A Public Prosecutor and a Teacher

This was a fascinating experience for me, not having seen a Korean silent film before. Long before the days of "Parasite" (2019) being the first foreign-language film to win an Anglophone Best Picture Oscar--and shortly after Japanese occupation during WW2 and before the Korean War resolved in the nation's so-far-lasting division--"A Public Prosecutor and a Teacher" reflects a tumultuous time via a dying, or rather resurrected and anachronistic, art. A film about characters starving made by a national cinema that at the time was starving even for film stock (this one being shot silent on 16mm), relying on the remnants of the industry left behind by Japanese occupation and against the incoming dominance of Hollywood distribution.

Not only is it a silent film, either, and without a score, but one featuring narration from Sin Chul, the "last byeonsa," the Korean version of the Japanese benshi. Such live lecturers to silent screen images largely died out in Europe and the United States with the rise of permanent movie theatres and the story film wrestling control away from exhibitors and for producers, but continued elsewhere, although silent cinema in general had long since been abandoned for the most part by then, too, with even the last major holdout in the West, Charlie Chaplin, having since transitioned to talkies, as had Japanese cinema. Some of the home videos for the films of Georges Méliès have done especially well to include such lectures. Sin's reading, however, including of what intertitles there are here, is also highly emotive and an extension of the characters we see on screen. It's integral to the diegesis and a performance in itself.

Another layer in this case is that characters within the film also take on a storyteller role, including two important flashback sequences as narrated by the characters to other characters, which itself is narrated by Sin to us, the audience. Aptly, one of these nested-narrative flashbacks occur within the theatrics of the courtroom stage.

The actual story is almost secondary except that it, too, emphasizes past-to-present hardships and with a hope for the promise of the future. This is the point of the main story of the teacher providing food and money to a starving student, who in melodramatic fashion grows up to be the prosecutor in her trial. There is also a lot of emphasis on children without parents and characters lamenting the inability to stop time.

Speaking of which, as Weissberg also says, the Korean Film Archives have preserved only about 25 of the some 230 of the nation's pre-1940 features, which is unfortunately not even all that poor of a survival rate for old films. The most thorough study on the matter, by David Pierce, finds only a slightly better rate for the U. S. features between 1912-1929 when not including the greater number of U. S. films found in foreign archives and on home-projection formats due to Hollywood's vast distribution networks.

Remade as a sound film in 1958 by the same director, Yun Dae-ryong, this silent version was deemed a national cultural treasure in 2007, as indeed it is.