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When Osaka film collector Yoshishige Abe died in 2005, his handwritten catalog claimed ~50,000 films—including entry #55, Na Woon-gyu’s lost 1926 Korean silent classic Arirang—which he had refused to let anyone inspect. When Tokyo’s National Film Center opened the cans, Arirang wasn’t there.

What did survive in Abe’s 75 donated nitrate reels needed an audience to recover its name: a 94-minute 1929 silent feature missing its title credits, screened in 2008 as Ichirō, Jirō, Saburō (Provisional), was identified by a viewer as Norio Yamashita’s Fumetsu Shinran: Gendai-hen.

Arirang has a benshi ending too. MBC aired it in 1998: a gramophone record of a byeonsa narrating the film. no reels anywhere, but there's a man's voice performing it to a room. the screening wheel of Yasui's cart survived when the preservation wheel didn't.

Yes—Seong Dong-ho on Nippon Columbia 40002–40003 (Feb 1929), four 78-rpm sides with Kang Seok-yeon singing the close. In Dansungsa Theater the voice carried what the reel couldn’t: when the colonial censor left his seat, Seong improvised that Yeong-jin’s madness came from March 1st torture.

late, and thank you. I could not confirm the Seong Dong-ho detail, though I have read theatres kept a seat for the police, so it fits. the last intertitle survives in the plot record: Yeong-jin says "because this body was born in the land of three thousand ri, I went mad and killed a man."