Korean Film and History

Cinema has become a battleground upon which history is made—a major mass
medium of the twentieth century dealing with history. The re-enactments of
historical events in film straddle reality and fantasy, documentary and fiction,
representation and performance, entertainment and education. This interdisciplinary
book examines the relationship between film and history and the links between
historical research and filmic (re-)presentations of history with special reference to
South Korean cinema.
As with all national film industries, Korean cinema functions as a medium of
inventing national history and identity, and also establishing their legitimacy— in
both forgetting the past and remembering history. Korean films also play a part in
forging cultural collective memory. Korea as a colonised and divided nation clearly
adopted different approaches to the filmic depiction of history compared to colonial
powers such as Western or Japanese cinema. The Colonial Period (1910–1945) and
Korean War (1950–1953) draw particular attention as they have been major topics
shaping the narrative of nation in North and South Korean films.
Exploring the changing modes, impacts and functions of screen images dealing
with history in Korean cinema, this book will be of huge interest to students and
scholars of Korean history, film, media and cultural studies.

Hyunseon Lee is a London-based film, media and cultural scholar. She is

Privatdozentin at the Department of German (teaching in literature, culture and
media) at Siegen University and Research Associate at the Department of East
Asian Languages and Cultures, and Centre for Creative Industries, Media and
Screen Studies, SOAS, University of London. She is also Professional Researcher
of the Institute of Humanities at Yonsei University in Seoul. Her publications
include books and articles on film, popular culture, gender, German literature and
media aesthetics from a comparative intermedial perspective. Her recent book is
Korean Film and Festivals: Global Transcultural Flows (Routledge, 2022), which
she edited alone. She currently researches war, gender and memory with a focus on
K-culture and Korean Peninsula cinema.
Routledge Research on Korea
Series Editors: Niki Alsford and Sojin Lim, University of Central
Lancashire, UK.

The Research on Korea series surveys key topics in the study of North and South
Korea (both on the peninsula, and in the diaspora). It is a prestigious series that is
multidisciplinary, covering the social sciences and arts and humanities. The series
seeks to publish best new research from both senior and junior scholars.

1. South Korean Popular Culture in the Global Context

Beyond the Fandom
Edited by Sojin Lim

2. The North Korean Army

History, Structure, Daily Life
Fyodor Tertitskiy

3. Korea and the Global Society

Yonson Ahn

4. Politics, International Relations and Diplomacy on the Korean Peninsula

Edited by Sojin Lim

5. International Aid and Sustainable Development in North Korea

A Country Left Behind with Cloaked Society
Sojin Lim

6. South Koreans and the Politics of Immigration in Contemporary Australia

David Hundt

7. Soviet-North Korean Relations During the Cold War

Unruly Offspring
Fyodor Tertitskiy

8. Korean Film and History

Hyunseon Lee
Korean Film and History

Edited by Hyunseon Lee

First published 2024
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ISBN 9781032245010 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032245034 (paperback) |
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Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures–Korea (South)–History. | History in
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ISBN: 9781003279013 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003279013
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Contents

List of Figures vii

List of Contributors viii
Acknowledgements xi

1 Cinematic Battlefield of Memory, Imagination, and Narrative

of the Past: A Preface to Korean Film and History 1
HYUNSEON LEE

PART I
Issues, Positions and Approaches to Historical Memory 15

2 Making Nations: Film Propaganda in Colonial Korea

and Nazi Germany 17
YONG-KU CHA

3 Could History Films Be Rivals of Historians?: Historical

Criticism Through History Films 33
HANA LEE

4 Writing a History Through Cinema: A Focus on Two

‘Comfort Women’ Films 52
YOU-SHIN JOO

PART II
Korean Cinema and the Colonial Period 67

5 ‘Be a Soldier’: War and Melodrama in Late Colonial Korea 69

MOONIM BAEK
vi Contents

6 Hyŏnhaet’an, Mon Amour: Colonial Memories and

(In)visible Japan in 1960s South Korean Cinema 87
HWAJIN LEE

7 Screening Collaboration: The Pro-Japanese Korean

in 2009 Lost Memories and Modern Boy 102
MARK E. CAPRIO

PART III
How to Remember the Korean War, Its Origin and Aftermath 117

8 Ghostly Imaginings and Alternative Reckonings

in Reiterations of Dissent 119
SEUNGHEI CLARA HONG

9 Korean War Films: Generational Memory of North Korean

Soldiers, Partisans, Brothers, and Women 133
HYUNSEON LEE

10 Between Protector and Oppressor: Representation of the

United States as a Geopolitical Entity in Korean Blockbusters 161
CHONGHYUN CHOI

PART IV
Archiving Contact Zones 181

11 The Agonistics on the Borders In Between Two Koreas:

The Politics of Cinematic Representations in Documentary
Films on Borders Since 2018 183
WOOHYUNG CHON

12 A Walk Into History With Kim Hong-joon 200

HONG-JOON KIM AND SEUNG-AH LEE

Index 214
Figures

5.1 Mother’s reaction: Volunteer 75

5.2 Kinshuku Lamenting: Straits of Choseon 77
5.3 Kinshuku with her son and Kiyoko(Seiki’s sister).
Straits of Choseon 78
6.1 Korean-Japanese actress Gong Midori stars as a young
Japanese woman who falls in love with a Korean soldier in the
film The Sea Knows (1961) 93
6.2 Poster of Daughter of the Governor General (1965) 94
6.3 Excerpt from Chorus of Trees (1968) 98
8.1 ‘Reiterations of Dissent’, ArtSpectrum, Leeum Samsung
Museum, 2016 120
8.2 The memorial altar at the Cheju 4.3 Peace Park in ‘The
Politics of Naming’ 125
9.1.1 North Korean partisans in Piagol (1955) 136
9.1.2 To the South—female partisan Ae-ran and intellectual anti­
hero Cheol-soo 137
9.2.1 Celebrating Yanggongju—Western Princesses, from The
Marines Who Never Returned (1963) 141
9.2.2 Brotherhood of Marines in battle 142
9.2.3 Erotic bodies of GI brides at war 142
9.3.1 Poster of Red Muffler 146
9.3.2 The dialogue between masculine men and feminine women in
1964 Korean War film Red Muffler. From left Ji-seon, Na, Bae
and Bar madame 147
9.3.3 Na sets up Ji-seon and Bae, even though he loves her, for the
sake of the brotherhood in Red Muffler 147
9.4 Brothers in dispute and sister, a Western Princess, on the
poster for Aimless Bullet (1961) 148
9.5 The Statue of Brothers at the War Memorial of Korea in
Yongsan, Seoul 154
12.1 Kim Hong-joon 208
Contributors

Moonim Baek is Professor of Korean Language and Literature at Yonsei Univer­

sity. She is the author of Zoom-Out: Politics of Korean Cinema (2001), Crippled
Daughters of Chunhyang (2001), Figural Images (2004), Scream Under the
Moon: Korean Horror Film History Through Female Ghosts (2008), Im Hwa
(林和)’s Cinema (2015) and co-author of What Is Choseon Cinema? (2016).
Mark E. Caprio is Professor Emeritus in the College of Intercultural Communica­
tion, Rikkyo University, in Tokyo. He is the author of Japanese Assimilation
Policies in Colonial Korea (2009). He has also authored articles on Korean
colonial-era collaboration and Japan-based Korean repatriation, as well as on
the more recent North Korean nuclear weapons crisis. Currently he is conduct­
ing research toward a manuscript on the dregs of colonialism in post-liberated
southern Korea.
Yong-Ku Cha [Ch’a Yongku] is Professor in the Department of History and
the former director of the HK+ Reconciliation and Coexistence in Contact
Zones (RCCZ) Research Center at Chung-Ang University. He earned his
PhD in medieval German history from the University of Passau, Germany.
He has published, among others, ‘Discourse on Borderland History Between
German and Polish Historians,’ The Jeonbuk Historical Journal 31 (2008)
[in Korean]; ‘Korea und der Islam. Handelsgeschichtliche Betrachtungen
zum Mittelalter,’ Der Islam 85/2 (2011); ‘Die Reformation in aktuellen
koreanischen Schulbüchern,’ Luther und die Reformation in internationalen
Geschichtskulturen (2015); and History of Borders. Adopting the Border-
scape as Method (2022).
Chonghyun Choi [Ch’oe Chonghyŏn] is Assistant Professor in the Department
of Political Science and Diplomacy at Jeonbuk National University, South
Korea. Previously, he was Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at
the National University of Singapore and Research Professor at the Research
Center for Reconciliation and Coexistence in Contact Zones at Chung-Ang Uni­
versity. His research interests include the political economy of distribution and
redistribution, regime change and labour politics. He earned his PhD in Political
Science from the University of Notre Dame in 2017.
 Contributors ix

Woohyung Chon [Chǒn Uhyǒng] is Associate Professor at Chung-Ang University.

His research has focused on the intermediation between novel and film in mod­
ern Korea. Recently his research interest has extended to genealogical studies
of literature and film representing borders and contact zones. His recent English
language publications include ‘Candlelight Documentary as the Cultural Poli­
tics of Recording and Memorizing, and the Emergence of the Candlelight Plaza’
in Korea Journal (December 2018) and ‘The Vernacular Aesthetics of Conte
Adaptations of Western Films in Late Colonial Korea’ in the Journal of Korean
Studies (December 2015). Chon’s Korean language publications include, among
many others, a monograph: Cine-roman in Colonial Era Choson (2014).
Seunghei Clara Hong is Assistant Professor of East Asian Literature and Compar­
ative Literature at Underwood International College, Yonsei University, Korea.
She specialises in modern Korean literature, and her areas of research include
partition literature, testimonial narratives, politics of memory and cultures of
authoritarianism. She teaches courses on modern Korean literature and film,
Korean American literature, memory and trauma, translation, critical theory and
cultural studies.
You-shin Joo [Chu Yusin] is Professor of Film History and Screenwriting at
Young-San University in Busan, South Korea, and a member of the Korean
Film Council. She worked for the Seoul International Women’s Film Festival
as a programmer for several years and directed three documentaries about the
important persons of Korean film history for the Busan International Film Festi­
val. In 2017, she published Cinefeminism: 13 Ways of Watching Films Through
Women’s Perspective.
Hong-joon Kim [Kim Hongjun] is a filmmaker and director of the Korean Film
Archive (KOFA), and Professor Emeritus at the Department of Film, School of
Film, TV and Multimedia, Korea National University of Arts. He has been a
festival programmer (Real Fantastic Film Festival, Puchon International Fan­
tastic Film Festival and Chungmuro International Film Festival 1997–2008) and
recently art director of the Chungmuro Musical Film Festival and Gangneung
Film Festival. Kim’s publications include Lee Jang-Ho’s Master Class (2013),
Selected Screenplays by Kim Ki-young, vol. 2 (ed.) (2008) and Kim Ki-young
(ed.) (2007). Films he has directed include Im Kwon-taek’s Moonlight: Making
of Hanji (2011), Garujiki Redux (2008), Two or Three Things We Know About
Kim Ki-young (2006), My Korean Cinema: Episodes 1–9 (2002–2006), Jungle
Story (1996) and La Vie en Rose (1994).
Hana Lee is currently a Professional Research of the Institute of Humanities, and
Lecturer at Department of History, Yonsei University. She received her PhD
from the History Department in Yonsei University. She has been a research
professor in the Institute for Korean Studies in Yonsei University and a senior
researcher at Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies in Seoul National Univer­
sity. She teaches and researches socio-cultural history, film and popular cultural
studies and affect history in modern and contemporary Korea in Yonsei.
x Contributors

Hwajin Lee [Yi Hwajin] is Research Professor of the Institute of Humanities at

Chosun University in South Korea. She is the author of Joseon yeonghwa—Soriui
doibeseo chinillyeonghwakkaji [Joseon Cinema: From the Introduction of Sound
to Pro-Japanese Films] (Seoul: Chaeksesang, 2005) and Soriui jeongchi—Singminji
joseonui geukjanggwa jegugui gwangaek [Politics of Sound: Theaters of Colo­
nial Korea, Spectators of the Empire Japan] (Seoul: Hyeonsilmunhwa, 2016).
Alongside co-authoring several books in Korean, she has also authored English
articles. Notable among her contributions are the articles titled ‘Liberator or
Intimate Enemy: Examining the Ambivalence of South Korean Cultural Cir­
cles towards Hollywood,’ published in The Review of Korean Studies in 2015,
and ‘Struggles over Foreign Films and Film Culture in Wartime Colonial Seoul
(1937–1941),’ featured in Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema in 2019.
Hyunseon Lee [Yi Hyŏnsŏn] is a London-based film, media and literary scholar.
She is Privatdozent at the Department of German (teaching in literature, culture
and media) at the University of Siegen in Germany and Research Associate at
the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, and Centre for Crea­
tive Industries, Media and Screen Studies, SOAS, University of London. She
is also Professional Researcher of the Institute of Humanities at Yonsei Univer­
sity in Seoul. She is the author of the books Metamorphosen der Madame But­
terfly: Interkulturelle Liebschaften zwischen Literatur, Oper und Film (2020),
Geständniszwang und ‘Wahrheit des Charakters in der Literatur der DDR: Dis­
kursanalytische Fallstudien (2000), Günter de Bruyn—Christoph Hein—Heiner
Müller: 3 Interviews (1996) and various articles on film, popular culture, gen­
der, media aesthetics and German literature. She was co-editor of Akira Kuro­
sawa und Seine Zeit (2005), Mörderinnen (2013) and Opera, Exoticism and
Visual Culture (2015), and sole of the book Korean Film and Festivals: Global
Transcultural Flows (Routledge, 2022).
Seung‐Ah Lee [Yi Su^ng A] earned her PhD in UCLA’s Department of Asian
Languages and Cultures. Her scholarly interests include the most cutting-edge
and border-crossing aspects of contemporary popular culture in Asia. She has
published JYJ Republic (2013), ‘JYJ Republic: By the Fans, for the Fans, of
the Fans’ Hallyu 2.0: The Korean Wave in the Age of Social Media (2015) and
‘Decolonizing Popular Music: Japanese Color Dispute Over Trot’ in Popular
Music and Society. Vol. 40 (Routledge, 2017). Her co-edited volume Made in
Korea: Studies in Popular Music, is also published by Routledge (2016).
Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and
the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF- 2017S1A6A3A03079318).

This publication stems from the conference Film and History: The Korean Exam­
ple, which I organised with the Centre for Film Studies—now Centre for Creative
Industries, Media and Screen Studies—and the Centre of Korean Studies, School of
Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. It was held at SOAS
with the support of the Academy of Korean Studies and at the Korean Cultural Cen­
tre UK along with the 10th London Korean Film Festival on 5–6 November 2015.
I feel obliged to express my thanks to the SOAS colleagues: Jaehoon Yeon gave me
full support and freedom in designing this conference. Isolde Standish was there
to develop the core concept. Grisedis Kirsch was always there for the discussions
and exchange of ideas.
As concepts evolved, not all participants of that conference stayed on board,
but new authors—mostly experts in the field—joined the publication, so I am very
proud of this book and thank all institutional supporters and contributors for their
contributions and patience. It has become a strong book.
My special thanks to Stephanie Rogers at Routledge, whose support and
patience have been a great encouragement to me since the inception of this
second Routledge book of mine. I have been conducting research on Korean
Peninsula cinema at SOAS since 2014. I thank the Department of East Asian
Languages and Cultures, the Centre of Korean Studies and the Centre for Crea­
tive Industries, Media and Screen Studies at SOAS for their institutional sup­
port. In addition, many students in the modules on South Korean cinema in the
1990s and the new millennium (2014–2018) at SOAS and other film, media
and popular culture courses I have taught at various institutions, especially the
Department of German (Literature, Culture, Media) at the University of Siegen
in Germany, have inspired me to incorporate my ongoing academic interests
into this book publication. The Korean Film Archive has given me permission and
advice to use their material.
For their support, I also thank the Research Group on Reconciliation and Coex­
istence in Contact Zones (RCCZ) at Chung-Ang [Chungang] University in Seoul.
I was privileged to be invited as a guest researcher to the RCCZ at Chung-Ang
xii Acknowledgements

University in the late summer of 2021, in the midst of Covid-19. The valuable
essays in this volume have emerged from several talks given by colleagues there
on 15 September at the Workshop on Korean Film and History.
This book has been published as the third volume of the RCCZ Research Book
Series.
1 Cinematic Battlefield of
Memory, Imagination,
and Narrative of the Past
A Preface to Korean Film and History

Hyunseon Lee

Cinema has become a battleground upon which history is made—a major mass
medium of the 20th century dealing with history. When the medium of film
emerged at the end of the 19th century, it was spectacular enough to capture images
of ‘reality’: materials, picturesque images, moving things, people, lives, and sig­
nificant or mundane events that themselves became history. It took only a few
years for moving images to be able to tell stories, to constitute narratives, even the
grand narrative, memories and histories, but also, soon after, to shape memory and
history itself.
The medium of film reached the Korean peninsula surprisingly quickly. In
1903, the first public film screening took place in Korea (though the exact year is
disputed). The 1919 film The Righteous Revenge (Uirijeok Gutu) is considered the
first cinematic drama (play with film interludes), making Korean film history over
100 years old.
In Korea, too, film was one of the most popular cultural and media forms of the
20th century—both before and after the Korean War. However, due to Japanese
occupation from 1910 to 1945 and the war from 1950 to 1953, as well as the divi­
sion of the country, Korean film history has not yet been fully written and is still in
the process of discovering materials, information, and lost films, as well as reap­
praising film history itself.
In particular, the colonial period made it difficult to access a proper history, as most
of the films did not exist or ended up in other places, and after the division of the coun­
try, it is not clear what kind of films North Korea has from the colonial period. South
Korean dictatorship and film laws, which allowed legal censorship for decades, as well
as the lack and delay of institutional establishment of film studies as a discipline in
South Korea, also necessitate a more systematic approach to Korean cinema.1
The recent boom in Korean culture—K-culture, the Korean Wave—has made
it possible to draw the attention of global film and media industry, and consumers
to Korean cinema. Or, conversely, one can say, it was film, the dramatic form of
storytelling, that brought millions of viewers to discover Korean culture and its
products, especially initially through international film festivals, and now through
the diverse new media forms of the 21st century. While the Korean New Wave from
the late 1980s sparked the boom of Korean cinema in South Korea in the 1990s,
attracting millions of viewers—often over ten million—in the early 2000s, the film,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003279013-1
2 Hyunseon Lee

along with the popularity of Asian Extreme, also landed in Europe through stages
beginning at international film festivals and is now attracting audiences worldwide.
On the other hand, Korean cinema has discovered and uncovered untold (hi)stories
at least since the Korean New Wave in the late 1980s. This ongoing process—often
from a macro perspective—has now enabled another stream of creative, unique
documentaries, festival films, and independent films.
It is fascinating to observe that Korea and its culture are attracting the attention
of audiences through films and other media, so that the unknown history of the past
century has become an interesting object of study for scholars, academics, schools,
and the general public, who have become aware of the existence and history of the
Korean peninsula. The soft power of Korean content has grown amazingly in the
last two decades; when Psy’s ‘Gangnam Style’ (2012) enthralled even little kinder­
garten children in London in 2012, Korean culture was still quite exotic and other
cultural forms were not yet widespread enough to be called popular.2 When I first
started to look at Korean film in academic teaching and research in 2014, it was
also still quite exotic. There were no modules that could promote Korean cinema
per se, and of course film studies itself was neglected in Korea only a few decades
ago. The years around the establishment of the Busan International Film Festival in
1996 can be seen as the starting point for the academic study of Korean film itself.
It is therefore a great pleasure for me to publish this volume as an edited volume,
as I have been conducting the research on Korean film at the School of Oriental
and African Studies, University of London, since 2014. Modules on South Korean
cinema in the 1990s and new millennium at SOAS and the various film, media, and
culture courses at other universities—in particular at the University of Siegen—that
I taught from 2014 onwards—as well as the conference Film and History: The
Korean Example I organised at the Centre for Film Studies—currently Centre for
Creative Industries, Media and Screen Studies—and the Centre of Korean Studies,
SOAS, in November 2015—inspired me to incorporate my ongoing academic inter­
ests into this book. Not all the participants of the conference, then held at SOAS and
the 10th London Korean Film Festival in support of Korean Cultural Centre, UK
and the Academy of Korean Studies, have stayed on board, but new authors, mostly
experts in the field, have joined the publication, so I am proud of this book.

Films with historical incidents include not only historical drama and documen­
tary but also other genres such as melodrama, modern political drama, thrill­
ers, martial arts—and war films. The social functions of these films are also
diverse: from remembering, writing, or inventing national histories to educat­
ing and transporting spectators to enable them to deal with experienced or future
catastrophes. The re-enactments of historical events in film straddle reality and
fantasy, documentary and fiction, representation and performance, entertain­
ment and education. The filmic forms of historical memory offer wide-ranging
research possibilities in the fields of history, film, media, and cultural studies.
Why does film need history, and history film? Why has film become an impor­
tant medium to interpret history, to correct or even invent it? In what way are inde­
pendent single author films different from recent blockbuster historical dramas?
 Memory, Imagination, and Narrative of the Past 3

Which historical figures, battles, and events became filmic myths? In which way,
and with what kind of film—and genre aesthetics (compared to other media)—
have the characters of the mythic figures, and events continued or changed? Why
are they popular? With which theoretical tools can we describe the historical re­
enactment in each film in the appropriate way?
This interdisciplinary book will examine the relationship between film and his­
tory and the links between historical research and filmic (re-)presentations of his­
tory with special reference to South Korean cinema. The questions just posed
will be explored. The volume also aims to explore the changing modes, impacts,
and functions of screen images dealing with history through the case study of
Korean cinema. As with all national film industries, observing North and South
Korean film histories, Korean cinema functions as a mass medium of inventing
national identity and national history and also establishing their legitimacy—in
both forgetting the past and remembering history. Korean films also play a part in
forging cultural national memory. Korea as a colonised and divided nation clearly
adopted different approaches to the filmic depiction of history compared to colo­
nial powers such as Western or Japanese cinema. The Colonial Period (1910–45)
and Korean War (1950–53) draw particular attention as they have been major top­
ics in shaping the narrative of nation in North and South Korean films.
There are also films of vivid memories that condense the often-overlooked expe­
riences of daily life throughout Korean history, bringing to the fore the intimacy
of relationships, traumas, and emotions through the memories of those who lived
through extraordinary times in the modern Korean past—the marginalised history
in the modernised or modernising present within or outside the Korean peninsula.
In this chapter, I would like to contextualise the essays included in this volume
in the current discourses on history and memory. Historical memories in Korean
cinema could be discussed in relation to the various forms of memory discourses
and debates discussed in what follows. In recent Korean film, we find the—often
painful—memories of individuals and their connection to a past that is mostly
unknown, especially to non-Korean audiences, and to forgotten modern historical
events. Certainly, this past has much to do with the macro-history of the country
and also casts a glance at Korean film history.
The study of Korean cinema has gained importance only in recent years. How­
ever, the relationship between Korean cinema and history has rarely been discussed
in an anthology, although the successful Korean films have mostly dealt with his­
torical themes. Under the assumption that not only well-known historical events
but also unknown, newly discovered historical memories have contributed to the
global success of Korean cinema, this book sees the need to explore Korean film
and history and specifically considers the following current states of Korean cin­
ematic discourses in three interconnected and intertwined ways:

(1) the significant role of historical memory in current films; (2) the place­
ment of Korean cinema in the internationally growing field of research in
film studies; (3) the lack of research and work on Korean history in film
compared to other international memory studies.
4 Hyunseon Lee

Korean history in film history is a relatively new field of representation and related
research. The ‘golden period’ of Korean cinema from the late 1950s to the 1960s
was interrupted by the ‘dark period’ of the 1970s, but resumed from the late 1980s
with the Korean New Wave movement. After an era of dictatorial regime and strict
censorship under Park Chung-hee [Pak Chŏnghŭi] (1961–79), the Motion Picture
Law, which had been revised six times since 1961, was transformed into the Film
Promotion Law in 1996, and film production was no longer subject to state control.
The conditions for the emergence of the Korean New Wave were made through the
transformation of the Korean film industry after the depression period of Korean
cinema (1973–86), the relaxation of political censorship in the milder political
atmosphere of the Roh Tae-woo [No T’aeu] regime in 1988–93, and the emergence
of young directors.
The eventually achieved democratic regimes of Kim Young-sam ([Kim
Yŏngsam] (1993–98) and Kim Dae-jung [Kim Taejung] (1998–2003) strongly pro­
moted the cultural industry and globalisation, and pressure was exerted by the US
to open the film market to Hollywood. The government’s influence on film produc­
tion weakened, while larger conglomerate companies (Chaebŏl) such as Samsung,
Daewoo, and Lotte took over the production of South Korean films and injected
capital into production after 1998 following the IMF Asian Financial Crisis.3
The Korean New Wave of young directors emerged and quickly changed the
landscape of the Korean film industry. Im Kwon-taek, Jang Sun-woo, Park Kwang­
su, and others pioneered the Korean New Wave beginning in the late 1980s, coincid­
ing with the end of not only dictatorship in South Korea but also the Cold War and
the beginning of globalisation actively promoted by the South Korean government.
Since the nation was still divided after the so-called end of the Cold War, both the
wounds of the Korean War and the ideology of the Cold War were still omnipresent
in Korean society and culture—visible and invisible. The young directing genera­
tion of the New Wave movement, having experienced neither the war itself nor the
colonial era—thus a post-memory generation—used their freedom to engage with
history, especially the Korean War, in an unprecedented way. South Korean block­
busters of the new millennium focus on national history, especially the ‘forgotten’
war, and production of this type of Korean War cinema began in the first decade,
while the colonial era became more prominent in the 2010s.
The younger post-memory generation of filmmakers produced numerous genre
films around 2000 about previously unaddressed historical issues, memories, and
the Korean War. This post-memory generation of filmmakers—the initiators of the
Korean New Wave, the so-called Generation 386 (then 30 years old, educated in
the 1980s, and born in the 1960s)—had the educational background of profes­
sional film schools, arthouse cinemas, and European cultural offerings such as the
French Film Institute and the Goethe Institute in Seoul since the 1970s. They also
benefited from the greater freedom of artistic expression following the relaxation
of censorship and government controls.
The Korean New Wave bridged two divergent film practices: Im Kwon-taek’s
home and cultural films from the 1980s and early 1990s and the aspirations of the
young directors of Generation 386 for commercially viable cinema. Their films,
 Memory, Imagination, and Narrative of the Past 5

which take a strong realist approach (New Realism), are mostly about isolated work-
ing-class characters (including factory workers and powerless intellectuals), social
issues (family breakdown, anti-Americanism, political oppression, labour and student
movements, etc.), and forgotten historical themes—expressions of Han and Minjung
in an industrialised environment. At least since Laura Mulvey’s classic work, many
other feminist film critics have criticised the way women have been portrayed in film
for over a century as objects for the male gaze.4 The opposite is true in the Korean films
of New Realism auteurs, who refuse to conform to existing gender norms and provoke
with depictions of working-class women, GI brides, female sexuality, and even of and
about older ladies, whose close-ups are particularly striking in many documentaries.
History and memory in film is a thriving field of not only representation but also
research, debate, and discussion. In the context of cinema on the Korean peninsula,
this is one of the most fascinating themes, and in South Korean film discourse, the
memory of major historical events such as the colonial period, national division,
and the Korean War and its aftermath have become the most visible themes for both
film production and reception, with Silmido (2003) by Kang Woo-suk ushering in
the era of Ch’ŏnman Younghwa [10 million films], that is, the period of films that
attracted more than ten million viewers to the big screen. Remarkably, these films
dealt often with actual historical events or figures.5
While the films, especially the blockbusters, dealing with the Korean War and
its aftermath, including national division, became the most commercially success­
ful films in Korea, films depicting traditional and historical aspects of Korea, as
well as the fates of suffering women and gendered traditional Korean culture, were
the most attractive and popular subjects at European film festivals in the 1980s and
1990s. This started with The Surrogate Mother (Ssibaji, 1986), for which actress
Kang Soo-yeon [Kang Suyŏn] (1966–2022) won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at
Venice in 1987, followed by the Best Actress award at the Moscow International
Film Festival in 1989. With these screenings, Korean cinema gained a presence that
led to it becoming one of the most popular kinds of films in the world in the new
millennium, both at film festivals and in popular culture in general. In many suc­
cessful festival films that focus on the fate of Korean women—especially subaltern
women whose voices have never been heard or taken seriously and have instead
mostly been forgotten and ignored—a historical framework is used to portray the
roots of gender issues that are still visible in modern Korean culture.6

In recent years, there has been a noticeable increase in research on film and his­
tory. Several film theorists have already raised questions like these: can film make
a positive contribution to explaining history? Can cinematic representations serve
as historical source material? Can film provide special knowledge that other media
cannot? These questions and debates are becoming increasingly relevant as our
multimedia society evolves.
In the late 1980s, Robert A. Rosenstone distinguished between Hollywood his­
torical films, which aim for entertainment value and profit, and historical films,
which focus on understanding the past.7 He notes three ways in which history films
contribute to the understanding of history: contestation, visioning, and revision of
6 Hyunseon Lee

historiography.8 Contestation challenges the existing traditional narrative through a

specific and microscopic narrative in search of truth. Visioning promotes historical
awareness and imagination through various cinematic techniques. Revisioning is
the historical film that visually re-examines the standardised past by breaking away
from the realism-based means of expressing human relationships that reflect a clear
and modern historical consciousness by assimilating diverse and innovative means
of expression. Although the revision is innovative, it can obfuscate the concept of
history film, as certain means of expression can make a film seem like a fable or a
parody. There are several aspects to the assumption that films can be used to teach
history. The first is that films, regardless of genre, reflect the ethos of the era in
which they were produced as a reflection of the public sentiment of that era.
For this volume, it seems most useful to include current discourses on history
and memory, among others, as the many chapters include these aspects in their
discussions. This is also helpful in exploring the question of why history matters
in film, in this case South Korean film, or conversely why film matters in history.
Here, we simply take the position that the medium of film shapes historical mem­
ory in the similar way as other popular media. Historical memory is shaped through
remembered experiences of individuals, and grand narratives of history found in
textbooks, books, libraries, museums, monuments, archives, memorials, and vari­
ous production forms of popular literary and visual culture such as film, televi­
sion, literature, family photographs, and memorabilia. The concept of ‘prosthetic
memory’ as used by Alison Landsberg can be applied here, as it aims to explore
how popular culture shares private memories in a public way and conveys indirect
historical experiences to the public in a sensual and engaging way.9
French historian Pierre Nora contrasts history and memory because they have
different conceptions of time: while memory is ‘open to the dialectic of remem­
bering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to
manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodi­
cally revived,’ history is ‘the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of
what is no longer’.10 The ‘sites of memory, where memory crystallizes and secretes
itself,’ then, are a modern phenomenon associated with the acceleration of history,
the loss of oral traditions, and a more organic collective memory. ‘There are lieux
de mémoire, sites of memory, because there are no longer milieux de mémoire, real
environments of memory’.11
Paul Ricoeur points out that collective memory is constituted by processes of
forgetting and remembering, with the state playing a key role but various other
groups contesting memory, meaning that (collective) memory is constituted by
specific collective interests and power relations. The work of remembering—and
forgetting—shapes collective identities, influences cultural interactions, and per­
petuates shared myths and stereotypes.12
In the words of Chris Weedon and Glenn Jordan,

Collective memory [. . .] signifies narratives of past experience constituted

by and on behalf of specific groups within which they find meaningful forms
of identification that may empower. Collective memory and the institutions
 Memory, Imagination, and Narrative of the Past 7

and practices that support it help to create, sustain and reproduce the ‘imag­
ined communities’ [Anderson 1981] with which individuals identify and that
give them a sense of history, place and belonging.13

There is a potential relationship problem between collective memory and his­

tory, but they should not be played off against each other. According to Maurice
Halbwachs, the ‘framework of collective memory confines and binds our most inti­
mate remembrances to each other. It is not necessary that the group be familiar with
them’.14 Halbwachs states that any collective memory depends on particular groups
delimited by space and time; the group constructs the memory, and the individuals
do the work of remembering. He emphasises that individual memory is always part
of group memory and the social framework for memory.
Likewise, ‘counter-memory is memory that challenges the interests at stake in
collective memory’.15 Currently, the control of collective memory by nation-states
is increasingly being challenged by various factors such as ethnically and reli­
giously different groups, globalisation, and anti-colonial struggles, among others.
‘Counter-memory can be mobilised to challenge hegemonic collective memory,’
which can then lead to not just a ‘sense of ownership’ and empowerment but also
‘work to transform dominant narratives and help produce a more nuanced and just
understanding of the past’.16
The increasing thematisation of forgotten history, remembering the past, indi­
vidual, and historical memory as successful K-content, are relatively new in Korean
cinema, as is the Korean Wave in the new millennium. In order to better understand
these phenomena, the preceding theoretical frameworks for Korean cinema and
Korean history are of great importance. In particular, as the past and history have
become more discursive, the themes of ‘commemoration, apology, and historical
responsibility’17 have also become more important in cultural, political, and aca­
demic discourses and, accordingly, in the artistic productions of the post-memory
generation.
The discourse of generational memory, especially the filmmaking of the post-
memory generation, is fascinating in this context, as the most ambitious works of
this generation often include the aspect of commemoration—cinema as a commem­
orative space, cinematic space as a memorial, sometimes as a historical archive.
Moreover, Holocaust studies are key to debates about the cultural politics of
memory, which include

the status of survivors’ testimonies, the social role of public forms of memo­
rialisation, the motives informing strategies of remembering and forgetting,
the therapeutic importance of transforming traumatic memories into narra­
tives that are socially recognised, and the concepts of trauma, postmemory
and cultural memory.18

