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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.

Across Osaka in Utsubo, Yoshio Yasui built Planet Bibliothèque de Cinéma (1974, now Kobe Planet Film Archive) on the opposite rule: starting with a worn 16mm benshi print of Kagebōshi (1925), he treated independent screening and preservation as two wheels of the same cart.

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.

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."

My source for Seong’s aside was this Edu Dong-A auction report (13 March 2018): edu.donga.com/news/articleVie… . It tells the story retrospectively, without an eyewitness citation. I should have marked that distance in my first reply.