Answer: < A Diary of Woman (Yeoseong il-gi) (1949, Hong Seong-gi)

The first Korean movie in color is documented as director Hong Seong-gi’s 16mm film < A Diary of Woman (Yeoseong il-gi) >, made in 1949. Looking at the early years of film history, we can see that film technicians felt limited by the inability to include sound in silent films and dreamt of making sound movies. In the same way, people made attempts to progress from the black and white films to color films. Color films became popular in the ‘30s, but consistent experiments and trials with using color in films had already begun in the 1890s. Edison, the renowned inventor, was using tinting techniques in 1896 where pre-developed black and white negative films were dipped in dye to add color. Back then, tinting was used by film technicians who wanted to make color films but these days, the technique is used for aesthetic purposes. Steven Spielberg’s (1993) is a black and white film, but only the little girl’s coat is tinted in red for dramatic effect.

Research and development in color films began from the end of 19th century but failed to see commercial output due to technical shortcomings and cost restrictions. Only after the invention of 3-color Technicolor in the 1930s did it gain stability. The 3-color Technicolor is a very intricate method where light filtered through the lens is recorded on the film in red, green, and blue using a prism, and then transformed into blue-green, orange-red, and yellow before combining the two sets of colors. The famous was created with this technique. Just like cinemascope is the name of a film company that developed this unique projection technique, Technicolor is also the name of the company that came up with this technique for color films. Then when did the first color film come on to the scenes in Korea? Tinted films where only a certain part of the film is colored for dramatic effect were around at the time of the Japanese rule in Korea as well. These seem to be imitations of tinted films produced by French film companies such as Gaumont or Pate.

The first color film in the film history of Korea appears after Independence. This is director Hong Seong-gi’s 16mm movie, < A Diary of Woman (Yeoseong il-gi) > made in 1949. According to film historian Jeong Jong-hwa, the story is about “a woman who is fooled into marrying a man who already has a wife leaves him and overcomes all hardships while opening up a daycare center. In the end, her nursery business becomes successful.” This was also the debut film of the top actress Hwang Jeong-sun, who usually played a typical mother figure of Korea. But < A Diary of Woman (Yeoseong il-gi) > was only in the theaters for one week. The greatest reason that audiences shunned this film is because of the unstable playback of colors. Unlike the test projection carried out on a small screen, people found out that enlarged projection on the theater screen dilutes colors. This was the beginning of color films in 1949, but after the Korean War and its aftermath, new experiments were nonexistent for several years with the deteriorated situations of the Korean film industry. It was toward the end of the 1950s when films such as < The Princess Seon-hwa (Seonhwagongju) > (1957), < Kong-jwi and Pat-jwi (KongjwiPatjwi) > (1958) as well as < An Exotic Garden (Igugjeong-won)> (1958) were produced in color. But even among these color films, films that could represent true colors were rare. The most urgent problem with this color technique was the lack of facilities to develop color films. And with the increase in demand for developing in color a color processing laboratory was finally opened in Korea. In this sense, the color films of the 1950s arrived in the scene just as industrial and aesthetical formats were being formed. In other words, they were the prototypes. The competition between Hong Seong-gi’s < The Love Story of Chun-hyang> and Shin Sang-ok’s < Seong Chun-hyang ( Seong Chun-hyang ) > and the latter’s box office hit in 1961 became the opportunity for color films to flourish under the attention and interest of the people.