As Johannes von Moltke states, the new forms of emotional appeal in films
about German history point to not only an ongoing change in German cinema after
reunification but also a profound generational shift. To the extent that the history of
8 Hyunseon Lee

the Holocaust and the Third Reich ‘recedes from collective memory into cultural
memory’ and the contemporary witness generation dies out, ‘the historical valence’
of the era changes—and with it ‘the politics of representation’.19
This is also true for Korean cases. The concept of postmemory generation,
which originated from Holocaust research, is one of the most appropriate concepts
to capture the current cultural memory of labour in South Korean cinema as well.
The concept of the postmemory generation is a type of second-generation trauma
memory and represents a unique way in which the children of survivors of col­
lective trauma ‘remember’ these traumatic events through the stories and images
they grew up with. The term postmemory, according to the 2012 work of Marianne
Hirsch, refers to the ‘experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that
preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the
previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor
recreated’.20 The work of the second Holocaust generation is characterised by the
‘Absence of direct historical experience, (silence) and historically reliable proof’
and their own ‘imaginative investment, projection, recreation’.21
The silence of the older generation can illustrate, on the one hand, the historical,
social, and ideological circumstances on the Korean peninsula and, on the other
hand, the different attitudes of the generations toward the Korean War and the Cold
War. The generation of those born later in South Korea and abroad also witnessed
and heard about the sufferings of their parents or grandparents during the Korean
War. However, their encounter with the tragedy is incomplete and fragmented. The
autobiographical works of young documentary filmmakers are wonderful exam­
ples of dealing with the painful history of the first generation that experienced
such a traumatic historical tragedy, and South Korean blockbusters dealing with the
Korean War and the colonial era can be viewed from this perspective as well, even
though their approaches are completely different.22
As Robert Burgoyne suggests in his work on generational memory and war
films, compared to the past, when epic films expressed one-sided national narra­
tives, contemporary cinematography is to a much greater extent open to more than
one interpretation. The notion of generational memory offers a way to articulate
‘the positive aspects of emotional engagement with the past’23—an engagement
made possible by certain visual and tonal patterns of war films—while also allow­
ing us to recognise the representation of affect in this genre as inherently political.
The concept of generational memory is also framed by the fact that each genera­
tion interprets historical events differently and that war films are a way of creat­
ing new interpretations of the past, which is consistent with Weedon and Jordan’s
consideration of the culture industry as one of the crucial actors in enabling ‘a more
nuanced and just understanding of the past’.24 Burgoyne argues that the question of
guilt—the older generation as culprits, the younger as innocent witnesses—is also
perceived and portrayed differently.
This volume presents an interdisciplinary approach to Korean film and history
developed from a variety of perspectives. After introducing the book Korean Film
and History by Hyunseon Lee, the volume is divided into four parts. Part I, ‘Issues,
Positions and Approaches to Historical Memory,’ contains three chapters that deal
 Memory, Imagination, and Narrative of the Past 9

with conceptual aspects of the cinematic representation of historical events. His­

tory has always played an important role in Korean film history, which is especially
evident in the late 20th century. But there are still historical themes that have never
been discussed, as well as recent films that deal with unwritten Korean contempo­
rary history and historical events.
Yong-Ku Cha is devoted to propaganda film in Germany and Korea. In his
opening chapter, ‘Making Nations: Film Propaganda in Colonial Korea and Nazi
Germany,’ Cha compares the political adaptation of the Middle Ages during the
Nazi era (Nazi medievalism) in Germany with Korean propaganda films of the
colonial period. He discusses how the Middle Ages have been understood, concep­
tualised, and portrayed in subsequent centuries. Cha addresses a relatively under-
researched area of history, focusing on the 1920s and 1930s, the interwar period
between World War I and World War II, when mass culture emerged and devel­
oped. The new mechanical means of reproduction, such as photography and film,
also began to profoundly change political life and people’s perceptions. Cha shows
that the vision of the Middle Ages underwent a decisive reassessment and offers the
opportunity to view film and history in a comparative perspective.
In her chapter, ‘Could History Films Be Rivals of Historians? Historical Criti­
cism Through History Films,’ Hana Lee focuses on the relationship between film
and history by rethinking the discussion of historiophotography from the perspec­
tive of historians in the contemporary Korean context, adopting two perspectives:
(1) the perspective of popularising history; and (2)) the perspective of producing
historical content. Her theoretical reflections on various concepts of historical film,
such as historical representation, faction, and historical film, also include the role
of historians and the importance of historical criticism. She distinguishes between
these films by using Rosenstone’s terms in the categories of history film and his­
torical film.
The theme of You-shin Joo’s chapter, ‘Writing a History Through Cinema:
A Focus on Two “Comfort Women” Films’ is also an exploration of the forgotten
past of a traumatised nation in both history and film. By looking at recent films
and the controversy surrounding the issue of ‘comfort women,’ she focuses on the
figures of ‘sexual slavery’ during the Asia–Pacific War (1937–45) and discusses
concepts of historical memories related to ‘comfort women’ in two films: Spirits’
Homecoming (dir. Cho Jung-rae, 2016) and Snowy Road (dir. Lee Na-jeong, 2015).
Her reflections and analysis include a gender perspective as she discusses new
ways of rewriting (women’s) history and representing victims’ wounds and memo­
ries in national history.
Part II, ‘Korean Cinema and the Colonial Period,’ focuses on Korean films deal­
ing with the lives of the Korean people during and after the Japanese colonial
period and examines the ways in which the historical past has been represented in
film, which has not been a major target of academic research.
Moonim Baek’s ‘ “Be a Soldier”: War and Melodrama in Late Colonial Korea’
draws attention to propaganda films from the 1940s that were produced during
the colonial period but disappeared for several decades. She analyses the narra­
tive and rhetorical strategies of Japanese propaganda films about Korean men who
10 Hyunseon Lee

were encouraged to become soldiers of the emperor, such as Volunteer (dir. An

Seok-young, 1940), Straits of Choseon (dir. Bak Gi-chae, 1943), Portrait of Youth
(dir. Toyota Shiro, 1943), and Mr. Soldier (dir. Bang Han-jun, 1944). Baek argues
that they specifically depict the division of Korean women into articulate speech
and inarticulate visual image, in body and voice, thus aiming at an ironic effect of
propaganda films in the late colonial period.
Hwajin Lee dedicates her chapter, ‘Hyŏnhaet’an, Mon Amour: Colonial
Memories and (In)visible Japan in 1960s South Korean Cinema,’ to the romance
between the Korean man and the Japanese woman in the colonial era—the so-
called Hyŏnhaet’an story produced after the April 19th Revolution in 1960, which
opened a space for the South Korean people to express their complex emotions
about Japan and Japanese culture. The gendered reversal of the former colonial
dominant–subordinate relationship in selected films such as The Sea Knows (dir.
Kim Ki-young, 1961), Governor’s Daughter (dir. Jo Geung-ha, 1965), and Chorus
of Trees (dir. Kang Dae-jin, 1968) allow for reflection on not only that the Korean
government tightened film censorship after the normalisation of diplomatic rela­
tions between South Korea and Japan (1965) but also the representation of Japan as
‘abnormal and dangerous’. Her analysis of the distorted visualisations of colonial
memories in popular films aims to describe how South Korean spectators were led
to pay attention to their own complex, which has not been overcome even after the
normalisation of the diplomatic relations.
In ‘Screening Collaboration: The Pro-Japanese Korean in 2009 Lost Memories
and Modern Boy’, Mark E. Caprio turns his attention to films produced in the new
millennium. 2009 Lost Memories (dir. Lee Si-myung, 2002) and Modern Boy (dir.
Jung Ji-woo, 2008) deal with the Korean pro-Japanese collaborators, as the 1990s
saw over 3000 Koreans listed as guilty of excessive collaboration with the Japa­
nese during the colonial period. Caprio, as a historian, focuses on the cinematic
attempt to introduce an alternative approach to understanding and dealing with
colonial collaboration, which is different from formal investigations conducted to
determine guilt or innocence of these pro-Japanese collaborators.
Part III, ‘How to Remember the Korean War, Its Origin and Aftermath,’ con­
tains three chapters that explore the origins of the Korean War and post-war mem­
ory, particularly the ways in which the unspoken, marginalised figures and events
before the war, in the postliberation period, and even in the post-war period are
remembered and appreciated. The chapters also lead to the transnational nature of
post-1990s Korean film culture.
Wartime memory begins with the unwritten history and lost memory of the Cheju
4.3 Uprising by Seunghei Clara Hong. The historical incident of Cheju 4.3—the
systematic killing of civilians by South Korean military and police under the com­
mand of the United States from 1947 to 1954—was the precursor to the Korean
War in 1948–49. Hong’s chapter, ‘Ghostly Imaginings and Alternative Reckon­
ings in Reiterations of Dissent,’ focuses on the video documentary Reiterations of
Dissent (2013) by visual artist Jane Jin Kaisen. Drawing on the concepts of Avery
Gordon’s ‘ghosts’ and Marianne Hirsch’s ‘postmemory,’ it explores how Kaisen
reworks trauma from multiple perspectives—personal, social, historical, ethical, and
 Memory, Imagination, and Narrative of the Past 11

transnational. For Hong, there is a new and ethical aesthetic to the recovery and
representation of wounded memory, history, and transnational subjectivity.
In her chapter, ‘Korean War Films: Generational Memory of North Korean Sol­
diers, Partisans, Brothers, and Women,’ Hyunseon Lee discusses cinematic dis­
courses on the Korean War in the post-war period. One of the fascinating, unique
characters in Korean War cinema is the brotherhood. Fighting brothers have been
a recurring theme in Korean War films since the 1950s, but North Korean parti­
sans, soldiers, and women had disappeared from film historical discourses until the
late 1980s. Lee looks at the gernerational memory of the representation of gender,
especially women, in Korean War films and argues that South Korean war films of
the 1990s celebrate the cinematic comeback of the notion of ideologically opposed
brothers. In particular, the portrayal of communist partisan figures draws attention
to a forgotten and repressed element of national history that remains largely unseen
elsewhere. By observing the transition from the performance of living history (col­
lective memory) to its melodramatic recollection (cultural memory), she examines
not only the changing but also the persisting methods of dealing with the Korean
War, drawing as much on the cinematic performances of the early war films of the
1950s and 1960s as on current blockbusters.
While Hyunseon Lee explores the minorities, the margins, and the other in Korean
War films, Chonghyun Choi’s ‘Between Protector and Oppressor: Representation of
the United States as a Geopolitical Entity in Korean Blockbusters’ uses mainstream
cinema to examine South Korea’s relationship with the United States, particularly
its military aspect as embodied in the Korea–US alliance. The United States has
always played a critical role in modern Korean politics; however, the Korean public
does not directly interact with the United States in general, and important contact
zones between the two are created through the presence of the United States Forces
Korea (USFK). Choi’s chapter traces the representation of the USFK in Korean
cinema from the Flower in Hell (dir. Shin Sang-ok, 1958) to Operation Chromite
(dir. John H. Lee Jae-han, 2016). One of Choi’s arguments is that growing political
polarisation in Korea threatens a return to the dichotomous and unidimensional rep­
resentation of the USFK or the evasion of the topic all together in Korean cinema.
Concluding the volume, Part IV, ‘Archiving Contact Zones,’ consists of two
reflections on the relationship of film and history and unwritten past, less known
but significant historical cross-over and/or interrelation of antagonistic figures fea­
tured in recent South Korean films. The subject matter of Woohyung Chon’s ‘The
Agonistics on the Borders In Between Two Koreas: The Politics of Cinematic Rep­
resentations in Documentary Films on Borders Since 2018’ is ‘red complex’—the
hostile attitude to North Korea and its ideology of communism in South Korea.
Chon analyses the documentary film Shadow Flowers (dir. Yi Seungjun, 2019),
focusing on protagonist Kim Ryunhee, who has defected from North to South
Korea, but has been denied a request to return to North Korea. This, a decade-
long denial of repatriation, is for Chon the intention of the South Koreans to (de)
politicise the defection—not only isolating North Korea as a poor country but also
resolving the dissatisfaction of South Korea in the face of long-term economic
recession with hatred to North Korean defectors.
12 Hyunseon Lee

While Chon explores the minority of North Korean defectors in South Korea,
Seung-Ah Lee explores a Korean auteur’s perspective on film history in an inter­
view with filmmaker and former artistic director of Gangneung International Film
Festival (GIFF) and Chungmuro Musical Film Festival, Kim Hong-joon, who is
currently director of the Korean Film Archives. In this interview, entitled ‘Walk
Into History With Kim Hong-joon,’ Lee leads the conversation about Kim Hong­
joon’s personal artistic and historical experiences with Korean film culture in the
context of history. Kim was heavily involved in the Korean New Wave in the 1990s,
making his own films and also working at various film festivals. Kim reflects on
the various classic South Korean film auteurs. As a participant in numerous inter­
national film festivals in Korea, Asia, Europe, and other countries, he provides an
insightful personal view of globalised film culture and Korean cinema’s unique
approach to its history.

Notes
1 The term ‘Korean cinema’ in this volume refers mainly to South Korean cinema, unless
explicitly stated otherwise. ‘Korean peninsula cinema’ refers to films produced both
across the South Korean border—in North Korea—and in South Korea, including the
films of other migrants and the younger generation of filmmakers of Korean origin or
heritage who live abroad, e.g., in the US, Japan, or another part of the world outside the
Korean peninsula due to their diaspora. I have used the term ‘Korean peninsula cinema’
in my recent research project with the same title.
2 Korean names in the texts are given in the Korean spelling (family name followed by
first name) using conventional romanisation. Exceptions are made when the names have
already been established, and when the authors explicitly use them. American spellings
using McCune-Reischauer for the romanisation of names and movie titles are mainly
used only when they first appear.
3 Darcy Paquet, “The Korean Film Industry: 1992 to the Present,” in New Korean Cin­
ema, edited by Shin Chi-Yun and Julian Stringer (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2005), 32–50. Seung Hyun Park, “Korean Cinema after Liberation: Production,
Industry and Regulatory Trends,” in Seoul Searching: Culture and Identity in Contem­
porary Korean Cinema, edited by Frances Gateward (Albany: SUNY University Press,
2007), 15–35.
4 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18.
5 See Korean Film Council’s past box office official statistics, Gye-yeon Kim, “List of
Movies with 10 Million Viewers,” Yonhap News, June 11, 2022, accessed December 22,
2022, www.yna.co.kr/view/AKR20220610118500005.
6 Hyunseon Lee, “From Festival Films to Film Festivals: Korean Cinema at European
Film Festivals,” in Korean Film and Festivals: Global Transcultural Flows, edited by
Hyunseon Lee (London; New York: Routledge, 2022), 15–40.
7 Robert A. Rosenstone, “History in Image/History in Words: Reflections on the Possibil­
ity of Putting History onto Film,” American Historical Review 93 (1988): 1173–85. As
Hana Lee also points out in her chapter in this volume, Rosenstone uses four criteria
that prevent films from becoming a history in their own right: (1) a film’s single-layered
narrative cannot fully reflect the history’s multi-layered interpretations; (2) films lack a
process for providing evidence, which prevents them from providing analysis or criti­
cism; (3) the dramatic structure of film (exposition–climax–denouement) prevents it
from reproducing a grand narrative; and (4) film cannot be a field of history that pursues
truth because it is an art form that creates fabricated narratives.
 Memory, Imagination, and Narrative of the Past 13

8 Robert A. Rosenstone, Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).
9 Alison Landsberg, “Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner,” in Cyber­
space, Cyberbodies, Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment, edited by
Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows (London; Thousand Oaks; New Delhi: Sage
Publications, 1995), 176.
10 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations
no. 26, Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory (Spring 1989), accessed Decem­
ber 22, 2022, www.jstor.org/stable/i347292, 8.
11 Ibid., 7.
12 Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
2004).
13 Chris Weedon and Glenn Jordan, “Collective Memory: Theory and Politics,” Social
Semiotics 22, no. 2 (2012): 143–53. DOI: 10.1080/10350330.2012.664969, 143.
14 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press
1992), 53
15 Weedon and Jordan, “Collective Memory,” 150.
16 Ibid., 143.
17 Tessa Morris-Suzuki, The Past within Us: Media, Memory, History (London: Verso,
2005), 4.
18 Weedon and Jordan, “Collective Memory,” 147.
19 Johannes von Moltke, “Sympathy for the Devil: Cinema, History, and the Politics of
Emotion,” in Der Untergang? Nazis, Culture, and Cinema: New German Critique, vol.
102, 17–43. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007, accessed December 20, 2022, www.
jstor.org/stable/i27669204.
20 Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the
Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 5.
21 Ibid.
22 Hyunseon Lee, “The South Korean Blockbuster and a Divided Nation,” International
Journal of Korean History 21, no. 1 (2016): 259–64, accessed December 11, 2022,
https://ijkh.khistory.org/upload/pdf/ijkh-21-1-259.pdf.
23 Robert Burgoyne, “Generational Memory and Affect in Letters from Iwo Jima,” in A
Companion to the Historical Film, edited by Robert A. Rosenstone and Constantin Par­
vulescu (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 349.
24 Weedon and Jordan, “Collective Memory,” 150.

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Trends.” In Seoul Searching: Culture and Identity in Contemporary Korean Cinema.
Edited by Frances Gateward, 15–35. Albany: SUNY University Press, 2007.
Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Rosenstone, Robert A. “History in Image/History in Words: Reflections on the Possibility of
Putting History Onto Film,” American Historical Review 93 (1988): 1173–85.
Rosenstone, Robert A. Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to our Idea of History.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.
Rosenstone, Robert A. History on Film; Film on History. London: Routledge, 2018; New
York: Longman/Pearson, 2006.
Von Moltke, Johannes. “Sympathy for the Devil: Cinema, History, and the Politics of Emo­
tion.” In Der Untergang? Nazis, Culture, and Cinema: New German Critique 102 (2007):
17–43. Durham: Duke University Press. Accessed December 22, 2022. www.jstor.org/
stable/i27669204.
Weedon, Chris, and Glenn Jordan. “Collective Memory: Theory and Politics.” Social Semi­
otics 22, no. 2 (2012): 143–53. DOI: 10.1080/10350330.2012.664969
Part I

Issues, Positions and

Approaches to Historical
Memory
2 Making Nations
Film Propaganda in Colonial Korea
and Nazi Germany

Yong-Ku Cha

Introduction: Film and Politics: A Ghostly Return

In the 2010s, films based on specific historical events smashed box office records
in South Korea. The Admiral: Roaring Currents (Myŏngryang, dir. Kim Han-min
[Kim Hanmin], 2014), Ode to My Father (Gukje Sijang, dir. Youn Je-kyoon [Youn
Chaekyun], 2014), and Operation Chromite (Incheon Sangnyuk Jakjeon, dir. Lee
Jae-han [I Chaehan] 2016) all depict historical events, namely the victory against
the Japanese fleet in 1597, South Korea’s modernization era, and the successful
amphibious landing in conflict with communist North Korea, respectively. The
Admiral became the most-watched film in Korean film history with 17.6 million
admissions, while Ode to My Father was seen by 14.2 million local viewers.1 It is
worth noting that these films, which appeal to audiences’ sense of patriotism, were
released when conservative President Park Geun-hye [Pak Kŭnhye] was in power.
The president has seen all three films and is reported to have been deeply touched
by Ode to My Father, even shedding tears.
In its obsession with representing history, South Korean popular cinema has
built an emotional attachment to the past. Former President Park emphasized the
importance of history education and, in many of her official speeches, made it
clear that the correcting and rewriting of biased and distorted historical facts are
essential to national pride in South Korea’s historical achievements. To rectify a
distorted national history, Park’s government utilized political power to exercise
control over Korean cinema, and the Korean film industry was pressured into mak­
ing a series of patriotic movies by the Park administration (2013–2017).
However, the cozy relationship between cinema and politics is a complex phe­
nomenon that has a long history, and lessons from the political use of film can be
learned from the past. For example, in this regard, films of colonial Korea and
Nazi Germany engaged in cinematic fabrication and the weaponization of history.
The filmmakers of Nazi Germany and colonial Korea each used film as a tool for
reconstructing collective memory. Despite their different political systems—with
the Nazi regime as a totalitarian government and colonial Korea as a colonized
one—the pro-government propaganda films of both sides played a significant role
in creating their national identities.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003279013-3
18 Yong-Ku Cha

Although scholars have examined the use of cinema in spreading national­

ist propaganda, most studies have focused exclusively on one nation, ignoring
direct comparisons of propaganda films between different countries. This chapter
aims to compare the cinematic propaganda of colonial Korea and Nazi Germany,
revealing how the two countries used film to construct narratives of nationalism.
Furthermore, this chapter will aid our recognition and understanding of the simi­
larities and differences between victims and aggressors in spreading nationalist
propaganda.

Colonial Korean Film

In 1910, Korea was officially annexed by the Japanese Empire. During the Japa­
nese occupation from 1910 to 1945, the film industry in colonial Korea was
ironically a vibrant business. Korean filmmakers looked forward to collaborat­
ing with their Japanese counterparts and Japan’s major studios. Whether for
commercial or political purposes, they desperately—according to Mary Louise
Pratt, who used the term ‘contact zones’ to describe those spaces where “cul­
tures meet, clash, and grapple with each other’—grappled with problems in
the colonial frontier.2 Arirang, a Korean silent film directed by Na Un-kyu [Na
Yunkyu, 1902–1937] in 1926, was regarded as a national film that evoked the
strong nationalistic sentiment of han (resentment). However, within the system
of cooperation between colonial Korea and mainland Japan, the Korean colonial
government encouraged and promoted the production of pro-Japanese propa­
ganda films.3
From 1937 onward, Japan started a war with China, and local screens began to
undergo fundamental changes. The Korean colonial government formalized the
assimilation policies of Naeseon ilche [Naesŏn ilch’e], which translates as Japan
and Korea as one body. With the doctrine of common ancestors (Ilsôn tongjoron),
the slogan of Naeseon ilche sought to legitimize the annexation of Korea by Japan.
Films made during this wartime regime were developed to shore up the falter­
ing campaign of this ideology. By August 1940, film production, distribution, and
exhibitions in colonial Korea had come under the strict control of Korean film law,
which was designed to censor, edit, and potentially ban any films that might dam­
age the Japanese Empire and challenge its colonial authority. This complete film
censorship controlled all aspects of the filmmaking process, forcing every film­
maker to follow the film censorship ordinance.4
In a state of total war, film industries in colonial Korea were created to present
Japan and Korea as one nation, coproducing films that fostered a strong feeling of
unity between the two nations with the intent of transforming Koreans into loyal
subjects of the Japanese Empire. The colonial Korean film industry was used as a
propaganda tool to promote the ideology of Naeseon ilche and attempt to assist the
establishment of the Japanese total war system. Of the 51 films made in colonial
Korea between 1937 and 1945, nearly all were designed to imbue Koreans with the
doctrine of Japan and Korea as a single body.5
 Making Nations 19

Transcolonial Film Coproductions

The transcolonial cinematic network between Korea and Japan produced numerous
Joseon films—colonial Korean films made during Japanese imperialism—within
the Japanese Empire. This chapter focuses on films by Director Choi In-gyu
[Ch’oe Inkyu, 1911–1950?], who was active in embracing the assimilationist
policy of Naeseon ilche and making pro-Japanese propaganda films. This chapter
aims to show how national identity is imagined, invented, and reconstructed by
films. The chapter also seeks to reveal how films play a formative role in the
nation-building process. While the two films that will be analyzed below have
been the subject of many research efforts,6 there is a lack of studies that examine
how new nations can be created through cinema. Furthermore, as Tuition and
Homeless Angels were made by a private film company operation in colonial
Korea, the plan, production, and distribution of the two films show how the film­
makers of colonial Korea voluntarily tended to respond at Japan’s request of the
Naeseon ilche ideology.

Tuition (Suŏmnyo, 1940)

The original scenario for Tuition was written in Japanese by Yoo Soo-young [U
Suyŏng], a fourth-grade Korean elementary school student and prizewinner of
a writing contest. Nishiki Motosada, an advisory board member of the colonial
government’s Book Department, asked Yi Chang-yong [I Ch’angyong], presi­
dent of the Goryeo Film Company, to make the essay into a film. The producer,
Yi, who had tried to seize lucrative opportunities to screen Korean films out­
side Korea, took the approach of fostering collaboration between Japanese and
Korean filmmakers.
Under the slogan interchange between Korea and Japan, Yi hired Yagi Yasutarō,
one of the most acclaimed scenario writers in Japan. He also selected amateur
child actors and invited Susukida Kenji from Japan for the role of the protagonist’s
teacher. In June 1940, director Choi In-gyu began filming. Choi In-gyu was one of
the most active movie directors at the end of Japanese colonial rule. His film career
began with Tuition, which ushered in a demand called the New Order of Cinema.
Commercially, Tuition was a box office hit in colonial Korea.
The film is set in the city of Suwon, Korea, in the 1930s. At the start of the
film, audiences are introduced to fourth-grade student Yeong-dal, who is learning
geography. On the blackboard in Yeong-dal’s classroom, a map of ‘our state’ is
drawn with chalk, depicting the Japanese islands and the Korean peninsula as one
state. The teacher and students speak Japanese, and all classroom notices are in
Japanese language. At home after school, Yeong-dal reads from his textbook in
a loud voice, ‘Our land includes Japanese islands, the Korean peninsula, Man­
churia, and Kwantung.’ Tuition, the first children’s film made in colonial Korea,
was designed to act as a vehicle of propaganda for the racial and imperial unity
of Korea and Japan.
20 Yong-Ku Cha

Homeless Angels (Jibeopneun Cheonsa [Chip Ŏmnŭn ch’ŏnsa], 1941)

Homeless Angels was produced by the Goryeo Film Company, featured an
all-Korean cast, including domestic star Kim Shin-jae, and was directed by Choi
In-gyu. It was inspired by the true story of a Korean Christian pastor who rescued
homeless children (mostly young boys) and resettled them in an orphanage in the
countryside. Similar to the film Tuition, Homeless Angels was a transcolonial film
coproduction with the Japanese Empire. The original script was written in Japanese
by Japanese writer Nishigame Motosada, and the script was later translated into
Korean by the colonial writer Im Hwa [Im Hwa].
The film demonstrates how thoroughly Korean filmmakers had become assimi­
lated into Imperial Japanese doctrine due to the Naeseon ilche ideology. The film’s
final sequence shows a mixed group of orphaned children and adults chanting the
Pledge of the Imperial Subjects in Japanese. This scene emphasizes the assimila­
tion of Koreans into the Japanese Empire.
Korean filmmakers had begun using the national Japanese language and adopt­
ing Japanese names. On the surface, they also began to express the nationalis­
tic ideals expected of them by the colonial administration. Homeless Angels was
designed to inculcate educational messages intended to transform the Korean peo­
ple into loyal subjects of Japan. Colonial Korean film producers were no doubt
aware that the film’s ending, with its emphasis on unity between the Japanese and
Koreans, would meet with the approval of the Japanese authorities and censorship
offices in both Korea and Japan.

The Failed Cinematic Dream of One Nation

Goryeo Film Company’s close connection with Japan’s distributors, which
included Towa Company, helped it export Tuition and Homeless Angels to Japan.
In fact, unlike their releases in colonial Korea, the two films faced difficult barriers
in mainland Japan. Tuition passed the censors and enjoyed box office success in
colonial Korea, but its Japanese release, which was promoted by Towa Company,
was delayed for more than a year before its release was finally denied.
Homeless Angels was praised as a Ministry of Education recommended film.
This thrilling masterpiece, which ran over two hours, was approved by the cen­
sorship board in Korea in mid-July 1941 and given a special screening in Japan
in September 1941.7 However, despite its overwhelmingly positive reception, the
Japanese Home Ministry strictly censored the film and recommended redacting
scenes they considered inappropriate, claiming that the film violated the spirit of
the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The movie was modified from its
original release, resulting in 218 meters (or about eight minutes) of cut film, but
it was considered a box office flop in Japan. Tuition and Homeless Angels failed,
struggling to gain recognition as Imperial Japanese films, and were ‘ultimately
categorized as Joseon films.’8
Although Director Choi In-gyu’s plans did not come to fruition, he continued
to direct a series of propaganda films advocating for and promoting Japanese
 Making Nations 21

imperialism. In September 1942, the Japanese colonial government closed all

existing film companies in colonial Korea and, in the end, established the Joseon
Film Production Company (JFPC), which was directly administered by the colo­
nial authorities. Choi In-gyu joined the JFPC and fulfilled his long-held ambition
to become a director of propaganda films. His story illustrates the dilemmas and
tragedies of colonial Koreans who wanted but were unable to become Japanese.
Despite the similarities between the colonial Korean and Nazi German film
industries in spreading nationalist propaganda, there are significant differences
between these two countries’ ways of promoting national values: the colo­
nial Koreans adopted transcolonial nationhood (i.e., the strategy of integrat­
ing nations), whereas the Nazis excluded minorities, such as Jews. Therefore,
dichotomous evaluations of the victim and the aggressor are inconsistent with
existing standard interpretations. Colonial Korea, which is generally known as
having experienced the trauma of colonization, also engaged in cinematic fabri­
cation and the weaponization of history, as Nazi Germany did. Propaganda films
in both colonial Korea and Nazi Germany played a significant role in recon­
structing their national identities. Regarding the cinematic reinvention of these
national identities, we should eschew the artificial dichotomy between victims
and aggressors.

Nazi Nationalism
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, patriotic elites living in European nations
increasingly relied on medieval tropes in ethnonationalist rhetoric. They sum­
moned their own national history, and the dead medieval heroic figures, into being.
In the words of Jacques Lacan, they were “historicised in the present—historicised
in the present because it was lived in the past.”9 Therefore, he writes, the past has a
claim on the present. In this context, the film played an important role: it was used
to capture the hearts and minds of the people and to convey a sense of national soul
to a wide audience. Documentary films and feature films introduced a broad audi­
ence to masterpieces and heroes of national culture, providing historical figures
with a dramatic visual language.
Nationalism has encouraged an understanding of history in which history offers
a narrative for what the future might become. National memory culture has rep­
resented history through the production of novels, monuments, and films. The
early 20th century saw a resurgence in the popularity of medieval heroic figures
and various forms of popular media, such as narrative fiction, photography, and
film, that featured ahistorical reenactment of the medieval past. Through the use of
medieval history, cinemas became political weapon of Nazi nationalism that pro­
moted national values. In nationalist thinking, medievalism10 was a consequence
of searching the idea of the nation in wishful fantasies of (lost) medieval unity and
glory. The politics of memory served to shape the collective memory of a nation
and its haunted medievalism. The Nazi view of history aestheticized everyday life
and politics through the use of the film apparatus; the dramatization of a medieval
object could create the illusion of a spatial experience.
22 Yong-Ku Cha

In the 1920s, historians helped to reinvent and rewrite the Middle Ages as an
ideal period of German hegemony and expansion in Europe. Right-wing medieval­
ists, such as Percy Ernst Schramm and Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz,11 detested the
degenerate Weimar Republic. Their groundbreaking biographies of great German
rulers, written in 1920s Heidelberg, reflected the anxieties of an unstable Weimar
Republic and the wish for a charismatic modern leader. They longed for a heroic
leader who would restore German hegemony. For many, who saw the present as a
time of social and spiritual destabilization, medieval society seemed to be stable
and orderly, characterized by territorial expansion and a European empire united
under German hegemony. Unsurprisingly, Nazi leaders, including Hermann Goer­
ing, Heinrich Himmler, and Adolf Hitler himself, were enthusiastic about Kantoro­
wicz’s biography of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (d. 1250), which glorified
the totalitarian state and imperial power. As Walter Benjamin reminds us, Nazi
rulers took a ‘tiger’s leap into the past’:12 both conservatives and Nazis considered
the Middle Ages to be a golden age of political unity under German emperors, and
they sponsored cinematic productions related to a reinvented Middle Ages, as we
will see later on.
In Inventing the Middle Ages, Norman F. Cantor, the premier historian of the
Middle Ages, traces the Nazis’ strong interest in and profound impact upon medi­
eval studies, particularly the ways in which they promoted the use of history, lin­
guistics, and folklore as tools for shaping the ideology of the Aryan master race.13
To reinterpret history and propagate their ideology, the Nazis used new and emerg­
ing technologies of the 20th century, including film. Bettina Bildhauer, a medieval
specialist, argues that ‘film since its invention has always been interested in medi­
eval settings.’14 She continues that

the Middle Ages used to bolster politicians’ claims of nationhood by provid­

ing origin myths for modern nations in the distant past in ways that could be
seen as deliberate . . . they are currently being claimed back from nationalist
appropriations in particular during the Third Reich.15

Troubled Times
World War I left behind destruction on an unprecedented scale, and the trauma of
the war has been seen in popular discourse ever since. Throughout the world, the
legacy of the war threatened domestic and international spheres, but it hit Germany
like nowhere else: in the aftermath of World War I, Germany was burdened by the
twin shocks of defeat and revolution. Imperialist nostalgia for the glory days of
the medieval empire was evident in Germans living in the dismal Weimar years.
At the very heart of such nostalgia lay the concepts of an imperial German mon­
archy and the epoch of imperial glory, which commenced with the accession of
the Ottonian dynasty in the 10th century and ended with the demise of the Hohen­
staufen in the 13th century.
 Making Nations 23

This highly politicized view of German history used medieval studies as a tool
for achieving own purposes, and the idea of German nationhood was moved back
into the Middle Ages. German people were reminded of the glorious political and
military accomplishments of their ancestors. The present was portrayed as degener­
ate and lacking the heroism, cultural accomplishments, or the moral seriousness of
medieval times. The process of creating new states in Eastern and Central Europe,
German territorial losses imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, and the resurgence of
German racism all affected myths of medieval national origins, blood purity, and
ethnic enmity.
As David Wallace, a scholar of medieval literature, rightly mentions, these are
troubled times in which ‘we are seeing politics strongly intrude upon medieval
studies.’16 Prominent scholars were on the frontline of the nationalist political
movements, which aimed to find a historical basis for national identity and purity
and project ethnic nationalism onto the past. Scholars in the Weimar Republic
looked back at the splendor of medieval times, praising eastward settlement and
cultivation: the ancestors of modern Germany had conquered and colonized, once
and for all, their sacred, immutable, and irrevocable homelands, which Germany
had now been forced to cede to its neighbors. History was weaponized for political
gain, and the Middle Ages were back with a vengeance.

