Domestic v.s. International Audience

                           Domestic v.s. International Audience           Yu-Han (Frank) Chang

Sonpyonje is repeatedly mentioned as an unexpectedly huge box office success in South Korea in the readings while the intended audience was really at the international stage. As Prof. Cho mentioned before the screening, the question that needs to be asked is to understand why this particular film became a domestic hit.

The character Yu-bong was a portrayal of the oppressed masculinity in the Korean history. Using Sonpyonje, a traditional art of Korea, as a representation, the film depicted the long suffered oppression. For instance, Choi mentioned in the reading that Sonpyongje was prohibited during the Japanese colonization and later overwhelmed by the invasion of dominant Western culture. In Yu-bong’s portrayal, he and his family were repeatedly humiliated in the public. One particular scene was the parade where people played western music with instruments like trumpets that instantly overpowered their Sopyongje performance and drew away the crowd’s attention. As the head of the household and yet unable to take command, his masculinity was immediately stripped away. Furthermore, with no other ways to display his oppressed masculinity, he became more and more fixated to “retaliate” in that one day Sopyongje will become mainstream again. To that end, he began to see his daughter as a “vessel” to achieve his dream and ambition to one day reclaim the glory and dignity as a reciter. The condition exacerbated when Tong-Ho left and Song-Hwa became depressed. His blinding of his daughter, to me, was an act of insecurity and desperation to not lose the “vessel”, his only hope. Although his behaviour was rather extreme, it was this “Han”, pain and sorrow, that dug up the pains in the past in Korea with which the audience now could feel and relate to. Moreover, it was precisely this persistence despite the suffering that potently inspired the audience to what Cho referred to as “searching for our culture”  and in what Cho believed to be a “deprivation of national identity”.

However, taking this a step beyond, I would like to ask how the international audience received or reacted to this film. Personally, before doing all the readings on this film, I watched this film without paying much attention to the historical context and specifically the suffering and oppression in Korea earlier in the 20^th century.  As an international audience who did not share the same history and was not putting the history in context with this film, I did not feel the same sorrow, oppression and pain in my immediate reaction like I would later have after doing some researching around.  As mentioned in Cho’s reading, like the interviewee, the only character that made sense was Yong-Ho. The father and daughter to me were mentally not “right”. Thus, I could not feel the same richness of emotion. Contrarily, the film appealed to me primarily through its display of a distinct form of art and culture. As the intended audience, what other elements could have appealed to the international and not to the domestic viewers? Could the international audience see and feel the same emotions as native Korean viewers by watching the same film?