Cine-Mobility: Twentieth-Century Transformations in Korea’s Film and Transportation

Abstract

In his book Cine-Mobility: Twentieth-Century Transformations in Korea’s Film and Transportation, Hansang Kim argues that the introduction of two modern technologies, cinematographic media and powered transportation, “transformed Korean people’s protocols of sensing the world, constituting hegemonic modes of movement through visual experiences” (1). Kim emphasizes that the intertwining of these two modern technologies has more significance in establishing the scopic regimes of the non-Western world like colonial and postcolonial Korea. This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the scopic regimes of visual mobility in Korea, spanning over a century of colonial and postcolonial eras. The scopic regimes entailed forced and induced spectatorship of propaganda, playing a pivotal role in shaping mobilized subjectivities. The act of sensing the world and locating oneself as a subject through cinematic experiences extended beyond mere conformity to power but encompassed alternative possibilities as well. By drawing from a diverse range of sources, this book delves into the modern experiences of Koreans, with a specific focus on the interdependent link between visual mobility, spectatorship, and subjectivization.Using Heidegger’s concept of world-as-picture, according to Kim, in the early 1900s, when Koreans encountered distant landscapes and unfamiliar cultures through films, the visual experience posited the world itself as a picture—a picture that is not a representation of the preexisting world but presents the world itself in front of their eyes. Thus, the world itself was constituted and came to the viewing subjects at the moment of viewing. However, this experience of modern visuality was a coercive process that was coupled with the expansion of colonialism by the military, police, and policy authorities. As revealed in the Japanese government’s nationwide propaganda tours utilizing the railway system, visual knowledge delivered from the outside world on the screen and through mobility present in systems of transportation technology such as trains was inseparably intertwined with the viewing subject.To examine the scopic regimes of visual mobility in colonial and postcolonial Korea formed in this way, Kim analyzes what he identifies as “heteronomous spectatorship and induced spectatorship”—the viewing experience of propaganda films conducted by colonial and postcolonial power. Kim provides his theoretical key concepts such as world-as-picture, world-as-gesture, and cine-mobility based on a phenomenological approach to visual experience: the Heidegger’s aforementioned concept of world-as-picture has a dialectical articulation with world-as-gesture that stresses the “cinematic viewer’s capacity to evade capture by the image, communication, or information and instead, to experience the gestural dimension itself as the world” (5). This concept includes human movements, postures, manners, gestures, and so forth in certain social situations in the mise-en-scène that can interrupt and deviate from narrative and signification on the screen. Thus, the concept of world-as-gesture provides plural potentialities even in heteronomous spectatorship, generating unintended meanings counter to the original intentions of the propaganda films. While the previous notions of “worlds” relate to the cognitive experiences of the viewing subjects, cine-mobility indicates “the reciprocal relationship between modern visuality and mobility” in modern subjectivization; cine-mobility is “cinema’s ability both to move toward the viewing subject and to bring the subject into the flow of the world-as-picture” (3).Part 1, “Train-Cinema Interface,” covers the era of the arrival of the train and early cinema in Korea to the Japanese colonial period. Chapter 1, titled “In a Loop, on the Track: Locomotive Modernity in Colonial Korean Cinema,” thoroughly analyzes the mobility of the train in several cinema events, such as the traveling screenings of the Japanese emperor Taishō’s enthronement ceremony, as well as in colonial feature films, including Sweet Dream (Mimong, 1936), Volunteer (Chiwŏnbyŏng, 1941), and Straits of Chosŏn (Chosŏn Haehyŏp, 1943). Here, through the collectivity and centralizing movements of the railway system, locomotive modernity executed colonial bio-power demonstrating imperial authority and hierarchy. In chapter 2, titled “Cinematic Railway Tourism in the ‘New Order in East Asia,’” Kim provides a detailed textual analysis of the tourist culture film Tokyo-Peking (1939), sponsored by the Japan Tourist Bureau. Kim demonstrates that the film displayed Japan, Korea, Manchuria, and other regions of China as tourist spectacles with various cultures and localities within the unified Japanese Empire. This imperial expansion in the film was achieved through the railway system. Thus, both the railway system and the cinema “were not only the means of such construction [of the imperial order] but also the principles of that order’s operation” (76).Part 2, titled “Automobile-Screen Interface,” focuses on automobility and the expressway system as part of postwar modernization under U.S. hegemony from the postliberation period to the Park Chung Hee dictatorship era. In chapter 3, “My Car Modernity: U.S. Army Jeeps and Private Car Ownership,” Kim examines U.S. propaganda films screened in South Korea by the U.S. Army Military Government (USAMGIK) as a type of cultural Cold War. In these American-made propaganda films, the mobility of cars and highways symbolized the American values of flexibility and individual mobility in contrast to the Japanese Empire’s locomotive modernity. The free and autonomous American life of the nuclear family unit was re-created through private car ownership. Chapter 4, “The Birth of Happiness? The Nationalization of Automobility,” traces the nationalization of automobilization by the Park Chung Hee government through popular imageries of the South Korean auto industry in propaganda films and discourses around the construction of the expressway. The nationalized automobility is linked to the determined