Nazi Medievalism in Propaganda Films

As mentioned previously, key elements of Nazi ideology appeared in film and
in real life prior to Hitler’s rise to power. They just became stronger after 1933.
Just as left-wing and communist films had been produced in Weimar Germany,
right-wing and revanchist films, as well as nationalistic and fascist ones, were now
being made. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the Nazis used the myth of the Mid­
dle Ages as a historical role model in German history. The revival of the medieval
past was instrumentalized by nationalists: medieval emperors were now educators
of the Germanic people, in terms of their Germanness, and leaders who could guide
the nation’s destiny. The National Socialist government was obsessed with fulfill­
ing the same historic role as the medieval empire. The Middle Ages was at the
heart of right-wing Germany, and people believed that their Third Reich was the
rebirth of the first German empire. They wanted to reestablish historical continui­
ties through the use of a golden medieval past.
From the beginning, the reimagined Middle Ages, or medievalism, was a cen­
tral trope in Nazi propaganda films. As Goebbels notes in his 1934 diary, ‘film
is one of the most modern and far-reaching ways of influencing the masses.’17
In his speech on ‘Die deutsche Kultur vor neuen Aufgaben’ (German culture in
the face of new tasks), Goebbels argues that culture is the highest exponent of
the creative forces of the nation. He also declares that Nazism would be a good
patron of German culture and art. According to Goebbels, however, the artists of
the Weimar Republic had broken away from the nation. In his eyes, the culture
of the Weimar Republic exemplified cosmopolitan chaos and its inconsistencies
24 Yong-Ku Cha

with German tradition. For the Nazis, the Middle Ages were the true sources
of Aryan culture, while contemporary Germany was in the dark ages. The past
could, therefore, be politicized and used to step in the right direction and restore
political order, which had been endangered and disrupted by the weaknesses of
Weimar democracy.
In the campaign against the contemporary and un-German Entartete Kunst
(degenerate art), the Nazis aimed to resurrect a tradition-bound German culture in a
higher spiritual form involving ‘human dignity, strength of will, noble-mindedness,
strength of character, and physical comeliness.’18 By emphasizing the great
achievements of earlier German art, they vehemently tried to oppose the com­
mercialized mass media of the Weimar Republic. Degenerate art—demonstrating
negative characteristics such as obscenity, decadence, vice, greed, intellectualism,
anarchism, egocentrism, internationalism—was banned on the grounds that such
art was an insult to German feelings, and un-German in nature.
With the start of World War II, Germany’s film industry created a wave of
explicit Nazi propaganda films that were filled with slogans of pan-Germanism,
nationalism, and antisemitism.19 The Nazis claimed that degenerate art was the
product of Jews, and they used stereotypes of a Jewish enemy and emphasized,
almost exclusively, the racial inferiority of these Semitic subhumans and the intel­
lectual superiority of Aryans in antisemitic polemics. The purity of Germanness,
which the Nazis actively tried to discover by looking at the Middle Ages, could
only be recovered and preserved through the rigorous extermination of this foreign
race. International Jewish influence was seen to be corroding the purity of German
culture. Ironically, Germany’s technically advanced film industry had exaggerated
antisemitic tendencies in a very effective way.
According to Nazi propaganda, which was being used as an art of persuasion,
ancient Germanic peoples, including Aryan Greeks and Romans, had created a
harmonious society. Propaganda films praised the Blutgemeinschaft (blood com­
munity) of Germany as being an original homogenous ethnic group, and they
rejected the dangers of modernity, especially rapid urbanization and industriali­
zation. Antisemitism condemned Jews for benefiting from global turmoil linked
to urbanization, industrialization, and modernization. The ancient Germanic peo­
ples were closer to the original purity and beauty of the Nordic race. Therefore,
Nazi leaders strove to return to this peaceful and pure community, praising, for
example, the concept of medieval brotherhood. As Nazi cinematic propaganda
espoused the notion of the original people of Germany, creating a mystical under­
standing of Volk (nation) that was outside the realm of the scientific rationale,
the racist manifestation of such work became clearer. The Nazis thought that a
new type of man should be regenerated from the layers of sediment under which
he had been trapped. The National Socialism was in favor of recreating the past
within the present by following examples of ancient and medieval communities
that were united and homogenous as well as closed and hierarchical. With this
purpose in mind, the Nazis used film as an instrument for reinventing German
medieval history.
 Making Nations 25

Ewiger Wald (Eternal Forest, 1936)

The Nazis developed a vast and elaborate propaganda system that made use of new
20th-century media, including cinema. Film became an intricate part of the Nazi
campaign to disseminate Nazi ideology to the masses and influence individuals’
beliefs. Ewiger Wald, a Nazi Kulturfilm (culture film) directed by Hanns Springer
and Rolf von Sonjevski-Jamrowski, is a remarkable example of Nazi medieval­
ism.20 Released in 1936, it sought to cover the organic and analogical symbiosis
between the German forest and the German people, so embodying a Nazi vision
of history. By making a German forest a symbol of the eternal nation and state,
the entire course of German history, from prehistoric to National Socialist times,
could be systematically re-arranged, re-staged, and re-written. Fascists effectively
appropriated the technology of reproduction as a tool to use and abuse history, and
they adeptly manipulated the media in their own interests.
In particular, the film reinterprets the Middle Ages for political and national­
istic purposes and portrays a mystical bond as existing between the pure German
race and the fertile German soil. The forest, which enabled the German people to
rise above their troubled history, becomes a symbol of a strong and secure nation.
Peaceful and noble peasants working the soil and living in harmony with the forest,
craftsmen building and sculpting from wood, artists working on Gothic churches,
and Teutonic knights driving territorial expansion eastward are all illustrated as
being heroes of the golden period Middle Ages. The film portrays them as being
peaceful while also emphasizing the harmonious history of Germany, which had
experienced frequent aggressions from foreign neighbors.
By depicting archaic, premodern, and even anti-modern sentiments, the film
features an idealized vision of the forest peasantry and highlights that, in medi­
eval times, hearty German peasant farmers worked with their sacred homeland and
achieved unity and greatness. Rural virtues and the sacredness of the soil are cen­
tral themes of the propaganda film. It also lauds the great passion and achievements
of craftsmen and artisans: the working class. The filmmaker emphasizes the need
for expanding Lebensraum (living space), which drove Teutonic knights to conquer
through militaristic expansion. After a long introductory sequence that presents
different visions of the German landscape through the seasons, accompanied by a
large orchestra and a male and female choir singing a long ode, a narrator is heard
declaring with great pathos: ‘Ewiger Wald, ewiges Volk, es lebt der Baum wie du
und ich. Er strebt zum Raum wie du und ich’ (Eternal forest, eternal nation, the
tree is alive like you and I. It strives towards its space like you and I). This infers
that territorial expansionism is regarded as the sacred mission of German people
and the national territories that their ancestors acquired should be protected and
preserved. To emphasize the collective nature of nation-building, the narrator uses
the collective ‘we’—the body of a nation or a state.
After the prelude, which lasts almost ten minutes, the film portrays the legend­
ary Battle of the Teutoburg Forest as a fight for liberation where Germans struggle
against Roman soldiers who have intruded into German territory. This serves as
a historical prototype for more modern conflicts with France such as the Wars of
26 Yong-Ku Cha

Liberations against Napoleon (1813–1815), the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871),

and World War I (1914–18). The battle scene, with its strong focus on Herman the
German—the hero of the fight for German liberation—shows the forest as the ori­
gin of the German nation, and it is secured by a victory attributed to fallen warriors.
At the same time, Ewiger Wald promotes cultural isolationism, which rejects
foreign influences over German national culture. The filmic perceptions of the
Middle Ages see cultural isolationism, which rejects foreign influences in the crea­
tion of national culture, as demonstrating the pure nature and deep roots of national
existence and recovering an original ethnicity: while the film depicts the Roman or
French others as being aggressive invaders, Slavic or Eastern others are denigrated
as being inferior steppe people. Here, there is no culture to be reckoned with. The
chorus insinuates that land in the East is vacant and unimproved, wasting away
under the indolence of uncivilized Slavic hordes. The phalanxes of armored cru­
saders are doubly ominous when the narrator commands, ‘to the East you can hear
the words: German knights take up your swords! Expand the soil, expand the for­
est! Create room for the nation and its inheritors!’

Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew, 1940)

Ewiger Wald employs a variety of techniques to turn history into nature. As the
camera scans a medieval Gothic cathedral, the architectural monument fades in
and out of a forest background that closely resembles the building’s outlines. The
pillars of the cathedral stretch ever higher, gradually fading into the tall trunks of
beech trees, and stained-glass windows filter a beam of sunlight like a beech bough
would. The production pioneered advanced cinematographic techniques, such as
the moving camera, scene dissolves, and superimposition. Later, these techniques
were used in the most malicious way in Der Ewige Jude, when groups of Jews
were visually equated with packs of rats. Art education in cinema experienced a
significance boost under National Socialism.
Released in 1940, the Nazi propaganda film Der Ewige Jude,21 directed by Fritz
Hippler, head of the film division of Nazi Propaganda Ministry, is infamous for its
horrific antisemitism. At the behest of Joseph Goebbels, minister of propaganda,
and under the guidance of Adolf Hitler, the film used technical manipulations to
legitimize the dehumanization and annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.22
Der Ewige Jude has been the subject of extensive scholarly criticism. However,
scholarship on this antisemitic propaganda film centers around its unique construc­
tion, its contents, and its use as a tool for Nazi ideology. However, its uses and
abuses of history, particularly medieval history, have not been investigated. Hip­
pler and his staff produced Der Ewige Jude as a documentary, but it imitates the
affective structures of fictional film ‘by combining documentary footage from the
ghettos with clips cut from newsreels, other National Socialist documentaries, and
even Weimar-era and Yiddish films.’23 To accomplish its goals, Hippler needed to
puzzle over fragments of history.
Wrapped up in the guise of being a brutally honest documentary, the appalling
pseudo-documentary Der Ewige Jude uses a series of odious images that show
 Making Nations 27

modern contemporary Jewish art as distorted and degenerate, in contrast to racially

pure Nordische Schönheit (Nordic beauty) and tradition-bound German art. The
film looks back to the Aryan Greeks, suggesting that the Aryan-Hellenic sculptures
of the ancient Greeks are a model for racial ideal and represent a genuine racial
consanguinity between Greek and Nordic aesthetics (echte Rassenverwandtschaft).
Using medieval German statues, two Gothic works—the Bamberg Rider (Der
Bamberger Reiter) and Uta von Naumburg—are combined into a single image by
focusing on their heads, which fill the entire screen. The Bamberg Rider is an early
13th-century life-size stone equestrian sculpture set in the cathedral in Bamberg,
Germany. The human subject looks westward, has an intense and furious gaze,
and his mouth is open, as if he is speaking. The true identity of the crowned, yet
unarmed, man remains unknown. It is speculated that it could be a particular saint,
a royal, or a representation of the Messiah.24 Due to vast gaps in knowledge about
this famous medieval sculpture, nationalists were able to appropriate and expro­
priate the statue, and it has been extolled as being the pinnacle of German aes­
thetic achievement. In a 1935 radio broadcast, Kantorowicz describes it as the true
national shrine of the Germans and the Germanic-Mediterranean ideal racial type.
Located in the early Gothic west choir of Naumburg Cathedral, Uta of Naumburg
is a life-size donor sculpture rendered by an anonymous Naumburg master. Uta
was one of 12 donators to Naumburg Cathedral. Therefore, a painted statue, dedi­
cated to her memory and honor, was erected around 1250. While the true identity
of the Bamberg Rider continues to elude scholars, the history of Uta’s life also lies
in darkness, except for the fact that she married Ekkehard II and the couple had no
children. She is known to history in name only. And, like the mysterious Bamberg
Rider, from the early 20th century on, a sequence of idealized images of Uta was
featured in publications. Previously, Uta’s statue had been forgotten and ignored
for almost 800 years. It is hard to believe that, until the 1920s, no one took much
notice of the statue.
However, right-wing nationalists began to use the statues for their own political
interests, characterized by the politicization of memory and the aestheticization
of politics. Through the politics of art (Kunstpolitik), the Bamberg Rider and Uta
became the figures who represented the national character of the German people.
The statues became enormously popular and were seen as evidence of an eter­
nally German culture; their popularity made use of the new technology of moving
pictures—cinema—by reinforcing a belief in a special destiny for Germany as a
singular nation whose history dates back to the Middle Ages.
Although the cathedrals of Bamberg and Naumburg belong to completely dif­
ferent sculptural cycles and have their own histories, the German fascists made the
aestheticization of politics possible through the apparatus of film, and figures were
enlisted to reinforce a German idea of art. A well-known voice actor of the time,
Harry Giese, narrated for cinema audiences, saying: ‘Der Schöheitsbegriff des nor­
dischen Menschen ist dem Juden von seiner ganzen Natur aus unverständlich und
wird ihm ewig unverständlich bleiben’ (The Nordic concept of beauty is, by its very
nature, completely incomprehensible to the Jew, and always will be) and ‘Für die
Reinheit und Sauberkeit des deutschen Kunstempfindenseins hat der wurzellose
28 Yong-Ku Cha

Jude kein Organ’ (The rootless Jew has no feeling for the purity and cleanliness of
the German idea of art).
Emerging on the left-hand side of the screen, Uta slides up against the shoul­
der of the Bamberg Rider to illustrate the noble beauty of German culture imper­
iled by Jewish degeneracy. Then, to the right of Uta’s image, the head of Adam
fades in. Finally, the head of Eve fades in, slightly below and to the left of Adam.
These Adam and Eve portal sculptures can be found beside the door of Bamberg
Cathedral. The variation of placement and gaze continues as Botticelli’s Venus,
Michelangelo’s Birth of Adam, and a representation of a Madonna and child float
solemnly down the screen.25
Film acts as a powerful agent for the tremendous shattering and liquidation of
aura in cultural heritage. Der Ewige Jude removes medieval statues from their
appropriate surroundings—both spatially, from their placement as a mounted rider
and a female donor in a holy space, and physically, from their historical context of
the Middle Ages—and places them into an incongruous juxtaposition. It detaches
the replicated objects from the sphere of tradition. Divorced from the standing
figure of her spouse (Ekkehard), Uta seems to now be leaning over the shoulder
of the Bamberg Rider from behind, and she is romantically portrayed as if she is
riding with him. The focus of the film is not so much an attempt to convey a spatial
experience of the Naumburg Cathedral as it is an attempt to enliven the sculpture
of Uta. The integration of the sculpture into the architecture of the cathedral takes
a back seat. It is a strange interpretation of space and time.
Through the appalling pseudo-documentary Der Ewige Jude, viewers are hyp­
notized into seeing medieval statues as contemporary people. The film encom­
passes diverse cultural and historical contexts and involves social interactions.
Uta and the Bamberg Rider are decontextualized from sacral environments and
are reincarnated as a testament to the ideal German. Their cult value is thwarted,
and, through technological reproduction in the film, they lose, as Walter Benja­
min claims, any claim to historicity. The cinematic fabrication of fact brings the
sculptures physically closer to viewers and blurs the approximate 750 years that
separates the audience from the medieval stone sculptures.
Nazi medievalization was not an expression of political reaction but rather one
of a longing for a lost national past. The past would be used for the ongoing and
future construction of a national identity. Nazism drew on powerful sentiments and
sensibilities and allowed for the combination of a mystic past with the future. Ger­
man medieval art was used by a wide spectrum of society, including politicians,
scholars, artists, and the public, and became a usable past that could ameliorate,
to some measure, disillusionment with present conditions. In terms of Uta’s sand­
stone statue, nationalist movements found a past that was useful for promoting
German national consciousness, superiority, and pride. The nationalization of the
statue recreated a racialized German community or, to use a term coined by Bene­
dict Anderson, an ‘imagined community.’26 Racial Germanization repositioned the
statue in a new light by removing Uta from a medieval environment and separating
her from her relatives, including her spouse.
 Making Nations 29

Conclusion: Film and Collective Memory in Colonial Korea

and Nazi Germany
Scholars have examined the use of cinema in spreading nationalist propaganda.
However, most of these studies focus exclusively on one nation, thus ignoring
directly comparing propaganda films of different countries. This study aimed to
compare cinematic propaganda of colonial Korea and Nazi Germany. Despite
the similarities between the colonial Korean and Nazi German film industries in
spreading nationalist propaganda, there are significant differences between these
two countries’ ways of promoting national values. Comparing these two countries
reveals that dichotomous evaluations of the victim and the aggressor are inconsist­
ent with existing standard interpretations.
The films Der Ewige Wald and Der Ewige Jude describe the medieval German
nation as racially pure and ideal, emphasizing the modern German state as failed
and influenced by the pernicious Jewish power. Two films like Tuition and Home­
less Angels produced during the late Japanese colonial era present imperial Japan
and colonial Korea as one nation. The films on which this chapter focuses have
some common features of making nations. To use Eric Hobsbawm’s definition,
nationalism is best understood as a political ideology.27 Like history books, films
play a very significant role in constructing narratives of nationalism.
The slogan Naeseon ilche is based on the idea that the origins of ancient
Japan and Korea are the same. Seeking to instill this ideology in the Korean
audience, Tuition and Homeless Angels intend to promulgate the harmony and
unity between the two nations. The films Der Ewige Wald and Der ewige Jude
were intended to bolster claims of nationhood by providing origin myths for
modern nations in the distant past, thus affecting myths of medieval national
origins, blood purity, and ethnic enmity. The past would be used for the ongoing
and future construction of a national identity. Nazism drew on powerful senti­
ments and sensibilities and allowed for the combination of a mystic past with
the present and future.
Due to the political and ideological differences between Nazi film policy
and colonial Korea’s film industry, drawing a parallel between them is dan­
gerous. Nonetheless, the comfortable relationship between cinema and politics
and cinema’s response to political and social changes appears like a ghost that
transcends time and space. The ghost of ferocious censorship and propaganda
still haunts, consumes, and glorifies history. The film policies of the authoritar­
ian regimes in Germany and colonial Korea struggled to use history to create a
unified national identity. To appeal to audiences’ sense of national identity, Choi
In-gyu’s films embodied nation-building policies in the same manner as the
Nazis did. For these political purposes, strategies of exclusion were launched.
While Nazi propaganda films were intended to demonstrate the otherness of
the Jews by labeling German Jewish artists as degenerate, excluding artists and
filmmakers from receiving funding from the Japanese Empire produced a simi­
lar effect.
30 Yong-Ku Cha

Notes
1 Jihoon Kim, “Korean Popular Cinema and Television in the Twenty-First Century:
Parallax Views on National/Transnational Disjunctures,” Journal of Popular Film
and Television 47 (2019): 2–8; Jihoon Kim, “Perceptual Realism and Digital VFXs in
the Korean Blockbuster of the 2010s: The Admiral: Roaring Currents and Ode to My
Father,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 47 (2019): 9–20.
2 Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession (1991): 34.
3 Brian Yecies, “Systematization of Film Censorship in Colonial Korea: Profiteering
from Hollywood’s First Golden Age, 1926–1936,” Journal of Korean Studies 10, no. 1
(2005): 65; Brian Yecies and Richard Howson, “The Korean ‘Cinema of Assimilation’
and the Construction of Cultural Hegemony in the Final Years of Japanese Rule,” The
Asia-Pacific Journal 11, no. 25 (2014): 3.
4 Hwajin Lee, “The Development of the Film Censorship During Colonial Period in
Korea,” The Studies in Korean Literature 35 (2008).
5 B. Yecies and R. Howson, “The Korean ‘Cinema of Assimilation’,” 5.
6 For example, Ducgi Lee, “Choe Ingyu’s the Sueopryo and the Joseon Cinemas Coor­
dinate,” The Journal of Korean Drama and Theatre 29 (2009); Chongwha Chung,
“A Study on the Filming Process of Tuition and the Comparison with Its Regarding
Texts,” Film Studies 65 (2015); Namseok Kim, “Angeles on the Streets and Korea’s
Reality in 1930s~40s,” The Journal of Korean Drama and Theatre 56 (2017); Baek
Moonim, “Revisiting Colonial Cinema Research in Korea,” Journal of Japanese and
Korean Cinema 10, no. 2 (2018).
7 B. Yecies and R. Howson, “The Korean ‘Cinema of Assimilation’,” 4.
8 Chongwha Chung, “The Identity of ‘Joseon Film’: Between Colonial Cinema and
National Cinema,” Korea Journal 59, no. 4 (2019): 33.
9 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 1: Freud’s Papers on Technique
1953–1954 (New York; London: Norton, 1991), 12.
10 The very term “medievalism” refers to how the Middle Ages has been, since the 15th
century, perceived and conceptualized by latter times. Medievalism Studies is therefore
not related to the Middle Ages per se, but rather to the ways in which the medieval period
has been understood and portrayed in the centuries that followed. For more detail, see
Ute Berns and Andrew J. Johnston, “Medievalism: A Very Short Introduction,” Euro­
pean Journal of English Studies 15, no. 2 (2011); Tison Pugh and Angela J. Weisl,
Medievalism: Making the Past in the Present (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013); Bettina
Bildhauer, “Medievalism and Cinema,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism,
edited by Louise D’Arcens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Andrew B.
R. Elliott, Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media: Appropriating the Middle Ages in the
Middle Ages in the Twenty-First Century (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2017).
11 Norman F. Cantor refers to them as ‘The Nazi Twins’ in his book, Inventing the Middle
Ages. The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century
(New York: W. Morrow, 1991), 79.
12 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 261.
13 Norman F. Cantor, Inventing the Middle, 79–160.
14 Astrid Swenson, “Historicism: Forum with Bettina Bildhauer, Stefan Goebel, Stefan
Laube, Sue Marchand and Astrid Swenson,” German History 34, no. 4 (2016): 647.
15 Swenson, “Historicism,” 655.
16 David Wallace, “Studies in Troubled Times: The 1930s,” Speculum 95, no. 1 (2020): 11.
17 Erwin Leiser, Deutschland erwache! Propaganda in Film des Dritten Reiches (Reinbek
bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1968), 40–1.
18 Jost Hermand, Culture in Dark Times: Nazi Fascism, Inner Emigration, and Exile (New
York: Berghahn Books, 2014), 29.
19 Valerie Weinstein, Antisemitism in Film Comedy in Nazi Germany (Bloomington: Indi­
ana University Press, 2019), 4.
 Making Nations 31

20 For more detail about the film, see Sabine Wilke, “Verrottet, verkommen, von fremder
Rasse durchsetzt. The Colonial Trope as Subtext of the Nazi Kulturfilm Ewiger Wald
(1936),” German Studies Review 24 (2001); Robert G. Lee and Sabine Wilke, “Forest
as Volk: Ewiger Wald and the Religion of Nature in the Third Reich,” Journal of Social
and Ecological Boundaries 1, no. 1 (2005).
21 About the content and public’s reaction to the film, see Stig Hornshøj-Møller and
David Culbert, “Der ewige Jude (1940): Joseph Goebbels’ Unequaled Monument to
Anti-Semitism,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 12, no. 1 (1992); Stig
Hornshøj-Møller, “Propaganda and Produced Reality in the Holocaust,” in Encyclope­
dia of Genocide, edited by Israel W. Chany, et al. (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 1999);
Joan Clinefelter, “A Cinematic Construction of Nazi Anti-Semitism: The Documentary
Der ewige Jude,” in Cultural History Through a National Socialist Lens: Essays on
the Cinema of the Third Reich, edited by Robert Reimer and Robert C. Reimer (New
York: Camden House, 2002), 133–54; Jennifer Hansen, “The Art and Science of Read­
ing Faces: Strategies of Racist Cinema in the Third Reich,” Shofar 28, no. 1 (2009).
22 According to Stig Hornshøj-Møller (“Propaganda and Produced Reality,” 472), “Der
ewige Jude is probably one of the most manipulated films ever made.”
23 Clinefelter, “A Cinematic Construction of Nazi Anti-Semitism,” 133.
24 Assaf Pinkus, “Imaginative Responses to Gothic Sculpture: the Bamberg Rider,” Viator
45, no. 1 (2014).
25 Wolfgang Ullrich, Uta von Naumburg. Eine deutsche Ikone (Berlin: Verlag Klaus
Wagenbach, 2011), 59.
26 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006).
27 E. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990).

Bibliography
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism. London: Verso, 2006.
Baek, Moonim. “Revisiting Colonial Cinema Research in Korea.” Journal of Japanese and
Korean Cinema 10, no. 2 (2018): 85–91.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.
Berns, Ute, and Andrew J. Johnston. “Medievalism: A Very Short Introduction.” European
Journal of English Studies 15, no. 2 (2011): 97–100.
Bildhauer, Bettina. “Medievalism and Cinema.” In The Cambridge Companion to Medieval-
ism, edited by Louise D’Arcens, 45–59. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
Cantor, Norman F. Inventing the Middle Ages. The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great
Medievalists of the Twentieth Century. New York: W. Morrow, 1991.
Chung, Chongwha. “A Study on the Filming Process of Tuition and the Comparison with Its
Regarding Texts.” Film Studies 65 (2015): 201–36.
Chung, Chongwha. “The Identity of ‘Joseon Film’: Between Colonial Cinema and National
Cinema.” Korea Journal 59, no. 4 (2019): 16–47.
Clinefelter, Joan. “A Cinematic Construction of Nazi Anti-Semitism: The Documentary Der
ewige Jude.” In Cultural History Through a National Socialist Lens: Essays on the Cinema
of the Third Reich, edited by Robert C. Reimer, 133–54. New York: Camden House, 2002.
Elliott, Andrew B. R. Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media: Appropriating the Middle Ages
in the Middle Ages in the Twenty-First Century. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2017.
Hansen, Jennifer. “The Art and Science of Reading Faces: Strategies of Racist Cinema in the
Third Reich.” Shofar 28, no. 1 (2009): 80–103.
32 Yong-Ku Cha

Hermand, Jost. Culture in Dark Times: Nazi Fascism, Inner Emigration, and Exile. New
York: Berghahn Books, 2014.
Hobsbawm, Eric J. Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990.
Hornshøj-Møller, Stig. “Propaganda and Produced Reality in the Holocaust.” In Encyclope­
dia of Genocide, Vol. 2 of Encyclopedia of Genocide, edited by Israel W. Charny, 472–4.
Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 1999.
Hornshøj-Møller, Stig, and David Culbert. “Der ewige Jude (1940): Joseph Goebbels’
unequaled monument to anti-Semitism.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television
12, no. 1 (1992): 41–67.
Kim, Jihoon. “Korean Popular Cinema and Television in the Twenty-First Century: Parallax
Views on National/Transnational Disjunctures.” Journal of Popular Film and Television
47 (2019a): 2–8.
Kim, Jihoon. “Perceptual Realism and Digital VFXs in the Korean Blockbuster of the
2010s: The Admiral: Roaring Currents and Ode to My Father.” Journal of Popular Film
and Television 47 (2019b): 9–20.
Kim, Namseok. “Angeles on the Streets and Korea’s Reality in 1930s~40s.” The Journal of
Korean Drama and Theatre 56 (2017): 13–52.
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 1: Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953–
1954. New York; London: W. W. Norton, 1991.
Lee, Ducgi. “Choe Ingyu’s the Sueopryo and the Joseon Cinemas Coordinate.” The Journal
of Korean Drama and Theatre 29 (2009): 123–52.
Lee, Hwa-Jin. “The Development of the Film Censorship During Colonial Period in Korea.”
The Studies in Korean Literature 35 (2008): 417–56.
Lee, Robert G., and Sabine Wilke. “Forest as Volk: Ewiger Wald and the Religion of Nature
in the Third Reich.” Journal of Social and Ecological Boundaries 1, no. 1 (2005): 21–46.
Leiser, Erwin. Deutschland erwache! Propaganda in Film des Dritten Reiches. Reinbek bei
Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1968.
Pinkus, Assaf. “Imaginative Responses to Gothic Sculpture: The Bamberg Rider.” Viator 45,
no. 1 (2014): 331–60.
Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession (1991): 33–40.
Pugh, Tison, and Angela J. Weisl. Medievalism: Making the Past in the Present. Abingdon:
Routledge, 2013.
Swenson, Astrid. “Historicism. Forum with Bettina Bildhauer, Stefan Goebel, Stefan Laube,
Sue Marchand and Astrid Swenson.” German History 34, no. 4 (2016): 646–71.
Ulrich, Wolfgang. Uta von Naumburg. Eine deutsche Ikone. Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagen­
bach, 2011.
Wallace, David. “Studies in Troubled Times: The 1930s.” Speculum 95, no. 1 (2020): 1–35.
Weinstein, Valerie. Antisemitism in Film Comedy in Nazi Germany. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2019.
Wilke, Sabine. “Verrottet, verkommen, von fremder Rasse durchsetzt. The Colonial Trope
as Subtext of the Nazi Kulturfilm Ewiger Wald (1936).” German Studies Review 24
(2001): 353–76.
Yecies, Brian. “Systematization of Film Censorship in Colonial Korea: Profiteering from
Hollywood’s First Golden Age, 1926–1936.” Journal of Korean Studies 10, no. 1 (2005):
59–83.
Yecies, Brian, and Richard Howson. “The Korean ‘Cinema of Assimilation’ and the Con­
struction of Cultural Hegemony in the Final Years of Japanese Rule.” The Asia-Pacific
Journal 11, no. 25 (2014): 1–11.
3 Could History Films Be Rivals
of Historians?
Historical Criticism Through
History Films

Hana Lee

Foreword: Between the Popularization of History and the Popular

Culturalization of History
This chapter redefines the concept of history films from the historian’s perspec­
tive. Today, a vast number of images are globally produced daily, acting as vivid
records of our lives ‘here and now’ and historical material documenting the pre­
sent. Films attract scholars’ attention as one of the most popular types of visual
media. Although studies of the relationship between film and history exist, ranging
from theoretical approaches to specific cases by country, this chapter will discuss
the pioneering research of Marc Ferro and Robert Rosenstone. Cinéma et Histoire
(1993), Ferro’s landmark work, deems film to be both a visual text and a historical
record, arguing that a historical analysis of film and a cinematic analysis of history
are needed to trace the relationship between the two. Calling on historians to regard
all images and cinema as history when linking cinema to the world around it, Ferro
made clear that cinema’s impact on present society could not be ignored.1 If noth­
ing else, Cinéma demanded that historians take film seriously as a product and
historical record meriting analysis. Revisioning History: Film and the Construction
of a New Past (1995), edited by Rosenstone,2 broke new ground by distinguishing
between history films, which sought primarily to recreate history, and historical
films. As history itself is constructed, films also construct history; Rosenstone thus
asks not whether ‘films recreate history’ but ‘how’ cinematic portrayals of history
raise the issue of how films read the past itself. Hence, this chapter will follow
Rosenstone’s usage in distinguishing between historical films and history films.
Despite scholars since Ferro and Rosenstone3 having treated film as objects of
historical study, few historians in Korea have done so.4 With the world’s fastest
Internet, Koreans produce original content (films, dramas, YouTube videos, etc.)
that enjoys greater domestic popularity than that of any other country. However,
Korean historians have merely begun to consider linking this visual content to
history, due to the popularity of historical dramas in Korean films and television.
Alongside the growing number of historians acknowledging the value of visual
materials and digital archiving,5 some also call for studying visual materials based
on fiction (as opposed to solely documentaries) as historical materials express­
ing an era’s collective sensibilities.6 Although Korean historians rarely discuss

DOI: 10.4324/9781003279013-4
34 Hana Lee

films and dramas, this will likely not be so in the future. While historians have
merely discussed their historical accuracy in the past,7 they now remain silent,
viewing such authenticity in popular entertainment as a pipe dream. However, this
silence deserves consideration. Do historians have nothing to say about popular
culture besides the issue of historical accuracy? While the authority and popularity
of historians and history as discipline wane and history as portrayed by popular
culture dominates, how should historians approach history video content (yŏksa
yŏngsangmul)? How should historians participate in popular culture?
Today’s public professes to learn history from films, dramas, TV documentaries,
and other visual media.8 History Special (Yŏksa sŭp’esyŏl, 1998– 2003, 2005–2006,
2009–2012), Narrating Korean History (Han’guksa chŏn, 2007– 2008), and Trac­
ing History (Yŏksach’uchŏk, 2008–2009) aired on Korea’s public broadcasting sta­
tion KBS, and the currently airing History Journal, That Day (Yŏksajŏnŏl kŭnal,
2013–2016) and History Tour, That Place (Yŏksagihaeng kŭgot, 2017–present) as
well as other history education programmes and documentaries are well known
for their educational effectiveness. However, some question whether learning a
fictionally reconstructed history through popular media such as films and dramas
is possible or desirable. They argue that their educational merits are negligible
at best and damaging at worst, as they have been first moulded in the minds of
writers and directors at the risk of distorting facts. Others argue that recreating
history through popular culture is significantly effective, as it fosters the histori­
cal imagination and awareness. Is incorporating fiction in history video content
an effective educational medium in teaching history? Or is it merely a way of
packaging narratives based on true people and events as visual entertainment for
mass consumption?
This question represents two approaches to dramatized history video content:
the first is popularizing history, and the second is making historical content, that
is, the popular culturalization of history. While used interchangeably, they are pro­
duced in entirely different contexts. The first centres history and views mass media
and history video content as tools for better conveying history to the public. The
second approach uses history as a resource for creating video content. The issue
of popularizing history, while concerned with history education, also encompasses
methodologies of historiography and historical awareness. This approach became
salient in Korean society through the efforts of historians and history educators
seeking to bring history to the public, in part to raise social consciousness, follow­
ing democratization in 1987. The acceleration of democratization in the 1990s led
to an unprecedented boom in the quality and quantity of popular culture, with its
commercial value growing daily. With the Korean Wave and rising international
interest in Korean music, dramas, and films in the 2000s, the government also
launched the Korea Creative Content Agency, linking the popularization of his­
tory and the culture industry by acknowledging and supporting popular culture as
the content guiding the culture industry. Thus, the concept of history content was
born, with several universities renaming their history departments as content and
culture departments due to the humanities crisis and neoliberalism. However, this
perverted the purpose of fostering historians, instead exploiting history to create
 Could History Films Be Rivals of Historians? 35

cultural content through the popular culturalization of history, that is, designing
historical content.
This approach could simply aim to popularize history and produce historical
content as a by-product. Nonetheless, the fact that not all history-related video
content accords with the said goal demonstrates the gap between them. Although
both seek to simplify history, the former is concerned with history’s significance,
while the latter focuses on its entertainment value.9 Roughly speaking, the former
considers the methods and forms of emphasizing history as tools, while the latter
tends to use history as a tool by prioritizing the methods and forms of its convey­
ance. Thus, many historians are concerned with how to view historical dramas and
films borrowing real events or persons while being mostly based on fiction. Lately,
the historical films debuting in Korea have primarily been history films,10 demon­
strating the public’s greater interest in films based on historical events than in the
fusion historical dramas popular in the past. Thus, this chapter will re-examine the
many concepts surrounding historical films, explore the possibilities of the history
film in Korea, and propose what role historians should play regarding them.

