The book that linked an author and a director

But unexpectedly, my meeting with director Yu Hyun-mok came thanks to his published work. That was in 2019, ten years after his death. 2019 marked the centennial of Korean cinema, a year when events and various contents commemorating the milestone appeared. Like many, I aimed to create content commemorating the centennial, and in a moment of frustration I wandered into a used bookstore and found 『A History of the Development of Korean Cinema』(1997).

The book traces Korean cinema from its nascent days to the emergence of contemporary Korean cinema, and it does so with highly apt and lucid prose. What stood out most was that it covers the artistic merits of films and the auteurs—directors and cinematographers—whose works are now lost, giving the sense of having seen the works without watching them. I asked who could have written such an excellent book, and only then did I realize the author was Yu Hyun-mok. Although he served as a professor at Dongguk University, he undertook the arduous work of organizing film history and wrote accessible prose; I was struck by his intellectual discipline, not resting after the 1980 first edition but publishing two revised editions by 1997.

His book, , became the link between the author and Yu Hyun-mok.