The Bell Tower: Missing Another Dawn (1958) Jonggak

Director: Ju-nam Yang
Writers: Nam Cheong, No-hyang Kang
Stars: Min Chung Sook, Jang-kang Heo, Jeong-shik Maeng

Seok-sung is an elderly bellmaker who is lying on his sick-bed in the Buddhist temple where he made his greatest bell. He is nursed by a neighbour, a young woman called Young-sil, who implores him to tell her how the bell came to be. In a series of flashbacks Seok-sung’s tragic life story is revealed against the backdrop of Japan’s colonial occupation of Korea and war with China. The bellmaker has lost everything and everyone he ever cared for, but throughout has never wavered in his determination to create the bell of his dreams, a divine bell whose pure, sublime sound “could resonate with people everywhere”.

As Seok-sung’s great bell continues to toll in the background, Young-sil then tells her own, equally tragic story, which has included being trafficked into sex slavery at a mine. Despite the differences in their age and circumstances, it seems that there may be a connection between the old man and his young caregiver…

Yang Ju-nam’s poetic, one-of-a-kind masterpiece was shown in competition at Berlin in 1958, and then neglected for 40 years until its rediscovery by the Korean Film Archive.

I believe this film has to be rediscovered for many reasons, and not simply from a layman's viewpoint. Korean films continually try to resemble Western movies by embracing their modernity, and because of this, current Korean films of the 1990s, in addressing the question of who we are, find it’s quite a challenge. What this old film, made 40 years ago, answered the question with was the return of history. We might have to re-learn about cinema through this film.

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