plight of commoners in the face of extortionate government officials, especially the hyangni clerks to whom Dasan had directed much of his criticism. These officials thus represent the weight of four centuries of Joseon statecraft that had long entered a stage of decay, reflecting also the degradation of Confucian ideals. Catholic and western teachings can offer a way out of this predicament, Jeong Yak-jeon seems to imply, by presenting a model for preserving the best features of the old teachings while learning new lessons, and even for re-imagining the basis of the social order, an admittedly confronting prospect for traditional Confucian elites.

The Prince Regent and National Destiny

The balance and ambivalence of competing directions, suggesting the surviving possibility of comprehensive renewal even after King Jeongjo’s death in 1800, provide the overarching subtext in a group of films set in the mid-nineteenth century. Judgement on the realisation of such promised change, however, is almost uniformly negative, and this process of potential leading to disappointment is unmistakably personified in Prince Heungseon, known also by his official royal title of “Daewongun”. The Daewongun came to power through the extraordinary coincidence of the ascent to the throne, at least in name, of a series of four boys over the first seven decades of the century. When these circumstances resulted in his own son (later, King Gojong) becoming monarch in 1864 despite coming from a relatively inert royal lineage, Prince Heungseon exercised supreme power officially as the Prince Regent until the mid-1870s and behind the scenes even thereafter. The cinematic portrayal of this man, however, mostly focuses on the years before his formal takeover, as he is shown pushing reforms in staunch opposition to entrenched courtly forces. Once in power, however, his failure to follow through—in fact, his increasingly reactionary stance—seems to encapsulate the kingdom’s inability to correct its fatal course, despite the continuing growth of signs beyond politics that seem to forecast a new era, such as science, Catholicism, populism, and, most interestingly, commerce and mass culture.

The emerging commodification of popular culture is the primary historical undercurrent in a film, set in the 1840s, that actually does not feature the Daewongun: “Heung-boo—the Revolutionist” (Heungbu—Geullo saesang eul bakkun ja [“Heungbu—the man who changed his world through writing”]; Jo Geun-hyeong, 2017). This film imaginatively crafts an origins story of the famous folk tale from the time, “Heungbu and Nolbu” (Heungbu-jeon), a version of the archetypical fraternal confrontation morality tale, in which the abused but kind-hearted younger brother, Heungbu, gains triumph in the end. (This outcome is usually taken as an expression of grievance against the prevailing Confucian ethos of primogeniture.) But unlike “Blood Rain”, the film struggles in its efforts to draw historical connections, which come across as strained and almost arbitrary. In addition to the folk story, elements of the historical context include the pansori singing and mask dance genres; the rising material influences on literature; the disabling political corruption by royal consort families and local rulers; the incessant popular uprisings and their social consequences; and the increasing interest in Jeonggam-nok, a book of prophecy that had inspired the 1811–1812 Hong Gyeong-nae rebellion (also alluded to). Even Catholicism is incorporated into the storyline. Many plot holes thus get exposed, and the messaging seems clichéd, despite the intriguing application of the dominant trope of Korean War films (Chap. 6): the separation of siblings and its implications for the balance between fate and freedom. Here, there are actually two pairs of divided brothers, with the Heungbu character, a successful author of pulp fiction, compelled to write a story about not his own sibling situation but rather that of a second fraternal pair, who then become the actual models for the famous folk tale, in this retelling. A simple parable about karma and character is thus transposed to the realm of the debilitating politics of the time, but with the suggested stakes being nothing less than the country’s fate.

Similar in context and outlook, at least in dealing with the rise of popular cultural forms, is a film set in the 1860s and 1870s, “The Sound of a Flower” (Dori hwaga [“The Song of peach and plum flowers”]; Yi Jong-pil, 2015), which shifts the artistic balance from writing to singing but suffers from an unclear centre of gravity. As the film’s title suggests, the story features a pioneering female singer, Jin Chae-seon, of the Korean musical genre of pansori, which features usually a solo vocalist accompanied by a drummer. (This orientation in the film was due, undoubtedly, to the emphasis on crafting a lead for the K-pop star Bae Suji, who takes this demanding role.) In the story, the Chae-seon character fulfils the trope of the struggling artist from a disadvantaged background, in this case both of class and gender, who overcomes the odds through diligence, principle, and singular pursuit of her craft. As in “Heung-boo”, spotlighted are the two canonical folk tales (and partnering pansori works) centred on young female characters—Chunhyang and Sim Cheong, respectively—with Jin Chae-seon becoming an avatar for both of them. As such, however, the film presents itself substantially as a generic period piece.

