On Joongangdaily.com, I came across an article that described the last one-screen theater to exist in Korea. Hwayang Theater was built in 1964 and was renamed to Dream Cinema in 1999. The article discusses how cinema culture has changed throughout the years in that movie theaters today show/screen more than one movie at once. The Dream Cinema plays movies that have been released for a long time and about to come out on DVD. Recently, it has been decided that the movie theater is to be closed due redevelopment of the surrounding area. The closing of Dream Cinema is important because it is the closing of the “history of old-time single-screen theaters in Seoul”. Now that theaters today have become “state-of-the-art multiplexes” rather than theaters that screen single movies, it is understandable that the appeal for the latter has been diminishing over the years.
In order to celebrate the theater in the last months before closing, Kim Eun Joo, the owner, decided to play classic movies, such as Dirty Dancing, the Sound of Music, and Ben Hur up until the day the bulldozer arrives. The article discusses how the closing of Dream Cinema not only has an effect on the owner, but how it also influences the other workers that have been involved with the cinema for a number of years, such as the security guard, the projectionist, and theater sign painters.
This article had me thinking about a few things after. We can see that movie culture has changed throughout the years, but has it changed for the better or worse? The owner of Dream Cinema, Kim Eun-Joo, compared the “degraded culture of going to movies” to “going to a neighborhood supermarket wearing slippers”. The uniqueness and spirit of Korean cinema is being lost, as there will no longer be tickets that are thin and rough, as well as the irreplaceable theater posters which are drawn by hand. Are we sacrificing traditions and historical artifacts in place of other developments and advancements in society? I feel as though the article is an example of the struggle of balancing and maintaining the past while further progressing into the future. Some things are lost and some things are kept, but how and who determines such things?
http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2883587Korea’s last one-screen theater about to close by Chun Su jin
December 6, 2007
1 comment:
I think that this is a problem that many people face all over the world. What is worth preserving and what does someone or some people agree to demolish for improvement?
I believe the answer lies in the people. Koreans do not, I believe, in particular care for this old style viewing of movies. Everything is so global and accessable that the want or ned for this kind of thearter is now tiny. If anyone cared to keep it up, there would have been some sort of motion of protest. After reading the blog and searching the internet, I could not find one example of protest.
So yes it is always a struggle of balancing past and future, but people have the choice to keep what they think is important thought protests
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