I remember the day I went to the movies with my mother for the first time in my life. Unusualfor her, she wore a nice sky-blue hanbok (traditional Korean dress) and held a small parasol. Wewent over the hill and walked under the blazing sun along the narrow-gauge tracks of the Suwon-Incheon Line. Following my tall 39-year-old mother, I occasionally glanced at her, trying to hide myexcitement and an inexplicable feeling of guilt. It was 1967, and I was in second grade, my summervacation drawing to an end. That day, we saw the animated film “Hong Gil-dong” (a Korean equivalentof Robin Hood). My brief research tells me that the film premiered in January that year, attracting100,000 viewers in three days, probably during the Lunar New Year’s holidays. The film was rereleasedin August, and that was when we went to see it. I won’t tell you how much I begged andnagged my mother to take me. At the time, I was a devoted reader of Children’s Chosun Ilbo, whichwas running the cartoon series “The Hero Hong Gil-dong,” by Shin Don-wu. So, I must have knownearly on that it had been made into a movie.

I don’t remember the content of the film, but I do remember the theater. The thick, soft curtainsbrushing against my face as soon as I opened the door, the smell of sweat and mildew emanatingfrom the darkness, the air lukewarm from the audience’s warmth. I stepped into the darkness,shuffling and groping along the wall. The dark hall had a stepped floor, and I could vaguely see arow of chairs on each level and the outline of a head on top of each. Nothing seemed to guaranteeour safety in the darkness, but my mother had no difficulty leading me to an empty chair and seatingme there. A ray of light passed over my head, and dust particles danced in the blue beam.

Even now, coming out of the theater after a movie, I always feel as if I were thrown out of mymother’s womb into the fierce brightness of the street. It always takes a considerable time for mydark and irregular heart to beat to the rhythm of the calm, strange street.

After this memorable trip to the cinema, I started to frequent the neighborhood theaters with myfriends. Generally, they were located in the markets. In their concealed halls packed with people,all kinds of bold crimes unfolded, as well as dramas revolving around people loving, betraying, andtaking revenge. For boys who had nothing to do to amuse themselves but to dig up kudzu roots orwatch trains chugging by, going to the movies was a pastime both irresistible and dangerous. Wemanaged to avoid the brutish guards who would bully underage customers, but were always scaredand puzzled by the presence of the “spot inspector’s seats,” reserved for policemen, on either sideof the theater at the back. These special seats had been installed during the Japanese colonial periodto censor films, and were retained long after liberation under the pretext of maintaining order inthe theater. These seats, usually left unoccupied, made me wonder how such a haven for excitingentertainment could also be an improper place that needed surveillance and control.

Nonetheless, we were enthralled by Wang Yu (aka Jimmy Wang) in “One-Armed Swordsman”(1967) and shed tears over “Susanna” (1967) starring Li Ching. The former is about a manwho loses his right arm in an unfortunate incident but trains himself to master a one-armed styleof swordplay to avenge his father’s death and repay his teacher’s care. The story itself was interestingenough, but I was especially fascinated by the leading actor, Wang Yu. I held my breath when hisshifty, steely eyes glinted in the darkness. Any boy who had seen this film would have tried to imitate hisswordplay with his right arm tucked inside his shirt, defeating an imaginary enemy, on his way home.

At the 2013 Busan International Film Festival, Wang Yu received the Asia Star Award for Best MaleActor. Then 70 years old, the actor said in his acceptance speech, “Thank you for remembering me.”BIFF’s Executive Programmer Kim Ji-seok took the stage and said, “How could we possibly forget you?Almost every middle-aged Korean man probably remembers and appreciates you.” That was no exaggeration,I swear.

I was as deeply impressed by “Susanna,” but in a different way. I would go up the back hill overlookingthe sea at sunset and think of Li Ching’s heartrendingly lovely eyes, playing on my harmonica thetheme song that begins, “The sun sets down in the sky; the wind blows away the leaves.”

It is not that I went to see only the commercially successful, well-made foreign movies at the time.I often giggled through a vulgar comedy or a tacky action movie, and also went with adults to watchpropaganda films, clapping when everyone else did. One of them was “Mountains and Rivers of theEight Provinces” (1967), featuring an elderly couple who travel all over the country to visit their marrieddaughters. The purpose of this idyllic family drama was to praise Korea’s economic development on itsway to industrialization, leaving behind the bleakness of war and poverty.

In the 1970s, I became an adolescent to whom the cinemas presenting obvious propaganda or banalhigh-teen movies were no longer a place of interest. Besides, television was introduced around that timeand the weekend “Masterpiece Cinema”more or less quenched my thirst for “goodmovies.”

The small neighborhood theaters, theshabby landmarks in the alleys of outdoormarkets, started to disappear one by one,and so did the boy who would whistle andholler with adult members of the audienceevery time the film broke in the middle of ashow, plunging the theater into darkness.But in my mind, I can still see the scrawnyboy with a serious face who would run tothe cinema whenever he heard the instrumentalhits of the Ventures or the Spotnicks,even when he had to break his piggybank to buy the ticket. The Spotnicks’ “LastSpace Train” and “Johnny Guitar” filled thedouble-feature cinema when the first filmended and the projectionist was getting thenext one ready. Although I’ve always likedthe cheerfully powerful rhythms of “Walk,Don’t Run” by the Ventures, the Spotnicks’electric guitar sounds, as clear as the cold,bright Scandinavian sky and as maudlin ascan be, have the power to instantly transportme somewhere into space, even now.And, oh, the unforgettable “Karelia”!

Gukdo & Garam is a 143-seat artcinema in Daeyeon-dong, Busan.Located in a quiet neighborhood,it is a stronghold for independentand arthouse films, which find ithard to break into mainstreammultiplex cinemas.

Recently, I began to return to the cinema with my son. Around 1998, movie theaters startedto be transformed into multiplexes by big-money capitalists. The age of single-screen theaters,exuding the elegance of a tailored suit, had to make way for multiplexes offering a wide selectionof films in one place, like ready-made clothes. Accordingly, the old method of film distribution— with the prints circulated around the first-run, re-release, and double-feature cinemas, consecutively— has become obsolete. Despite a now modernized system, not all titles are allowedto compete on a fair basis. While profitable films are assigned more screens to maximize theirshowings, obscure titles are presented only a couple of times a day, usually at odd hours, beforedisappearing altogether. That’s why my son and I sometimes had the luxury of a spacious theaterall to ourselves, the only problem being that the films we saw were all of my son’s choosing— Japanese horror films.

A credit card company’s 2015 survey revealed that one out of four viewers bought a singlemovie ticket, reflecting the recent increase in the number of solitary moviegoers. The figuresroughly correspond to the proportion of single-person households, which stood at 27.2 percentthat year, according to Statistics Korea. Over time, the cinema landscape has evolved. But oneessential thing has not changed: those who go to watch films, whether alone or with others, arepeople who cannot sit back at home and let the world pass them by. Their will to go out and seefor themselves what lies beyond their limited private worlds compels them to sit next to strangersin a darkened theater, staring ahead. They are bored with their everyday lives and also curiousto know what lies beyond. I hope they will not be thrown out, crestfallen, into the reality ofour stuffy world again, after wandering around a land of illusion and deception for a couple ofhours.