Aspects of the film’s storyline that could have been much more grounded in the historical circumstances of the mid-nineteenth century include a sub-plot that features Chae-seon’s teacher, Shin Jae-hyo, the master systematiser of the pansori art form. As a historical figure, however, Shin represented much more than simply the artistic source of the standardisation of pansori as a musical genre. Shin was also a local hereditary clerk, or hyangni, which as noted in a brief aside in the film meant that his day job was director of personnel (Ibang) for a county government office. The constraints imposed by his subordinated status, albeit one that stood closer to the ruling elite than to the “low-born” (a misrepresentation in the film) or even commoner class, become important to the narrative. And given the popular perception surrounding this hereditary clerkly class, as shown in the other films analysed in this chapter, it is striking that this particular hyangni clerk receives a positive portrayal or at least not that of caricature. Indeed, Shin Jae-hyo’s contributions to the development of popular culture stemmed directly from official clerkly duties—which centred on tax collection but included just about every facet of local administration—that allowed these figures habitually to measure the pulse of the people.³⁷ Thus, it was no surprise that a person of such background would become the creative force behind this expression of mass sentiment, just as those of hyangni status also helped develop other popular artistic genres such as mask dances and visual arts.

Regrettably, the downplaying of this societal component constitutes a missed opportunity, especially since the plot features Shin’s chance encounter with the future royal regent, Prince Heungseon, before the latter would become the Daewongun in the mid-1860s. And here, as with other films set in the nineteenth century, the contrast between these two phases of the Daewongun’s impact—before and after taking political power—becomes a key element to the storyline: The Prince Regent helps promote, albeit for somewhat nefarious purposes, the further systematisation of Shin’s efforts at developing pansori performance and at training his singers, especially that of his female protege. (Unfortunately, this relationship between Shin and his apprentice singer gets laden with an unnecessary and clumsy romantic angle.) As with the lack of consideration for the social, governmental, and indeed artistic significance of the hyangni clerks, clearer attention to the cultural implications of the Daewongun’s political projects, such as his crackdown on Confucian academies, would have contributed substantially to the film’s historical framing. It also would have allowed a more meaningful depiction of how the conflict between longstanding social practices and emerging popular cultural forms reflected socio-political changes in the nineteenth century.

Along these lines, a more effective dramatisation of the historical context comes from a biopic of the storied geographer Kim Jeong-ho: “Map Against the World” (Gosanja: Daedong yeoji-do [“Kim Jeong-ho: The Great Map of Korea”]; Gang U-seok, 2016). By traversing much of the country in the mid-nineteenth century on foot, Kim produced a remarkably detailed and accurate map of Korea, one still considered a major cultural landmark. In presenting his travels as a process of discovering (and claiming) the nation through its territory, the camera follows Kim’s journey across numerous lush landscapes, towering peaks such as Mount Baekdu (Image 2), and even the open seas—where Kim encounters Japanese marauders near the Dokdo Islets. Reminiscent of a scene in “Forbidden Dream” (Chap. 1), in which the former slave Jang Yeong-sil lies down next to incarcerated comrades to look up at the starry night, “Map Against the World” shows Kim and a fellow commoner similarly gazing at the heavens, which signals that the natural world, whether land or sky, knows no hierarchies. Such an egalitarian framing comes through also in Kim’s explanations for his restless wanderings, such as “On the road, there is no social status, no distinction between high and low”, and in his claims that his map will allow “regular people” (baekseong) to gain greater awareness of their surroundings. To reinforce this message, the storyline creates a connection to the early nineteenth-century Hong Gyeong-nae rebellion, during which Kim’s father, a leader in the uprising, perishes because he held an inaccurate map and a faulty compass. In sum, Kim insists, geographical knowledge constitutes awareness of the nation, thus information and understanding cannot remain the preserve of elites but rather must be made available to everyone (“I resolved to make a map that people who need it can always use”.).