leadership of Park Chung Hee, as shown in the photo image of Park Chung Hee on a military jeep during the May 16 coup d’état. Unlike the American symbolic value associated with automobility in the previous chapter, the South Korean automobility of Park Chung Hee embodies high speed, efficiency, and fast economic development as a way of nationalistic mobilization.Part 3, “Post-Cine Mobility,” examines the decline of cine-mobility due to the fast rise of television’s private and small screens from the 1970s to the 1980s. In chapter 5, “Imagined Geographies of the World: Television, Aviation, and Koreanness,” Kim analyzes how films and television shows produced by the United States Information Services (USIS) demonstrated imagined geographies of the “free world” to South Korean people and how they characterized the viewers’ Koreanness within this free world by relating their lives and values to their American counterparts. This was the process of building Koreanness in the geographical imagination of the Cold War in the early stages of globalization, as shown by the satellite broadcasting of Apollo 11’s lunar landing. This USIS propaganda’s cultural logic was translated into a South Korean propaganda film franchise and television series, P’altogangsan. Chapter 6, “Technopia! Neoliberal Utopia of Automated Mobility,” considers the rapid proliferation of automation and computerization technologies in the 1980s; adopting these technologies forced human movement to adapt to automated mechanical mobility. This chapter shows that the flexibility and efficiency of automation technology were the technical foundations for neoliberal mobility and subjectivity through the representations of automation technology in various 1980s and 1990s commercial feature films.While the book provides an in-depth analysis of heteronomous spectatorship and cine-mobility through exhaustive archival work on propaganda films, it also has some limitations. Kim has excavated a vast collection of propaganda films from the colonial period to the postwar authoritarian era and meticulously analyzes cine-mobility (and post-cine-mobilities) that they reveal in heteronomous spectatorship. Despite his arduous work, cine-mobility, which is constructed through the mutual relationship between modern visuality and mobility, has yet to be fully explained, as it exceeds heteronomous spectatorship. Kim’s purpose in this book is to explore Korea’s scopic regime of modernity and the regime’s mode of subjectivization. However, a broader analysis of cine-mobility and spectatorship, beyond the limited domain of propaganda films, is required to achieve this goal. For example, immediately following the Korean War, South Korean feature films such as Madame Freedom (Chayu puin, 1956), Holiday in Seoul (Sŏul ŭi hyuil, 1956), and Flower in Hell (Chiok hwa, 1958) presented Seoul’s landscape as a newly discovered “world-as-picture” through the visual mobilities of trains, cars, military trucks, jeeps, and even classic convertibles on screen. The unfamiliar, Americanized landscapes of postwar Seoul in these films are presented to the viewer through a specific experience of visual mobility, with the affective arrangement of intense desires and passions. Such cine-mobility, one of the dominant modes of Korea’s modern scopic regime, is rarely found in propaganda films.In chapter 6, the close connection between heteronomous spectatorship and cine-mobility is no longer emphasized. Instead, this chapter examines how the discourses on automation and financial automation in 1980s–1990s South Korea disciplined people to a new form of mobility, or, in Kim’s terminology, “the conveyor-belt-like flow of automated mobility” (18), through their representation in commercial films of the 1990s. Up to chapter 5, Kim’s concept of cine-mobility is built on the relationship between visual mobility, media, and spectatorship. However, chapter 6 focuses solely on the discourse of automation represented in commercial films, which Kim had not previously examined, and does not discuss the relationship between visual mobility, media, and spectatorship. The 1990s, marked by the end of international travel restrictions in South Korea, the beginning of globalization, and the unprecedented development of the internet, represented a period of rapid change in visuality, mobility, and media. It is regrettable that discussions reflecting these transformations have not been incorporated into the theoretical framework developed in the previous chapters. Thus, it is not compelling to categorize chapter 5, which scrutinizes USIS’s propaganda television shows in 1970s South Korea, and chapter 6, which examines aspects of financial automation represented in 1990s commercial films, as belonging to the same conceptual category of post-cine-mobilities.This book brilliantly shows how the modern scopic regimes under the colonial empire and the authoritarian state power worked in colonial and postcolonial Korea and how the mechanisms of coercion, persuasion, negotiation, and deviation in heteronomous spectatorship formed mobilized subjectivities. Through the intertwined relationship between modern mobility and visuality, the book provides a significant analysis of the modern experiences of Korean people in a number of ways with its scope, depth, and erudition. In particular, the frame of cine-mobility, which allows us to grasp the shifting hegemonies from the colonial period to the Cold War period as a continuous paradigm, will be an insightful conceptual tool that can lead to many other studies. Although this book primarily focuses on propaganda films, expanding Kim’s framework to include commercial films will draw forth further meaningful and rich studies. Application of the frame of cine-mobility to commercial film can create rich interpretations and implications of how the mobility of cinema visualizes desires, passions, and affects in the postcolonial era. Since this book mainly examines archival propaganda films of the Japanese empire, the United States, and South Korea, it will be very helpful for those working in social history and postcolonial studies, as well as in Korean studies and cinema studies.