KJCKorea
Journal Central

Depression, the morbid sign, frequently appears in the cinema of the 1970s. It can be said that the Korean cinema in the 1970s created the image of the 1970s through gloomy city people. The morbid sign city people of the cinema show should be seen that it goes beyond individual phenomenon and contains the public and societal metaphor. This paper aimed at comprehending the morbid symptoms and looking into the relation between this and the time, noting that depression of city people leaped into the iconic image in the films from the 1970s. The subjects of the study are <Heavenly homecoming to stars>, <Yeong-Ja’s Heydays>, <The March of Fools>, and <It rained yesterday>. The Korean cinema of the 1970s can be the image as new composition toward ‘the picture of the world’ as well as the expression of consciousness toward the Korean modernity. Therefore, this study of the causes and aspects of emotional gloom penetrating one era would hold the value of reading an era through pathology. Seoul in the 1970s is the space with the compound identity of city in many different ways. ‘Rapid’ modernization being achieved, the city got the mixed identity in terms of city members. Besides, the city formed different kinds of spaces, the symbolic center and circumference, inside the city and class separation of city members was accomplished. Various and sensational popular culture and the ideological clash toward sex and capital can be causes to provoke the compound identity of the city. Korean cinema characters living in the chaotic city of Seoul in the 1970s themselves could be the symbols of the city of the time. The pathology of depression these city people showed largely appears in three aspects. The first aspect is caused by ‘the loss of home’ as a root of existence. The morbid symptoms such as depression, alcohol addiction and suicide or suicide attempt that occurred among human beings, who could not acquire the space of their own, revealed the split lives of the homeless in the city of the 1970s. The second aspect is related to limitless competition forced by the growth-oriented society. The split self of city people whose results were forced under the system of strict disciplines means incompetence of the time and defeated youth. The third aspect is caused by the repression and contradiction of the moral sense of the sex. If a venereal disease is the physical disease proving the sex moral corruption in the 1970s, sex mediated depression can be the expression about the tension of sexual ideology. The disease shaping a special discourse or emerging as the image of the time should be interpreted and analyzed in the very culture. It is not so as to use violence of exception and discrimination, covering this disease with metaphor, but to read the emotion and anxiety of the time with the imaged disease and grope the solutions. In that sense, through this study we could get the message that we have to find and face other images digging into now and here profoundly.

films of the 1970s, city, city people, depression, pathology, Heavenly homecoming to stars, Yeong-Ja’s Heydays, The March of Fools, It rained yesterday