Image 2

Kim Jeong-ho encountering the “Heavenly Lake” at the top of Mount Baekdu, from “Map Against the World”

Naturally such ideals clash with the enforcers of the exploitative and elitist power structure, starting with the Daewongun himself, the main secondary character in the film. The Daewongun’s meeting with Kim ends in confrontation precisely because of this difference in outlook. Granted, this is a wholly fictionalised encounter, but the point is to depict the Daewongun as both antagonist and partner, one who seeks reform but who is primarily concerned with amassing power and therefore suspicious of Kim’s egalitarian motives. The other source of antagonism is the Andong Kim family of high officials, who represent the corrupt stranglehold on the court by consort families in this era of weak monarchs, a familiar trope in films and tv dramas set in the nineteenth century. The basic plot line of “Map Against the World”, then, is the repeated suppression of Kim’s ambitions and grand cartographical project by these two political forces. Meanwhile, Kim is joined in sympathetic support by figures such as Shin Heon, a military official who later helped the court negotiate the opening of trade relations with Japan, resulting in the Treaty of Ganghwa in 1876. And just as much as the fiendish consort families, the Daewongun, who actually worked fiercely to curb their abuses, also stands responsible for the Catholic persecutions, which the film, through harrowing scenes, shows victimising both Kim Jeong-ho’s love interest and his daughter. Thus, faith in Catholic teachings, much like knowledge and awareness of the nation’s physical contours, provides promises as well as pitfalls in this era, with both potential trajectories embodied in the figure of the Daewongun.

In the film “Feng Shui” (Myeongdang [“Fortuitous spaces”]; Bak Hui-gon, 2018), the Daewongun is no longer a supporting character but rather the lead figure. As the (Chinese) term for the film’s official English title suggests, the motivic sphere of knowledge is not geography but rather geomancy, an ideology and science with over a millennium of tradition in Korean history. But the story, set in the mid-nineteenth century, is actually a highly dramatised retelling of the rise of Prince Heungseon, before he would gain political supremacy as the Daewongun. The film suggests that the roots of the Daewongun’s grip on politics thereafter, as the country was inundated with threats from both within and without, lay in the 1850s, when Prince Heungseon, a descendant of a relatively inert royal line, cunningly and ruthlessly manoeuvred himself into position to establish his son as the next monarch. Most of all, the prince is portrayed as having recognised and appropriated the connection between, on the one hand, the corrupt politics of consort family domination and, on the other, the grand fatalistic power of geomantic forces.

Heungseon’s belief that destiny was attached to a favourable piece of land, especially for burial plots, arises through his friendship with a professional geomancer, who works for the government agency (Gwansang-gam) responsible for such matters. In many ways these characters, as well as the larger story, mirror those of the “Face Reader” (Chap. 1), which was set in the fifteenth century. Like in the earlier film (both part of the same trilogy), the story unfolds through a good-natured fortune teller’s power of prescience—appropriated by some political actors while targeted by others who see it as a threat—which results in the soothsayer paying a heavy personal price. There is also a madam of a courtesan house, a comic-relief sidekick character, and evil-doers from the realm of the privileged aiming to control the throne, with the stakes reaching the level of the dynasty’s survival.³⁸ While not as engrossing or reaching the level of depth or accomplishment in probing the social hierarchy implications as “The Face Reader”, “Feng Shui” does well demonstrate, with the corruption accompanying the takeover of politics by consort families, the severe reach of socio-political exploitation. And in signalling again the prescriptive solution of a strong monarchy as a protector of both the country and the people, “Feng Shui” extends the message, discussed above, of the baneful consequences of the passing of King Jeongjo in the signal year of 1800, just as the troubled nineteenth century began.