The Concepts of Historical Films

Historical films are theatrical features based on history or set against a historical
background and are usually labelled sagŭk (lit. ‘historical dramas’) and sidaegŭk
(lit. ‘period dramas’) in South Korea. Although many writers have attempted to
differentiate between the two, no unified consensus exists. In general, historical
dramas depict history up to the Chosŭn dynasty period (1392–1910), and period
dramas depict history from the Korean empire (1897–1910) and Japanese colonial
rule to the liberation period (1945) and the 1950s.11
History dramas are also divided into traditional (chŏngt’ong) and fusion
(p’yujŏn) genres, with the former recreating the thinking and speech to fit the time
period, while characters of the latter genre speak and think in a more contemporary
manner. Usually, historical dramas shown during KBS’s prime time slot are consid­
ered traditional, while Untold Scandal (Sŭk’aendŭl chosŏn namnyŏsangyŏlchisa,
dir. E. J-yong, 2003) is thought to be the first of the more contemporary fusion his­
torical dramas. While traditional historical dramas are generally thought to depict
standardized history and fusion historical dramas depict unofficial history, or in
many cases even entirely fabricated stories, no precise distinction exists. As the
term fusion historical drama (p’yujŏn sagŭk) began as a marketing idea to generate
viewer interest, it allowed creators to break free from basing stories on historical
facts and functioned as a shield from behind which to wield their imaginations. In
addition, although the term ‘faction’ films (p’aeksyŏn yŏnghwa), a portmanteau of
films depicting historical fact and fiction, is also used, it is now applied to histori­
cal dramas in general. We will now re-examine the usage of the terms faction and
history films by discussing the views of scholars Kim Ki-pong, Kim Ki-dŏk, and
Kim Si-mu.
According to Kim Ki-pong, who popularized the use of the term ‘faction’ in
Korea, all historical dramas are a mix of fact and fiction, i.e. faction. To him, written
36 Hana Lee

history and visual history (i.e. historical dramas) are essentially the same. ‘History,
which could be regarded as the drama of life already staged in the past, might be
no different from the sort of historical dramas that recreate history from today’s
point of view’.12 Hence, history is both a construction and a type of historical drama
wherein the historian plays a role similar to that of a historical drama producer.
The difference, however, is that history is written from a rational standpoint, while
historical dramas recreate history from an emotional perspective. Kim argues that
history is a simulacre, a type of simulation from a contemporary point of view.13
Though it is impossible to recreate the past, the historian narrates it from their per­
spective, and thus one historical event may give rise to many historical narratives
with differing interpretations. Therefore, visual history created by imaginative
interpretations of the past carries the same weight as a written historical narra­
tive.14 In other words, Kim deems all forms of historical dramas as historiophoty.15
Moreover, he claims that today’s historians should do away with their past stance
of solely devoting themselves to producing historical knowledge and establish a
new genre of historical criticism by creating a new field tasked with critiquing how
the public consumes the history inundating us today outside of historical scholar­
ship. At the same time, he cautions producers of historical dramas against distort­
ing historical facts, pointing out, ‘the core issue of historical theory for historical
dramas is how to create a space for historical dramas in which they can experiment
with methods of constructing historical narratives without contradicting historical
facts’.16 Kim Ki-pong’s discussion is valuable for raising the issue of historical
theory in defining the concept of historical dramas,17 dismantling the exclusive
authority of historians and the field of history, and arguing the need for historical
criticism. However, equating the historian’s pursuit of the truth with the distortion
of facts in historical dramas seems contradictory.
According to Kim Ki-dŏk, an advocate of history video content studies, his­
tory portrayed through visual images deserves to be treated on par with history
expressed in the written word in historical scholarship. While agreeing with Kim
Ki-pong that all films with historical subjects should be viewed as faction films,
he emphasizes the importance of fact in historical dramas in order to categorize
faction films. Moreover, he argues that criticizing factions derived from historical
subjects is ‘the duty and expansion of historical scholarship’.18 Despite the views
of many who regard faction as simply dressing historical reality with fiction, Kim
argues that such works are important in searching for the essence of the past.19 Kim
broadly categorizes faction films into four types according to films such as Once
Upon a Time in a Battlefield (Hwangsanbŏl, dir. Yi Jun-ik, 2003), The Accidental
Gangster (Kibang nandong sakŏn, dir. Yŏ Kyun-dong, 2008), Untold Scandal, and
King and the Clown (Wang ŭi namja, dir. Yi Jun-ik, 2005), exploring the criteria
that best immerse the audience. According to him, the categories are as follows:
1) films appropriately applying fiction in the context of historical reality; 2) films
emphasizing the creator’s imagination over historical reality; 3) films taking lib­
erties with specific historical facts while being based on an essence, context, or
reality; and 4) films based on historical figures and events seeking to reinterpret
facts by pursuing their underlying truth or context through fiction. Although these
 Could History Films Be Rivals of Historians? 37

categories are based on the weight they attach to fact or fiction, the first and fourth
categories are virtually indistinguishable; the second and third differ in form but
very little in perspective. Viewed in this light, this categorization of faction films
conflicts with historical facts, which, according to Kim, is important for inducing
sympathy and immersion. However, if historical dramas are regarded as a type of
history, mass popularity becomes an arbiter of history.
Moreover, film scholars have been more effective in highlighting the impor­
tance of historical facts in historical dramas. Kim Si-mu argues that while historical
dramas and history films are certainly faction films, not all faction films are history
films. Claiming that a line can be drawn between historical dramas and faction
films, he classifies historical dramas based entirely on factions as period dramas,
costume films, and faction films based on actual subjects as history films (yŏksa
yŏnghwa). Kim criticizes Kim Ki-pong’s historiophoty, regarding all films as fac­
tions despite being based on facts, such as Once Upon a Time on a Battlefield, or
fiction, such as Pak Kwang-hyŏn’s Welcome to Dongmakgol (Welk’ŏm t’u tong­
makgol, 2005).20 It is particularly noteworthy that a film scholar, not a historian,
argues that history video content cannot replace history.21 Kim takes issue with
Korea’s grand ethnonationalist discourse intervening in personal histories in his
analysis of Japanese colonial historical dramas. According to him, Modern Boy
(Modŏn po’i, dir. Chang Chi-u, 2008) is merely a historical drama, and Blue Swal­
low (Ch’ŏngyŏn, dir. Yun Chong-ch’an, 2005) a faction film, but both are forced
to yield to the grand ethnonationalist discourse. However, if his concern is whether
historical and faction films can break free of national history, then it remains vague
as to why faction and history films should be differentiated to begin with.
Despite all three scholars criticizing historical distortion in historical dramas,
they differ in the concepts of faction, historical dramas, or history films. Neither do
they draw clear distinctions or categories that demarcate genres. On the contrary,
investing historical films with the same status as history seemingly contradicts the
criticism of distorting historical facts. If all historical dramas are historiophoty,
should distortion also be viewed as part of history? Moreover, to what degree
should creators take liberties with history? As examined earlier, the issues of cat­
egories and concepts such as history films and faction and distorting history arise
from confusion over whether to view history and film from the standpoint of popu­
larizing history or as history content. The former permits historical dramas to inter­
pret history but prohibits its creation, while the latter merely borrows historical
subjects while failing to recreate the past accurately. If historians’ roles should be
expanded to interpret and criticize history video content, the relationship between
history and historical dramas needs to be clearly defined.
Therefore, the author will sort out this conceptual confusion and outline the use
of more precise and specific terms. The first of these concepts is the emplotment of
historiography. According to Hayden White, an advocate of metahistory, the only
difference between screenplay writers and historians is the former invent narrative,
while the latter finds them; both are alike in constructing them.22 Yet, what White
refers to by emplotment is the historian embedding their views within a determined
plot; this differs from the plotting by writers in constructing dramas.23 Erroneously
38 Hana Lee

equating these two concepts compares historiography to fiction and historians to

screenplay writers or novelists. The historian seeks to discover new truths/time
periods/histories and demonstrate them by narrating verifiable facts and contexts.
Though historians use their imagination in the process, writers utilize much more
of their imagination. Historical imagination based on historical probability and cin­
ematic imagination pursuing emotional impact are two different worlds.
The second is the concept of factions. As is well known, the term faction origi­
nates in the US in the 1960s, from author Truman Capote’s novel In Cold Blood
(1965). Capote embellished his investigation of a real-life murder case in the form
of, according to him, a ‘non-fiction novel’.24 Thus, faction originally referred to
a novel based on real incident borrowing journalistic techniques for mass appeal.
However, calling it a novel indicates Capote’s fictional interpretation of these
events. Therefore, faction originally meant to convey that the novel did not com­
pletely match actual events despite being written with nonfiction techniques resem­
bling fact. Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1980) or Yi In-hwa’s Korean
adaptation, The Eternal Empire (Yŏngwŏnhan cheguk, 1993), can be regarded as
the origin of the faction boom in Korea. The latter is written as a framed novel, as
the foreword mentions that the book itself is based on a text the author discovered
called A Record of Gathered Stars (Ch’wisŏngnok), making it seem as if the novel
is nonfiction based on a real source. Yi states, ‘I sought to show the facts of the
period by portraying history translated through fiction, that is in the voice of the
protagonist Yi In-mong’,25 clearly demonstrating his intent. Thus, Eternal Empire
merely appeared to be nonfiction by borrowing faction techniques; strictly speak­
ing, it is not faction. By revealing in the end that the entire story was fabricated,
the author demonstrated a plausible history, a reinterpretation of history through
entirely different eyes. In other words, portraying plausible events, not actual
events, is closer to the task of literature rather than history, but sometimes fiction
can demonstrate historical truth better than facts.
The issue raised by a historian over the character of Ri Chin depicted in novels
and TV documentaries some years ago best demonstrates this confusion over fac­
tion. The incident is as follows: Kim T’ak-hwan and Sin Kyung-sook, renowned
contemporary Korean storytellers, both wrote novels about Ri Chin (also known as
Ri Sim), a kisaeng (female entertainer) of the late Chosŏn dynasty who married the
French minister to Korea and became a French celebrity in French society. How­
ever, the novels claimed to report on Ri’s international travel as if she had actually
existed.26 Although these novels claimed to be nonfiction novels, or factions, the
airing of an episode titled ‘Ri Chin, the Chosun Dancer Who Became the Darling
of Paris’ (Chosŏn ŭi muhŭi, p’ari ŭi yŏnin i toeda) in the KBS history documentary
Narrating Korean History raised doubts about whether Ri existed. The historian
Chu Chin-o argued, based on numerous sources, that Ri Chin was a fictional char­
acter,27 which senior producer Chang Yŏng-ju publicly rebutted28 and Chu in turn
answered.29 Of course, the debate can change course if sources verifying Ri’s exist­
ence are discovered, but this misses the point. Rather, it is the fact that a historian
criticized a documentary, a means to teach history to the public, and to transform
fiction into history rather than a drama or film.
 Could History Films Be Rivals of Historians? 39

Along with the role historians should play in an era inundated with history video
content, there are also implications as to how such content can qualify as a histori­
cal narrative. While this case demonstrates how faction was used differently from
its origins, the usage of the term in Korea, which emphasizes its basis in fact rather
than imagination, demonstrates its confusion. Writers packaging their novels as
faction created the societal belief that Ri Chin was a real figure, resulting in a his­
tory documentary on her existence. In short, the use of the term faction should be
limited to techniques for fabricating a narrative or describing a genre using such
techniques. If all stories combining fact and fiction are designated factions, then
no film escapes being labelled as such, and any film can be a history film since all
films combine both facts and factions.30 Thus, designating all historical dramas as
factions according to the definition of mixing fact and fiction would obscure the
essence of historical dramas and lead the public to erroneously believe fiction as
fact. Limiting the use of the label to documentary-style films with an imaginative
spin on recreating facts rather than historical films in general could reduce the
confusion caused by the term.
The third is the concept of history films. Although historical films and history
films are used interchangeably, they should be defined concretely. Films with a
historical understanding and interpretation should be differentiated from those sim­
ply borrowing a historical setting or subject. Of course, historical truth itself is not
final, as new truths are discovered with the development of historical research.
However, considering that consumer perceptions often miss the producer’s intent,
viewers may mistake a story added for entertainment for fact. In other words, such
films neglect to differentiate historical reality from fiction for viewers even the
least bit curious about history. Both producers and historians have reasons for not
raising this issue; the goal of the former is to make fiction seem like fact, while
the latter worries that applying academic standards to popular entertainment would
undercut the creativity of its creators.
As mentioned earlier, Rosenstone distinguished Hollywood’s historical films,
which pursued entertainment value and profit, from history films, prioritizing an
understanding of the past.31 According to him, an example of the latter is Daniel
Vigne’s The Return of Martin Guerre (1982). Historian Natalie Zemon Davis par­
ticipated in its production, resulting in a microhistory film of a real incident that
occurred on a 16th-century French farm. However, it is rare for a history film that
fits Rosenstone’s definition to be created, as such a relatively costly film is forced
to seek profits. Even if the director and producers intend to create a history film,
the result would not meet their expectations or would draw criticism from histori­
ans. In fact, when the production crew of Steven Spielberg’s film Amistad (1997)
distributed pamphlets for use in history classes to emphasize its genre as a history
film, it failed to dispel doubt that this was merely for publicity.32 When Oliver
Stone’s JFK (1992) drew controversy for distorting reality in digging for the truth
of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Stone, who called himself a cinematic histo­
rian, countered that film directors had the right to provide new interpretations of
history. These cases clearly show how easy it is for the authenticity of history films
made within a commercial framework to draw doubt. Despite this, history films
40 Hana Lee

should not be regarded as completely different from commercial films, as popular

films made for commercial purposes can be history films to an extent.
Rosenstone mentions four criteria that prevent films from becoming history in
and of themselves. First, the single structure narrative of a film cannot fully por­
tray the multi-layered interpretations of history. Second, films lack a procedure
for demonstrating proof, preventing them from providing analyses or criticism.
Third, the dramatic structure of film (exposition–climax–denouement) prevents it
from portraying a grand narrative. Fourth, film cannot be a field of history pursu­
ing the truth, as it is an art form that creates fabricated narratives.33 Regardless,
he notes three ways in which history films contribute to understanding history:
contesting, visioning, and revisioning historiography.34 Contesting questions the
existing traditional narrative through a specific and microscopic narrative in pur­
suit of the truth. Visioning enhances historical awareness and imagination through
various cinematic techniques. Revisioning is the history film visually re-examining
the standardized past by breaking free of realism-based means of expression of
human relationships that reflect a clear and modern historical awareness by assimi­
lating various and innovative means of expression. In particular, for revisioning,
Rosenstone would have viewed expressionist or surrealist (as opposed to realist)
techniques as fitting for history films, as he yearned for alternative narratives chal­
lenging traditional historiographies. However, although revisioning is innovative,
it may obscure the concept of history films, as certain means of expression could
make a film seem as if it were a fable or parody.

The Category and Criteria of History Films

Hereupon, we address what types of films should be considered history films. The
following discussion is derived from an analysis of 85 South Korean historical
films since the 2000s. First, a history film offers a macroscopic view of the por­
trayed period through a microscopic depiction of figures and events in a specific
time and space. Although the audience cannot imagine a period’s ethos if the time
and space in the film are vaguely depicted, a film’s figures and events need not be
well known in standardized history. On the contrary, unofficial accounts, folk sto­
ries, and anecdotes could contribute to portraying the history of the marginalized
instead of that of the ruling class, depictions desperately lacking in Korean history
films. Such microcosmic recreations of the overall period could draw comparisons
to cultural history narratives, forcing the field of history to recognize history films
as worthy rivals.
Second, history films depict historical truths accurately (while incorporating
cinematic imagination) and uncover new insights through reinterpretation from a
coherent point of view. By incorporating scholarship in the search for historical
truth, the history film’s production crew will come to understand history through a
synthesis of various perspectives surrounding a historical event. As this concretely
shows how multiple layers of historical truth can exist, it also allows for more
nuance than historical narratives written by scholars. At this point, the production
clearly plays the role of a historian. Multiple interpretations of history enhance the
 Could History Films Be Rivals of Historians? 41

significance of a history film through the contesting of narratives. For example,

several films portraying the period of the Chosŏn dynasty rulers Yŏngjo, Prince
Sado, and Jŏngjo exist but from slightly varying perspectives. Eternal Empire, The
Fatal Encounter (Yŏkrin, dir. Yi Chae-kyu, 2014), and The Throne (Sado, dir. Yi
Jun-ik, 2015) are examples, but the latter two were made by production crews that
extensively read the historical sources and scholarship, presenting their own inter­
pretations of Prince Sado’s death or of King Jŏngjo.35 Rather than lending their sup­
port to a certain viewpoint, the production crews judged that it would be easier to
insert contemporary significance in constructing characters and events from their
own perspective.
Third, history films present a plausible narrative that is historically probable
in their use of imagination. Here, historical probability can be defined as a range
of possibilities that may be presumed plausible during the time period. A written
historical narrative uses historical imagination, but a history film uses cinematic
imagination because it is also a film to some extent. However, when cinematic
imagination goes beyond the range of historical probability, the production team
must contemplate which imagination to use, and the historian is obligated to distin­
guish fiction from fact. For example, is portraying Sin Yun-bok as a woman a case
of cinematic imagination, or historical one, as the Painting Bureau of the Chosŏn
dynasty did not employ women painters. Hongchŏnki, the sole female painter of
the Chosŏn dynasty, really existed in the early period of Chosŏn, according to
YŏngJaeChongHwa (1525), written by Sŏng Hyŏn. Nevertheless, the Painting
Bureau in the late Chosŏn dynasty, much more conservative than the early Chosŏn
dynasty, hardly employed women painters. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that
Sin had feminine sensibilities. Portrait of a Beauty (Mi’indo, dir. Jeon Yun-su,
2008) would not be a history film since the production crew had no intention of
making one; rather, they worked on the premise of using cinematic imagination to
depict Sin as a woman.
Even so, the intent to make a history film does not shield it from the issue of
historical distortion. The Battleship Island (Kunhamdo, dir. Ryoo Seungwan, 2017)
and The King’s Letters (Naranmailssami, dir. Cho Ch’ŏl-hyŏn, 2019) drew criti­
cism from different corners for historical distortion and were box office failures. As
the first film to discuss the matter of forced labour during Japanese colonial rule,
netizens attacked The Battleship Island as pro-Japanese for portraying Korean col­
laborators instead of Japanese imperialists as villains. The King’s Letters chose to
depict the Buddhist monk Sin Mi as the creator of the Korean alphabet out of many
other purported creators. However, the film drew netizens’ ire over the authentic­
ity of the alleged source behind this theory36 and by glossing over the nationally
revered King Sejong as the alphabet’s creator.37 While both films did their best to
accurately depict history, it was precisely this aspiration that attracted even more
fury, making them case studies regarding the pitfalls of making history films.
Fourth, a history film is portrayed as realistically as possible so as to immerse
the audience in the verisimilitude of the period. While verisimilitude is not neces­
sarily limited to realism, a realistic portrayal is expedient for representing the ethos
of the period. The production crew should portray the period as realistically as
42 Hana Lee

possible in all aspects, such as shooting, lighting, art design, and music. Memories
of the Sword (Hyŏmnyŏ: K’arŭi kiŏk, dir. Pak Hŭng-sik, 2015) does not fit this
criterion as it neglected to do so, despite borrowing a wuxia formula and late Koryŏ
dynasty setting; hence, it was neither a wuxia film nor a history film. Although the
film was serious from start to finish, it was inauthentic as a film as it failed to offer
the pleasures of the genre or any historical truths. Authenticity and seriousness
are two different beasts, since visual expression has the effect of visually limiting
the audience’s imagination rather than stimulating it. Even if a film is based on
authentic materials, it is difficult to categorize it as a history film if it is excessively
allegorical or faithful to genre conventions. According to this criterion, while Tae­
gukgi: The Brotherhood of War (T’aegŭkgi hwinallimyŏ, dir. Kang Che-kyu, 2004)
can be classified as a history film, the same cannot be said for Welcome to Dong­
makgol. Handmaiden (Agassi, dir. Park Chan-wook, 2016) is a well-made piece of
cinema but cannot be said to be a history film as an adaptation of a foreign work.
Contrastingly, Once Upon a Time on a Battlefield (Hwangsanbŏl, dir. Lee Joon-ik,
2003) and Battlefield Heroes (P’yŏngyangsŏng, dir. Lee Joon-ik, 2011) are said to
be highly self-aware history films in the constraint of the times, even though they
are allegorical.38 Fly High Run Far (Kaepyŏk, dir. Im Kwon-taek, 1991) and The
Uprising (Yi Chae-su ŭi nan, dir. Park Kwang-su, 1998) are also clearly history
films despite not being as well polished or entertaining. Films excessively prior­
itizing contemporary sensibilities over recreating the time period, or portraying
quasi-fantasy or imaginary settings, can be excellent historical films but might not
qualify as history films; the category is not a privileged collection of commercial
or critical hits.
Fifth, films portraying contemporary history can also be included in this cat­
egory. Despite depicting periods close to the present day, a film can be called a
history film if it portrays history rather than merely memories of the past. For exam­
ple, President’s Last Bang (Kŭddae kŭ saramdŭl, dir. Im Sang-soo, 2005), 18 May
(Hwaryŏhan hyuka, dir. Kim Ji-hoon, 2007), National Security (Namyŏngdong,
dir. Chung Ji-young, 2012), The Attorney (Pyŏnhyoin, dir. Yang U-sŏk, 2013), and
Ordinary Person (Pot’ong saram, dir. Kim Pong-han, 2017) are history films depict­
ing 1970s–1980s Korea. While both Sunny (Ssŏni, dir. Kang Hyeong-cheol, 2011)
and Ode to My Father (Kukje sijang, dir. Yoon Je-kyoon, 2014) are film memoirs,
the former does not qualify as a history film, but an argument could be made for the
latter. However, films classified as history films should not be regarded as perfect
recreations of the past, as recreating the past is difficult under any circumstances.
The ‘impossibility and incompleteness of recreation’39 is the same regardless of
whether it is being represented through words or images. However, as contempo­
rary Korean history is a treasure trove of topics for films and documentaries, such
films are highly effective in creating a space for history education that can foster
critical sensibilities by contesting standardized history.40
Thus, we can define history films as films pursuing historical reality/facts with
authenticity and reinterpreting them as realistically as possible from a coherent
viewpoint. Therefore, films entirely unrelated to historical facts, such as Untold
Scandal, and films set in a historical period without portraying historical figures
 Could History Films Be Rivals of Historians? 43

and events, such as Modern Boy, can be classified as historical films but not his­
tory films. History films are difficult to make without attempting to depict histori­
cal facts or truths, and these attempts must be depicted accordingly. If historical
films are judged by this standard, then only some films qualify as history films.41
Moreover, judging what is or is not a history film will surely differ according to the
standards of each discussant, producing controversy. Therefore, what is the point
in distinguishing history films from historical films and establishing the former as
a category with exclusive criteria?
The answer is that only history films can be regarded as alternative historical
narratives seeking to reinterpret history, or as histories represented through images,
that is, historiophoty. In other words, films reinterpreting history from a different
point of view, qualifying as alternative historical narratives, deserve the label of
history films. If the filmmakers are uninterested in reinterpreting history and the
film subsequently lacks an interpretation, it does not need to be labelled a history
film. When filmmakers consciously or unconsciously reinterpret history from their
own standpoint and convey it to the viewer, this fulfils an essential criterion of a
history film and is worthy of being used to teach history. Here, the statement that
a history film could be used to teach history should be clearly differentiated from
the statement that all films are historical sources. The latter means that regardless
of their entertainment value, they were produced during a certain period and were
products of that time. Thus, all films, not merely history films, are simultaneously
tools and objects of historical study as historical sources.42
There are several layers to the implication that films can be used to teach his­
tory. The first is that, regardless of genre, films portray the ethos of the period they
were produced in as reflections of that era’s public sensibilities. The second is
that history films can be used as educational materials to understand the historical
setting, events, and figures they depict. Third, while films might not portray his­
tory perfectly, they are useful for enhancing historical imagination when portraying
plausible histories. Among these, the first applies not only to historical films but to
all films, while the second and third apply to history films. Defining the category
of history films is not intended to establish a hierarchy ranking historical films
and history films; if both are entertaining authentic narratives, then they qualify as
popular films.
As such, history films are a medium that makes multi-layered relationships
between film and history/historians possible. First, historians can use history films
as teaching aids to help students understand a time period, figures, and events,43
allowing a course to be taught as history in cinema or cinema in history. Second,
history films can become objects of research where they are studied for the produc­
tion crew’s methods of understanding history as well as public sentiment regarding
history when the film was produced. Such films can be treated as historical sources
for understanding the ethos and view of history at the time. Third, historians can
raise the bar for public consumption of history by criticizing historical facts and
figures in history films. Fourth, historians can participate as consultants or review­
ers in production crews, as today’s history films can be recognized as historical
sources speaking to later generations about the present. Fifth, historians can also
44 Hana Lee

become directly involved in planning a history film, writing screenplay, or produc­

tion itself. However, historians can provide background knowledge and subjects
for history films by writing popular or academic works in their research field. This
final point is probably where historians can contribute the most. Historians are
especially needed who can apply their expertise and promote the production of his­
tory films to content creators and the public through their writing.

Conclusion: History Films and Historical Criticism

What are the benefits of redefining the concept of history films? First, clearly cat­
egorizing history films can become a new stimulus for producers, consumers, and
critics. The interest and debate stirred by history films are one such direct effect.
When historical dramas on a historian’s field of expertise appear, historians are
socially obligated to analyse and critique whether they are history films. Through
this, the public can satisfy their curiosity over how much of the film (or drama) is
fact or fiction and can then decide what to accept as history and what to accept as
entertainment. However, it is of greater importance to enhance the public’s his­
torical awareness through history films than to sift fact from fiction. Moreover,
discussions can stimulate the production of history films, as production crews are
always sensitive to critical and audience reception. Even so, production crews are
unlikely to grow tepid about producing history films, as historical films make up a
great number of recent commercial hits, some of which can be regarded as history
films. Thus, the production of history films will become an important specialty in
garnering commercial and critical success from the aspect of content creation. As
historians are mediators between history and the public, the history film is a space
where they can critique popular history video content, which is effective for his­
tory education by helping viewers acquire accurate information in approaching
historical dramas. Beyond an understanding of historical facts, history education
is important for learning how we arrived at our current situation and for taking a
long-term perspective. Thus, the purpose of historical criticism for historians is not
about sifting fact from fiction but rather about expanding the scope of historical
thinking by critiquing the contexts in which today’s reality is linked to the past. The
space in which creators, consumers, critics, and historians can converse with one
another grows through the medium of history films.
Therefore, history films can become an intellectual space where the two oppos­
ing approaches to history video content mentioned earlier—the popularization of
history and the popular culturalization of history—can overlap. That is, history
films occupy a happy medium between history video content primarily conveying
historical interpretations to the public and that utilizing history as a resource in
creating such content for entertainment. History films can also do both. In an age
where anyone can easily access historical sources thanks to their rapid translation,
classification, and digitization, it is more crucial than ever to realize the original
goal of history education and popularizing history: fostering the ability to think
historically. Then, not only can historians ‘do history’, but film/drama producers
and the public can also ‘do history’ as they ‘do literature’ or ‘do philosophy’ to a
 Could History Films Be Rivals of Historians? 45

degree. Yet, simply because anyone can interpret history for themselves does not
mean that the role of the historian disappears, just as film directors have not disap­
peared in an age where anyone can shoot films. On the contrary, the expertise of
historians will grow in importance, and the role of historians can potentially grow
to include collaboration on screenplays and planning rather than simply acting as
consultants or reviewers.
Films have become texts that cannot be ignored in today’s culture. The introduc­
tion, explanation, and critique of countless natural scientists, humanities scholars,
and social scientists on their own areas of expertise through film has become a uni­
versal and essential task. Shockingly, however, historians of Korea seem to be the
most negligent about critiquing history through the film’s medium. There may be
various reasons for this phenomenon, but one may be that critical writings on film
from the field of Korean history education have focused on admonishing rather
than supporting the medium. Critiquing history through film requires not merely
judging movies on their historical accuracy or sifting fact from fiction but also
raising historical awareness and historical thinking/imagination while mediating
history and the present. Historians who practice historical criticism are no longer
superior to creators of popular culture, just as film critics are no longer superior to
film directors. As film criticism raises the public’s film literacy, historical criticism
through film can also raise the public’s historical awareness and thinking. His­
torical criticism through film creates a stepping-stone for vibrant historical think­
ing in the public consumption of history by uncovering historical significance and
revealing the truths hidden or (whether consciously or unconsciously) distorted or
changed in film, just as film criticism enriches the public’s consumption of culture
by exposing what is hidden in film.
The standard of history films produced by a society does not depend on its
standards of film production but on the standards of its historical scholarship. His­
tory education in Korea today is accomplished by implementing rote memorization
until secondary school education; education fostering historians is limited to the
university level. In this sense, Kim Ki-pong’s argument that the concept of history
education should be changed to education for producers of history and education
for consumers of history is entirely valid.44 As the importance of media literacy
grows, education that reads visual materials and historical visual materials and
converts this to historical thinking needs to be included in history education. The
popularization of history required today must reject the past framework of a hier­
archy between historians and the public, wherein the former unilaterally enlightens
the latter. No matter how much history films contribute to recreating and interpret­
ing the past, their production, consumption, and critique ultimately occur from a
contemporary viewpoint and context. The past in history films always parodies the
present, and thus history films foster the ability to evaluate the present by eliciting
emotions. As viewers understand and interpret history more deeply than before,
they earn the right to make judgements about history to historians and creators of
popular culture, giving them the opportunity to participate more actively in current
issues through history films. Moreover, history films are the most efficient means
of offering alternative historical interpretations to the public, making them worthy
46 Hana Lee

competitors of historians themselves. Thus, the true mission of history films is to

act as a space where history and the public meet, that is, as a public history,45 foster­
ing historical thinking and critical consciousness.

Notes
* This article is an edited and revised version originally published in Korean language in
the National Institute of Korean History’s Korean History, Issue 121 (2016).
1 Marc Ferro, Cinéma et Histoire (Paris: Éditions Galimard, 1993), 19.
2 Robert A. Rosenstone, ed., Revisioning History: Film and the Construction of a New
Past (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
3 Examples of such scholars include: Tony Batra, ed., Screening the Past: Film and the
Representation of History (Westport: Praeger Publishers, 1998); Marcia Landy, ed., The
Historical Film: History and Memory in Media (London: The Athlone Press, 2001);
Robert A. Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on History (New York: Longman/Pearson,
2006); James Chapman, Film and History (UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
4 Aside from Jun-sik Yi and Hana Lee, most Korean historians do not research film.
Examples of these scholars’ works are as follows: Yi Jun-sik, “Propaganda Films and
War Mobilization Ideology During the Japanese Fascist Period [Ilche p’ashijŭmgi
sŏnjŏnyŏnghwawa chŏnjaeng tongwŏn ideollogi],” Tongbanghakchi 124 (2004): 701–
43, and Lee Hana, The Nation and Cinema [Kukkawa yŏnghwa] (Seoul: Hyean, 2013).
5 Kim Ki-dŏk, “History in the Age of Information [Chŏngbohwa sidae ŭi yŏksahak:
‘yŏngsang yŏksahak’ ŭl chech’anghanda],” The Korean History Education Review 75
(2000): 127–53 and Hŏ Ŭn, ed., Visual Media, Archiving, and Writing a New History
[Yŏngsanggwa ak’aibing kŭrigo saeroun yŏksassŭgi] (Seoul: Sŏnin, 2015).
6 Lee Hana, The Republic of Korea: The Age of Reconstruction (1948–1968) [Taehan
min’guk, chaekŏn ŭi sidae (1948–1968)] (Seoul: P’urŭn Yŏksa, 2013), 28–55; Lee
Hana, The Nation and Cinema: The Cultural Reconstruction of the Republic of Korea
and Cinema Narratives [Kukkawa yŏnghwa] (Seoul: Hyean, 2013).
7 Historical Films and Their Accuracy [Sagŭkyŏnghwawa kojŭng],” March 26, 1962;
“Historically Inaccurate TV Serial Historical Dramas [Kojŭng pushirhan yŏnsoksagŭk],”
DongAilbo, DongAilbo, September 16, 1975; Traditional Historical Drama Radiant
Dawn’s Historical Inaccuracies [Taehasagŭng ch’allanhan yŏmyŏng kojŭngŏmnŭn
pangyŏng Nolan],” DongAilbo, January 24, 1996.
8 According to one study, 41.6% of students surveyed acquired their historical knowledge
from TV historical dramas outside of class, 37.8% from TV documentaries, and 30.6%
from history films. See Ch’oe Chae-uk, A Study of Applicable Proposals and Develop­
ing Models to Teach History Through Film [Yŏnghwarŭl hwaryonghan chujejungshim
yŏksahaksŭm mohyŏnggaebal min chŏkyongbangan yŏn’gu], Ehwa Woman’s Univer­
sity Graduate School of Education Master’s Thesis, 2005.
9 This is best exemplified by fusion historical dramas, which are merely set in the past
while shot according to contemporary tastes and sensibilities. There are, in fact, cos­
tume dramas also set in alternative historical settings and narratives. For the former, see
Untold Scandal (Sŭk’aendŭl chosŏnnamnyŏsangyŏlchisa, dir. E J-yong, 2003), and for
the latter, see MBC’s TV drama Moon Embracing the Sun (Haerŭl p’umŭn tal, 2012).
10 Numerous History Films were made in 2019 in honour of the centennial of the March
First Movement.
11 Depending on the scholar, dramas that portray the period up to Japanese colonial rule
are regarded as historical dramas, while those from the period of liberation onward qual­
ify as period dramas, according to Yi Byŏng-hun, A Study on the Changes and Char­
acteristics of TV Historical Dramas [T’ibi sagŭgŭi p’yŏnch’ŏngwa t’ŭksŏng kwanhan
yŏn’gu], Hanyang University Journalism and Mass Communication Graduate School
 Could History Films Be Rivals of Historians? 47

Master’s Thesis, 1997. This distinction is made with reference to historical dramas in
English as costume dramas, in which dramas that show people mainly wearing hanbok
are called historical dramas, while those set in the period when Western dress had come
into fashion from the late Korean empire on are called costume dramas. Although this
might be the most appropriate usage of the terms, there is no consensus on the lower
range of time periods for period dramas.
12 Kim Ki-pong, “The Historical Drama as History in the Postmodern Age: The Theory of
History for the Historical Drama [P’osŭt’ŭmodŏn shidaeŭi yŏksarosŏŭi sagŭng sagŭkŭl
wihan yŏksa iron],” History and Culture 5 (2002): 200.
13 Kim Ki-pong, “What Is History in the Age of ‘Simulacre’? [Shimyullak’ŭrŭ shidaeesŏ
yŏksaran muŏshin’ga],” Han’gugŏnŏ munhwa 25 (2004).
14 Hayden White uses the term ‘historiophoty’ to refer to history represented through
images in contrast with the concept of historiography, history represented through
words. See Hayden White, “Historiography and Historiophoty,” The American Histori­
cal Review 93 (1988): 1193–9.
15 Historiophoty, as stated earlier, refers to historical narratives represented through images
and visuals. Here it includes photos, documentaries, and dramatic films. Ibid.
16 Kim Ki-pong, “Shimyullak’ŭrŭ shidaeesŏ yŏksaran muŏshin’ga,” 211.
17 Kim Ki-pong, Beyond What Is History [Yŏksaran muŏshin’garŭl nŏmŏsŏ] (Seoul:
P’urŭn Yŏksa, 2000).
18 Kim Ki-dŏk, “Faction Film Genres and the Question of Mass Immersion [Paeksyŏn
yŏnghwa ŭi yuhyŏng kwa ‘taechungjŏk molip’ ŭi munje],” Journal of History and
Culture 34 (2009): 457.
19 Ibid., 471.
20 Kim Si-mu, “Boundary between Costume Films and Historical Films: Focusing on
Korean Films with Setting in Japanese Imperialism [Sagŭkkwa p’aeksyŏnyŏnghwaŭi
kyŏnggye—ilche kangjŏmgirŭl shidaejŏng paegyŏngŭro han yŏnghwarŭl chungshimŭro],”
Simin inmunhak 16 (2009): 13–42.
21 Film scholar Chin Sŏng-chŏl goes a step further in pointing out the problems of histor­
ical distortion in historical dramas, arguing that historical films should aspire to be as
historically accurate as possible; Chin Sŏng-chŏl, “A Study of Movies Reinterpreted
Based on Historical Events: Between Reinterpretation and Distortion of the Histori­
cal Event [Sagŭkŭl kŭn’ganŭro hanŭn han’gukyŏnghwaŭi yŏksa chaehyŏne kwan­
han yŏn’gu yŏksaŭi chaehaesŏkkwa yŏksa waegogŭi kyŏnggyeesŏ],” Tongsŏŏllon 15
(2012): 109. In addition, film critic Hwang Chin-mi, who is not a historian, strongly
criticized the deliberate distortion of history in Hŏ Chin-ho’s 2016 film The Last Prin­
cess (Tŏkhye ongju). See www.entermedia.co.kr/news/news_view.html?idx=5727,
December 14, 2019.
22 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe,
trans. Ch’ŏn Hyŏn-gun (Seoul: Munhakkwa Chisŏngsa, 1991).
23 Lee Hana, Taehan min’guk, chaekŏn ŭi sidae (1948–1968) [The Republic of Korea: The
Age of Reconstruction (1948–1968)] (Seoul: P’urŭn Yŏksa, 2013).
24 Kim Sŏng-kŏn, Faction. The Key to Reason [P’aeksyŏn. Sayu ŭi yŏlsoe] (Seoul:
Sanch’ŏrŏm, 2006), 168.
25 Yi In-hwa, The Eternal Empire [Yŏngwŏnhan cheguk] (Seoul: Segyesa, 1993),
156–7.
26 Kim, T’ak-hwan, P’ariŭi chosŏn’gungnyŏ, Yi sim [The Palace Woman of Paris, Yi Sim]
(Seoul: Minŭmsa, 2006); Shin Kyung-sook, Ri Chin [Ri Chin] (Seoul: Munhak Tong-
nae, 2007).
27 Chu Chin-o, “In Search of Historical Existence of Li-Tsin, the Korean Dancer Who
Became a Parisienne [P’ariŭi chosŏn muhŭi rijinŭi yŏksasŏng orient’allijŭmgwa
senseisyŏnŏllijŭmi mandŭrŏnaen hŏgu],” History and Criticism 93 (2010): 268–95.
28 Chang Yŏng-ju, “Ri Chin Was Real [Ri Chinŭn shilchaehaetta],” Media Today, Novem­
ber 10, 2010, www.mediatoday.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=91639#Redyho.
48 Hana Lee

29 Chu Chin-o, “There Is No Evidence Ri Chin Existed [Ri Chini shilchaehaettanŭn

chŭnggŏnŭn ŏpta],” Media Today, November 10, 2010, www.mediatoday.co.kr/news/
articleView.html?idxno=91871
30 Kang Yu-chŏng, “The Strength of History Films in Imploding a Forced Order
[Wan’ganghan chilsŏrŭl naep’ahanŭn yŏksayŏnghwaŭi him],” Film/Criticism/Reality 3
(2006): 50–1.
31 Rosenstone, Revisioning History.
32 Sally Hadden, “How Accurate Is the Film?,” The History Teacher 32 (1998): 374–9.
33 Robert A. Rosenstone, “History in Image/History in Words: Reflections on the Possibil­
ity of Putting History onto Film,” American Historical Review 93 (1988): 1173–85.
34 Robert A. Rosenstone, Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).
35 Yi Jun-ik, the writer and director of The Throne, spoke as follows on the production
process in collaborating with fellow writer Cho Ch’ŏl-hyŏn, who had worked on many
history films in an interview dated October 4, 2015: ‘We read almost all the scholarship
on Prince Sado and his era, even going so far as checking the original texts cited in them
one by one. We wrote the ending of the screenplay to have Man In-so appear and argue
for Prince Sado to be posthumously named king, even verifying Man In-so’s real name
and shooting the scene. In the end, the scene was cut’. According to an interview with
the director dated September 24, 2015, the scene was cut due to its being considered
commercially harmful, according to the marketing team. However, Cho testified that
the director himself cut it, as Man In-so’s scene did not match the tone of the ending
scene of Lady Hong’s sixtieth birthday banquet. This shows the lengths the production
team went to in making a history film, having a Korean literature scholar as a consult­
ant on hand in the process, with a book of his appearing in the ending credits. How­
ever, the film’s consultant, Chŏng Byŏng-sŏl, voiced dissatisfaction at merely receiving
credit as a reference when the film relied almost entirely on his work, Men and Power
[Kwŏllyŏk kwa ingan] (Seoul: Munhak Dongne, 2012), which was resolved by the film
company donating a scholarship to Seoul National University. For more on the differ­
ence of opinion between the scholar and producer during The Throne’s production and
the freedom of cinematic expression, see the following interview: http://blog.daum.net/
donaldyu/8028, September 30, 2015.
36 King Sejong met Sin Mi in 1446, three years after the creation of the Korean alphabet. Extant
copies of Biography of the Enlightened Sŏn Buddhist Monk [Wŏn’gaksŏnjongsŏkpo],
which credits Sin Mi as the creator, are regarded as forgeries made by Sejong’s daughter,
Princess Chŏngŭi. See No T’ae-cho, “The Creation of Biography of the Enlightened
Sŏn Buddhist Monk [Wŏn’gaksŏnjongsŏkpo ŭ ich’ansŏng kyŏng’u],” Buddhist Culture
Studies 2 (2003): 2.
37 The criticism grew so intense that the director issued a public apology. See “Director
Cho Ch’ŏl-hyŏn Speaks about The King’s Letter’s Historical Distortion [Naranmalssami
yŏksawaegong nollane ibyŏn choch’ŏrhyŏn kamdok],” July 29, 2019, www.inter­
view365.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=87915#_enliple.
38 The existing literature cites these three films as successful examples: Kim Ki-pong,
The Age of Faction, Mediating Film and History [Paeksyŏn sidae, yŏnghwa wa yŏksa
rŭl chungmaehada] (Seoul: Ungjin Think Big, 2006); No Kwang-u and Ch’oe Ji-hŭi,
“Once Upon a Time on a Battlefield and Battlefield Heroes as Historical Comedy Films
[Yŏksa k’omidi yŏnghwarosŏŭi Hwangsanbŏlgwa P’yŏngyangsŏng],” Yŏnghwa yŏngu
51 (2012): 93–118.
39 Chŏn P’yŏng-guk, “A Study of the Possibility of Historicisation Category in Film
[Yŏnghwaŭi Yŏksahwa Pŏmju Kanŭngsŏnge Kwanhan Yŏn-gu],” Yŏnghwa yŏngu 35
(2008): 31.
40 For the effectiveness of history films, see Pae Kyŏng-min, “A Study of the Performance
and Ideological Containment in Historical Film: Focus on Seopyonje and The Tae
 Could History Films Be Rivals of Historians? 49

Baek Mountains [Yŏksayŏnghwaŭi suhaengsŏnggwa ideollogijŏng pongswae yŏn’gu

sŏp’yŏnjewa t’aebaeksanmaekŭl chungshimŭro],” Association of Image and Film Stud­
ies 13 (2008): 7–45.
41 According to the NIKH’s “A Basic Survey for Developing History and Cultural Content in
Dramas and Film,” carried out from June 15 to October 31, 2014, of the 882 historical films
and 247 historical dramas aired from the 1920s to October 2014, only about 30% of the
productions were based on historical evidence, while historical films without any basis in
historical fact at all made up upwards of 80%. However, there is a growing trend in recent
years of history films dealing with actual incidents and figures. National Institute of Korean
History, “A Research Report on Making Korean History Content [Han’guksak’ont’ench’ŭ
urieksanen kuch’uksaŏm yŏn’guyongyŏng kyŏlgwa pogosŏ]” (2014).
42 Lee Hana, The Nation and Cinema [Kukkawa yŏnghwa] (Seoul: Hyean, 2013), 28–55.
43 Currently most popular lectures on historical dramas are carried out on these topics. An
example is a series of citizen lectures carried out from 2015 to March 2016 in several
of Seoul’s district offices titled ‘Historical Dramas—Between the Truth and Historical
Imagination of Dramas’, hosted by research members of the Korean History Society on
the historical significance and ethos of the periods depicted in history films.
44 Kim Ki-pong, The Age of Faction, Mediating Film, and History [Paeksyŏn sidae,
yŏnghwa wa yŏksa rŭl chungmaehada] (Seoul: Ungjin Think Big, 2006), 119.
45 For public history, see Thomas Cauvin, Public History: A Textbook of Practice (New
York: Routledge, 2016), 164–6. For discussions on public history in Korea and fur­
ther discussions on history films as public history, please refer to the following. Hana
Lee, “The Korean Context of the Discussion of Public History and the Public Histo­
rians” (gonggongYŏksa noneueu hankukjuk macnak kwa gonggongYŏksagadle),
Critical Review of History 136 (2021) Seoul: Yuksabipyungsa; Hana Lee, “History
Films as a Public History And History as a Probability” (gonggongyŏksaroseoeui
yŏksayŏnghwawa gaeyonsungeuroseoui yŏksa), Critical Review of History 139 (2022)
Seoul: Yuksabipyungsa.

