News of Seoul: Three Minutes of Yesteryear

When it opened it 2015, Kyoto's Toy Film Museum was a humble institution, displaying historic cameras and bygone home projectors in a wall of cubbyholes. (There was also some toy audiovisual equipment with which visitors could play.) Screenings of old samurai movies were shown on a television, the guest speaker might be a screenwriter of yore. But just being a movie archive does position one to make discoveries. And so here we are as TFM's Director Oto Yoneo donates this bit of footage (dating back to the 1920s) to the Korean Film Archive circa 2019. If you're a Korean movie buff like me, then you know full well that homegrown celluloid prior to 1950 is precious goods indeed as the occupying Japanese were actively engaged in destroying Korean culture/art in all forms from 1910 up through the Korean war. How this particular snippet survived (on enemy territory, no less) is a bit of a mystery!

As for the footage itself, which lasts but a few minutes, there are street scenes with trolley cars and brief, overhead shots of Seoul's early skyline, devoid of skyscrapers, Namsan Tower, Lotte World, and the National Museum with its memorable modern spin on traditional architecture. Everything you see is scratched and marked up; the sound — if there ever was any — is long lost; and the title cards — like some of the in situ street signage — are in... Japanese. Still it's nice to get this glimpse of the past, no matter how damaged, no matter how mute.