Hence the historical subtext of the film, unveiled as it unfolds in the second half, is not just the customary wrangling over royal succession, but the fate of both the Joseon dynasty and the nation’s autonomy over the nineteenth century. The discovery of and contestation over “fortuitous spaces”, especially for family gravesites, thus represent not just the narrative’s main plot point of conflict but, given what would later occur, the struggle for the country’s survival. Thus, like the island in “Blood Rain”, a prime burial spot serves as a stand-in for Korean territory as a whole. Likewise, Heungseon’s turn from defender of the monarchy against the ravenous consort families to an exploiter of this connection between land and power anticipates the collective downfall to come. His machinations, coming shortly before his son’s ascension to the throne, were signalled by his forcible appropriation of an auspicious area occupied by a thousand-year-old Buddhist temple, which in the film he burns down in order to use the grounds for his own father’s grave. This benefits him personally, but in the larger scheme of things, the scene of the temple going up in flames forecasts the country’s doing the same a few decades later.

End Times of the Late Nineteenth Century

The downfall would eventually arrive in the nineteenth century’s closing decades, but the signs, in the hindsight of cinematic recreation, had been there all along, and here the apocalyptic becomes the overriding sense conveyed in two films that metaphorically and otherwise portray the end times, starting with “Kundo: Age of the Rampant” (Gundo: Millan ui sidae [“Gundo: The Age of people’s uprisings”]; Yun Jong-bin, 2014). A descending sun on the horizon both opens and closes the film, the former instance to relay the grave decay and decrepitness of conditions in the countryside, and the latter to suggest a contrastingly hopeful future as the film’s heroes ride off into the sunset. Scenes of horse riding in an open field are the most notable examples of the film’s cheekiness with genre, as both the cinematography and music seem to suggest a spaghetti western, one with clear moral lines of conflict and lots of close-ups of facial expressions in decisive moments. But “Kundo” is also very much a tale of class injustice, a film that one imagines could have been made in North Korea. Even here, however, things are not quite what one expects, for the storyline, while drawn from familiar folkloric allegory, also presents compelling digressions from the script, beginning with the antagonist himself, played with extraordinary verve and range by the actor Gang Dong-won.

That character, named Jo Yun, is a spitting replica of the most storied righteous bandit in Korean history, Hong Gil-dong, a real-life figure from the fifteenth century whose fictionalised exploits were immortalised in the late Joseon era through one of the earliest Korean vernacular novels. Countless films and television dramas have portrayed this legendary hero or a contemporary spinoff of him, almost always to use Hong as the everyman fighter for social justice.³⁹ But in “Kundo”, he is the evil enemy. Like Hong Gil-dong, Jo Yun is a concubine’s son of a rich and powerful father, who eventually mistreats and abandons his own son for having been born illegitimate. And like Hong, the burdens and resentments from this stigma lead Jo Yun to take matters into his own hands, as he trains himself to become a swashbuckling fighter and alpha male. In the “Kundo” story, however, he uses his martial skills and fierce determination to become a ruthless landlord and usurer who builds personal power through corruption, exploitation, accumulation, and callous disregard for average people. He is, in short, the budding wicked capitalist of the socialist imaginary, a century before the tycoons of modern-day South Korea.

Aligned against Jo is a collection of ragtag righteous warriors calling themselves “Kundo” (Gundo), who display everything else about Hong Gil-dong’s famed group except for Hong himself, particularly through its activities of raiding the rich and corrupt and then redistributing the gains to the poor and exploited. Indeed, a voice-over narration states that these miscreants take themselves as descendants of Hong Gil-dong. Rather than from a single leader, however, the band’s leadership comes through collaboration among characters who are all victims of the country’s intractable social discrimination, including a Buddhist monk, a courtesan, and a former government interpreter. They are later joined by someone from the lowest of all hereditary social ranks, a butcher named Dolmuchi from the baekjeong class of outcasts. After having abandoned his lucrative assignment from Jo Yun to kill one of Jo’s family members, Dolmuchi suffers a terrible personal loss and is now set on revenge. Here, his facility with knives serves him well as he prepares for the culminating battle against Jo, who has repeatedly shown himself an unbeatable swordsman.

