In 1949, two films centered on the idea of ‘hometown’ appeared simultaneously in South and North Korea: The Hometown of the Heart (South Korea) and My Hometown (North Korea). Both were acclaimed as surpassing the artistic and technical achievements of Korean cinema up to that time. The imagery of these two ‘hometowns’ becomes especially compelling when examined within their historical context—the founding of the Republic of Korea and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in 1948. Arriving at this critical juncture, both films are deeply invested in constructing a ‘landscape’ of the hometown, one imbued with ideological and symbolic significance.
What, then, do these two cinematic landscapes signify, emerging precisely as the Korean Peninsula fractured into two competing postcolonial states—each claiming legitimacy over the other? This article investigates how these foundational national imaginaries were visually and narratively articulated. Images—both as visual representations and as perspectives—function not merely as visions but as historical strata, archival deposits of their time. What visions did these films project, and what layers of history constitute them?The Hometown of the Heart (1949), adapted from Ham Se-deok's play The Boy Monk (1939), presents a compelling case study of how colonial locality transforms into the archetypal landscape (archi-landscape) of postcolonial nation-building. Situated within the intertextual network connecting Toyoda Shirō's Ohinata Village (1940) and Yun's own colonial-era cultural film Pioneering the Continent (1944), this cinematic work simultaneously appropriates the idealized imagery of Japanese agrarian homeland - particularly its mountains and rural landscapes - from the imperial narratives of Manchurian settlers while strategically employing visual isolation to reconstruct locality as a shared mental image of ‘hometown’.
Through this process, the film transforms Korea's mountain temples, as distilled historical archetypes, into a mental picture of unified national origins demanded by the historical moment of 1949. The narrative of the wandering boy monk searching for his mother within this archi-landscape allegorically suggests the new nation's difficult ‘birth’, framing the quest as both a reckoning with historical impurities and a forward-looking project of forging new paths.
My Hometown, on the other hand, appears to engage with two distinct cultural strata in its construction. The first involves the prevailing demands of Soviet socialist realism in North Korean cinema and its narrative imperative of 'historical completion.' By centering on the land (toji)—simultaneously a site of class struggle and the emotional homeland of national consciousness—the film successfully synthesizes the contradictory affects of nostalgia and antagonism within a single space, dialectically transcending them in the process.
The second stratum stems from colonial-era cultural legacies. Rather than cinema as technological apparatus, the film reactivates pre-existing theatrical traditions, stage conventions, and painterly aesthetics of Joseon regionalism (Joseonsaek)—cultural forms that had allowed greater space for Korean agency during colonial rule. These elements, revitalized in the post-liberation moment, become reconfigured as both tradition and history reclaimed through the deus ex machina appearance of Kim Il-sung as liberator.
By fusing the exceptional event of Kim's emergence (or the demand for historical fulfillment) with older localist aesthetics, the film unexpectedly established the cyclical template for North Korean visual politics: 'historical completion → deficient reality → popular mobilization/fervor → decisive intervention by an exceptional figure in crisis.' This would become an enduring paradigm in North Korea's revolutionary aesthetics.