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4 Writing a History
Through Cinema
A Focus on Two ‘Comfort
Women’ Films

You-shin Joo

The History of Comfort Women and the Formation

of Relevant Discourses
On April 6, 2017, Tsutsui Yasutaka—best known for his novel The Girl Who Leapt
Through Time, adapted as an animated film of the same title—posted a ludicrous
and offensive comment on the Statue of Girl. He tweeted,

Yasumasa Nagamine, the Japanese ambassador to South Korea, returned to

Seoul [after being recalled to Japan in protest over a Statue of Girl being
placed in front of the Japanese Consulate], which means Japan would toler­
ate the Statue of Girl. That girl is cute. Everyone, let us ejaculate in front of
her and shower her with our semen.1

Meanwhile, a Korean man mentioned in the 1990s that the

Japanese Prime Minister’s apology to elderly victims would never resolve

the issue of comfort women mobilized by the Imperial Japanese Army. What
Japan did to Korea was nothing less than pouring their dirty semen over our
people’s face with a bucket.2

These two men, taking opposite stances as a Japanese and as a Korean, respectively,
and expressing their feelings of hostility towards each other, both use ‘semen’ as a
sexual metaphor that arouses complex emotions rather than merely anger. This sug­
gests that the national mentality associated with the comfort women issue involves
a dispute between those who sexually assault women and those who must protect
them from such violence—in other words, between Japanese and Korean men.
Male-dominated nationalist discourses thus work in tandem with patriarchal gen­
der norms, while the voices of the women who are its victims and survivors can
never be heard.
A comfort station operated by the Imperial Japanese Army was a scene from the
Japanese version of the Holocaust and a space under extraterritorial jurisdiction
exposed to extreme human rights violations and humiliating ethnic oppression.
The pervasive contempt for and exploitation of women in a colony entangled with

DOI: 10.4324/9781003279013-5
 Writing a History Through Cinema 53

male violence, which sexually objectified the female body, prompted soldiers of
the colonial power to deliberately, systematically, and collectively rape women in
the colony, seeking to destroy their souls, bodies, and sexual rights. Joseon women
were exposed to frequent verbal abuse and violence by Japanese soldiers, sexually
transmitted diseases, and pressure to choose an abortion. If they showed disobedi­
ence or attempted escape, they were immediately and cruelly executed without
the benefit of a full and fair trial. When Japan was about to lose World War II,
Japanese soldiers ruthlessly killed or abandoned comfort women in foreign lands.
Victims who narrowly avoided death were forced to remain silent or take their own
lives, forever haunted by their traumatic experiences. Nevertheless, the Japanese
government and army have justified their acts of violence and violations of human
rights—caused by a double dose of discrimination, one based on gender and the
other on nationality—by reciting their ruling ideology emphasizing the importance
of loyalty and duty to their country.
The comfort women issue rose to the surface when Yun Jeongok, a professor
at Ewha Women’s University, published a detailed coverage of Jeongsindae
(a term formerly used to refer to ‘comfort women’) as a regular contributor to the
daily newspaper The Hankyoreh in 1990, and when Kim Hak-sun came forward
in 1991as the first South Korean victim to give public testimony of her life as a
comfort woman. Since 1992, the Wednesday Demonstration has been held in the
presence of surviving comfort women in front of the Embassy of Japan in Seoul,
demanding an apology from the Japanese government. In the 1,000th Wednesday
Demonstration in 2011, the first Statue of Peace (also called Sonyeosang, literally
‘Statue of Girl’ in Korean) was installed with funds from private donors. Neverthe­
less, the Abe Shinzo administration, which had refused to take responsibility for
wartime Japan’s involvement in procuring women for its soldiers, agreed with the
Park Geun-hye administration on December 28, 2015, to finally and irreversibly
resolve the comfort women issue, and went further to demand the relocation of
the Statue of Girl upon providing a billion yen to a fund for compensating vic­
tims. This agreement was a humiliating compromise and deceptive manoeuvre by
the far-right, pro-Japanese Park Geun-hye administration, desperate to conclude
the comfort women issue, which was, in its view, one of the greatest obstacles to
improving Korea–Japan relations.
However, the fact that it took half a century to address the issue of comfort
women in South Korea was deeply rooted in not only Japan’s historical attitude in
denying Japanese war crimes and ignoring victims’ demands for an apology and
compensation but also Korea’s Confucian patriarchy and reactionary nationalism
deliberately disregarding the historical truth. Korea and Japan both approached the
comfort women issue from a patriarchal point of view in which women’s sexual­
ity was regulated in the interests of national honour and women were considered
men’s property. They shared a desire for oblivion and concealment of the comfort
women as a disgrace to their country or as a reminder of war atrocities they were
desperate to forget. Other reasons why Korea lagged in addressing the comfort
women issue include the Japanese government and army’s systematic concealment
of information, the United States’ failure to bring war crime prosecutions with the
54 You-shin Joo

tacit approval of the post-war US–Japan alliance, a sense of shame imposed on vic­
tims under the influence of Confucian culture, and the lack of research on colonial
history, particularly in the field of women’s history.
However, surviving comfort women who had returned from the battlefields
began to break their silence and share their stories. It was a process of breaking
free from colonial and patriarchal restraints, restoring their repressed voices and
marginalized subjectivity, and demanding an apology from Japan for unresolved
war crimes against humanity. The party primarily responsible for using the sexual
abuse of women as a means of warfare was not an individual male assailant but the
imperialist and patriarchal government, which brought about the war and organ­
ized or tolerated massive rapes. Nevertheless, the Japanese government, which
remained silent and dismissive in the past, has actively defended itself by saying
‘No abuse was made’, ‘There were also Japanese victims’, and ‘There is no need
to give compensation for forced labour or military conscription since it was done
in perfect accordance with a decree’. Korea and Japan have been taking opposite
stands on whether survivors’ testimonies could be a valuable source of evidence
in a battle of sex slavery, war crimes, and legal responsibility, in opposition to sex
work, sexuality on the front, and ethical responsibility. Such a battle has led to
political disputes concerning the involvement of the colonized and the relation­
ships among nationality, gender, war, and sexuality.
That said, future discourses on comfort women must not succumb to appeals
to personal feelings such as pain and anger but must make ethical judgements of
Japanese imperialism and, above all, simply call for truth and reconciliation. It is
also important to reject not only the simple binary of Korea and Japan, of ‘us’ and
‘them’, and of good and evil, but also the attempt to arbitrarily exploit or repre­
sent the comfort women issue as a subject of mere research or representation. Fur­
thermore, it is necessary to take a feminist approach to the comfort women issue
instead of reducing it to a national ordeal, as well as to consider it as a human rights
issue in common across Asia that transcends national boundaries.

Writing a History as Part of the Memory Wars

Alison Landsberg’s notion of ‘prosthetic memory’ explains how popular culture
shares private memory in a public manner and delivers indirect historical experi­
ences to the public in a sensuous and persuasive manner.3 Banal yet influential
forms of media such as cinema and television are important means of program­
ming public memory. By viewing media representations, the public gains access
to selected memories about past events and experiences and eventually shares
a specific interpretative frame about not only the past but also the relationship
between the past and the present. Selected memories, in this sense, do not come
from a person’s lived experiences but from fictional experiences mediated through
representations.
Prosthetic memories, which can be seen as a new technology of memory, are
physical and sensuous, creating a memory frame to achieve social unity and col­
lective identity mainly through cultural texts. More specifically, cinema, the most
 Writing a History Through Cinema 55

renowned mediator of prosthetic memories, plays a crucial role in transforming the

public into a ‘community with a specific sentiment’, that is, into a group of people
characterized by their simultaneous and collective imagination as well as by their
shared emotions and senses about a specific object. It seems that recent Korean
films never stop striving to write a public history by repeatedly returning to the
past. Films that focus on ‘presenting’ the past and bringing back the voices of those
excluded from or silenced by the existing public history have great significance in
creating a new version of reality based on these memories instead of simply replay­
ing memories of the past.
The representation of historical events through a narrative structure with a touch
of imagination enables history to come to life, evoke emotions, and eventually
make us identify with the subjects of the past and share the experiences of others.
Likewise, in documentaries, fiction films, and other media forms, the history of
comfort women has been repeatedly revisited and represented along with growing
social interest in the comfort women issue. Such a tendency has turned us into a
‘memory community’ and ‘national community’ by raising our awareness of the
history of comfort women’s pain and death, developing and spreading emotional
empathy, and prompting us to lament the past and identify with the comfort women.
Two examples of this are: (1) Spirits’ Homecoming (Kwihyang, dir. Cho Jung­
rae, 2015), which drew a total of 3.5 million audience members and became a
social sensation, and (2) Snowy Road (Nungil, dir. Lee Na-jeong, 2017), a critically
acclaimed film that takes a new ethical approach to the representation of comfort
women as a subject matter. These two films revisited the comfort women issue we
thought we had become familiar with by listening to survivors’ testimonies and
participating in the comfort women movement. They also ask whether we ‘prop­
erly’ understand the issue and how we achieve the cultural representation of com­
fort women. These films aim to bring our attention to and allow us to mourn the
lost past and the history of silence, both by portraying individual comfort women’s
pain and sacrifice thoroughly from the victims’ point of view and by filling in the
memory gap through the integration of historical reality and fictional life.
Marianne Hirsch uses the concept of ‘postmemory’ to explain that the trauma of
the generation-before can be mediated and understood through imaginative invest­
ment and creation by generation-after.4 Given that, the representations of comfort
women in the recent films and other cultural texts might be seen as part of: (1) the
‘memory wars’ led by the generation-after striving to call out the oppressed histori­
cal others and reveal their hidden memories out of guilt over silencing the victims
and ignoring their pain for a long time, or (2) the ‘history-writing’ process led by
national subjects who aim to overcome the colonial past, in need of healing and
comfort away from the madness and sacrifices caused by war.
In line with this, how can we re-write a history based on unrecorded women’s
lives and re-narrativize the experiences of the weak and the oppressed? Along the
way, can a cultural text manage to break free from temptations to pursue ‘victim­
hood nationalism’, authoritative narration, or collective identification? How sig­
nificant will this cultural text be when writing an alternative history or actively
and critically remembering the past in opposition to indifference and oblivion? The
56 You-shin Joo

achievements and limitations of these two films, Spirits’ Homecoming and Snowy
Road, will become a milestone for answering the above-mentioned questions and
further expanding our horizons.

Between ‘Elderly Survivors’ and ‘Storytelling From Girls’ Perspectives’

Girliness Over Representation

The dominant images the public has of comfort women are perhaps those of:
(1) elderly survivors speaking up at a Wednesday Demonstration or giving testi­
mony on television, or (2) the Statue of Girl, which has been at the centre of contro­
versy. Despite the pervasive images of elderly survivors who look angry and tired
with traces of time and pain in their faces and the Statue of Girl staring straight
ahead, barefoot with clenched fists, most historical narratives on comfort women
are centred around girls as protagonists. This can be attributed to the fact that most
women who were forced into sexual slavery were young girls. The Statue of Girl
dressed in hanbok symbolizes women in the Joseon Dynasty under Japanese rule,
who were drafted for sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army, reminding
us of the indescribable pain of the past. Nevertheless, the identity of surviving
comfort women cannot be reduced to that of elderly women, because they are the
survivors who have constantly lived their dynamic lives against the oppressive
concept of chastity, that is, individuals with their own life histories. However, the
representation of elderly survivors in mass media tends to collectivize and stand­
ardize them, underestimating their capacity to act and their indomitable vitality and
determination. The representation of comfort women, as either young girls or old
women, signifies the de-sexualization of women. The narratives and images of the
above-mentioned two films are also torn apart between these two images, revealing
the complexity of the representation.
At the beginning of Spirits’ Homecoming, the film emphasizes that Jung-min
(played by Kang Ha-na) is only a little girl before being forced into sexual slavery
by including scenes in which she plays hide-and-seek and Korean jacks and sings
a song on her father’s A-frame carrier. There is a reference to her first period,
implying that Jung-min is in a transitional period. Meanwhile, the film describes
Eun-kyung (played by Choi Ri) as someone caught up in feelings of complete
numbness and unreality after surviving extreme situations that involve being raped
by a newly released prisoner and watching him kill her father. Later, she became
a shaman possessed by a spirit. The film’s portrayals of these two girls are used
merely as a dramatic tool or as a story premise to dramatize Jung-min’s life as a
comfort woman and Eun-kyung’s role as a shaman who eventually helps Young­
ok (played by Son Sook) achieve a spiritual reunion with the deceased Jung-min.
In contrast, Snowy Road provides a realistic account of its two protagonists
from different class backgrounds: Young-ae (played by Kim Sae-ron), an arrogant,
elite, and intelligent student with high self-esteem, and Jong-boon (played by Kim
Hyang-gi), a strong and altruistic girl from a poor family who must work hard
to make ends meet. Their backgrounds and personalities later prompt different
 Writing a History Through Cinema 57

responses to their lives at a comfort station. Their personalities and relationship

with each other change over time in a persuasive manner, as seen in the scenes
where Young-ae begins to feel ashamed of herself and grateful to Jong-boon
for selflessly taking care of her throughout her pregnancy, abortion, and suicide
attempt, and where Jong-boon grows angry at consistently arrogant Young-ae try­
ing to avoid facing an unpleasant reality.
As this indicates, both films feature two young girls as main characters in tragic
situations and fated relationships and build a story around them. Nevertheless,
there is a significant difference in what the directors of these films intend to show
and achieve through that story and, consequently, how they explore girls’ images
and what their story implies by doing so.
Above all, the notion of girliness was built upon a social norm in modern times
that a girl must remain sexually chaste and pure as a ‘future female citizen’ until
she marries to reproduce healthy citizens and perpetuate patriarchy. In other words,
it is implied that girls are supposed to be non-threatening, de-sexualized, and gen­
dered, based on relatively objective age-specific standards and social norms on
chastity, affection, and beauty often associated with the formation of a modern
nation. In this context, having girls as protagonists is crucial to emphasizing the
tragedy of the so-called comfort women and dramatizing the violence on their bod­
ies and souls. Gendered terms are often used to explain the relationship between
the ruling and ruled. Given that, it is legitimate to say that these films have been
influenced by an Orientalist view of the ‘colony as a pure woman’ being abused
and pillaged by the colonizer.
Therefore, girliness, best characterized by sexual ignorance and chastity,
becomes a space inscribed by imperialist violence and a platform of discourse
projecting national sentiments. It additionally creates multiple layers of meaning
as it intertwines with an imaginary patriarchal order of ‘women–nature’ and a
nationalist metaphor of ‘hometown–motherland’. Both films include scenes signi­
fying the hometown and motherland are as warm and tender as a mother’s arms:
(1) where family members come together and share a meal following the image
of the smoke coming from cooking rice, and where Jung-min receives a goebul
norigae (a traditional Korean accessory for women, which is believed to ward off
bad luck) from her mother in Spirits’ Homecoming; and (2) where Young-ae says
she wants to fall asleep under a cotton blanket that her mother used to dry under
the sun, and where Jong-boon covers her dying friend with snow instead of the
cotton blanket in Snowy Road.
Both films create image repertoires of the nation and the motherland by show­
ing symbols such as the heart-warming family meal, the cotton blanket, and the
house as well as by using the colour white as a metaphor for the cotton blanket and
pure snow. All these image repertoires romanticize and idealize the nation and the
motherland through fantasies of ethnic homogeneity, the motherland before it is
damaged, and a safe and peaceful hometown. They play a pivotal role in conceal­
ing domination and repression by the motherland and the nation. Besides, if we
reposition and ideate the nation in this context with ‘hometown’ as a place to settle
in after returning home and ‘nature’ as a metaphor for the hometown, the images of
58 You-shin Joo

wounded and damaged girls would signify the sacrificed nation. In this sense, the
desire to ‘return home’, which is the key to storytelling in both films, is hackneyed
and simplistic. The thoughtless sharing of images and standardized allegory asso­
ciated with women is based on nationalist discourses that constantly set bounda­
ries between inside and outside and between the self and the other. Aestheticizing
women who must endure humiliation and contempt and showing their extremely
intense pain, close to martyrdom, work to sublimate the painful past of the nation.
Meanwhile, at another level, such imagery involves sisterhood and solidarity
among comfort women who secretly communicate and sympathize with each other,
keep their fading dignity with a determination to survive, and comfort and rely
on each other. They evolve from passive victims to active agents and understand
and embrace each other as pseudo-sisters after enduring hardship and experiencing
identity change. Consequently, the films take the form of a road movie combined
with a coming-of-age story that captures their life journey. In the final scene of
Snowy Road, Jong-boon gives Young-ae back her name after living as Young-ae
for decades. On the one hand, this scene suggests that Jong-boon manages to part
ways with her past as a comfort woman and overcomes her trauma. On the other
hand, it signifies that Jong-boon, who has been in a pseudo-sister relationship with
Young-ae already dead but still around her, is reborn as a new agent ready to go out
on the street along with other victims as she expands her secret circle of sisterhood
to society.

Tensions Between Melodrama and Sexuality

Director Cho Jung-rae decided to make the film Spirits’ Homecoming after seeing
the painting Burning Virgins by Kang Il-chul, whom he met while working as a vol­
unteer for the House of Sharing (a shelter for surviving comfort women) in 2002.
Inspired by her work with a shocking message, he managed to finish his script;
however, he had to wait 14 years to find funding to turn his script into a film. It was
a miracle that he managed to raise KRW 1.2 billion (about USD 1 million) from
more than 75,000 sponsors through crowdfunding for the film’s production, distri­
bution, and release. Perhaps one of the most touching moments in this film is when
the end credits roll with the names of sponsors for more than 10 minutes on screen.
As we can see from this, the director must have felt the urge to create this film out
of empathy and compassion for surviving comfort women, deeply rooted national­
ist sentiment against Japan, and guilt coming from the realization that he had been
avoiding and forgetting their pain and tragedy. Interestingly, the core emotions asso­
ciated with Young-ok, the protagonist of Spirits’ Homecoming, are the ‘feel­
ings of loss and guilt’. Since the moment she had no choice but to leave her
dead friend behind, her heart remained in that faraway land. She had neither
overcome the death of her friend nor fully returned to her beloved hometown and
country. As the director’s intent overlaps with the nucleus of the narrative, the film
naturally takes the form of melodrama.
Melodrama begins and wants to end in a space of innocence, such as a home.
It creates pathos by revealing a sense of loss or ‘too late’, with a particular focus
 Writing a History Through Cinema 59

on the victim’s pain, in an obvious conflict between good and evil. In short, the
victim’s perspective, a private space called home as a symbol of innocence, and
a sense of being too late are the three key characteristics of melodrama. In addi­
tion, melodrama plays a crucial role in the formation of national identity and
the public representation of history as it reconstructs and provides access to
hard-to-articulate day-to-day memories by examining public memory and unof­
ficial testimony. National trauma, which is reconstructed through the ‘narrative of
pain’ in melodrama, turns individual memory into national memory while bringing
about an encounter between individual memory and national history.
In line with this, many films on comfort women, which selectively represent the
national tragedy with emotional excess by showing the extremely painful experi­
ences of young girls, have typical elements of melodrama, much like those seen in
the nationalist narratives that direct our attention to the painful history of Korea and
visualize unrepresentable trauma through girls/women. These films aim to maxi­
mize the sensationalism and power of emotions by sharing the victims’ perspective
and commemorate the history of pathos by grieving over the past of the nation and
its people when it is already too late. In particular, Spirits’ Homecoming, along
with the use of emotional excess and ideological memory, emphasizes and displays
sexual assault and physical abuse and takes a voyeuristic look at comfort women.
It also creates conflicts and tensions between melodramatic conventions and the
lascivious depictions of comfort women, focusing on capturing the pain of the girls
at the moment of being sexually assaulted and the wounds left on their bodies while
overtly sharing the voyeuristic perspective and voice of those viewing and record­
ing these. A few examples of this include scenes sharing the perspective of a mili­
tary surgeon performing virginity tests or sexually transmitted disease screenings;
including long tracking shots composed of panning and bird’s-eye view shots in
which young Korean girls are sexually and physically assaulted; repeatedly show­
ing their naked bodies with bruises and wounds; and featuring sexually suggestive
lines such as ‘A fourteen-year-old virgin’ and ‘This is how a virgin should react’.
One might find an excuse for such a representation in relation to nationalist dis­
courses by stressing that these scenes are designed to address the imperialistic and
male violence against women in the colonies. Nevertheless, it is still true that this
type of representation reduces the victims’ personal experiences, which make them
feel ashamed and remain silent throughout their lives, to the matter of a sexualized
nation or a nationalized sexuality. It simultaneously raises the criticism that Spirits’
Homecoming chooses violence itself in order to portray violence. Is this film’s
sexually suggestive representation another form of violence against the ‘victimized
women’?
Contrariwise, Snowy Road does not overtly display the tragedy of comfort
women on screen. Instead of inserting sexually suggestive or extremely violent
rape scenes, it shows the images of Japanese soldiers lining up in the corridor of a
comfort station or uses metaphors such as doors that endlessly open and close and
slips piling up in a box. ‘What fills in the gap is the daily routine of the women
forced to live their lives as nothing more than “flesh”, yet, with a strong determina­
tion to survive each day’.5 This is why Snowy Road, unlike Spirits’ Homecoming, is
60 You-shin Joo

considered a film that follows the ‘ethical principles of representation’. Director

Lee Na-jeong once stated:

When surviving comfort women are still coping with their emotional wounds,
how can I turn them into a cinematic spectacle? Since I started working on my
script, I tried my best neither to consume their experiences as a cinematic spec­
tacle nor to treat them as a mere subject. Even when I had to portray Japanese
soldiers, I ensured that they were not depicted as individual human beings or
assailants. Instead, I captured their silhouettes or appearances from the behind
in full shots so as to present them as part of the tragedy called imperial war.6

As you can see from this, it was certainly the director’s conviction that has made a
difference in representation.
Since the comfort women issue is mainly about whether there were collective
and systematic wartime rapes of colonized women by colonizing soldiers, it is dif­
ficult to address the issue without having sexually explicit or suggestive scenes.
Given that survivors’ testimonies can be reconstructed through imagination-driven
narrative and imagery, filmmakers have the right to decide which aesthetic strat­
egy and perspective to adopt for their story. In other words, creativity is a matter
of creativity. Nevertheless, it is worrisome to see comfort women’s experiences
repeatedly included in official and public forms of representation such as cinema
in such a way that ‘their experiences are part of the voyeuristic pleasure the Korean
society shares as well as of the “shameful” past deserving to be forgotten since
their chastity, which belongs to Korean men, was lost by the enemies’.7 In addi­
tion, it is worth noting that when insensitively realistic representations of rape and
violence repeat by including specific images of comfort women, perpetuating their
state of being sexual slaves, women’s bodies are reduced to nothing more than a
sign with the inscribed power dynamics between the colonizer and the colonized
and a screen onto which the collective experiences of war are projected.

Between Memory/Trauma Representation and History-Writing

The Articulation of History-Writing and Memory

Since the 2000s, Korean films have been shifting their focus to the past more often
than ever before. In particular, instead of costume films depicting real historical
figures and events, faction films have become an emerging trend, blurring the
boundary between fact and fiction by adding a filmmaker’s fictional imagination
to a historical fact. Such a trend involving ‘historical memories’, on one hand,
integrates history with imagination for genre films through eclecticism, parody,
and quotation instead of seriously reflecting on the axis of time connecting past,
present, and future in this postmodern era ‘with little historical awareness’. On the
other hand, it is closely associated with the emergence of mass media, including
cinema, as an alternative means of history-writing during the rapid process of
de-ideologicalization and de-politicization.
 Writing a History Through Cinema 61

In this context, it is interesting to see these two films on comfort women that
use generic norms of less popular film subgenres such as erotic, coming-of-age,
and road movies while giving vividly realistic accounts of historical events through
closed narratives. Despite their success and significance, these films are still prob­
lematic because a politics of memory, which turns the comfort women issue into a
collective trauma, is highly likely to simplify or erase comfort women’s individual
memories; moreover, the traditional concept of realism with a particular focus on
achieving faithful representations of the past can clash with gendered experiences
and melodramatic representations.
These films, which reconstruct comfort women’s traumatic experiences, char­
acterized by feelings of pain, damage, and shame, as ‘indubitable and undeniable
truths’8 through linear and closed narratives, ironically suggest that such violent
and traumatic experiences are unrepresentable and indescribable. They prompt
us to forget the violent aspects of historical events and enable us to relive them
by showing a new closed narrative representing these events. Moreover, they are
problematic in that they tend to focus on an identity politics where a person’s
wound becomes our wound and, therefore, we must seek revenge on the one who
caused the wound, that is to say, subaltern politics involving the fetishization of
the wound. Despite our belief that testimony is first-hand experience and the myth
that experiences are facts, these experiences can be understood only through inter­
pretation. When representing a past event, it is necessary to reflect on the fact
that although subaltern experiences, sentiments, and knowledge cannot stand alone
without being represented by intellectuals, it is impossible to achieve a clear and
thorough representation of them in the first place.
Official memories reflect a society’s mainstream and dominant perception of
historical events, while personal memories belong to individuals/agents, which can
be articulated through micro-narratives in contrast with official memories. How­
ever, summoning up memories basically requires an external effort because it is
the memories of others that bring up one’s memories and on which these memories
rely. Without society, it would be impossible not only to collect memories but also
to revive, perceive, and position them. This means that memory is a social fact.
That is, it is a society that provides a collective framework for handling memories.
However, the comfort women stories re-enacted in these two films do not address
anything more than what we have already learned from oral statements or testimo­
nies collected as part of the comfort women movement or academic research on
this issue. They also have several limitations regarding rewriting women’s history
and representing wounds and memories.
Cinema, previously considered a product of fiction, has become an agent of
history that goes beyond being a historical record. In other words, since collec­
tive memories represented by cinema have been accepted as historical images and
records by history scholars, cinema has proudly become part of alternative and
unofficial histories. Therefore, it plays a pivotal role in presenting the past more
actively and effectively than any other media form, summoning various memories
neglected by official history. Throughout the process of the official representa­
tion of history, different interpretations of the past must compete to be recognized.
62 You-shin Joo

Historical representations in popular culture, including cinema, are highly likely

to become dominant memories themselves, restricting the potential of different
memories and reducing the driving force for resistance through alternative memo­
ries. Since the imagination of the past through history-writing can be a ‘memory’
itself, controlling the process of narrating and representing this memory is equal to
dominating the past by using a means of repression that involves creating another
reality.
If this is the case, as mentioned before, it is worrisome that while transform­
ing comfort women’s personal experiences into narrativized representations, both
films use closed narratives, almost equating the validity of their testimonies with
the fictionality of narratives. It is also a shame that what they do is close to a re­
enactment of the story that the public already knows about comfort women. First,
if such closed narratives become dominant memories without leaving room for
alternative memories and show rigidity and stubbornness about achieving account­
ability and transparency in terms of the representation of past events, it would be
difficult to approach history from a different point of view or to create a new dia­
logue between past and present. For this reason, what is lacking in these films is a
representation that can ‘make a difference’ by thinking outside the box away from
common knowledge, universal sentiments, and fixed categories associated with the
comfort women issue. This ushers in the argument that historical representations
through memories in this age must ask ‘what will come along if the past moment
repeats itself (“what if” speech) instead of re-enacting it as if it were happening
right now (“as if” speech)’.9

Trauma and Mourning Ritual

In an interview, Cho Jung-rae, the director of Spirits’ Homecoming, said, ‘I had a

dream about the girls reincarnated as butterflies out of the pit full of dead bodies
and flying back to their hometowns. I wish my film could bring their spirits back’.10
In so saying, he defined Spirits’ Homecoming ‘as a “film of salvation and healing”
that prays for restless spirits in a foreign land to come back’.11 This signifies that
adapting comfort women’s stories embodies a desire to call back a traumatic event
in a place of public memory, turn it into something that evokes sympathy, and
grieve the premature deaths of comfort women with deep sorrow and pain.
Both films express this desire through elaborate metaphors and symbols. In
Spirits’ Homecoming, Eun-kyung, a shaman and victim of sexual assault, per­
forms a traditional ‘homecoming ritual’ through which Young-ok reunites with the
deceased Jung-min and makes peace with her lifelong feelings of guilt. After the
ritual, Jung-min’s spirit became a butterfly and returned home, along with count­
less others. Meanwhile, Snowy Road ends with a scene in which young Jong-boon
returns home hand in hand with her mother after elder Jong-boon gives Young-ae
back her name and performs an austere ritual for her.
Modern and contemporary Korean history can be characterized by the suffering
and trauma of the innocent. For that reason, countless works in literature, theatre,
and cinema have given voice to such a tragic history, mourning undocumented
 Writing a History Through Cinema 63

sacrifices. In line with this, a few questions arise: How do these two films on the
sacrifices of comfort women represent the objects of mourning and the loss accom­
panied by grief? How do they ‘imagine’ the people as a collective entity? How well
do they allow us to confront and reflect on our tragic past?
First, in Snowy Road, the spirit of the deceased Young-ae is still present in
the elder Jong-boon’s everyday life and space, coexisting with and talking to her
friend. Another story simultaneously unfolds as the older Jong-boon befriends
a teenage girl named Eun-soo (played by Cho Soo-hyang), becomes like fam­
ily to her, and begins to share and heal the pain of the past. By doing so, the
mourning process becomes closely intertwined with the resolution of the story,
creating a sense of reality and sociability. Meanwhile, major motifs such as sha­
manism and the medium, which play an important role in Spirits’ Homecoming,
provoke the criticism that ‘to imagine there is no possibility of reconciliation
and consolation since the past cannot be shared, remembered, and documented
without the help of a medium is a manifestation of rigid thinking and political
regression’.12
Obviously, it is not easy to remember the collectively forgotten past and repre­
sent unconsciously neglected trauma. When memory is revisited after being lost or
damaged, however many times, it can be called ‘re-memory’. The comfort women
issue is all about ‘mediated memory’, given that it can never be understood sepa­
rately from the influences of social controversies, political movements, and media
representations over a few decades. In this context, we, the ‘generation-after’ with­
out direct personal experience of the trauma, must create our own postmemory,
that is, a mediatory relationship between history and trauma/memory. We must
also avoid identifying or perpetuating the victim’s trauma/memory. It is necessary
to understand historical trauma by placing it in a socio-historical context instead
of approaching it merely as a past event or at an individual level. We must move
beyond simple and repetitive re-enactments to translate the trauma into multiple
layers and positions and eventually provoke criticism of colonialism in collusion
with patriarchy and historical oblivion.

Towards an Alternative History

It is exciting and encouraging to have two films that overtly discuss the contro­
versial comfort women issue after a number of Korean people expressed disap­
pointment and outrage over the news that Korea and Japan had agreed to settle the
comfort women issue on December 28, 2015. Spirits’ Homecoming’s production
process, close to a miracle, and its box office success in excess of expectations,
might be an implicit indicator of the Korean public’s rejection of such an ahistori­
cal and unjust agreement. The comfort women issue is still ongoing and hurtful,
combined with a sense of guilt that keeps haunting our mind and soul.
The goal of this chapter has been to attentively examine the achievements and
limitations of Spirits’ Homecoming and Snowy Road and carefully yet sharply criti­
cize them in this context. A number of documentary films have already worked
to make comfort women visible and to integrate their memories into history by
64 You-shin Joo

looking at the existing records of the heartaches, sorrows, murmurs, and silence of
surviving comfort women. These works in the form of socio-cultural activism have
often faced challenges in restoring the history of those who have been deprived of
their voices in an unreasonable and unjust society and defeated in the exhausting
battle for justice. Nevertheless, just as the title of the documentary My Heart Is Not
Broken Yet suggests, these works continue to thrive, encouraging solidarity among
comfort women across Asia and transcending the narrow-minded nationalist frame
of ‘Japan the assailant vs. Korea the victim’.
Such an effort indicates the growing importance of revising the history denied
and distorted by Japan from a postcolonial point of view. It restores a history of
women recognized as that of the marginalized and wounded to a place within a
national history and repositions the comfort women issue into the geopolitical
frame and across multiple levels of analysis concerning issues of ‘civil society,
state, Asia, and the global’. Moreover, cinema, as a new platform of history-writing,
must carefully examine the ‘dialectic of memory and oblivion’ away from the
nationalist impulse to ‘territorialize memory’, while affording thoughtful insight
into radical cultural politics on the representation of memory against the con­
cept of history-writing in a traditional sense. In short, cinema must play a crucial
role in moving toward a truly creative ‘alternative history’ rather than towards an
‘allohistory’.

