Over That Hill: Cinematic adaptations and cross-cultural remakes, from Depression-era America to post-war Korea

Abstract

This article explores the ways in which film-makers of South Korea's cinematic golden age tapped into a vast repository of images and themes borrowed from other national contexts, from Depression-era America to post-war Japan. To illustrate Korean film-makers' unusual penchant for narrative assimilation and cross-cultural adaptation, the author highlights a representative melodrama of that era. Produced by Sin Sang-ok and directed by Kang Ch'an-u, Over That Hill/Chŏ ŏndŏk nŏmŏsŏ (1968) is a remake of Over the Hill (1931), a motion picture directed by Henry King and produced at Fox Film Corp. Besides looking west for its narrative and thematic material, Over That Hill looks toward neighbouring Japan. In fact, there are numerous similarities between Over That Hill and Ozu Yasujiro's Tokyo Story (1953), above all their shared focus on the love/hate relationship between rural parents and city children — a generational as well as geographic schism that casts in relief an issue central to the study of remakes and adaptations: fidelity to an ancestral or antecedent text. Given this diegetic as well as extra-diegetic focus on loyalty (to one's literal or figurative ‘parents’), it seems appropriate to ask if the structural isomorphism between South Korean films and their American and Japanese predecessors simply revives the spectre of cultural imperialism. Or, as the culmination of several cross-cultural ‘makeovers’ and adaptations, do films like Over That Hill mark a break from the past by using Euro-American and Japanese signifiers as mere pretexts for distinctively Korean texts envisioning the nation's socio-economic future?