Revisiting colonial cinema research in Korea

Abstract

Korean cinema during the colonial era has become the subject matter of the most productive scholarship in Korean language over the last decade. Contemporary Korean scholarship on colonial cinema challenges the canonical work of critics such as Young-il Lee, who offered a nationalist perspective on the relationship between Korean cinema and its coloniality. In Hangukyeonghwa Jeonsa [The Whole History of Korean Cinema] ([1969] 2004), for instance, Lee prioritizes the cinematic resistance to the ruling of Japanese empire in Korea. The emerging scholarship, in contrast, has tried to adopt a postcolonial as well as a transnational perspective that enables scholars who commands the Korean language, to examine an ecology of film production, culture and appreciation, which should and could not be reduced to the old dichotomy of Japanese oppression and Korean resistance. This methodological turn has inevitably involved the reconsideration and revaluation of the concept of national cinema; the term ‘Korean cinema’ is replaced by ‘Joseon [the official name for colonial Korea] cinema,’which underscores a rupture existing between the colonial and postcolonial status of Joseon and Korean cinema, respectively. Such reconsideration indeed serves to break the seamless linearity and continuity postulated by a majority of previous scholarship. The new scholarship has excavated the conflicting aspects of Japanese regulations on Joseon cinema, informed by both the insights drawn from digital archiving and the postcolonial turn in the humanities since the early 2000s. Contemporary scholarship on colonial cinema is a response to such changes that have called for more flexible and nuanced views on the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. What made this shift more invigorating was, from 2004 onwards, the ‘unearthing’ of a few film prints produced in the colonial period. Such discovery was possible through the cooperation among various national film archives in Korea, Japan, China, and Russia. Most of the ‘unearthed’ prints (11 out of 15) were war propaganda films, which had previously been excluded from respective historiographies. Recently discovered and digitized films of this era have invited scholars’ historical as well as theoretical contemplations on the matters that have not been recognized as significant. The war propaganda films that were made available to the public between 2004 and 2014 include Gunyongyeolcha [Military Train] (1938) directed by former-socialist Gwang-je Seo, which bluntly encourages Korean men to volunteer for Japanese military service, while Jipeopneun Cheonsa [Angels on the Streets] (1941) directed by In-gyu Choe, feature characters who declare a clear-cut loyalty to the Japanese Emperor under the Rising Sun Flag. Newly discovered