During the Park Chung-hee regime, a period marked by rapid industrialization and transportation development, the government promoted a cultural policy that actively incorporated modern spaces (such as trains, bus terminals, and apartments) into films. As a result, trains became a frequent and important narrative device in the cinema of the era, used to express movement, encounters, farewells, and deviations.
This lecture examines how trains appear in films within the context of 1970s film policy and its social background, focusing on key examples such as Ha Gil-jong’s Declaration of Idiot (1975) and Chung Ji-young’s I Love You (1979), and explores the symbolic meanings they carried.