Early Life
Na Woon-gyu was the third son of Na Hyong-gwon, a military officer during the final days of the Joseon Dynasty who had returned to his hometown of Hoeryong, Hamgyongbuk-do to teach. As a high-school student, Na was involved in theater and acting, but also in anti-Japanese activities including the March 1, 1919 protest against the occupation. To avoid imprisonment, he spent two years crossing and re-crossing the Duman River, which separates Korea from Manchuria. He traveled as far as Siberia, joining with Korean Liberation fighters in anti-occupation work.
In 1921, he returned to Seoul, and enrolled in Yonhui (now Yonsei) University to study social science. It was at this period that his fascination with the cinema began. He would fill notebooks with jottings while watching films in theaters, and would carry a hand mirror with him wherever he went to practice facial expressions.
However, like the main character in his first, and most famous film, Arirang, he was caught by the Japanese and jailed for his participation in The March 1st Movement. While in prison in Chongjin, from 1921 until 1923, Na received his artistic pen-name, Chunsa, from Lee Chun-song, another resistance fighter. When he was released in 1923, he joined the Yerimhoe Play Troupe in his hometown, Hoeryong.
After leaving the troupe, he sold all of his books to buy a train ticket to Busan, where he applied for a job acting at the Choson Film Company. He started playing extras and then villains in films for this company. His debut was in the 1925 film UnYeongJeon.
Read more about this topic: Na Woon-gyu
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There was never a revolution to equal it, and never a city more glorious than Petrograd, and for all that period of my life I lived another and braved the ice of winter and the summer flies in Vyborg while across my adopted country of the past, winds of the revolution blew their flame, and all of us suffered hunger while we drank at the wine of equality.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)