Seopyeonje vs. Modernity (A Look into Early K-Pop)
Seopyeonje is a South Korean film that is about a family of traveling Pansori singers. The main characters are Song-hwa, Dong-ho, and their adopted father, Yu-bong. Song-hwa is a blind woman who, after Yu-bong exposes her to aconite, still loves to sing despite their rocky relationship.
Throughout the movie, the three main characters live in poverty and try their best to keep traditional Korean folk music alive. According to Patrice Pavis’s Performing Korea, Pansori is an art form that “dates back to the 19th century (Pavis 154).” It is a very difficult talent to achieve, and this is present throughout the film.
Although Pansori is a traditional singing style, Song-hwa, Dong-ho, and Yu-bong’s careers are put at stake when contemporary art and music forms reach South Korea in the 1950s and early 1960s. They must make a rough adjustment from traditional Korean music to modern versions of the styles they love.
The movie takes place in the aftermath of the Korean War (1950 to 1953) and during periods of dictatorship in Korea, but it focuses on Pansori and modernity. In East Asian performing arts, storytelling is very important. Pansori is a well-used example of why this is the case. The movie did not depict this, but Pansori singers usually hold a fan while performing (Pavis 154). In it, Song-hwa is the main singer, Dong-ho is the drummer, and Yu-bong is the mentor. He has been teaching the young adults since they were children.
As mentioned before, they also have to deal with changing traditions as modernity hits their hometown. One example is when the three main characters meet a street artist calligrapher. He tells them that citizens are turning away from Korean folk music and looking at Western and Japanese music instead. Soon after that, as they are singing Pansori in the marketplace, a marching band passes by and quickly grabs the attention of the crowd that once surrounded them. Yu-bong is disgusted by those people’s taste in music and ends up working his adopted children twice as hard. Eventually fed up with all this nonsense, Dong-ho leaves, but Song-hwa stays with Yu-bong. As modernity peaks in South Korea, they start losing money and fall into poverty.
While there is a gap between when the movie was made and the period it depicts, the historical background and message it conveys to the audience are accurate. Pansori is central to the film, but it also weaves in messages about both modernity and self-identity. At the beginning of the film, South Korea seems to be living in a time of very little modern development, but as it progresses, modern technologies begin to appear. These include phones and buses. Like the three main characters, the inventions felt like predators, and Pansori was the prey. They did not feel natural. Despite being attacked, the prey shook off their wounds and continued the tradition.
Pansori is an early version of Ch’anggŭk, a singing style it later influenced. In the film, it seemed like Song-hwa was starting to lean toward the modern art form, but she stopped herself at the last second when she realized Pansori was her passion. Like any other Pansori artist, she used very little set with her singing. All she had was Dong-ho playing the drum.
Early forms of Ch’anggŭk, according to Andrew Killick in In Search of Korean Traditional Opera, were still very similar to Pansori. Sure, the singer may have one or two more actors accompanying her, but it still focuses on storytelling and very few instrumental pieces. Because of this, Killick said it is hard for today’s audiences who listen to early Ch’anggŭk to consider it Ch’anggŭk. To them, it is still Pansori, but to Koreans, it is an evolved form of it (Killick 73).
One moment in the film where this change in musical style is evident is when Yu-bong angrily tells Song-hwa and Dong-ho that their performances lack emotion. He wants them to dramatize the singing and instrumental accompaniment heavily, which was uncommon in Pansori. It sounded like Song-hwa’s motivation to keep on trying and Dong-ho’s motivation to leave.
To understand this film as a whole, viewers need a decent understanding of what Pansori is, what it led to, and how modernity affected East Asian countries in the mid-twentieth century. This historical context comes not from the Korean War, but from modernity and its impact.
Seopyeonje was an interesting watch, and I enjoyed every moment. As a lover of music, I was instantly drawn toward it when I went over the list. Also, Pansori was a topic I found very interesting in class, and I wanted to expand on it a bit more. After watching it, I now understand how much the modern world has impacted traditional countries such as South Korea. It was a story of self-identity. Even though Song-hwa was blind, she did not give up and continued her career, even though Yu-bong challenged her. When she sang for her brother at the end of the film, it felt bittersweet to me. Although it includes some historical references, its primary focus is a traditional form of music that faced challenges during a period of great change in Korea’s music industry and performing arts.
