불교영화 <마음의 고향>(1949)의 유년 주체와 인식의 드라마

초록

This article rereads Yun Yong-gyu’s A Hometown in Heart (1949) as a Buddhist film and examines how it transforms an “in search of the mother” plot into a drama of practice and cognition. Focusing on the twelve-year-old novice monk Doseong, the study first argues that the film foregrounds not spiritual attainment but a pedagogical phase in which monastic discipline is learned and rehearsed. Through the repeated cycles of temple labor and ritual preparation, the sustained spatial contrast between inside and outside the temple gate, the bodily mark of “measuring height,” and the episode of “catching a bird,” the film reveals how childhood affect—longing, anxiety, and lack—is repressed within disciplinary rhythms yet persistently leaks out through gesture, gaze, and movement. The article then interprets the film’s central symbol—the lotus sealed inside a rosary bead—not as a mere prop but as an epistemic device that organizes recognition and misrecognition. It shows how Doseong’s reliance on a sign prevents him from recognizing the truth before his eyes, leading to daemyeon bulsik (face- to-face nonrecognition) and exposing a structure of ignorance (avidyā). The climactic wail is presented not through psychological explanation but through long duration and sustained takes, compelling viewers to endure the weight and time of grief rather than consume it as an immediately legible meaning. In conclusion, the film’s ending is read not simply as a departure toward the mother but as a reconfiguration of chulga—from institutional practice (monastic rules) to existential practice (a decision enacted on the road)—thereby articulating a distinctive Buddhist-film aesthetics that fuses childhood affect with Buddhist epistemology.

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