A total art, and a remark the notes will not attach to a name

Film, the notes write at some length, was born in the great modern turn of scientific technology that sped up with the Industrial Revolution. A hunger for art and a public interest in beauty mattered, they say, but the medium itself is basically the result of technical experiment and scientific curiosity after the nineteenth century. Industry and art had once been, in this telling, essentially opposed; once film arrived, the two began to work as partners. Film absorbed the strengths of photography, theatre, painting, dance and literature, and is called a total art because it shares something with each of them.

Into that frame they place the 1959 Ben-Hur, made more famous still by a director’s acceptance remark: “My God, did I really make this film?” They do not name that director. The picture, they write, was the first to sweep eleven Academy Awards, and remains a legend in film history. That record stays as the notes claim it.

A general’s novel, a tribune, and a half-brother

The film, they write, takes as its base a bestseller published in 1880 by a Civil War hero they name General Lew Wallace — Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. The notes write that surname in two Korean spellings; both are left as they write them. It is a deeply Christian story, they add, with the spread of Jesus’s gospel at the centre of the narrative. Judah Ben-Hur, a Judean noble under Rome, loses everything through the betrayal of a friend, suffers every kind of trial, and narrowly survives. Wealth and honour return, and revenge succeeds, but true salvation comes through Jesus’s atonement — an ending, they write, that was a common box-office code in a United States where a Christian worldview was treated as everyday culture.

A second telling in the same notes names the betrayer again: Judah, a Jewish noble, is reduced to slavery by the betrayal of a friend and half-brother, then, after many turns, is adopted into a powerful house and takes his revenge. The friend is first called Messala, a friend who has become a Roman tribune; later the same notes spell the name a second way and call him a friend and half-brother. Both identifications are kept as the notes give them, not silently made into one official relation.

A 1927 feature, six months of 70 mm, and a television hour

The story, they add, was first made as a feature in 1927, but remained at a silent-film level as they judge that version. In Korea, when the 1959 picture opened, it ran for fully six months at Daehan Theater on the first 70 mm wide screen, and was revived several times — enough, they write, to make it a special memory for a middle-aged generation. For the writer it is the very name of a childhood TV classic-film hour, a classic whose image has grown faint and warm. Festival broadcasts were common, but the spectacle of the chariot race never grows stale, and the channel could not be changed. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes, a student film report on the 1959 Ben-Hur, with the eleven-award claim, the 1927 first feature, and the two namings of Messala left as the notes record them.

Last updated: 15 November 2026