Notes
1 “ ‘Let’s ejaculate the comfort women statue’ . . . Japanese author tweets remarks,”
Yonhap News, April 6, 2017, accessed January 20, 2022, www.yna.co.kr/view/
AKR20170406180000073?section=search.
2 The Dong-a Ilbo, January 20, 1992, quoted in Yang Hyun Ah, “Testimony and Writing
History: Representation of Korean Military Comfort Women’s Subjectivities,” Society
and History 60 (2001): 68.
3 Alison Landsberg, “Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner,” in Cyber­
space, Cyberbodies, Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment, edited by
Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows (London; Thousand Oaks; New Delhi: Sage
Publications, 1995), 176.
4 Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cam­
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 22.
5 Jay Sohn, “Jay Sohn’s Film Criticism: How Are We Going to Imagine ‘New’ Us?”
Cine 21, March 16, 2016, accessed January 22, 2022, www.cine21.com/news/view/
?mag_id=83396.
6 Lee Ye-ji, “People: Lee Na-jeong, the Director of Snowy Road,” Cine 21, March 9,
2017, accessed January 22, 2022, www.cine21.com/news/view/?mag_id=86621.
7 Kim Sooah, “A Study on the Discourse Formation of the Issue of the Korean ‘Military
Comfort Women’,” Research Institute for the Comfort Women Issue, accessed June 3,
2021, www.k-comfortwomen.com.
8 Oka Mari, Memory, Narrative (Seoul: Somyong Publishing, 2000), 149.
9 Cho Hye-young, “History Repeats Itself Three Times: Documentary Reenactment and
History-Writing with a Focus on MANSHIN: Ten Thousand Spirits and Tour of Duty,” in
The Current State of Korean Documentary: Genre, History, and Media, edited by Nam
Inyoung, et al. (Seoul: Buonbooks, 2016), 119.
 Writing a History Through Cinema 65

10 Yun Hye-ji, “Girls Who Return Home as Butterflies,” Cine 21, March 7, 2016, accessed
January 22, 2022, www.cine21.com/news/view/?mag_id=83191.
11 Yun Hye-ji, “Girls.”
12 Jay Sohn, “Jay Sohn’s Film Criticism.”

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Bok-soon, Kim. “The Discovery of Girls and Genealogy of Anti-Communist Narratives:
A Focus on Choi Jung Hee’s Green Door.” Journal of Modern Korean Literature 18
(2008): 203–34.
Chin-Sung, Chung. “The Nature of the Imperial Japanese Army Policies on Comfort
Women.” In Social Ideologies and Movements in the Late Joseon Period During the Jap­
anese Occupation, edited by Korean Social History Association, 172–201. Seoul: Moonji
Publishing, 1994.
Cho, Hye-young. “History Repeats Itself Three Times: Documentary Reenactment and
History-Writing with a Focus on MANSHIN: Ten Thousand Spirits and Tour of Duty.” In
The Current State of Korean Documentary: Genre, History, and Media, edited by Nam
Inyoung et al., 110–50. Seoul: Buonbooks, 2016.
Choi, Young-joo. “Theatrical Representation of Comfort Women in Korean, Japanese, and
American Plays.” Journal of Korean Theater Studies 18 (2002): 89–118.
Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1997.
Kim, Soo-ah. “A Study on the Discourse Formation of the Issue of the Korean ‘Military
Comfort Women.’” Research Institute for Comfort Women Issue. Accessed June 3, 2021.
www.k-comfortwomen.com.
Kim, Soo-jin. “The Representation of Trauma and Oral History: Aporia in Korean Comfort
Women’s Testimony.” Women’s Studies Review 30, no. 1 (2013): 35–72.
Kim, Soo-yeon. “Melodramatic Memories in A City of Sadness and Peppermint Candy.”
Journal of Popular Narrative 14 (2005): 325–53.
Kim, Young-beom. “A Study on Maurice Halbwach’s Sociology of Memory.” Journal of
Social Science Research 6, no. 3 (1999): 557–94.
LaCapra, Dominick. History Towards Healing, edited by Yook Young Soo, et al. Seoul: Blue
History Publishing, 2008.
Landsberg, Alison. “Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner.” In Cyberspace,
Cyberbodies, Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment, edited by Mike Feath­
erstone, and Roger Burrows, 175–89. London; Thousand Oaks; New Delhi: Sage Publica­
tions, 1995.
Lee, Ye-ji. “People: Lee Na-jeong, the Director of Snowy Road.” Cine 21, March 9, 2017.
Accessed January 22, 2022. www.cine21.com/news/view/?mag_id=86621.
Mari, Oka. Memory, Narrative. Trans. Kim Byeonggu. Seoul: Somyong Publishing, 2000.
Moon, Kyoung-hee. “Flower Granny’s Representation of Comfort Women and the Politics
of Emotion.” Gender and Culture 9, no. 2 (2016): 173–209.
Park, Suk-ja. “A Study on the Formation Process of Modern Subject and the Other.” Korean
Language and Literature 97 (2007): 267–90.
Shin, Hyung-gee. “Beyond National Narratives.” Contemporary Criticism 13 (2000).
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March 16, 2016. Accessed January 22, 2022. www.cine21.com/news/view/?mag_id=83396.
66 You-shin Joo

Suvin, Darko. “Victorian Science Fiction, 1871–85: The Rise of the Alternative History
Sub-Genre.” Science-Fiction Studies 10 (1983): 148–69.
Yang, Hyun-ah. “Testimony and Writing History: Representation of Korean Military Com­
fort Women’s Subjectivities.” Society and History 60 (2001): 60–98.
Yun, Hye-ji. “Girls Who Return Home as Butterflies.” Cine 21, March 7, 2016. Accessed
January 22, 2022. www.cine21.com/news/view/?mag_id=83191.
Part II

Korean Cinema and the

Colonial Period
5 ‘Be a Soldier’
War and Melodrama in
Late Colonial Korea1

Moonim Baek

Introduction
The son I raised to offer to the nation
When I sent him off to a shining battle
With smiling face, tears did not drop
I waved the flag, at the train station at dawn.

If a man’s life is like a flower

Shedding blood under mountains and streams
A red sakura flower falling with force
This is the duty of the man of pando [Peninsula].

More than see your face alive

I welcome you in your death
The courageous loyalty of my brave son
I, as the mother of the volunteer soldier, will be boastful.2

These words are the lyrics of a popular militia song released when the Japanese
colonial government implemented a volunteer soldier system in 1938 in colonial
Korea after the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War. The words are expressed by the
mother of a volunteer soldier who is about to go off to war. Written and composed
by the musician Cho Myŏng-am, the song features a middle-aged Korean woman
who acknowledges the Empire of Japan as her state, has raised her son to devote
himself to that state, and proudly expects him to return in ‘death’. This patriotic
motherhood, which not only willingly sees sons join the army but also encourages
them to devote their lives to the empire, is influenced by ‘the mother of the national
army’ (軍國の母), an image that was abundantly produced and circulated within
the Japan’s mass media during World War II.
Some of the expressions, such as ‘the man of pando [Peninsula]’ and ‘waving
the flags . . . with a smiling face’, however, touch upon contradictory desires that
belie the policy of naesŏn ilch’e (J: naisen ittai, Japan and Korea as ‘One Body’).
The word pando, which signifies the spatial difference between the geospace of
the metropole and the colony, reinforces such a hiatus between the colonizer and

DOI: 10.4324/9781003279013-7
70 Moonim Baek

the colonized in terms of power relations and hierarchy. The figure of the Korean
mother from the song above cannot be the same as the mother of Japan, because
her son is an inferior man born on the Korean peninsula who can never be a true
imperial subject. Therefore, the imagined scene in the song, in which the mother
waves the Japanese flag and wears a smile at the train station as she sends her son
to the battlefield where he is likely to die, is entirely implausible. The word pando
reveals the gap between Japan and Korea concealed in the policy of naesŏn ilch’e,
and her loyalty to the Japanese empire described with the smile and the flag creates
suspicion by excessively according with what Japan expected of the colony.
In this chapter, I discuss the ways in which cultural products both reveal and
resolve the contradiction in the process of mass mobilization by analysing a
series of wartime propaganda films produced in late colonial Korea. My focus
will be the ‘gendered desire’ of Korean volunteer soldiers and the melodramatic
styles that problematize their desire by appealing to female spectators. I pay
great attention to scenes that express a sheer number of elements of pathos: the
moment that a Korean man decides to become a volunteer; the strained scene in
which the man’s mother and/or female lover responds to his voluntary decision to
join the military; and, finally, a farewell scene between them drenched in pathos.
Melodramatic styles used in films such as Military Train (Gun-yong-yeolcha,
dir. Seo Gwang-je, 1938), Volunteers (Jiweonbyeong, dir. A Seok-young, 1941),
and The Straits of Choseon (Chosŏn haehyŏp, dir. Park Gi-chae, 1943) raised
the question of the legitimacy of militarization and masculinization of Korean
men and simultaneously produced a fractured image of Korean women as audio­
visual and linguistic signifiers. These scenes show, to borrow Homi Bhabha’s
term, an ‘ambivalence’ that is central to forming stereotypes within colonial
discourse.3 This reveals the transformation of Korean men into a new subject,
that is, soldier–imperial–complete men; at the same time, the othering of Korean
women takes place during this transformative process. Henceforth, Korean male
subjectivity becomes complete, while Korean women are presented as incoherent
and divisive as audio-visual and linguistic subjects.

Gender Politics of Military Service

In the metropole (Japan proper), it took incredible effort by the Japanese govern­
ment to convince each household in Japan to have their son(s) to enlist in the army
and send them off to the battlefield;4 in Korea, persuading Korean mothers to send
their sons off to war for the ‘waenom’ (a derogatory term for the Japanese that is
equivalent to an American slang ‘Japs’) was a very complicated process initially.
For a long time, Koreans regarded a military career as a ‘lowly profession’ that
had ‘an inevitable relationship with the death’. After deciding to join the military,
many Korean volunteer soldiers had a hard time persuading the female members
of their family, especially mothers, who did not want their sons to join the military.
For this reason, the colonial government’s policy on Korean women, especially
that around the volunteer system, was broader. It promoted slogans such as ‘The
rising imperial army would not exist without the mothers of imperial Japan’, which
 ‘Be a Soldier’ 71

aimed to convince women in the peninsula to prioritize their maternal existence in

the imperial context.5
Whether Koreans should be mobilized as a force for Japan’s war had long been
a controversial topic, since the beginning of the Japanese colonization of Korea.
There were many problems, such as how to distinguish the status of the colonizer
and the colonized in the military; whether the colonized, who were hostile to the
colonizer, should be sent to the battlefield alongside the Japanese; and whether it
was actually possible for Koreans to devote their lives to Japan’s wars. The colonial
government planned to draft Koreans into the Japanese military in 1913, three years
after annexation, but the plan did not materialize. However, the plan was reconsid­
ered in 1932 in the aftermath of the Manchurian Incident and finally implemented
in a more practical manner in 1938, after the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War,
by Imperial Ordinance 95, which created the Korean Special Volunteer Soldier
System (K: Yukkun tŭŭkpyŏl chiwŏnbyŏngnyŏng). The goal of this measure was
twofold: first, to increase the number of soldiers in case of escalation of the war,
thus significantly reducing the number of Japanese soldiers who could fight in
a large-scale war; and, second, making Koreans imperial subjects (K: hwangguk
shingmin) through effective means of persuasion.6 Here, educating Koreans to have
a national consciousness (for Japan) was an important task for the colonial govern­
ment, and the volunteer soldier system could be abolished if Koreans were thought
to be insufficiently imperialized.
The volunteer system and the subsequent conscription policy in 1943 both tar­
geted the colonized, as they sought to persuade Koreans that they could have the
chance to be raised to the same level as the Japanese rather than being discrimi­
nated against. This propaganda seems to indicate that Koreans, though secondary
soldiers, would be officially recognized as Japanese citizens. Here, Korean men
were given the prospect of gaining new strength and spirit and becoming ‘a leader
of the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere, overcoming the 300-year-old
effeminate politics that had deprived Koreans of vigorous spirit: as a result they
had been ill and frail’.7 Accordingly, Korean women were also given the task of
participating in a national cause, serving men on the battlefield and being faithful
to their household chores.
However, the process of subjectification and interpellation—one that is to be Jap­
anese just by entering the war—as well as Koreans’ reaction towards such process
was fraught with contradictions. There were three parties with overlapping inter­
ests through which tension lingered: first, Korean intellectuals, who anticipated that
the fundamental premise of naesŏn ilch’e would result in an institutional equality
between Korean and Japanese; second, the colonial government in Korea stressed
equality less than imperialization, which attempted to dissolve the Korean national
identity into Japanese identity;8 and third, the colonial military authorities revealed
their discomfort towards Koreans, who only saw the volunteer soldier system as a
chance for Koreans to overcome discrimination by the Japanese.9 We see that each
group’s ideas and desires overlapped but were simultaneously contradictory: the
desire of Korean intellectuals excited at the thought of the policy that would ensure
equality between Korean and Japanese;10 the desire of the colonial government to
72 Moonim Baek

speed up the process of imperialization of Koreans; and the anxiety of the military
authorities who had to deal with the Korean soldiers. These overlapping but contra­
dictory desires are also present in mass propaganda for volunteer systems.
Gradually recognizing film’s ‘rapid influence on the mind of human beings’,11
the Japanese colonial government from the late 1930s established a film control
system to exploit film as an effective propaganda tool for Koreans, who were
thought to be easily influenced by its visual medium since there was a lack of
other forms of entertainment.12 Between 1927 and 1942, the number of Korean
film audiences increased by 7.6 times, and in 1941 audiences were 83.25% male
and 16.75% female.13 According to the personnel of the Ministry of Culture of
Mobilization Federation in 1942, one-third of the entire audience was students,
while another third was employed young men and women, and the number of mar­
ried young women was outstanding.14 By the time the Chosun Film Regulation
(Chosŏn yŏnghwaryŏng) was enacted in 1940, the colonial government saw that
Koreans were more easily influenced by film than Japanese audiences, and it began
to concentrate on circulating a discourse emphasizing the greater importance of
film control in Korea than in Japan. The problem for Korean men of becoming a
volunteer soldier and an imperial subject—both reasons why volunteer soldiers
were the main focus of propaganda in Korean films—was part of the movement
of recruitment propaganda conducted by the Korean federation that was fulfill­
ing its mission for the National Spiritual Mobilization Movement (K: Kungmin
chŏngsin ch’ongdongwŏn; J: Kokumin Seishin Sōdōin Undō). The target audience
of the Chosun Federation’s propaganda campaign included young men who were
old enough to enlist in the army as well as students in secondary school or higher,
housewives, and the elderly.15 Here, two types of audience proved important for
film control. First, young Korean men were prime propaganda targets in connec­
tion with the implementation of the volunteer and conscription system. Moreover,
the films’ rhetoric focused on the mobilization of female audiences. It became clear
that female audiences, including mothers, were the direct recipients of propaganda
messages. We can observe such examples through rediscovered colonial Korean
films such as Straits of Choseon (1943), Vow of Love (Ai to chikai hi, 1945), and
Dear Soldier (Heitai-san, 1944).
Dear Soldier itself can be called a direct message by the Governor-General to
Korean mothers, focusing on the life of volunteer soldiers under training in terms
of safety and convenience. There are many shots of mothers reading letters, first
from the Governor-General and later from their sons. Dear Soldier looks as if it
visualizes the motto that ‘the army squad is a home to its soldiers’, as a protagonist,
Eichi, explains to his Korean neighbours during his short furlough, through vari­
ous props such as army surgeons, medicines, manjoo, red-bean porridge, flowers,
and birdcage—all of which act as a method of persuasion directed towards moth­
ers. Two similar shots of two mothers’ gazes at their militarized sons, Hiramatsu
and Yasumoto, look as if the mothers feel relief to see their sons fully adopted by
a better family to finally become better men. As the letters written by the sons are
delivered to their mothers in the last part of the film, corresponding to the letters by
the Governor-General delivered to the mothers in the first part, the Korean young
 ‘Be a Soldier’ 73

men repeat the message of the Governor-General in their own voice to confirm its
authenticity:

Dear Mother . . . I’m doing well serving the country. Please rest assured. Train­
ing in summer is difficult, but in the afternoon, we have nap time. So, please
do not worry about me. In the evening, we drank the sodas at the shop. I am
sure you will not understand how delicious it is after a hard day of training.

Further, Korean men in these propaganda films are given the opportunity to
become not only complete imperial subjects for the empire but also masculine
adults. Analyzing Korean soldiers in colonial Korean films, Takashi Fujitani argued
that Japan faced the impossibility of sustaining the bifurcation between masculin­
ized colonizers and effeminate colonized:

As in colonialisms throughout much of the rest of the world, Japanese colo­

nial discourse generally worked to infantilize and feminize the colonized in
such manner as to make masculinist imperial domination appear warranted
and natural. It was commonly said, for example, that Korea had become
effeminate because of its long history of valorizing the literary over the mili­
tary arts. . . . Yet the practical necessity of incorporating Koreans into the
Japanese war effort and into the Japanese nation, particularly as soldiers,
made it impossible to sustain a rigid binary logic of masculinized colonizers
and infantilized and feminized colonial subjects. Instead, even as it femin­
ized Korean males, colonial discourse and practice presented them with the
opportunity to attain their (Japanese) adult manhood through service for the
nation. Colonialism and nationalism thus sought, albeit with mixed results,
to mobilize their subjects not simply through repressive means but also by
producing gendered desires and presenting opportunities to fulfill them.16

Here, Fujitani drew attention to the production of the propaganda film narrative,
which tells a story in which the colonized men can go from infantile, effeminate
beings to mature, masculine beings. Fujitani also displayed how Korean men, after
becoming soldiers, turn into the masculinized object of feminine desire, making it
possible for men to acquire masculinity and to make themselves more appealing
to women. However, I argue that the desired gaze belongs not to Korean women
but rather to the men or women of the empire. For example, a Korean soldier in
You and I (Kimi to Boku, dir. Heo Young, 1941) does not merge in a heterosexual
love relationship with a Korean woman, but with a Japanese woman. The Japanese
woman here is a sign that the Korean man has entered the stage of symbolic order,
while the Korean woman is a sign of being suppressed for the sake of Korean man’s
masculinization. In The Volunteer, Chun-ho gives up his heterosexual bonds with
a Korean woman (whether a country girl or urban modern girl) in order to become
a real man. Given these examples, we sense a contradiction when Korean female
spectators cannot make sense of choices made by these characters: for whom do
they become soldiers and why?
74 Moonim Baek

Moreover, it is important to consider how Korean women would react to men

leaving them behind. The melodramatic film styles that I will examine in the next sec­
tions foreground Korean women’s responses to Korean men’s voluntary enlistment
and, accordingly, problematize the legitimacy of their masculinization and imperial
subjectification. These films always showcase scenes in which Korean women must
send off their precious men to the war. These scenes are the most dramatic moments
for Korean female characters and spectators. Although these are the moments in the
eyes of the filmmakers that must persuade Korean audiences to make up their minds
about recruitment, they are also the moments for Korean female spectators that mark
climactic tension and doubt, through which Korean men might break ties with their
loved ones and pay the price if it happens. The narrative develops to final approval by
the female characters, fulfilling the aim of the propaganda, but the pathos produced
by their ambivalent responses make the authenticity of that approval incomplete.

Abandoned Love and Voice With(out) Body: The Volunteer

The Volunteer (1941), written and produced by former members of KAPF (Korea
Artista Proleta Federatio) such as Ch’oe Sŭng-il, Pak Yŏng-hŭi, and An Sŏk-yŏng,
was a form of ideological conversion (chŏnhyang) that secured their positions as
cultural leaders until 1945. Despite the fact that they intended to dispel the Korean
audience’s doubts about the volunteer soldier system and to call on all Koreans to
accept the colonialist ideology, the film seems to have been addressed less to the
Korean people than to the colonial government and imperial bureaucrats. Although
the film was criticized for lacking a full transformation of the colonized men (this
film ends with a Korean man finally enlisting in the military, right before his trans­
formation), the Korean filmmakers succeeded in gaining recognition from the
colonial government and the imperial bureaucrats by the pre-emptive description
of over-satisfying the imperialization of Korea.
This film tells the story of a rural Korean man named Chun-ho and his quest to
enlist in the military, presenting visually a mise-en-scène that invokes Korea’s local
colour—a beautiful natural landscape, a watermill, a well-side in rural areas, and
women dressed in Korean attire.17 In the film, Chun-ho seems to be dealing with
two conflicts, which makes it quite incomprehensible for audiences to understand
his character: the landlord whom Chun-ho works for, on the one hand, tries to put
him down in terms of his promotion, and his status as a Korean subject, on the
other, limits him from becoming a soldier. Even without his promotion, however,
Chun-ho and his whole family have no difficulty living since his late father left a
substantial inheritance, and Chun-ho had already committed to cultivating waste
land, so he had no reason to become a soldier. Why, then, does he want to be a
soldier so badly? Born a farmer’s son who was once educated in higher school, he
is distressed about his own unemployment in Seoul (a symbol of the modernized
world) and his own status as Korean. If his desire to cleanse the mountain slope
into a farming field serves to show traces of the rural movement of proletarian lit­
erature from the past, then it conflicts with his depression at not participating in the
modernized world or war. In other words, Chun-ho is represented as a person with
two distinct personalities: a figure in proletarian literature who left the modernized
 ‘Be a Soldier’ 75

world to participate in the rural movement, and a depressed man unable to escape
the countryside. Chun-ho’s determination to join the army violates the rule of the
proletarian subject. This was the intention of this film, which acts as a conversion
film on the part of the filmmakers, former KAPF members.
As a bildungsroman, the film shows Chun-ho going through a process of
masculinization—becoming a real man as he overcomes depression and a lack of
self-confidence. However, in a scene in which Chun-ho’s proud moment of finally
becoming a Japanese soldier is revealed, the camera focuses on the ambiguous
facial reaction of his loved ones, his mother and his fiancée. When Chun-ho says
goodbye to his mother to go off to the war, we hear the mother’s off-screen words
(‘take care of yourself’) without her presence on the screen. The next shot reveals
Chun-ho, about to say goodbye, and we see his mother looking at him wordlessly.
The camera was fixed on the mother, who did not speak, visually captured her in
a medium shot, and then moved slightly away from her for 10 seconds. Here, we
experience the voice (sound) and body (visual image) of the mother (an old Korean
woman with ambiguous expression and silence) as separate entities.
Furthermore, we see Bun-ok, a stereotypical Korean woman, discreet and inno­
cent, who is played by the popular actress Mun Ye-bong, frowning in shock at
Chun-ho’s decision to join the military. They exchange the following dialogue:

Bun-ok: A volunteer soldier? (Chiwŏnbyŏngio?)

Chun-ho: Why? Are you surprised? (Wae, nollatso?)
Bun-ok: No. Be a soldier. (Anio. Kunini toeseyo.) For the sake of our nation, be a
great soldier. (Nararŭl wihaesŏ hullyunghan kunini toeseyo.)

Figure 5.1 Mother’s reaction: Volunteer

76 Moonim Baek

Here, the dialogue (‘be a soldier’ and ‘for the sake of our nation, be a great sol­
dier’) is clearly spoken by Bun-ok. However, while we see her body and her mouth
speaking the word ‘be a soldier’, the rest of the sentence is heard off-screen, which
creates a subtle gap between the ‘be a soldier’ and ‘be a great soldier’ that repeats as
well as (over)emphasizing the previously spoken words. It can be said that the scene
is divided into two voices: the voice of the body and the voice of the disembodied
body. The voice of the disembodied body of the mother and Bun-ok ignites the con­
tent that supports Korean men’s transformation into soldiers and masculinization.
This voice is what Michel Chion calls ‘acousmatic’, which is a voice that comes
in with the advent of the ‘talkie’ films in the late 1920s Hollywood, which sounds
‘without showing their emitters . . . intentionally eliminating the possibility of seeing
the sounds’ initial causes’.18 The audience hears the dialogue ‘take care of yourself’
and thinks that it is the mother’s disembodied voice; when the audience hears Bun­
ok’s dialogue ‘be a soldier’, seeing her visually while she moves her lips, they fill in
the gap with the next spoken words, ‘For the sake of our nation, be a great soldier’.
By detaching the voice that authenticates the masculinization and militarization of
Korean men from the voice of Korean women, the audience experiences a change in
the relations between what they see and what they hear. The audience cannot know
for sure whether the voice came from the same body (though the narrative implies
that they are the same), for the body or the subject that authenticates the masculiniza­
tion and militarization of Korean men becomes absent in that brief moment.
We then witness the couple (Chun-ho and Bun-ok) suddenly stop exchanging
dialogue. During this moment of silence, we see an elaborate mise-en-scène in
which Bun-ok draws water from the well and Chun-ho helps her, combined with a
sweet Western-style orchestra melody, all of which complete a perfect harmony of
colonial melodrama and its locality. However, this moment of silence and colonial
beauty is also the climax in the narrative, in which the audience senses an anticipa­
tion of their parting and that Bun-ok will ultimately accept it. Bun-ok is already
sought by another family to be the wife of the male heir, and suspense is created
as her fate can be changed by the choice Chun-ho makes. Of course, the audience
would not have taken Bun-ok’s dialogue ‘be a soldier’ as a surprise, as the first
scene of the film shows her with a band around her chest that reads ‘Patriotic Wom­
en’s Association’ (Aegukpuinhoe), a cliché for imperialized women in late colonial
propaganda. The problem, however, lies in her facial expressions and gestures,
voice–body separation, and silence. Like the mother, Bun-ok’s expression shows
her inner conflict that the Korean (female) audience can recognize. Throughout the
film, Bun-ok is portrayed as someone who respects yet fails to understand Chun-ho
and cannot hide her fear of being left behind.
In the last scene of the film, we see the departure of Chun-ho at the train station;
here, the camera shows a close-up of Bun-ok’s face with a smile. However, is Bun­
ok putting on a smile for Chun-ho or for a camera? Her smile is quite ambiguous,
in that the audience is not sure if she finally recognizes and approves Chun-ho’s
remasculinization. Foreshadowing Chun-ho’s fate of becoming a real man, this
shot hints at the fact that he can become masculinized once he gives up his hetero­
sexual relationship with Korean women and excludes them completely from his
life. Then, which character does the audience sympathize with? The film seems to
 ‘Be a Soldier’ 77

suggest that the only way Korean men can truly become imperial soldiers is not
only to recant their socialist ideology but also to abandon their relationships with
Korean women.

The Effect of Gendered Desire: Straits of Choseon

Pak Ki-ch’ae’s 1943 film Straits of Choseon was produced by the Chosŏn Film
Corporation, which was built by the colonial government as a monopolized film
company in the aftermath of the enforcement of the Chosŏn Film Regulation in
1940. After it unexpectedly garnered a large audience, Straits of Choseon influ­
enced the production policy of the company. The company analysed the reason
for the success as the film’s all-Korean crews in the production, who knew how to
appeal to Korean spectators, in contrast with other films made with Japanese and
Manchurian film staff.19 This later led to the creation of the motto ‘Korean films
are better made by Korean people’, which affected upcoming film productions like
Dear Soldier and Story of Big Whales (both directed by Bang Han-jun in 1944).20
However, we must understand that the success of Straits of Choseon was attributed
to its appropriation of melodramatic conventions of Korean popular culture, in that
it revolves around the fate of a woman left behind when her lover leaves to become
a soldier.21 In fact, this film was advertised in many newspapers and magazines
as ‘women’s film’ describing the sorrow, love, and agony of Kinshuku. Further, a
male intellectual criticizes the film for squeezing out the main theme of volunteer
soldiers with private, trivial themes such as a romantic affair that appealed to low­
brow spectators.22

Figure 5.2 Kinshuku Lamenting: Straits of Choseon

78 Moonim Baek

Figure 5.3 Kinshuku with her son and Kiyoko(Seiki’s sister). Straits of Choseon.
Source: Courtesy of Korean Film Archive.

The film begins with two events that simultaneously revolve around one family:
the funeral of the older brother Sŏng-kyung, who died in the Sino-Japanese War,
and the pregnancy of Kinshuku (her Korean name is Kŭm-suk), an unapproved
lover of self-centred Seiki (Sŏng-ki is his Korean name), a younger brother of
Sŏng-kyung. We come to realize that Seiki’s family was in crisis because they lost
their eldest son. Korea’s Confucian tradition was based on the principle that the
eldest son is the heir of the family, but Sŏng-kyung died leaving no children. Inter­
estingly, the story starts off during a conflict in the father–son relationship—Seiki
is forsaken by his father, who does not accept his younger son’s affair with
Kinshuku, a low-born Korean woman. This motif is typical of the conventions
of Korean popular culture at the time, allowing a build-up to the tearful fate of
Kinshuku and her quest for acceptance by Seiki’s family. This motif grabs the
audience’s attention. The build-up intensifies as Seiki leaves Kinshuku behind for
volunteer enlistment. By becoming an imperial soldier, however, Seiki is forgiven
 ‘Be a Soldier’ 79

by his father, who is willing to offer his son to the empire, thus accepting Kinshuku
as a part of his family at the end of the film.
Fujitani observed that this film, which brings down the conservative Confucian
customs and values of the past (represented by the father), breaks the barrier hold­
ing the new generation back from obtaining ‘free love’ and fulfilling their emotion
as human beings.23 Although it is true that Seiki is able to solve all of the conflicts
by simply becoming a soldier, I argue that the new generation of Koreans is more
(re)appropriated by the old customs and values than it is taken away from them.
Through enlistment, Seiki less escapes from customs than settles into them—he
receives a warm welcome from his family, including his stubborn father, who even­
tually recognizes him as a legitimate son and Seiki’s son as the direct heir to his
family lineage as well. In effect, it is Seiki’s father, a patriarch, who gains honour;
he gains his national honour by sending off his son to the war and gains Confucian
honour by having his grandson continue the family lineage. All of this was made
possible through Seiki’s enlistment, which makes the film the story of a colonial
family that gains imperial recognition by offering their son as a sacrifice to the state.
Meanwhile, the film uses melodramatic styles and techniques to elicit emotions
from the audience, especially through certain scenes that describe Kinshuku’s agony
over Seiki’s departure for the war, eventually leaving her behind. Such scenes take
place in Seiki’s house with a sentimental soundtrack in a long shot where Kinshuku
wanders around looking for Seiki, in a factory where Kinshuku works to support her
fatherless son while her physical labour drains her life, and the train station where
Kinshuku misses Seiki as he is off to the war. Here, the melodramatic temporal­
ity of ‘too late’, which, following Franco Moretti,24 elicits tears from spectators, is
elaborately applied with the cross-cutting of faraway lovers. It intensifies Kinshuku’s
agony and reaches its peak at a scene where she finally falls unconscious at the fac­
tory, making the audience yearn for her escape from the pain. Now it seems doubt­
ful that Seiki’s enlistment would alleviate Kinshuku’s suffering; rather, it seems to
aggravate her pain. For this reason, we can hardly agree with Fujitani’s argument
that Seiki is portrayed in his military march, filmed with intercuts between a close-up
of Kinshuku’s face and a long shot of the march, as the ‘gendered desire’ of femi­
nine desire for the masculine object. Kinshuku’s gaze is not sexually oriented toward
Seiki’s masculine physicality; rather, her eyes look as if they are filled with a grudge
against Seiki for not looking back at her and her baby.25 In her eyes, Seiki becomes
less the realization of the great cause of the empire than someone who simply ignores
her. The melodramatic style that has intensified Kinshuku’s agony invites the audi­
ence to identify with her and to accuse Seiki of not seeing what he should see. There­
fore, the scene depicts the Korean soldier who excludes Korean women and does not
need her approval in order to become a masculine and imperial soldier, making the
audience recognize Kinshuku’s devastation, left behind and in silence.
Focusing on this identification with Kinshuku, the reunion scene—the suffer­
ing couple (Kinshuku lays in bed at the Korean hospital and Seiki recovers at the
Japanese hospital) talk to each other over the phone—draws a different meaning.
By inserting the waves of the Korean straits that link the empire and colony in
between the couple’s shot, the scene attempts to visualize, as Fujitani points out,
‘the larger public theme of the unification of the Japanese metropole and Korea’.26
80 Moonim Baek

The problem, however, is that when the shot of the strait appears on screen, Kin­
shuku’s words (‘Get well quickly, and achieve your honour!’) exude a sense of
patriotism, but the tone of her voice is full of agony, lamenting the strait separating
her from Seiki.27 The shot of the strait does not connect Kinshuku and Seiki, or, for
that matter, Japan and Korea; rather, the shot creates a gap between the two subjects
that is both emotional and political.

