![\"kb-seopyeonje-1\"](\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/KB-Seopyeonje-1.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
One singer and one drummer on an otherwise nearly bare stage, expressing the pain of Korea for four or five hours: the prospect, to a great many foreigners, does not immediately appeal. Then again, despite its deep roots in the culture, the traditional form of musical storytelling called pansori<\/em> (\ud310\uc18c\ub9ac) didn\u2019t much appeal to a great many Koreans for a long stretch of the twentieth century, if not due to\u00a0 distaste then to unfamiliarity. But \u201cKorea\u2019s opera\u201d has seen a revival of interest in recent decades, due in part to the massive success in 1993 of a movie about, and only about, the then seemingly dying art and the emotion that drives it: Im Kwon-taek\u2019s Seopyeonje<\/em> (\uc11c\ud3b8\uc81c).<\/p>\n
The prolific Im, still working today after 102 films and counting, directed in the first years of the 1990s\u00a0 a trilogy of popular gangster pictures, General\u2019s Son<\/em> (\uc7a5\uad70\uc758 \uc544\ub4e4) and its two sequels. (You can watch the first of them<\/a> on the Korean Film Archive\u2019s Youtube channel, as well as Im\u2019s 1976 Wangsimni, My Hometown<\/em><\/a>, the last movie we featured in this series.) Their considerable box-office return gave him a free hand to make a passion project, and on paper Seopyeonje <\/em>looks like the very definition of one: a middle-aged filmmaker who remembers a very different time in his rapidly developing homeland tells a story, in the form of a period piece within a period piece, of a wandering pansori master and his two young charges whom history has already left behind, but whose suffering only enriches the tradition to which they have dedicated their lives.<\/p>\n
That suffering produces an emotion much written about as unique to the Korean people: han <\/em>(\ud55c, often written with the Chinese character \u6068), variously explained in English as \u201clifelong regret,\u201d \u201ca collective feeling of oppression and isolation in the face of insurmountable odds\u201d connoting \u201caspects of lament and unavenged injustice,\u201d the \u201csentiment that one develops when one cannot or is not allowed to express feelings of oppression, alienation, or exploitation because one is trapped in an unequal power relationship,\u201d and an \u201cacute pain in one\u2019s guts and bowels, making the whole body writhe and squirm, and an obstinate urge to take revenge and to right the wrong.\u201d Fictional United States President Josiah Bartlet, on the episode of The West Wing<\/em> when he has to turn away a North Korean asylum-seeker, explains it as \u201ca sadness so deep no tears will come. And yet still there\u2019s hope.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n