Obaltan is Yu Hyun-mok’s most exem­plary work and a key work of Korean realist cinema. The film captures the collective anxiety of post-war Korea through clerk Cheol-ho and his family – his mentally ill mother, his sex-work­er sister and his bank-robber brother. Cheol-ho is a tortured soul and often ends up wandering around the streets of Seoul late at night. The film has long been considered a cursed masterpiece. A commercial failure upon its ini­tial release, it was soon banned by the military government, finally receiving its due recognition when presented at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 1963. Yet with the loss of the original film negative, the only re­maining print was the English subtitled copy of the film screened at SFIFF. All of these factors helped the film to gain its legendary status in Korea as a clas­sic awaiting rediscovery. The true value of this film, however, lies in its candid dissection of the devastating decade that followed the Korean War, re-appropri­ating filmic techniques developed in the West to show how the most atrocious event in Korea’s modern history ravaged society both economically and psycho­logically. Obaltan is not simply an anti-war film, rather it extends to the wider context of human existence in all its chaotic glory. The film shows how damaging human relationships reflect the socio-political system that inflicts suffering on a larger scale. Cheol-ho and his family are trapped in the prison of a powerful, unyielding social structure. We witness Cheol-ho singing the popular ballad Sa-ui Chanmi (Praise of Death) to himself and this epitomises the feeling of self-hatred and hopelessness that has been central to Korean society since the Japanese occupation instituted a culture of domination and exploitation.

Kim Ki-ho