Fractured Others of the Empire: Military Train

The melodramatic styles used in the selected films question the legitimacy of
Korean masculinization and soldiering through, oddly enough, the presentation of
Korean women as fractured subjects placed between the audio-visual and the lin­
guistic. In fact, the fracture of this female subject was first exemplified in the 1938
film Military Train (Kunyongyŏlch’a). This film is known as the first pro-Japanese
film to introduce a Korean kisaeng (female entertainer), the most prevalent figure
of popular culture and known as representing authentic Koreanness.28 The story
revolves around two Korean males: one is a train conductor named Chŏm-yong
who achieves the status of an imperial subject through the sacrifice of his sister
Yong-sim, who became a kisaeng to support her brother, and controls the military
train that carries coal and water from Seoul to Northeast China; the other is Won­
jin, the lover of Yong-sim, who feels extreme guilt for providing military secrets to
(Chinese) spies and eventually commits suicide, but we later realize that the reason
for his action was to pay debts to save Yong-sim.
The film shows the difficult life of Yong-sim as a kisaeng whom men take advan­
tage of, and her suffering is revealed in her voice, which is separated from her body
and becomes a main cause of Won-jin’s psychological conflict. In a night scene,
Won-jin hears Yong-sim’s whispering voice, ‘Please save me. I live on because
of you’ (Ŏsŏ chŏrŭl kuhaejuseyo. Chŏnŭn wŏnjinssiman mitko sesangŭl sanŭn
yŏjaeyo). After hearing this voice, Won-jin decides to become a spy. Two male
characters— Chŏm-yong, the proud conductor of the military train, and Won-jin, the
traitor to the empire, have their own ways of dealing with the kisaeng, their sister/
lover. While Chŏm-yong, who does not care much about Yong-sim, can go on to
have a bright future with a Korean woman (his lover Sun-hŭi, played by the Japanese
actress Sasaki Nobuko), Won-jin, who is captured by Yong-sim, walks a ruinous path
of betraying the nation. We see that the former couple, who see the future (symbol­
ized by the moving train wheels), are saved, while there seems to be no hope for the
latter couple, who are tied to the past (symbolized by the voice of kisaeng).29
The Korean woman Yong-sim in this film is depicted as troublesome, as someone
who interferes with men in their quest to become an imperial subject; simultane­
ously, she exerts her power through a separation of voice from body. Here, we need
to pay attention to the fact that another voice of Yong-sim is introduced in Won-jin’s
hallucination. Once Won-jin is found to be the spy, he hears the voice of Yong-sim
criticizing him, ‘Did you do that awful thing just to save me? How foolish! You
filthy spy!’ The first auditory hallucination above parallels the real Yong-sim (a piti­
ful kisaeng who asks Won-jin to save her), which can be called a ‘visualized voice’ in
that it vocalizes her difficult situation. The second hallucination involves a cold and
 ‘Be a Soldier’ 81

contempt that Yong-sim never reveals, pushing Won-jin to commit suicide, which is
what Michel Chion called ‘acousmêtre’, a solitary voice that acts without reference to
the corporeal body.30 This is the most bizarre voice in all Korean propaganda films, as
if coming from hell. Here, the voice of Yong-sim as acousmêtre becomes an omnipo­
tent goddess who plays an important role without revealing her physical appearance.
In this regard, the presence of Yong-sim is divided into two separate entities—the
body and the voice—and her voice also parallels the division of two other voices—
the lower-class colonized women and the imperial voice.
We can see that the fractured description of Korean women in The Military
Train parallels and anticipates the fracture between the verbal announcements of
propaganda (such as the line ‘Be a soldier for our nation’, the ‘Institution of Patri­
otic Women’ band, ‘you traitor’) and non-verbal gestures such as gaze, silence,
and gasping dissonant with them in later films such as The Volunteer and Straits of
Choseon. Even if these Korean women are portrayed as participating in a linguistic
symbolic order, they are also portrayed as annoying characters who interfere with
Korean men becoming soldiers/subject/masculine. To become a perfect imperial
subject, Korean men must leave Korean women and their world outside the lan­
guage of the empire, that is, the world of unarticulated sound, gesture, and silence.
If not, they must disappear from the empire, just as Won-jin does.31
This is an inevitable effect of colonial discourses and representations that adopt
an ethnic and cultural hierarchy. Colonial men can become the subject of soldier–
imperial subject–perfect manhood only by separating themselves from feminine
and infantile realms, and propaganda films that describe the process of this sepa­
ration in the form of male bildungsroman necessarily deal with what is excluded
or repressed as feminine and infantile during the process. To form colonial man­
hood, as Bhabha suggested, a formalized ambivalence—something between what
is already in the place and what repeats uneasily—is involved.32

Conclusion
After visiting a training camp in 1940, a female writer, Mo Yun-suk, expressed her
admiration of Korean volunteer soldiers who possessed ‘strong arms and strong
legs that we have not seen from Korean men’.33 There were similar stories called
midam (‘impressive tale’) in newspapers and magazines that introduced women who
actively cooperated with the state to help Korean men become soldiers. These are
linguistic responses publicized by women to the interpellation of the empire. Mean­
while, there are non-linguistic, unarticulated responses to it in propaganda films,
described as gestures, silence, gazes, and voices separated from the body that may be
described as mumbled mimicry of the language of the empire by female characters.
This is ironic, given the historical emergence of ‘talkie’ pictures produced in
Korea as late as 1935. Korean female characters talked through the male narrator,
byunsa (film commentator), during the silent era, and then began to speak ‘the
language of the empire’ through the aid of the new sound technology. As soon
as the voice of Korean women was heard for the first time on screen in the first
‘talkie’ films, it was dominated by the imperial linguistic system and ideology. In
other words, the voices of Korean women faced the possibility of disagreement
82 Moonim Baek

with their utterance throughout the history of Korean cinema until Korea’s libera­
tion in 1945. In this respect, even when the Japanese dialogue permeates the film
and they are to deliver the ideology of the empire, Korean female voices (retaining
their incomplete pronunciation) belong to a different communication system than
that of articulated semantic systems (such as the Japanese language and its utter­
ances on screen). Korean female characters build a form of cinematic semantics
through non-linguistic, audio-visual qualities (silence, various facial expressions,
gestures, and a whispering tone that lacks energy) that is different from the impe­
rial symbolic order and communicate with their audiences through those qualities.
When the wartime situation interpellates colonized males as masculinized and sub­
jectified, colonized women in colonial propaganda films come to exist outside the
symbolic order that authenticates the process. Women on screen represent the val­
ues that should be excluded or suppressed for the sake of Korean men’s masculini­
zation/subjectification; simultaneously, they represent anxiety and agitation that
expose the ambivalence in the stereotypification of colonial discursive strategy.

Notes
1 This chapter is a condensed and revised translation of my Korean article, ‘War and Mel­
odrama: Chosun Women in Late Colonial Propaganda Films’, published in Threshold
of War: Cultural Structure of Wartime Korea and Taiwan [Chŏnjaengiranŭn munt’ŏk],
edited by Institute of Comparative Culture of Korea and Taiwan (Seoul: Grinbi, 2010).
The volume was translated into Taiwanese as 戰爭與分界： 「總力戰」 下臺灣‧韓國
的主體重塑與文化政治 (Linking Publishing) in 2011. The draft of this paper was
presented at the Gender, War and Modernity conference held by Academia Sinica in
Taiwan in 2008 and then published in a Korean journal, Dongganghakji, in 2009. Dur­
ing the writing process, I exchanged letters with Takashi Fujitani, who was at the time
writing his manuscript Race for Empire. I appreciate his comments and those of other
colleagues, who have shared their ideas on the rediscovered Korean films produced in
the late colonial period. Also, I thank Andrew Sanggyu Lee, who translated the draft,
and Jooyeon Rhee, who gave her detailed comments on this translated version.
2 The title of this song is ‘The Mother of a Volunteer Soldier’ (1941), written by Cho
Myŏng-am, composed by Koga Masao, and arranged by Sŏ Yŏngtŏk. Lee Jun-hee
assumed it to be a copy of a Japanese military song ‘The Mother of the National Army’
(軍國の母, 1937), which forms the ‘Mother Trilogy’ with ‘The Mother of Kudan’
(九段の母), and ‘The Mother of Empire’ (皇國の母). See Lee Jun-hee, Films Through
Songs, Songs Through Films (Seoul: KOFA, 2012).
3 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 2012), 94–131.
4 On depicting military forces in Japanese propaganda films during World War II, see
Peter B. High, The Imperial Screen: Japanese Film Culture in the Fifteen Years’ War,
1931–1945 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2003).
5 Hong Chong-pil, “Ilcheshidae chosŏne issŏsŏ chiwŏnbyŏng chedoŭi chŏn’gaewa
kŭ ŭiŭie taehayŏ [On the Development of the Volunteer Soldier System in Colonial
Korea],” Myungjisaron 8, no. 1 (1997): 57–95. For the mobilization of Korean women
during the wartime period, see Kawa Kaoru, “Korean Women under Total War,”
Silcheonmunhak 66 (2002): 290–313; Lee Sang-kyŏng, “Ilcheshidae malgiŭi yŏsŏng
tongwŏn’gwa ‘kun’gugŭi ŏmŏni’ [A Study of the Korean Women Mobilization and the
Image of the ‘Militaristic Mother’ under the National General Mobilization System of
Japanese Imperialism],” P’eminijŭm yŏn’gu 2 (2002): 203–41.
6 Choi Yu-ri, Ilchemalgi shingminji chibaejŏngch’aek yŏn’gu [A Study of Colonial Gov­
ernance Policy in the Late Colonial Period Korea] (Seoul: Kuk’akcharyowŏn, 1997), 180.
 ‘Be a Soldier’ 83

7 Chu Yo-han, “Pandoch’ŏngnyŏnege yŏham. chingbyŏngjewa pandoch’ŏngnyŏnŭi kago

[Upon the Men of Peninsula: The Conscription System and the Determination of Men
of the Peninsula],” Taedonga 14, no. 5 (1942).
8 Jang Yong-kyung, “Chosŏnint’kwa t’rkungmint’ŭi kan’gŭk: Chŏnshich’ejegi nae-
sŏnilch’eronŭi sŏnggyŏkkwa chosŏnjishiginŭi taeŭng [The Gap between Koreans and
Citizens: The Nature of Naeson ilch’e and the Response of Korean Intellectuals in the
Era of Mass Mobilization],” Yŏksamunjeyŏn’gu 15 (2005): 279–300.
9 The military authorities were embarrassed by the fact that Korean soldiers did not meet
the standard in the first place. This is also related to the realization on the part of the
colonial government that Korean men, who had been ruled under the 30-year-old colo­
nial system, were not sufficiently imperialized to serve as soldiers in the war. At the
time, Japanese military authorities were willing to draft Korean men in healthy condi­
tion, both physically and spiritually, and, furthermore, they favoured men from families
of the noble class, elites, and others with social influence. However, the majority of
Korean enlistees, at least those in their 20s, were men in poor condition from poverty-
stricken families who wanted to escape their harsh life and to seek financial advance­
ment, while others were married men. In the process of training Korean soldiers, the
military authorities were so surprised to find that these men were ignorant and lacked
spiritual attitudes that they designed training courses emphasizing a firm national spirit
in addition to military trainings. See Pyo Young-soo, A Study on the Korean Volunteer
System during the Japanese Colonial Period, PhD dissertation, Soongsil University,
2008, and Brandon Palmer, Fighting for the Enemy: Koreans in Japan’s War, 1937–1945
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013), 181. Meanwhile, Kim Young-hee
pointed out that some volunteers were forced to join the military under the watchful eyes
of the police and military headquarters, but there were also enough people motivated to
join for material gains and financial support for their families that a social atmosphere
lingered that promoted a feeling of envy for their material means and first-class citizen­
ship. In a survey of 140,000 applicants in 1941, 35% of the volunteers had voluntarily
joined the military, 55% joined under the coercion of the authorities, and the other 10%
joined for other reasons. Kim Young-hee pointed out that the coercion of the authorities
here implies less drastic pressure than material well-being, a higher social status than
before, the chance for promotion in the army, and a stable job. See also Kim Young-hee,
“Kungminjŏngshinch’ongdongwŏnundongŭi chŏn’gae hyŏngt’aewa kŭ ch’imt’u [The
Development Pattern of the National Spiritual Mobilization Movement and Its Penetra­
tion],” Han’gukkŭnhyŏndaesayŏn’gu 22 (2002): 245–55.
10 See Chu Yo-han, “Upon the Men of the Peninsula,” in which he mentioned the follow­
ing statement: ‘Use this golden opportunity to become a real citizen and become a real
human being who is not just a mere soldier but also an exceptionally great soldier. One
must earn a score above average. One must have a firm determination that he will never
lose track of his Japanese fellow soldiers’.
11 Matsuoka Yosuke, “The Movie Theatre of World Leaders [Segyegŏduŭi Yŏnghwagwan],”
Samch’ŏlli 13 (1941): 195.
12 “Film and Theatrical Play Attendance and Admission Fee of the Year,” Samch’ŏlli
(1940): 227; “Special Feature: Film Culture and New System,” Samch’ŏlli (1941):
181. Movie-goers occupied more than half of total attendance of entertainment cen­
tres, including theatres, racecourses, and billiard halls in 1938. By the end of 1941,
the number of film spectators was roughly 14 million, while that of radio listeners was
0.11 million.
13 Lee Jun-sik, “Propaganda Films and War Mobilization Ideology During the Japanese
Fascist Period,” Dongbanghakji 124 (2004): 706. See also “Yŏnghwa gwan’gaek:
kosangyŏngyŏnŭi chosa [Movie Audience: Report by Institute of Film Studies at Kosang],”
Maeil shinbo, July 13, 1941.
14 Ueda Dachio, “Orakbangdam [At-Random Commentary on the Entertainment Indus­
try],” Jogwang, July 1942.
84 Moonim Baek

15 See Pyo Young-soo, A Study on the Korean Volunteer System during the Japanese Colo­
nial Period, 63. Pyo detailed in his dissertation the thorough aims and propagation for
the volunteer system claimed by the Chosun Federation. According to these, the propa­
ganda must (1) hold a roundtable discussion on patriotic and low-ranking federations;
(2) hold public lectures sponsored by a higher federation; (3) deepen the awareness on
the part of each household, especially housewives and the elderly; (4) deepen the aware­
ness on the part of school cadets and teenagers, especially those of secondary school or
higher; (5) demonstrate, as a child of a household in a privileged social status, to the
public by enlisting [in the army] before graduation and showing [oneself] as a living
model (hwalmobŏm); (6) cultivate a feeling of admiration of ordinary youth; (7) distrib­
ute posters, prints, etc.
16 Takashi Fujitani, Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans
During World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 342.
17 The discourse of ‘localization’ or ‘lok’al colla’ was a strategy used by Korean cultural
elites in the mid-1930s. Faced with the introduction of ‘talkie’ films that required big
budgets and the implementation of the Film Regulation (1934) that limited the screening
of foreign films, Korean filmmakers began to realize the importance of the corporatiza­
tion of film production and tried to open the way by exporting Korean films to various
places in Japan and Manchuria. Korean locality was a popular item to be exported. Here,
Korean localism was contoured as something pre-modern, of rural traditions and habitats,
and related to traditional women (kuyŏsŏng). On the ‘lok’al colla’ strategy as a response
to the transitional era, refer to Lee Hwajin, “Singminji yŏnghwaŭi naesyŏnŏllit’iwa
‘hyangt’osaek’—1930nyŏndae huban chosŏnyŏnghwa tamnon yŏn’gu [The Nationality
and Locality of the Korean Film in the Colonial Period: The Study of ‘Chosun Film’ Dis­
course in the Late 1930s],” Sangheohakbo 13 (2004). See also Moonim Baek, Imhwaŭi
yŏnghwa [Im Hwa’s Cinema] (Seoul: Somyeong, 2015), 65–122.
18 Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound of Screen (New York: Columbia University Press,
1994), 71–2.
19 Straits of Choseon achieved great success, setting the record of 140,000 viewers and
earning about 80,000 won in total revenue, which was considered ‘an unprecedented
success’; Kyeongseonilbosa (ed.), Choseon Yearbook (Seoul: Koryŏsŏrim, 1944): 528.
20 Refer to the interview with Lee Pil-woo, who is known to be the first Korean director
of photography. Korean Research Center for the Arts, Iyŏngirŭi han’gukyŏnghwasarŭl
wihan chŭngŏllok [Yi Yŏng-il’s Transcribed Testimonies for the History of Korean Cin­
ema] (Seoul: Sodo, 2003), 292.
21 Park Hyun-hee pointed out that Straits of Korea was successful due to its ‘freedom
to draw any stories, steady production, star power by the actress Mun Ye-bong, and
the [smooth] route of distribution and release’. Further, she pointed out that the film
‘became a milestone as a propaganda film that deals with Korean reality depending
on female domain of everyday life’; Park Hyun-hee, Mun Ye-bong gwa Kim Sin-jae
1932–1945 [Mun Ye-bong and Kim Sin-jae 1932–1945] (Seoul: Seonin, 2008), 138–51.
22 Jogwang, 1943. 6; Maeilsinbo, 1943.7.16; Lee Chun-in, “Screenplay, Direction, Perfor­
mance: On Straits of Choseon,” Jogwang 9, no. 8 (August 1943): 79.
23 Fujitani, Race for Empire, 342.
24 Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms
(London: New Left Books, 1983), 159. Moretti investigated the characteristics of ‘mov­
ing literature’ by explaining the matter of timing that triggers the tears of the readers.
The readers cry not only because the protagonists are sad, but also at the moment that
the protagonists realize everything is ‘too late’. Tears are always the result of the irre­
versibility of time and of the helplessness of the characters/readers. See also Linda Wil­
liams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Film Quarterly 44 (1991): 11–2. In
this article, Williams associated this discussion of tears with melodrama films, investi­
gating the time that creates the affect of tears. In Straits of Choseon, Kinshuku and Seiki
 ‘Be a Soldier’ 85

fail to meet each other as Kinshuku arrives ‘too late’ at Seiki’s house, street, and the train
station. This creates in the narrative not only a feeling of suspense, but also sadness that
is created by the prolongation of cinematic time.
25 Kim Ki-jin, “Chosŏnhaehyŏbŭl chungshimŭro 1 [Analyzing Straits of Choseon, 1],”
Maeil shinbo, August 8, 1943. When the film was released, critic Kim Ki-jin pointed
out that this scene, where ‘Kinshuku’s astonishment, anxiety, and [censored] during the
march of the military’ demanded that the audience shed tears.
26 Fujitani, Race for Empire, 360.
27 It is noteworthy that Mun Ye-bong was not fluent in Japanese. The pronunciation of
Japanese language on screen was a problem for many Korean actors and actresses due
to the making of Japanese-language films. In 1944, only 20% of the Korean population
was proficient in Japanese listening (89% of Korean women at the time were illiterate).
For this reason, the Japanese dialogue by Kinshuku, played by Mun Ye-bong, was so
imperfect that Korean audiences regarded her words as unreliable.
28 This film was in fact much talked about, because it was produced through a col­
laboration between Korea’s Sŏngbong Film Company and Japan’s Toho Co. Ltd. Sŏ
Kwang-che, who directed this film, explained how Toho collaborated with a Korean
film company in order to ‘test out the advancement of Japanese films to the Continent
[in this case, China]’. He also mentioned that Korean filmmakers experienced various
contradictions due to the technological and economic dependency on the Japanese com­
pany. Sŏ Kwang-che, “Chosŏnyŏnghwawa shinsserit’ŭi: Illyŏn’gan chosŏnyŏnghwagye
ch’onggyŏlsan [Korean Cinema and Sincerity: The Year-End Result of Korean Film
Industry],” Jogwang (December 1938): 68.
29 The conflicting fate of this couple was evident in the difference in the use of music
background when their dating scene was cross-edited. The Chŏm-yong–Sun-hŭi cou­
ple rode in a boat, and this was when a romantic western-style music came in. When
the Won-chin–Yong-sim couple were seated lethargically on a hill, dark and poignant
Korean-style music was played in the background.
30 Michel Chion, Audio-Vision, 123–33.
31 In Japanese cinema during the Pacific War, the spiritual tendency, which considered
the enemy to be from your own mind rather than the enemy in the battlefield, was a
prevalent theme. If one looks at Korean propaganda films in this way, it can be said that
Korean men also have to fight the enemy in their conflicting minds, and there is a pos­
sibility that the enemy is Korean women.
32 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 121–31.
33 Mo Yun-suk, “Munsabudaewa chiwŏnbyŏng [The Munsa Unit and Volunteer Soldiers],”
Samch’ŏlli, December 1940.

References
Baek, Moonim. Im Hwa’s Cinema [imhwaŭi yŏnghwa]. Seoul: Somyeong, 2015.
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 2012.
Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound of Screen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Choi, Yu-ri. Ilchemalgi shingminji chibaejŏngch’aek yŏn’gu [A Study on Colonial Govern­
ance Policy in the Late Colonial Period Korea]. Seoul: Kuk’akcharyowŏn, 1997.
Chu, Yo-han. “Upon the Men of Peninsula—The Conscription System and the Determination
of Men of Peninsula [Pandoch’ŏngnyŏnege yŏham. chingbyŏngjewa pandoch’ŏngnyŏnŭi
kago].” Taedonga 14–15 (1942).
Dachio, Ueda. “Orakbangdam’ [At-Random Commentary on Entertainment Industry].”
Jogwang 7, no. 7 (July 1942).
Fujitani, Takashi. Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans Dur­
ing World War II. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.
86 Moonim Baek

High, Peter B. The Imperial Screen: Japanese Film Culture in the Fifteen Years’ War, 1931–
1945. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2003.
Hong, Chong-pil. “Ilcheshidae chosŏne issŏsŏ chiwŏnbyŏng chedoŭi chŏn’gaewa kŭ ŭiŭie
taehayŏ [On the Development of Volunteer Soldier System in Colonial Korea].” Myung­
jisaron 8–1 (1997): 57–95.
Jang, Yong-kyung. “Chosŏnint’kwa t’rkungmint’ŭi kan’gŭk: Chŏnshich’ejegi naesŏ­
nilch’eronŭi sŏnggyŏkkwa chosŏnjishiginŭi taeŭng’ [The Gap between Koreans and Citi­
zens: The Nature of Naeson Ilch’e and the Response of Korean Intellectuals in the Era of
Mass Mobilisation].” Yŏksamunjeyŏn’gu 15 (2005): 279–300.
Kaoru, Kawa. “Korean Women under Total War.” Silcheonmunhak 66 (2002): 290–313.
Kim, Ki-jin. “Chosŏnhaehyŏbŭl chungshimŭro 1’ [Analysing Straits of Choseon, 1].” Maeil
shinbo (August 8, 1943): 2.
Kim, Young-hee. “Kungminjŏngshinch’ongdongwŏnundongŭi chŏn’gae hyŏngt’aewa kŭ
ch’imt’u [The Development Pattern of the National Spiritual Mobilisation Movement and
Its Penetration].” Han’gukkŭnhyŏndaesayŏn’gu 22 (2002): 245–55.
Korean Research Center for the Arts. Iyŏngirŭi han’gukyŏnghwasarŭl wihan chŭngŏllok [Yi
Yŏng-il’s Transcribed Testimonies for the History of Korean Cinema]. Seoul: Sodo, 2003.
Kyeongseonilbosa, ed. Choseon Yearbook. Seoul: Koryŏsŏrim, 1944.
Lee, Chun-in. “Screenplay, Direction, Performance: On Straits of Choseon.” Jogwang 9, no.
8 (August 1943): 79–82.
Lee, Hwa-jin. “The Nationality and Locality of the Korean Film in the Colonial Period: The
Study of ‘Chosun Film’ Discourse in the late 1930’s [singminji yŏnghwaŭi naesyŏnŏllit’iwa
‘hyangt’osaek’—1930 nyŏndae huban chosŏnyŏnghwa tamnon yŏn’gu].” Sangheohakbo
13 (2004).
Lee, Jun-hee. Films through Songs, Songs through Films. Seoul: KOFA, 2012.
Lee, Jun-sik. “Propaganda films and War Mobilization Ideology During the Japanese Fascist
Period.” Dongbanghakji 124 (2004).
Lee, Sang-kyŏng. “Ilcheshidae malgiŭi yŏsŏng tongwŏn’gwa ‘kun’gugŭi ŏmŏni’ [A Study
on the Korean Women Mobilisation and the Image of ‘Militaristic Mother’ under National
General Mobilisation System by Japanese Imperialism].” P’eminijŭm yŏn’gu 2 (2002):
203–41.
Mo, Yun-suk. “Munsabudaewa chiwŏnbyŏng’ [The Munsa Unit and Volunteer Soldiers].”
Samch’ŏlli, December 1940.
Moretti, Franco. Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms. Lon­
don: New Left Books, 1983.
Palmer, Brandon. Fighting for the Enemy: Koreans in Japan’s War, 1937–1945. Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2013.
Park, Hyun-hee. Mun Ye-bong gwa Kim Sin-jae 1932–1945 [Mun Ye-bong and Kim Sin-jae
1932–1945]. Seoul: Seonin, 2008.
Pyo, Young-soo. A Study on the Korean Volunteer System during the Japanese Colonial
Period. PhD dissertation, Soongsil University, 2008.
Sŏ, Kwang-che. “Chosŏnyŏnghwawa shinsserit’ŭi: Illyŏn’gan chosŏnyŏnghwagye ch’ongg­
yŏlsan [Korean Cinema and Sincerity: The Year-end Result of Korean Film Industry].”
Jogwang, December 1938, 68.
Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” Film Quarterly 44 (1991): 11–12.
Yosuke, Matsuoka. “The Movie Theater of World Leaders [Segyegŏduŭi Yŏnghwagwan].”
Samch’ŏlli 13 (1941).
6 Hyŏnhaet’an, Mon Amour
Colonial Memories and (In)visible
Japan in 1960s South Korean Cinema

Hwajin Lee

Introduction
In the Korean language, the phrase Hyŏnhaet’an refers to the Korea Strait, a nar­
row sea passage between the south-eastern coast of Korea and Japan’s Fukuoka Pre­
fecture. Literally translated, the phrase means ‘Sea of Black Waves’. In Japanese,
Genaki-nada refers to the same body of water between Fukuoka Prefecture and Tsu­
shima Island. Regardless of the name used, this sea has served as a metaphor for
Korea–Japan relations since the colonial period. Hyŏnhaet’an has been represented
as a symbolic site embodying the ethnic suffering of Koreans during the colonial
period as well as serving as the actual sea route by which the young colonial gen­
eration accessed modern civilization. Indeed, this passage formed, transformed, and
distorted the identities of colonial subjects who crossed the border between colonial
Korea and the Japanese empire. The black waves of Hyŏnhaet’an retain the collec­
tive memories of hardship, frustration, and ambition held by the intellectuals, artists,
and labourers of colonial Korea.1 Following liberation, memories of Hyŏnhaet’an lay
dormant during the Korean War and the long period of reconstruction until finally re­
emerging in South Korean popular culture in the 1960s. At that time, representations
of Hyŏnhaet’an must be understood within two distinct social and political contexts.
First, the April Revolution in 1960 opened up a space for South Koreans to
express conflicting emotions concerning Japan and Japanese culture—a topic pre­
viously forbidden following the establishment of the South Korean government in
1948. The values of freedom and democracy were championed by the April Revo­
lution, and Koreans increasingly exercised their right to defy restrictions on culture
and expression.2 More remarkably, both negative and positive media representa­
tions of Japan irrupted into the South Korean cultural field. After the April Revolu­
tion, interest in Japanese culture—both popular and elite culture—increased across
all sectors of Korean society. The younger generation was intensely curious about
banned cultural products such as Japanese films, and middle-aged Koreans found
themselves unexpectedly interested in Japanese culture. Meanwhile, public opin­
ion leaders denounced the public’s interest in Japanese culture as deriving from ‘a
sense of national inferiority and confused cultural identity’.3
Second, the normalization of Korea–Japan diplomatic relations transformed South
Korea from a previously subjugated colony to Japan’s Cold War ally. Prioritizing the

DOI: 10.4324/9781003279013-8
88 Hwajin Lee

procurement of funds for economic development, the Park Chung-hee administration

aggressively pursued normalized diplomatic relations with Japan. Although Koreans
harboured deep hostilities towards the Japanese people, negotiations for diplomatic
normalization forced the Korean people to disregard the ugly legacy of their colonial
past and accept Japan as a neighbour within ‘free Asia’. Likewise, the cultural mem­
ory of Hyŏnhaet’an combined a similar conflicting set of memories and emotions,
such as the friendly relations exemplified by contemporary international exchanges
as well as traumatic memories of colonial subjugation.
In the 1960s, images of Japanese people as good neighbours began to appear in
South Korean films. Previously, Japanese characters were limited to villains and
evildoers. Japanese characters existed exclusively to harass and abuse their Korean
counterparts and were devoid of humanity. A Japanese character showing compas­
sion towards a poor Korean child or a Japanese girl who considers her Korean foster
parents to be her biological parents was entirely new to postcolonial Korean cinema.
Even more so, films of young Japanese women falling in love with nationalistic Korean
men presented a novel ethnic and gendered hierarchy that inverted the past colonizer/
colonized relationship, further reflecting the complicated relations between the two
countries. Films set in the colonial era portraying romances between Korean men and
Japanese women have been interpreted as expressions of the desire for the imaginary
reconstruction of Korea–Japan relations through the gendered reversal of the empire/
colony relationship.4 Such films not only conformed to the values of a younger genera­
tion of South Koreans but also conveyed South Korean filmdom’s ambition to appeal
to the wider market of a ‘free Asia’ during the Cold War era. However, representations
of anything Japanese in Korean films were severely censored as a result of the South
Korean government’s efforts to preserve national culture and identity following diplo­
matic normalization with Japan.
Previous scholarship has regarded the historical practices of South Korean cinema as
commemorating decolonization and eliminating the vestiges of Japanese colonialism.
However, in the 1960s, South Korean cinema presented a continual crisis of self-rep­
resentation; films failed to completely expel Japanese elements, revealing the inescap­
able influence of Japanese colonialism. Japan remained a complicated Other shaped
according to changing social, political, economic, and diplomatic circumstances. Japan
was both enemy and neighbour, colonial past and postcolonial present, and a model for
post-war reconstruction as well as a partner in Cold War ‘free Asia’.5
This chapter focuses on how Korean popular films represented colonial memories
in the times before and after the normalization of Korea–Japan diplomatic relations.
In particular, I explicate how the normalization of diplomatic relations destabilized
representations of Japan as abnormal and dangerous while analyzing how distor­
tions of colonial memory in popular films are dealt with in association with interracial
romances in the melodrama film genre. I categorize the interracial love story involving
Korean men and Japanese women during the colonial era under the term ‘Hyŏnhaet’an
romance’. Hyŏnhaet’an romance narratives illustrate the love, breakup, and reunion of
interracial couples and reflect certain unconsciousness thoughts and desires of South
Koreans at the time, who had to acknowledge and accept Japan as their new neighbour.
In this chapter, I examine 1960s Hyŏnhaet’an romance films for how they relate to the
censorship choices of the South Korean government, focusing on the following three
 Hyŏnhaet’an, Mon Amour 89

films: The Sea Knows (Hyŏnhaet’an ŭn algo itta, dir: Kim Ki-yŏng, 1961), Daughter
of the Governor General (Ch’ongdok ŭi ttal, dir: Cho Kŭng-ha, 1965), and Chorus of
Trees (Karosu ŭi hapch’ang, dir: Kang Tae-chin, 1968). In doing so, I will show how
South Korean government censorship in the 1960s both directly and indirectly incited,
suppressed, and refracted the imaginative potential of Hyŏnhaet’an romances.

Japan: From Enemy to Neighbour or Lover

Following the end of the Japanese occupation, the elimination of remnants of Japa­
nese colonialism emerged as a highly contentious issue in Korean society. The first
government of the Republic of Korea emphasized a combination of nationalism, anti­
communism, and anti-Japanese policies as a means to solidify its legitimacy.6 While
anti-communism is associated with the spatial and ideological border of the divided
peninsula, anti-Japanese sentiments are related to not only the geological boundary
demarcating South Korea and Japan but also a sense of temporal and cultural divi­
sion between the colonial past and the postcolonial present. A common slogan of the
Syngman Rhee administration (1948–1960) was ‘waesaek ilso (倭色一掃)’, which
translates to ‘eradicating Japanese colour’. More broadly, the term referred to the
elimination of Japan’s language, culture, customs, taste, and products and implied a
dismissal of Japanese culture as vulgar and lowbrow. Indeed, the term demonstrates
the centrality of anti-Japanese sentiment towards South Korean nationalist ideology
during this era. In this regard, ‘eradicating Japanese colour’ demanded the erasure
of everything Japanese, which had become deeply engrained within every South
Korean throughout the colonial period. During the 1950s, the campaign to eradicate
Japanese colour served to consolidate nation-building projects and direct nationalis­
tic energy into anti-Japanese nationalism to control and mobilize the general public
on the level of culture, consumption, and daily life.
However, the Rhee administration’s aggressive suppression of all things Japa­
nese revealed the ironic failure of the First Republic’s decolonization project. It is
well known that the Rhee administration appointed pro-Japanese figures to promi­
nent positions of power. As a result, large segments of the colonial apparatus were
directly transplanted into the newly established South Korean government. The
new government failed to remove powerful Japanese-aligned people from posi­
tions of power; therefore, the task of decolonization was placed upon each indi­
vidual citizen and the work of expelling Japanese influence was confined to the
arena of culture, consumption, and daily life.7
Colonization was an experience inseparable from the process of moderniza­
tion in Korea. Even South Koreans who actively sympathized with anti-Japanese
nationalism would have found it unnatural and counterintuitive to remove all traces
of Japan (and therefore the legacy of Japanese colonialism) from their bodies. It
became necessary to flexibly redefine the categories of Korean, Japanese, and
Western, and how each was related to modernity. The decade-long persistence of
the slogan ‘eradicating Japanese colour’ following Korea’s liberation testifies to
the difficulty of eliminating all vestiges of Japanese colonialism.
In the 1950s, a series of guidelines regarding film censorship were issued in
line with the South Korean government’s resolution to limit Japanese influence.
90 Hwajin Lee

In March 1959, the film Early Spring (Choch’un, dir: Yu Tu-yŏn, 1959) allegedly
copied a Japanese film. Subsequently, the Ministry of Culture issued a notice to
the Korean Film Producers Association, in which the first provision made par­
ticular note that the film being mimicked was Japanese. Indeed, the government’s
response was concerned more with the ‘Japanese elements’ within the film rather
than the unethical act of plagiarism or copyright infringement. The notice stated
that expressing anything related to Japan was restricted to cases where ‘it is inevi­
table to cultivate national spirit’, and that even in such cases, the use of Japanese
language, costume, and customs was strictly prohibited. Simply put, films were
barred from presenting ‘Japanese elements’ in either visual or auditory forms.8
As mentioned in the introduction, efforts to suppress popular depictions of Japan
waned in the wake of the April Revolution. South Korean interest in Japanese cul­
ture increased, and a number of genre films set in the colonial era were produced.
Although the majority of these genre films reconstruct Korean colonial history
from a shared nationalistic perspective, each film utilizes unique genre conventions
in its depiction of Japan.9
Hyŏnhaet’an romance films were a genre cycle that emerged within the larger
context of South Korean melodrama in the 1960s. In these films, ethnic and cultural
differences as well as power imbalances between the lovers’ respective nations pre­
vent interracial couples from achieving an everlasting relationship. As Naoki Sakai
points out, international romance serves as an allegory for international diplomatic
relations and constitutes an ‘iconography of colonialism’ that compresses interna­
tional relations of domination and subordination into the gendered representation
of a heterosexual romantic relationship.10 In general, interracial romances take the
form of a dominant man and a subjugated woman. In contrast, the 1960s South
Korean Hyŏnhaet’an romance films portray love affairs between a Korean man
(the subjugated nation) and a Japanese woman (the dominant nation). The Japa­
nese woman’s love and respect for a proud nationalistic Korean man is bound up
with her own guilty conscience. Indeed, the iconography of interracial romance in
Hyŏnhaet’an narratives is intimately related to the desire for a reversal of power
relations in the postcolonial era.
In such instances, Hyŏnhaet’an romances serve as allegories of Korea–Japan
relations and exist at the intersection of three converging impulses: attempts to con­
cretely represent the historical events of the colonial period, the postcolonial desire
to build an equal relationship with Japan as an independent nation, and the need
to transition away from unequal bilateral relations and become Cold War allies in
Asia. Indeed, the uneven process of decolonization and new Cold War trajecto­
ries overlapped at this juncture point.11 Hyŏnhaet’an romances invite spectators to
consider the possibility or impossibility of reconciling Korea–Japan relations and
intimates towards the past, present, and future prospect of the bilateral relationship.
In this context, Hyŏnhaet’an romance is pregnant with conventional yet political
meanings. The strategies of representing Japan in these films demonstrate the interests
and political visions of various players in the field of Korea–Japan relations as well
as their responses to intensifying nationalism among the South Korean public. Due to
Park Chung-hee’s desire to accomplish economic development through normalized
relations with Japan as a means to secure political legitimacy, his administration was
 Hyŏnhaet’an, Mon Amour 91

not able to promote a policy of ‘eradicating Japanese colour’ as fervently as the pre­
vious regime did. However, the 1965 Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and
the Republic of Korea soon developed into a humiliating diplomatic embarrassment
for the Park regime, triggering a nationwide protest against the treaty. The public’s
anti-Japanese sentiments and nationalistic passion grew in response to the govern­
ment’s choice to normalize relations with Japan, resulting in open criticism of the
Park Chung-hee regime. Although Hyŏnhaet’an romance had reflected the desire for
an imaginative reconciliation with Japan in the early 1960s, Hyŏnhaet’an romance
lost its political appeal once Korea–Japan diplomatic ties were restored. Represent­
ing Japan with a friendly face—as friends, neighbours, and lovers—became increas­
ingly untenable. As a result, such depictions slowly evaporated from Korean popular
culture. Indeed, in such a story, the Japanese woman in love with a Korean man
became a problematic character. As a Japanese woman, she presented herself as a
Korean man’s lover by blurring the visual and auditory indicators identifying her
with Japan. This was also a result of the Park administration’s intervention in control­
ling Japanese culture with a keen awareness of the dynamics mediating between the
public’s nationalist interests and the cultural sphere.

