[KS] Travelogue: Book on Seoul and First Movie ever Filmed and Played in Korea by E. Burton Holmes, 1901

[Michael Duffy]

The Daum clip shows (at 0:54) a lady who appears to be a Salvation Army member playing a concertina. If so, it must postdate the Army's arrival in Korea in 1908.
http://londonkoreanlinks.net/2008/11/23/salvation-army-in-korea/
 

 

> Date: Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:48 -0800
> To: koreanstudies at koreaweb.ws
> From: hoffmann at koreaweb.ws
> Subject: Re: [KS] Travelogue: Book on Seoul and First Movie ever Filmed and Played in Korea by E. Burton Holmes, 1901
> 
> Thanks to Kwang-On Yoo for putting our attention 
> on this -- especially this early movie.
> 
> E. Burton Holmes (1870-1958) seems to be the 
> inventor of the term "travelogue"--at least did 
> he fill that term with some content in modern 
> times. From 1902/03 onwards, AFTER returning from 
> his Russia/China/Korea tour, he used a small 35 
> mm Warwick Bioscope camera (see here for photos 
> and illustrations of that and earlier cameras: 
> http://wiki.phalkefactory.net/index.php?title=Camera) 
> as did most early filmmakers, because of its 
> convenient size. As the older ones among you are 
> aware the 35 mm film became the standard for 
> several decades. The earlier films he did with 
> Oscar Depue, e.g. the famous, very early Hopi 
> snake-dance documentary at Oraibi from 1898 or 
> 1899 (if you ever visited an exhibition about 
> Navajo or Hopi Indians' culture you will have 
> likely seen that film there)--well, those very 
> early movies were done with one of Léon Gaumont's 
> cameras. In 1897 Holmes had sent Oscar Depue to 
> France to buy such a camera. This was a very 
> bulky camera (see above link) that used 60 mm 
> wide film.
> 
> The short movie that Kwang-On Yoo pointed to 
> seems actually a segment from the 1922 
> Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer release "The Burton Holmes 
> Story":
> http://emovieposter.com/gallery/inc/archive_image.php?id=16444484
> According to the description there should be a 
> longer sequence in that movie showing scenes from 
> Inch'ôn Bay (but that short posted clip does not 
> have that). Anyway, what is noteworthy is that 
> (a) all 1901 material was re-mastered on 35 mm 
> film, and (b) some sequences may not be from 1901 
> but from 1912, when Holmes was again in Korea. 
> The court dancers are indeed from 1901, but not 
> sure about the remaining scenes.
> 
> The main point, however, is that there must 
> be--very likely--much more material from 1901 and 
> 1912. Please remember that the just mentioned 
> 1922 MGM movie was just taking some short scenes 
> from some of Holmes movies ... and Holmes, by 
> 1922, had already done travel film for 25 years 
> at that time, every summer a new destination. In 
> 2003 tons of film rolls by Holmes were 
> rediscovered in a sealed-up storage room across 
> the street from Holmes former enterprise. See 
> here: 
> http://burtonholmes.org/rediscovery/photos.html
> These are now all at the George Eastman House 
> (Eastman Kodak) in Rochester 
> (http://eastmanhouse.org). Maybe someone into 
> film history (or into studying that early 1900s 
> period) might want to dive deeper into this and 
> find out if there is more material on Korea that 
> survived? If you carefully compare the dance 
> scene in the online movie Kwang-On Yoo pointed us 
> to ...
> http://tvpot.daum.net/clip/ClipView.do?clipid=2614233
> (at minute 2:05 to 2:39)
> with the small intro clip on the Holmes collection at the museum ...
> http://podcast.eastmanhouse.org/preserving-the-world-of-burton-holmes/
> (at minutes 5:45 to 6:08)
> ... you will see that there must be more: e.g., 
> the the scene with the male dancer is not fully 
> part of that other clip, and in that clip (at the 
> Daum site) top and bottom were obviously also cut.
> 
> 
> Best,
> Frank
> 
> -- 
> --------------------------------------
> Frank Hoffmann
> http://koreaweb.ws
> 
 		 	   		  
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