The second half of the film is preoccupied with running this action-movie buildup towards and presentation of the final fight, but the first part of the film implants intriguing nuggets of the story’s historical setting as “the age of the people’s uprisings”, in line with the film’s Korean subtitle. As noted above, the nineteenth century was an era of mammoth revolts, the last of which, in 1894, led directly to the fall of the Joseon dynasty and eventually of national sovereignty itself. The year 1862, supposedly the film’s setting, was the year of the great mid-century popular rebellion, known commonly as the Imsul (“1862”) Uprisings, which began in the Jinju area along the south-central coast. “Kundo”, however, does not allude explicitly to this event and, interestingly, is mostly set in the southwestern coast, in Naju, known for its wide swaths of agricultural plains. The Kundo band, meanwhile, is headquartered on the opposite side of Mount Jiri from Jinju, but that is as far as the mid-nineteenth-century geographical contextualisation goes.

This lack of historically connecting detail can leave the messaging somewhat open-ended, or so it seems. As in the “The Face Reader” (Chap. 1), the ostensibly evil antagonist, though in this case completely fictional, can be taken as the carrier of the modern free will, personified in a figure, Jo Yun, who defies his hereditarily determined fate and, through personal skill and determination, crafts his own world. The problem is that he uses this personal freedom to do not good but rather the opposite. Like Kim In-gu in “Blood Rain”, Jo even celebrates his vanguard role in the upcoming age in which business, individualism, and self-determination will prevail. Such an attitude is observed with bewilderment by the Kundo fighters themselves, who speak often of fate and wonder how Jo could have turned out this way, given his own personal struggles against prejudice and oppression; they are thus determined to make him “set his fate correctly” in accordance with social justice.

It is doubtful, however, that ambiguity is intended here, for Jo ultimately meets his comeuppance at the hands of the regular people, a decidedly populist outcome. Indeed, the mass-oriented, socialist angle—minus the twentieth-century leadership cult, significantly—also comes to the fore. The Kundo community’s home is depicted as an idyllic retreat nestled in the mountains, where food, camaraderie, and cooperation are plentiful. In this sense, the film echoes the communal idealism of “Welcome to Dongmakgol” (Chap. 6), set a century later in the Korean War but released in theatres a decade before “Kundo”. The closing shot of Kundo swashbucklers riding into the sunset thus offers an alternative path for the country’s modern destiny, in both the determinative period of the mid-nineteenth century and beyond—a path that does not end in catastrophe.

By most accounts, however, the historical trajectory of the latter half of the nineteenth century did indeed end in catastrophe, in a process that directly led to the loss of national autonomy in the opening decade of the twentieth century (Chap. 5). These decades, from the 1860s to 1890s, provide the backdrop for a groundbreaking, celebrated, but ultimately puzzling epic, “Chihwaseon” (Chwihwaseon [“Drunken painting immortal”]; 2002), which turned out to be the last box office success from the doyen craftsman of historical films, Im Kwon-taek. A biopic of the painter Jang Seung-eop—and similarly to “The President’s Barber” (Chap. 7), which was set in the 1960s and 1970s—“Chihwaseon” positions the protagonist as accidental witness and participant in major episodes of history. In this manner, as “Blood Rain” and “The Book of Fish” did for the earliest years of the nineteenth century, “Chihwaseon” gathers together the main historical forces converging on this decisive era. The film’s portrait of the painter, however, does not resolve easily into an understanding of whether he represents, in such precarious times, the country’s fate or something else. Much of this uncertainty stems from the choppy editing that strings together countless short scenes in a way that leaves big plot holes as well as jarring disjunctures and transitions.

This effect might have been intentional but also feels like a result of trying to cover too much ground, which is understandable, given the film’s grand purpose of celebrating Korean painting. Such a motive connects Jang to the great artistic legacy of the latter Joseon era, but also portrays him as a tragic figure standing for the debilitation of the late nineteenth century. Thus, he acts as an observer and passerby in the alleyways of Seoul during major putsch attempts in 1882 and 1884, with the latter scene preceded immediately in time by Jang’s meeting the radical ringleader of that 1884 coup, Kim Ok-gyun. Jang is introduced to Kim by the artist’s mentor throughout the film, a reformist government interpreter (yeokkwan) likely based on the historical figure of O Gyeong-seok, who helped guide the early “Enlightenment Party” leaders behind the 1884 takeover attempt. Seoul also is the setting for a later scene, from 1894, when the captured leader of the Donghak Uprising, Jeon Bong-jun, is paraded through the streets (Image 3), and a Japanese admirer of Jang’s tells him that only his paintings will remain in the dying dynasty. Jang roams the countryside as well, witnessing major events such as the gruesome aftermath of the Catholic persecution of 1866, and most notably the harrowing spark of the Donghak conflagration in early 1894 (Image 4), as well as its tragic end a half-year later, when the peasants are mowed down by rifle-bearing Japanese troops. Jang’s mentor, now in hiding in the countryside, remarks presciently that the recent unrest created an ominous emptiness into which ravenous forces from the outside world entered.

