The Korean movie production during the colonial period was often overlooked due to its liminal space between Korean and Japanese cinema. Neither purely Korean, nor purely Japanese, the early Korean cinema encompasses an amalgam of disparate actors with different objectives resulting in the development of a hybrid cinema from which few copies survived the passage of time.

With the resurfacing from Russian archives in 2019 of the short film There is No Poverty at the End of Labor (근로의 끝에는 가난이 없다) realized in the 1920s, there is now the possibility to visually examine with greater accuracy the cinematographic language used in early Korean cinema during the colonial period and understand the impacts of global cinema viewership on local productions.

Inspired by the concept of Joseon cinema developed by the author and scholar Kim Dong Hoon, this paper supports the idea that, due to Joseon cinema’s broad viewership from the birth of cinema up to the late 1920s, filmmakers in the Korean peninsula adopted and developed at an accelerated rate codes and techniques from Western cinematographic language and formed a hybrid cinema regrouping entertainment and enlightenment purposes in the Japanese colonial context. By comparing and examining There is No Poverty at the End of Labor in parallel with prior European and American films such as A trip to the moon (Georges Méliès, 1902), this paper assesses the mastering of various codes and techniques in Joseon cinema, while also displaying more moralistic themes characteristic of the Japanese colonial rule.

5 key words

Korean cinema – Early cinema – Joseon cinema – Viewership – Cinematographic codes

Bibliographical references

There is No Poverty at the End of Labor (근로의 끝에는 가난이 없다). Ota Hitoshi and Lee Kyu-seol. 1920s. 19 minutes. YouTube. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgxi3m- 8jjM&t=92s>.

Kim, Dong Hoon. 2017. Eclipsed cinema, The film culture of colonial Korea, Edinburgh studies in East Asian film, 292p.

Yecies, De Brian, Ae-Gyung Shim. 2013. Korea's Occupied Cinemas, 1893-1948: The Untold History of the Film Industry. Routledge, 222 p.

Kim Mee-hyun. 2006. Ch. 1 “The Exhibition of Moving Pictures and the Advent of Korean Cinema 1897-1925” and Ch. 2 “The Japanese Colonial Period, Heyday of Silent Films 1926-1934.” Korean Cinema, from Origins to Renaissance, Communication Books, 477 p.

Some films discussed in this paper

There is No Poverty at the End of Labor (Ota Hitoshi and Lee Kyu-seol, 1920s)

A trip to the moon (Georges Méliès, 1902)

The Smiling Madame Beudet (Germaine Dulac, 1923)