The Manchurian Action Film: A New Anticolonial Imaginary in the Cold War Context

Abstract

The Manchurian action film cycle emerged in the mid-1960s, revisiting and refashioning Korea’s colonial history. The cycle began with Im Kwon-taek’s Farewell to Tumen River (Tuman’ganga chal ikkŏra) in 1962, peaked from 1963 to 1965, and entered an eclipse in the early 1970s. Along with the 1970s action films that frequently feature Hong Kong as a romantic backdrop for masculine romance and action, Manchurian action films occupy a special place in the constellation of South Korean cinema.1 They highlight the physical actions of masculine heroes as the principal means by which to figuratively render the colonial past and manage the era’s unique social and historical dilemmas. These films typically present the stories of Korean resistance guerrillas and their heroic struggle against the powerful Japanese military force in Manchuria during the colonial period. Forced into exile, the nationalist warriors engage in guerrilla warfare and eventually defeat the Japanese army in local battles through espionage operations, uncommon valor, and exceptional prowess. The films project the militant struggle of anticolonialism into the multiethnic space of Manchuria and affirm the relevance of a combative anti-Japanese nationalism in the shifting sociocultural landscape of South Korea in the 1960s. The Manchurian action film, in other words, codifies and expands the cinematic vocabulary of nationalism anew by romanticizing and mythologizing the militant nationalist struggle of diaspora Koreans against the Japanese. While the dream of a unifying nationalism is the most obvious feature of the films’ narratives and characterizations, a closer analysis shows the ambivalence 3