Im Kwon-Taek: Korean National Cinema and Buddhism

and leader in the movement to free Korea from Japanese occupation, published a collection of poems, Silence of Love (NimIui ch’immuk), in which he assumed the persona of a woman abandoned by her lover.1 In the title poem, she looks out across the mountains and the path through them by which he left her; but, with the dialectical logic of Buddhism, she finds in her loss the implication of its opposite, and so concludes by affirming her anticipation of reunion with him. Silence of Love is usually read as a religious and political allegory, with the absent lover Ž guring both the void at the heart of Buddhist ontology and the Korean national homeland seized by the Japanese invaders. Twenty years later, a similar scene occurs in Yun Yong-gyu’s Ž lm Home Is Where the Heart Is (MaIumI ui kohyang, 1948), made during the period of political turmoil that led to the division of the nation and the colonization of the South by the United States, and one of only two Korean Ž lms from before the civil war that still survive. In this Ž lm the erotic metaphor is Oedipalized. To-song, a young boy being raised by the monks at Chongnam temple, desperately awaits the return of his mother, who has abandoned him and now lives in Seoul. He asks an old woodcutter if his mother is beautiful, and when he hears that she is, he raises his eyes to the mountains that surround him, to the peaks and the forests which we see from his point of view. As these Ž gure both his mother’s beauty and her absence, To-song’s scopophilic gaze (like Han’s lyric voice) makes palpable and present that which is missing—a function that has been proposed as fundamental to the cinematic signiŽ er and its Oedipal operation, and one that the Ž lm’s narrative will conŽ rm by bringing him a surrogate mother who is nevertheless invested with all the erotic intensity of a lover. Thirty years later, the same motifs of loss and restoration begin to pass obsessively through the Ž lms of Im Kwon-Taek. In his mature work, Im explores pre-colonial cultural forms in order to engage the question of Korean national identity, especially as it has been alienated and thrown into crisis by the multiple forms of colonization to which the country has been subject. Of the traditional cultural vocabularies Im interrogates, Buddhism will be the one considered in de-