Image 3

Jeon Bong-jun, captured leader of the Donghak movement, being paraded through the streets of Seoul in 1894, from “Chihwaseon”

Image 4

The painter Jang Seung-eop caught in the Donghak Uprising of 1894, in “Chihwaseon”

The countryside also is central to the rich visual symbolism, which is obviously a focus, given the film’s subject matter. Considering also its release date of 2000, the numerous scenes of the painter walking along or gazing into the diverse expanse of the country’s natural surroundings probably helped establish this hallyu cinematic convention of using the country’s bucolic scenery as the canvas of choice for envisaging national heritage. The focus on backdrop also allows many allusions to Korea’s artistic traditions, including the establishment of painting(s) as emblematic of cultural identity. This orientation appears in scenes of artists discussing famous painters and their craft and of the recreation of well-known scenes from classic visual artefacts, from plum paintings and landscapes to images of flocking birds and fornicating humans. The bold splash of colours and the thickness of lines seem to suggest Jang’s modernist, individualist inclinations of resistance to or digression away from received understanding. Most prominent in these blotches is red colouring, which stands for blood, rebellion, and fire in tandem with shifting thematic emphases in the storyline and appears prominently in the dress of the gisaeng courtesans appearing serially in Jang’s life. This, too, draws directly from Joseon’s graphical traditions, especially the glamorous eighteenth-century paintings of Shin Yun-bok, whose works become recreated in the film as both paintings and scenes.

The simultaneous attachment to Joseon traditions, on the one hand, and resistance or escape from them, on the other, add to the multiple messaging of the film concerning this period’s historical significance. Beyond the real events, the sense of material transformation comes across in the appearance of modern instruments like a magnifying glass or the growing primacy of commercial considerations in creating art. And the trope of the imminent danger in this era is faithfully observed through the mentor character and his circles of associates struggling against the ravages of internal corruption and foreign interference, as most ominously depicted in the suggestive appearances of Chinese and Japanese troops in the Seoul streets. But even the social commentary is neither sturdy nor steadfast. Jang’s suffering from discrimination due to his “base” (cheon-han) birth background is played up early in the narrative, but later as an established and famed artist he seems not to carry a consciousness of his early struggles, at one point even getting angry at his mentor for suggesting that the painter include more social realism in his works. “L’art pour l’art” becomes his ideological stance, at least until it does not, after he becomes swayed by direct experiences and core loyalties. Jang emerges, then, as a classic genius yearning to break free of convention and the trappings thereof, both artistically and otherwise. But primal cravings for sex and drink, more than experience, seem to fuel his inner drive. What emerges overall, then, is a character who lacks definition or direction, which is characteristic of the film itself and perhaps of this historical period as well.

In the end, Jang’s life stands for the idea of ethereal eternity, as indicated by the film’s title, which means “Drunken painting immortal”. He disappeared to history without a trace, a void that the film fills with a bewildering ending. Jang Seung-eop’s aimless, or restless, incapacity to arrive at a set understanding of his place and principles reflects that of Korea at the time, the film seems to say. If so, this message would be symbolised, towards the end of the story, by his potentially greatest work being set ablaze amid the Donghak Uprising (Image 4), just as the thousand-year-old Buddhist temple was torched at the end of “Feng Shui”. Indeed, as a symbol and instrument of fate, fire becomes the closing theme through its determinative but ungraspable force (an alternative English title for the film is “Painted Fire”). It is as if fate, like fire, cannot be controlled in light of its unstable nature; it is capable of producing destruction as much as light, warmth, and uplift. If so, for the purposes of historical understanding, “Chihwaseon” provides a fitting closing judgement on the nineteenth century, filled with visions and omens of cataclysm but also promising hopes, however unrealised, in individual defiance.