Discussion of Korean cinema is usually centred on two distinct eras: the Golden Age and the New Wave. During the Golden Age of the 1960s, the average Korean person watched 60 films a year and, despite the degree of government censorship and oversight increasing over the decade, the sheer domestic demand for films saw many filmmakers make multiple films per year. This nationwide appetite saw an incredible expansion of creative and commercial possibilities to make energetic entertainment and also pushed against the social and economic reality of a country in postwar flux.

The history of South Korean cinema is inseparable from Korea’s 20th-century history and the severe restrictions imposed on creative industries after massive political shifts. During the devastation of the Korean War, a total of 14 films were produced (all of which have been lost), and it wasn’t until President Syngnam Rhee exempted the film industry from taxation that business started booming, aided by the arrival of modern equipment via lucrative trade.

Punishing censorship and the popularity of television stifled the industry in the 70s, and Korean cinema did not make an artistic and commercial comeback until the hallyu or the Korean Wave of the 90s, where cutting-edge filmmakers like Park Chan-wook, Park Kwang-su and Lee Chang-dong were part of a broader movement of Korean cultural expansion. With Echoes in Time, the BFI has programmed a dual season of Korean cinema that shows highlights from the New Wave in conversation with the seminal Golden Age films that deserve an equal spotlight. 

Below, we’ve picked out five films from the Golden Age strand of Echoes in Time to illustrate how the decade of film paved the way for the modern classics of 21st-century Korean film.

Aimless Bullet (1961)

The influences on Yu Hyun-mok’s titanic realist drama (which, along with The Housemaid, is often cited as the greatest Korean film of all time) are clear. The aching, despondent performances and moody location shooting are reminiscent of Italian neorealism – in particular Rossellini’s War Trilogy – but Yu zeroes in on the myriad ways postwar economic depression pushed Koreans into existential purgatories of poverty and angst to the point that the film was banned by the military government upon release. Underscoring a public accountant’s family strife (including an angry veteran brother, a younger sister who’s a sex worker for American GIs, a malnourished, pregnant wife and a traumatised, infirm elderly mother) is his piercing toothache that he can’t afford to fix. It’s another dose of suffering that he must swallow in a life that’s always in motion, but rarely with direction.

Aimless Bullet feels like the most crucial antecedent to the cutting-edge feel-bad works of the New Wave’s masters – its social ennui and incisive look at the psychology of suffering is found in Lee Chang-dong’s Peppermint Candy, Park Chan-wook’s Sympathy for Mr Vengeance and Bong Joon-ho’s debut Barking Dogs Never Bite.

A Woman Judge (1962)

A Woman Judge was only the second Korean film directed by a woman; Hong Eun-won spent years working as a script supervisor and assistant director before her directorial debut at age 40 (her first of three films). The film charts the entrenched resistance that Jin-suk (Moon Jeong-suk) encounters in becoming a female judge in a male-dominated profession. Her position is commodified by opportunistic men and ambition is interpreted as subversive by women, but the sudden intrusion of a mystery plot and courtroom drama calls upon Jin-suk to act with nobility and agency.

Unlike Lee Man-hee or Yu Hyun-mok, Hong’s films were relegated to obscurity. After a cool reception from audiences and critics, all prints of A Woman Judge were lost for decades, a fate shared by many older Korean works. The print that was recovered and restored in 2015 is marred by missing sections and deteriorated images, but Hong’s treatment of the infuriating hypocrisies of a gendered society still stings, and preceded the work of female Korean filmmakers in the 21st century like Yim Soon-rye, Jeong Jae-eun and Kim Bo-ra.

The Marines Who Never Returned (1963)

Lee Man-hee spent his prolific career (over 50 films in 15 years!) expanding the horizons of Korean genre cinema throughout and beyond the Golden Age – thrillers like The Devil’s Stairway and Break Up the Chain are both cited as influences on the work of Kim Jee-woon. Lee’s non-genre work included melodramas that sometimes won top prizes, and sometimes received a 37-year-long ban.

This war picture focuses on a band of scrappy but good-natured marines who do their best to fend off the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army after rescuing an orphaned young girl from the heat of battle. It’s a film filled with brash tempers and warm sentimentality, and the climactic battle in an enclosed valley makes an effort to undercut nationalist jingoism with bitter, fatalistic sorrow. Nearly 40 years later, Park Chan-wook would blend humanism and tragedy in his own film about the inanity of military divisions, Joint Security Area.

Let’s Meet at Walkerhill (1966)

This colourfully shot comedy is about many things: sweet but clueless country bumpkins getting culture shock in metropolitan Seoul; a slapstick melodrama about two men who don’t realise they’re estranged from the same woman; a showcase of Seoul’s lively 60s music scene, with the plot stopping in its tracks for diegetic cabaret numbers from artists like Key Boys, Wicky Lee, and star Nam Jeong-im. It’s a good tonic to many of the social dramas programmed in the BFI’s season.

Korea’s music culture went through an even greater renewal transformation in the Korean Wave, blending pop, rock, and hip-hop styles that ultimately led to a global industry powerhouse. One of K-cinema’s sole female auteurs, Yim Soon-rye, made a throwback musical comedy in 2001 called Waikiki Brothers (also part of the season), about a hapless young band performing in their hometown hot spring resort. Set in the 1980s, Yim’s film shows how pre-hallyu tourism and music culture was remembered in the New Wave.

Mist (1967)

Nearly half of the 100+ films directed by Kim Soo-yong are adaptations of Korean novels, and one highlight in this literary film surge is the modernist Mist, a film about a lethargic, married businessman who travels back to his misty hometown and, thanks to a charged emotional affair with a local music teacher, confronts the loneliness that imprisoned him there. There are many shades of Antonioni’s visual language here, especially with the cuts between present-day and memory and the foggy, barren landscapes where discontent brews, but Kim uses the modernist style to interrogate the hollowness that has grown in between the traditions of Korean life and the sharp contrasts of modern living.

Yun Jeong-hie makes an impression as the alienated, neglected school teacher, and would later star in Poetry from Lee Chang-dong, a pioneer of the New Wave. Much of Mist’s cynical and romantic perspective on modern Korean life is intact in the early works of prolific independent filmmaker Hong Sang-soo, like his debut film The Day a Pig Fell Into a Well.

Echoes in Time: Korean Films of the Golden Age and New Cinema runs at the BFI in London until 31 December 2024.