Censorship and (In)visible Japan in Hyŏnhaet’an Romance Films

Hyŏnhaet’an romances are an attempt to rewrite colonial memories in a post-
colonial context. Writing history via films involves not only the recreation and
rearrangement of narratives but also the wilful exclusion and inclusion of certain
audio-visual elements. Hyŏnhaet’an romance films attest to the tension between
attempts to both visualize and eliminate Japan as the Other. Generally, representa­
tions of Japan in Hyŏnhaet’an romance films took the form of Japanese women
loving Korean men. The women’s traditional clothes, gentle voices, and courteous
manners signified her Japanese identity within the film. Although these images
mitigated Koreans’ negative feelings towards Japan, conservative nationalists were
likely less receptive to such imagery.
I will now trace Japanese female characters and their associated visual and audi­
tory elements in three Hyŏnhaet’an romance films, The Sea Knows (1961), Daugh­
ter of the Governor General (1965), and Chorus of Trees (1968). Amid a boom of
interest in Japanese culture following the April Revolution, The Sea Knows was
approved after deliberation by the Motion Picture Code of Ethics Committee—a
body that claimed to oversee the ‘voluntary’ evaluation of films following the April
Revolution. Daughter of the Governor General was produced in 1965, the year
South Korea normalized relations with Japan, and was barred from public release.
Chorus of Trees was produced after normalization of Korea–Japan relations, and
certain images, such as Tokyo landmarks and unambiguously Japanese visual ele­
ments, were selectively censored.

The Sea Knows (1961)

Directed by Kim Ki-yŏng (1919–1998) and released in the late fall of 1961, The Sea
Knows was based on a radio drama of the same title. The story dramatizes the misery
92 Hwajin Lee

of war and the frustration of mobilized student soldiers in the late colonial period. The
film featured the Korean-Japanese actress Gong Midori in her screen debut. She played
the role of Hideko, a young Japanese woman who sympathizes with a Korean student
soldier named Arowoon. She falls in love and marries him against her mother’s wishes.
In a conversation with one of his colleagues long after the film’s release, director
Kim Ki-yŏng recounted that the film would not have been made ‘if the Syngman
Rhee regime had continued to exist’.12 Indeed, the Rhee administration emphasized
anti-Japanese sentiments under the pretext of ‘eradicating colonial remnants’. Had
Syngman Rhee remained in power, the radio drama may not have been broadcast,
making the film adaptation of the story highly unlikely. The Sea Knows was the
first South Korean film to utilize on-location shooting and miniature cinematogra­
phy to realistically depict Japan and the Pacific War. Therefore, it is not an exag­
geration to say that the context of the April Revolution and the ousting of Syngman
Rhee gave birth to the film. The Sea Knows employed Japanese costumes, customs,
and music to recreate the ambience of Nagoya, Japan. Such filmic elements would
not have passed the strict film censorship in place under the Rhee administration.
When the military coup that brought the dictator Park Chung-hee to power took
place on May 16, 1961, the film crew was in Japan shooting on location. Possessed by
the fear that he might not be able to complete the film, director Kim Ki-yŏng returned
to South Korea to finish principal photography and post-production work. According to
censorship documents from 1961, censorship criteria had been loosened since the Rhee
administration. In the case of The Sea Knows, three scenes and two sets of dialogue
were ordered to be removed, with one song to be played at a lower volume.13

A. Deletion of footage
1. Scene of an American prisoner being executed (scene of the prisoner falling
down)
2. Part of the scene from a Japanese film (scene of samurai’s sword fighting)
3. Scene of anti-aircraft emplacements (last of the two scenes)
B. Deletion of lines
1. A line mentioning ‘pig-like’
2. A line mentioning ‘haemorrhoids’
C. Restriction on music volume
1. A Japanese warship’s military march song (to be kept to a low or unperceiv­
able level)
Among the directives given was an order to delete scenes from a Japanese film
and to lower the volume of a military song played over the image of a Japanese war­
ship. In the former scene, a Korean soldier visits a movie theatre to watch a Japanese
film. Images of the Japanese film were ordered to be deleted from The Sea Knows.
It was not mentioned, however, whether the reason was that the Japanese film had
not been permitted for use, or if it was because the scene featured samurai. Censors
also requested that the volume of a Japanese military song be turned down to a barely
audible level. However, no restrictions were imposed on music played by a samisen,
 Hyŏnhaet’an, Mon Amour 93

a traditional Japanese three-stringed lute. In 1961, government censorship did not

ban all Japan-related elements. Censors distinguished between Japan and militarism,
while also separating militaristic violence from civilian culture and customs, and
deliberately restricted only those images and sounds that evoked militarism.
In films dealing with colonial memory, allusions to Japan, both explicit and implicit,
were unavoidable. The Sea Knows overtly depicts the cruelty of Japanese soldiers who
harass young conscripted Korean students. However, the film also shows how Japan’s
imperial war harmed the young Japanese woman, who ended up falling in love with
a Korean man. Such narration would have been unimaginable during the previous,
intensely anti-Japanese decade. In contrast, censorship in the transition period over­
looked such representations. In the film, the good-natured Japanese woman and the
audio-visual signifiers of her Japanese identity would have been particularly capti­
vating, considering that such images would remind Korean audiences of the present
restriction on any real contact with Japan. In early 1960s Korea, the prospect of nor­
malizing hostile relations with Japan was slowly emerging despite ongoing diplomatic
tensions and anti-Japanese nationalism. In this context, gentle and sacrificing Japanese
female characters can be understood as a product of lax film policies and the ambiva­
lent attitude towards representations of Japan displayed by the Park administration.

Figure 6.1 Korean-Japanese actress Gong Midori stars as a young Japanese woman who
falls in love with a Korean soldier in the film The Sea Knows (1961)
Source: Excerpt from the magazine Arirang (October 1961). Created by the author
94 Hwajin Lee

Figure 6.2 Poster of Daughter of the Governor General (1965)

Source: Courtesy Korean Film Archive

Daughter of the Governor General (1965)

The love affair in Daughter of the Governor General is set at the end of the Pacific
War, as if to commemorate 20 years since Korean independence. In this love story,
the daughter of the Governor General of Korea falls in love with a Korean college
student she meets on the cross-channel ferry between Shimonoseki, Japan, and
Busan, Korea. The film visualizes a forbidden love story between the daughter
of a Japanese colonial ruler and a rebellious young Korean man who conspires to
avoid conscription alongside fellow freedom fighters. The love story ends tragi­
cally when the man is arrested by the police and executed. On the ferry back to a
defeated Japan after the war, she laments the loss of her dead lover, who longed for
Korean independence.
The film was produced in 1965 after South Korea and Japan had signed a treaty
normalizing relations. The film’s producer capitalized on the public’s expectations
for increased cultural exchange between the two countries by casting Japanese
actress Kanako Michi, who had risen to popularity in Japan for her role in Tetsuji
Takechi’s film Daydream (Hakujitsumu, 1964). Twenty years after Korean libera­
tion, she was the first Japanese actress to appear in a Korean film. Because of this,
 Hyŏnhaet’an, Mon Amour 95

the film was praised as a sign of increasing Japan–Korea friendship and cultural
exchange. However, the film was soon enveloped by the atmosphere of hope and
fear surrounding the importation of Japanese films and Korea–Japan film partner­
ships following the signing of the 1965 treaty between the two countries.
Some Korean film producers likely held mixed feelings towards the treaty.
Although some clearly held ambitions to capitalize on cooperation with the Japa­
nese film industry and enter overseas markets, many film producers were equally
concerned that collaboration with Japanese filmmakers, Japanese investment in
film production, and the importation of Japanese films would eventually cause
the Korean film industry to collapse. Indeed, a Korean film industry professional
called Japanese films ‘quasi-domestic films’ that were more familiar than Western
films and newer than Korean productions.14
Film importers who attempted to benefit from the importation of Japanese films
met resistance from Korean filmmakers concerned about Korean dependence on
Japanese culture, nationalist voices critical of current diplomatic outcomes, and
authorities who wanted to maintain control over popular culture while also remain­
ing responsive to public opinion. Daughter of the Governor General was not pro­
duced in collaboration with a Japanese firm. It did not receive technological or
financial investment from Japan, nor was it based on a Japanese script. Regard­
less, the appearance of a Japanese actress was widely regarded as a precursor to
the importation of Japanese films. Therefore, despite the film being a completely
domestic production, it was not supported by the Korean film industry. In fact, the
Ministry of Public Information indefinitely postponed the release of the film after
taking issue with the fact that the Japanese actress had entered South Korea on a
tourist visa without obtaining proper permission. In the end, the film remained
unreleased for more than 50 years.15
The indefinitely postponed release of Daughter of the Governor General can
be attributed to the government’s ambiguous attitude towards Japanese culture
around the signing of the 1965 treaty. For diplomatic leverage, the South Korean
government needed to stress friendship and exchange with Japan in order to estab­
lish an ally in ‘free Asia’. Accordingly, the government suggested a three-stage
exchange of cinema culture to begin with the exchange of actors and actresses in
1965, progress to film collaborations in 1966, and finally allow the importation
of Japanese films beginning in 1967. However, the plan was soon cancelled over
concerns about South Korea’s growing cultural dependence on Japan.16 These
developments all influenced the postponement of the film’s release. Shortly
thereafter, the Park Chung-hee administration decided to manipulate the pub­
lic’s anti-Japanese and nationalistic sentiments, along with criticisms of Japan
made by cultural elites, for its own purposes. Through the expansive control of
public media, the government redefined Japanese films and popular music as
lowbrow and unhealthy media that threatened the ‘beautiful traditions and cus­
toms’ of Korea and justified the regulation of Korean culture and the pretext
of ‘eradicating Japanese colour’. Rather than establishing a legal framework for
regulating Japanese media influence, the government’s position was to consoli­
date anti-Japanese nationalism through the media to justify to the larger public
96 Hwajin Lee

the necessity of control and regulation in order to moderate Koreans’ interest in

Japanese popular culture and control popular culture domestically. As evidenced
by the banning of the hit Korean song ‘Tongbaek Agassi’ (Lady Camellia) for its
resemblance to Japanese popular music and not approving films with Japanese
actors and actress from appearing in theatres, the Park administration’s strategy
was to portray symbols of warming Korea–Japan diplomatic relations in popular
culture as threatening.
Through such cultural control, the Park Chung-hee administration reformed
its public image from that of a ‘pro-Japanese’ government to the originator
of ‘Korean-style democracy’. Newspapers and other popular media maintained
a critical stance towards the Park Chung-hee administration while promoting
anti-Japanese nationalism. Therefore, the media not only politicized the use of
‘Japanese things’ in Korean popular media but also aligned themselves with the
government’s regulation of popular culture. During the process of cultural negotia­
tion between the film industry, public opinion, and the government, the image of
a kimono-clad Japanese woman lost its enchanting qualities and slowly came to
signify a dangerous and foreboding threat to the nation. After the normalization of
Korea–Japan diplomatic relations, ‘eradicating Japanese colour’ became a viable
method for the political control of Korean popular culture, and it is not surprising
that the production of Hyŏnhaet’an romance films declined drastically.

Chorus of Trees (1968)

Chorus of Trees was directed by Kang Tae-chin (1935–1987) and adopted a typi­
cal Hyŏnhaet’an romance film plot; however, the narration resembled his late
1960s melodramas. Kang Tae-chin’s films from the early 1960s, such as Mr. Park
(Paksŏbang, 1960) and The Coachman (Mabu, 1961), feature lower-class city
dwellers who have been left behind by modernization, yet come to accept modern
values through reconciliation with the younger generation. In contrast, his films
from the late 1960s, such as Sorrowful Youth (Ch’ŏngch’un kŭkchang, 1967),
Kangmyŏnghwa (1967), and I Want to Go (Kagop’a, 1967), are set in the colonial
era and revert to reactionary and conservative tendencies.17 Like other Hyŏnhaet’an
romances, the story includes a Japanese woman who loves and respects the Korean
male protagonist. Also appearing in the film is a treasonous, pro-Japanese man
playing the part of the antagonist. Indeed, Chorus of Trees maps the values of
good and evil onto nationalism and anti-nationalism through the juxtaposition of an
independence activist and a pro-Japanese collaborator, thereby presenting a highly
dichotomous nationalistic narrative.
Chorus of Trees did not star a Korean-Japanese or Japanese actress. Korean
actress Yun Chŏng-hŭi, a rising star in Korean cinema, played the role of Yumiko,
the daughter of a high-ranking Japanese official who falls in love with a poor
Korean student named Ch’ŏlu. This casting choice not only is attributable to Yun
Chŏng-hŭi’s explosive popularity following the release of Sorrowful Youth but
was also a result of Daughter of the Governor General being barred for release for
starring a Japanese actress. In this film, the imagined love affair between a Korean
 Hyŏnhaet’an, Mon Amour 97

man and a Japanese woman no longer unfolds in the ‘in-between’ space separating
Korea and Japan. Instead, the narrative shifts its focus to the inner space of Korea.
Problems previously arising from interracial romance have become conflicts
internal to Korean life. In Chorus of Trees, the couple’s breakup is not attributed
to cultural differences. A Japanese sympathizer (Ch’inilp’a) and a Korean female
activist from the provisional government of Korea stand between the lovers,
fomenting misunderstandings that lead to a series of accidents eventually separat­
ing the couple forever. After their breakup, Ch’ŏlu is jailed for his involvement
in the independence movement, and Yumiko marries the pro-Japanese Korean
man who plotted the breakup of the couple for his own selfish material gain. In
the film, the marriage between Yumiko and the pro-Japanese Korean man lacks
true love and ends in sorrow for Yumiko. Even after his release from prison fol­
lowing Korean independence, Ch’ŏlu declares that his relationship with Yumiko
is finished, lamenting that their relationship was ‘the fate of a sad history’. Not
only did their relationship meet an unfortunate end, but with Korea’s liberation
from Japan they also cannot see each other thereafter, reducing their breakup to
a ‘sad history’.
In the final scene, Yumiko and her husband are driven out of the Korean Penin­
sula. Despite Yumiko being a good-natured person and her husband being Korean,
she is unable to remain in the newly established nation after liberation. The reasons
are simple: she is Japanese, and her husband is a Korean who betrayed his country
for material success. The scene where Yumiko departs Korea makes explicit the
difficult circumstances of Japanese wives in Korea who suffered the abuses of
multiple decades of history after liberation at the mercy of the colonial system.
Over half of Japanese wives living in Korea in the 1960s left Korea as a result of
missing their families and hometowns, exclusion by Korean nationalism, and eco­
nomic hardship.18 Hyŏnhaet’an romances were opportunities to highlight the lives
of these women, which had been ignored by larger social discourses. However,
Hyŏnhaet’an romances of the late 1960s devolved into narratives that suppressed
the imaginable potentialities of cultural and intimate relations between Korean,
Japan, and beyond.
The aforementioned scene can also be interpreted as epitomizing the Korean
film industry’s nationalistic obsession after the signing of the Korea–Japan diplo­
matic treaty in 1965. The film’s nationalistic conclusion is an attempt to appease
both vehemently anti-Japanese South Korean public sentiment and the govern­
ment’s enforcement of censorship in response to public opinion. Such an obsession
is found in the film’s audio-visual representation as well as the narrative structure.
Although the production crew shot on location in Japan, images of a fountain in
Hibiya Park, shots of Ueno Park, and the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo were eventually
removed by government censors. Meanwhile, Japanese elements appearing in the
mise-en-scène were purposefully disguised or obscured by the crew, such as the
strange dialogue spoken by the Japanese landlady and the blurred Japanese news­
paper article read by Yumiko’s father. Indeed, the fleeting snippets of Japanese
language and text that survive in the film remind audiences that censorship hides
and silences all things Japanese in the film. Elements threatening to nationalism
98 Hwajin Lee

Figure 6.3 Excerpt from Chorus of Trees (1968)

Source: Courtesy Korean Film Archive

were excised from the narratives of Hyŏnhaet’an romances of the late 1960s and
were replaced by reactionary narratives that stressed normative nationalist values.
However, the irregular interruptions caused by the obscured and distorted Japanese
elements in these films throw the intentional erasure of Japan into sharp relief.
Indeed, these cinematic scars and erasures attest to the traumatic colonial experi­
ence and cultural crises that could not be overcome despite the normalization of
Korea–Japan diplomatic relations.

Conclusion
As part of an effort to reconstruct narratives of colonial memories in postcolonial
Korea, I analysed what I categorized as ‘Hyŏnhaet’an romance’ films produced in
the 1960s. Against the backdrop of the normalization of relations between Korea
and Japan, these films offer an opportunity to examine how Japan as the Other was
represented in Korean films, colliding with the interests of Korean filmmakers and
producers in the process as well as the nationalistic aspirations and imaginings of the
new nation-state being constructed by both the South Korean public and repressive
regimes. In reconstructing colonial memory, Hyŏnhaet’an romance films invoke
Japan as not just enemy and oppressor but also lover, neighbour, and friend. Embed­
ded in the context of the postcolonial era, Hyŏnhaet’an love stories are imbued with
the South Korean public’s conflicted emotions regarding Korea–Japan relations.
Through the character of a good-natured Japanese woman who loves and
respects her Korean partner, Hyŏnhaet’an romance films romanticized feelings
towards Japan and attempted an imagined reconciliation between the two countries
 Hyŏnhaet’an, Mon Amour 99

on the level of narrative. Coupled with the overturning of gendered power relations
between a pair of Korean and Japanese lovers, Japan is displayed through the body
and imagery of Japanese female characters. Clearly noting the public’s desire for
objectified images of Japan in the form of attractive female characters, Korean
filmmakers took the unprecedented step of casting Korean-Japanese and Japanese
women as protagonists in Korean films.
However, when Japan–Korea relations were finally normalized, the Korean
film industry expressed fear instead of delight at the prospect of increased cul­
tural exchange. The Park Chung-hee administration strengthened the censorship of
popular media as a method for controlling critical public opinion. As a result, the
boom in Hyŏnhaet’an romance films, which navigated the space between Japan
and Korea, soon subsided. The appearance of kimono-clad Japanese women who
expressed their love for Korean men did not last long on Korean movie screens.
However, the tension between visible and invisible Japan in interracial love affairs
left scars in the films themselves. From such artifacts, we can trace the historical
meanings behind the limits of representations in 1960s South Korean film and the
latent desires to both disrupt and discard nationalist narratives.

Notes
1 Kim Hyein, “Politics of Hyeonhaetan: Law of Empire and Purification Techniques of
Postcolonial Subjects [Hyŏnhaet’an ŭi chŏngch’ihak: cheguk ŭi pŏpchilsŏ wa shin­
gminji chuch’e ŭi chŏnghwasul],” Ŏmullonch’ong 52 (2010): 195–224.
2 Kwŏn Podŭrae and Ch’ŏn Chŏnghwan, Asking 1960: Intellectuals and Cultural Politics
in the Park Chung-hee Era [1960-nyŏn ŭl mutta: Pak Chŏng-h ŭi sidae ŭi munhwa
chŏngch’i wa chisŏng] (Seoul: Ch’ŏnnyŏn ŭi sangsang, 2012), 515–30.
3 Unknown author, “Domestic Trends [Kungnaeŭi umjigim],” Sasanggye 88 (1960):
159–161.
4 Kim Yerim, The Life Following across the Border of Nations [Kukka rŭl hŭrŭnŭn sam]
(Seoul: Somyŏng, 2015), 258–69.
5 Oh Yŏngsuk, “Establishing Diplomatic Relations between Korea and Japan and the
Representation of Japan: Film Censorship and Korean Cinema in the First Half of the
1960s [Hanil sugyo wa ilbon p’yosang: 1960-nyŏndae chŏnban’gi ŭi han’guk yŏnghwa
wa yŏnghwa kŏmyŏl],” Hyŏndaeyŏnghwa yŏn’gu 10 (2010): 271–312.
6 Yi Pongpŏm, “Cultural Reorganization and Censorship in the 1950s [1950-nyŏndae
munhwa chaep’yŏn kwa kŏmyŏl],” Han’gungmunhak yŏn’gu 34 (2008): 7–49.
7 Kim Sŏngmin, Banning Japan: History of Korean Popular Culture as Prohibition and
Desire [Ilbon ŭl kŭmhada: kŭmje wa yongmang ŭi han’guk taejung munhwasa] (P’aju:
Kŭrhangari, 2017), 26–34.
8 “Notice issued by the Ministry of Education to the Association of Korean Film Writers
[Mun’gyobu‘ka han’guk yŏnghwa chakka hyŏp’oe’ e ponaen t’onggomun],” Kyunghy­
ang shinmun, March 12, 1959.
9 Film scholar Jinsoo An examines kisaeng films, gangster films, and Manchurian action
films in a similar context. Jinsoo An, Parameters of Disavowal: Colonial Representa­
tion in South Korean Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018).
10 Naoki Sakai, Japan, Image, and Nation: Empathic Community and Imperial National­
ism [Ilbon, yŏngsang, miguk: konggam ŭi kongdongch’e wa chegukchŏk kungminjuŭi],
trans. Ch’oe Chŏngok (Seoul: Kŭrinbi, 2008), 41–71.
11 Kim Yerim, The Life Flowing across the Border of Nations [Kukka rŭl hŭrŭnŭn sam]
(Seoul: Somyŏng, 2015), 186–225.
100 Hwajin Lee

12 Yu Chihyŏng, Dialogues for Twenty-Four Years: Interviews with Director Kim Ki-yŏng
[24-nyŏn kan ŭi taehwa: kimgiyŏng kamdok int’ŏbyujip] (Seoul: Sŏn, 2006), 96.
13 These censorship documents were accessed through the digital archives held by the
Korean Film Archive in Seoul, South Korea.
14 Unknown author, “Japanese Film Trying to Cross to Korea [Han’guk ŭl nŏmbonŭn
iryŏnghwa],” Kyunghyang shinmun, July 10, 1965, 7.
15 Daughter of the Governor General was produced in 1965 but shown to an audience
for the first time on March 21, 2017, at the Korean Film Archive. For a discussion of
the production and suppression of Daughter of the Governor General in the context
of changing Korea–Japan relations against the backdrop of the colonial legacy and the
postcolonial, Cold War situation, see Yi Hwajin (Lee Hwajin), “Daughter of the Gov­
ernor General and the Visual Politics of the 1965 Treaty Regime [65-nyŏn ch’eje’ ŭi
shigak chŏngch’i wa ch’ongdok ŭi ttal],” Han’gukkŭndae munhak yŏn’gu 35 (2017):
277–306.
16 Unknown author, “Entertainment [Yŏnye],” Tonga ilbo, August 15, 1967, 5.
17 This tendency is not limited to director Kang Tae-chin’s films but is typical of most
late 1960s South Korean melodramas. Film historian Yi Yŏngil states that in contrast
to films of the first half of the 1960s, which dealt with ‘the realities of wholesome liv­
ing’, melodramas produced in the second half of the 1960s displayed a ‘reactionary and
conservative tendency’ related to the ‘psychological frustration’ of a class of people
excluded from modernization. For more, see Yi Yŏngil, Complete History of Korean
Cinema [Han’guk yŏnghwajŏnsa] (Seoul: Sodo, 2004), 352–8.
18 Kim Suja, “Reconstructing Memories of Japanese Wives as Marginal People in South
Korea [Chaehan Ilbonin ch’ŏ ŭi kyŏnggyein ŭrosŏŭi sam kwa kiŏk ŭi chaegu],” Ihwa­
sahak yŏn’gu 46 (2013): 369–74.

References
An, Jinsoo. Parameters of Disavowal: Colonial Representation in South Korean Cinema
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018).
Kim, Hyein. “Politics of Hyeonhaetan: Law of Empire and Purification Techniques of Post-
colonial Subjects [Hyŏnhaet’an ŭi chŏngch’ihak: cheguk ŭi pŏpchilsŏ wa shingminji
chuch’e ŭi chŏnghwasul],” Ŏmullonch’ong 52 (2010): 195–224.
Kim, Sŏngmin. Banning Japan: History of Korean Popular Culture as Prohibition and
Desire [Ilbon ŭl kŭp’ada: kŭmje wa yongmang ŭi han’guk taejung munhwasa] (P’aju:
Kŭrhangari, 2017).
Kim, Suja. “Reconstructing Memories of Japanese Wives as Marginal People in South Korea
[Chaehan ilbonin ch’ŏ ŭi kyŏnggyein ŭrosŏŭi sam kwa kiŏk ŭi chaegu],” ihwasahakyŏn’gu
46 (2013): 369–74.
Kim, Yerim. The Life Flowing across the Border of Nations [Kukka rŭl hŭrŭnŭn sam]
(Seoul: Somyŏng, 2015).
Kwŏn, Podŭrae, and Chŏnghwan Ch’ŏn. Asking 1960: Intellectuals and Cultural Poli­
tics in the Park Chung-hee Era [1960-nyŏn ŭl mutta: Pak Chŏng-h ŭi sidae ŭi munhwa
chŏngch’i wa chisŏng] (Seoul: Ch’ŏnnyŏn ŭi sangsang, 2012).
Oh, Yŏngsuk. “Establishing Diplomatic Relations between Korea and Japan and the Rep­
resentation of Japan: Film Censorship and Korean Cinema in the First Half of the 1960s
[Hanil sugyo wa ilbon p’yosang: 1960-nyŏndae chŏnban’gi ŭi han’guk yŏnghwa wa
yŏnghwa kŏmyŏl],” Hyŏndaeyŏnghwayŏn’gu 10 (2010): 271–312.
Sakai, Naoki. Japan, Image, and Nation: Empathic Community and Imperial Nationalism
[Ilbon, yŏngsang, miguk: konggam ŭi kongdongch’e wa chegukchŏk kungminjuŭi], trans.
Ch’oe Chŏngok (Seoul: Kŭrinbi, 2008).
 Hyŏnhaet’an, Mon Amour 101

Yi, Hwajin [Lee Hwajin]. “Daughter of the Governor General and the Visual Politics of
the 1965 Treaty Regime [‘65nyŏn ch’eje’ ŭi shigak chŏngch’i wa ch’ongdok ŭi ttal],”
Han’gukkŭndaemunhakyŏn’gu 35 (2017): 277–306.
Yi, Pongpŏm. “Cultural Reorganization and Censorship in 1950s [1950-nyŏndae munhwa
chaep’yŏn kwa kŏmyŏl],” Han’gungmunhakyŏn’gu 34 (2008): 7–49.
Yi, Yŏngil. Han’guk yŏnghwajŏnsa [Complete History of Korean Cinema] (Seoul: Sodo,
2004).
Yu, Chihyŏng. Dialogues for Twenty Four Years: Interviews with Director Kim Kiyŏng [24­
nyŏn kan ŭi taehwa: Kim Kiyŏng kamdok int’ŏbyujip] (Seoul: Sŏn, 2006).
7 Screening Collaboration
The Pro-Japanese Korean in
2009 Lost Memories and Modern Boy

Mark E. Caprio

Aiding and abetting the enemy is a universal crime, punished in the most serious
instances with long prison sentences or capital punishment. Following the Second
World War, new European administrations of formerly German-occupied territo­
ries quickly established courts of law to bring to justice those suspected of com­
mitting such treason, arresting, trying, and sentencing fellow nationals who had
collaborated with the Nazi invaders. In France, for example, women accused of
engaging in ‘collaboration horizontale’ with German soldiers, for both romamtic
and financial profit, were disgraced by having their heads shaved before being
paraded down the city streets through jeering crowds. Many were decorated with
swastikas written across their naked bodies, their nakedness protected by their half-
German babies.1 Most often these sentences were carried out quickly after guilt
was determined, allowing little time for appeal.2
Korea’s era of foreign occupation was far longer, yet bringing collaborators to
trial and punishment proved to be far more difficult, particularly in the American-
occupied southern half of the peninsula.3 Delays and outright prohibitions against
addressing colonial-era collaboration further prevented Koreans from erasing this
vestige of Japanese rule until the late 1980s, after Korea’s democratisation move­
ment gained steam, opening debate over several colonial and postcolonial issues,
including collaboration.4 These debates took place primarily in print culture medi­
ums. More recently, several Korean films have offered a different view of the issue
of collaboration.
Formal discussion of how to identify and punish collaborators, the most popular
term for such Koreans being Chin’ilpa [of the pro-Japanese faction], was initiated
by the Roh Moo Hyun (No Mu-hyeon) government’s Truth and Reconciliation
legislation. This legislation formed six separate committees that aimed to ‘recon­
cile the past for the sake of national unity . . . and expose the truth through inves­
tigating [various incidents] that occurred throughout the course of Japanese rule
until the present time’.5 Efforts to identify colonial-era collaboration resulted in
reference publications that made the biographical information of over 3,000 Kore­
ans suspected of pro-Japanese crimes available to the Korean nation.6 Among the
activities deemed traitorous— as opposed to mundane collaboration, such as filing
taxes or catering to Japanese consumers at their place of business—were those that
assisted Japan’s annexation of Korea, inhibited the work of independence fighters,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003279013-9
 Screening Collaboration 103

and aided Japan’s war efforts. Also considered were those Koreans to whom the
homeland Japanese government or the Korea-based Government-General [GGK,
sōtokufu] offered favours, such as membership in the National Diet’s House of
Peers (Kizoku-in). The biographies of such Koreans, however, suggest a skewed
effort to identify national traitors based on their collaborative actions, with little
consideration given to the circumstances that drove them to collaborate, emphasis­
ing the what over the why. Korean film has also addressed issues of collaboration in
several recent works. This chapter considers two such films, 2009 Lost Memories
(K. Losŭtŭ memoriŭ 2009, dir. Yi Shimyŏng, 2002) and Modern Boy (Modŏn Poi,
dir. Cheong Chiu, 2008),7 both of which offer a more comprehensive approach to
remembering colonial-era collaboration, one that considers the individual acts of
the accused traitor but also the reasons for their actions.
The success of the democratisation movement freed Korean cinema to offer
views contrary to those pushed by military dictatorships.8 Films such as A Petal
(Kkonnip, dir. Chang Sun-woo, 1999), May 18 (Hwaryŏhan hyuga, Dir. Kim Chi­
hun, 2007), and more recently A Taxi Driver (T’aeksi unchŏnsa, dir. Chang Hoon,
2017), adapted the story of the 1980 Gwangju Incident from the perspective of the
citizens as victims of state terrorism rather than as leftist ideologically inspired
communist revolutionaries. Films such as Joint Security Area (Kongdong kyŏngbi
kuyŏk, dir. Pak Chan’wuk, 2000) imagined a more amicable North –South Korean
relationship, depicting soldiers from both sides of the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ)
sharing food and drink, engaging in childish games, and exchanging banter on
girls, music, and military life to suggest the potential for more amicable relations
forming, albeit at a slow, difficult, and, in the end, potentially deadly pace.
The two colonial-era collaboration films are also a product of this more liberal
South Korean culture that these political developments permitted. By probing more
deeply into the why of collaboration, these films present the possibility of mis­
guided Koreans’ redemption towards a more patriotic lifestyle. Both films high­
light the male protagonists’ guilt, but through introduction of a subjective timeline
afford them the opportunity to reflect on and correct their traitorous actions in time
to contribute as Korean patriots to their country’s glorious liberation. In this way,
the films emphasise a complex subjective side for a people in search of the reasons
behind actions that more formal investigations summarily ruled unpatriotic.

Investigations of Collaboration
Before recent efforts to identify pro-Japanese collaborators, there were several
attempts to address this aspect of Korea’s colonial past. However, intervention by
administrative authorities prevented resolution through the three years of United
States occupation of southern Korea (1945–1948) and up through the Cold War.
The Southern Korea Interim National Assembly (SKINA, Nam chosŏn kwado
chŏngbu) in 1947 and the first Republic of Korea (ROK) National Assembly in
1948 both drafted legislations to indict, try, and convict collaborators. The for­
mer move by the SKINA was blocked by the United States Military Government
before the legislative process was completed, while the ROK National Assembly
104 Mark E. Caprio

succeeded in promulgating such legislation, only to see the first president, Syng­
man Rhee (Yi Sŭngman), intervene to limit the number of people convicted and
sentenced for their actions. Even then, it is doubtful whether the convicted served
out their sentences.9 From the late 1940s, with the enactment of the National Secu­
rity Law (Kukka Poanbŏp), those deemed ‘national traitors’ were Koreans who
displayed pro-communist, rather than pro-Japanese, sentiments. While issues of
colonial-era collaboration were successfully silenced during the decades after the
Korean War, countless Koreans were arrested, jailed, tortured, and even executed
under the National Security Law. The end of the Cold War and the advancement in
the ROK of democratisation had once again opened the door to the collaboration
issue. Recent efforts have succeeded in compiling lists of names and biographies
of compatriots deemed guilty of cooperating and benefiting from Japanese colonial
rule. However, the six decades that had passed since liberation left few, if any, of
these people alive to answer the charges levied against them, leaving family mem­
bers to bear the shame and, in extreme cases, to forfeit property if the government
could link its acquisition to collaborative activities of their forefathers.10
Examining the lives of the more notorious Koreans whose names grace the lists
of collaborators suggests their relations with the Japanese to have been cyclical
rather than linear. That is, they displayed signs of patriotic as well as collaborative
activity. The life of the Christian educator, Yun Ch’i-ho, who appears on most col­
laborator lists, is one such case.11 Yet his complete biography suggests a patriotic
past as well. His participation in late Chosŏn-era (1392–1910) reform movements
forced him into exile, where he studied in China, the United States, and Japan. In
1911, just after Korea’s annexation by the Japanese empire, Yun was arrested on
suspicion of having participated in an alleged plot to assassinate Governor General
Terauchi Masatake. Whereas appeals exonerated the majority of the 105 Koreans
found guilty by the Japanese court, Yun was one of five who remained in prison
until pardoned in 1915.
Collaboration charges against Yun centre primarily on his actions during the
war. However, his refusal to participate in Korea’s 1 March 1919 independence
movement is also deemed traitorous. His refusal was not without reason. He often
stated in his diary his conviction that Koreans should spend their time preparing
for independence rather than demonstrating for Japanese withdrawal—the Japa­
nese were not going to leave, and Koreans were not ready for independence. He
emphasised this in an interview he conducted with the Japan-based Osaka Main­
ichi shinbun.12 He explained this view more clearly one year later when he penned
in his diary: ‘He who sends a poor boy to school to become more intelligent than
his fathers is doing a greater service than he who stirs up students for political agi­
tations’.13 His more recent biographers, however, do not consider this reasoning,
only arguing his act of non-participation to be unpatriotic. Also relevant to Yun’s
case were his early but unsuccessful attempts to reform Korean politics and society
in the hope that Korea might avoid the fate of colonial subjugation, or his later
predicament (perhaps a result of his arrest and torture) of feeling like ‘a drop of oil
in a bucket of water’ around the Japanese when he participated in such events that
he felt obligated to attend.14
 Screening Collaboration 105

Yun’s wartime collaboration reflects a pattern experienced by other Koreans

who appeared on collaborator lists. The educator and president of Ewha Wom­
en’s School, Helen Kim (Kim Hwarran), the historian and drafter of Korea’s
1919 Independence Declaration, Ch’oe Nam-sŏn, and Korea’s first modern nov­
elist, Yi Kwangsu, are other Koreans who allegedly engaged in acts interpreted
as traitorous that compromised their otherwise patriotic activities. Similar to
Yun’s case, the investigations downplay or simply ignore their more patriotic
acts and writings to emphasise those of collaboration. Moreover, the investiga­
tions make little effort to consider the subjective reasoning behind the acts of
these otherwise intelligent people. What drove them to cooperate with Korea’s
subjugators and—in some cases—to prevent others from advancing their coun­
try’s independence?

Film and History

The multi-dimensional capacity of digital culture, which includes film, affords
this medium access to techniques unavailable to print culture. Korean cinema’s
attempts to address colonial-era collaboration have utilised these techniques to
offer narratives that expand on those considered above. While avoiding conclusive
guilty or innocent verdicts, the films 2009 Lost Memories and Modern Boy deliver
a more nuanced discussion that condemns acts of collaboration but also consider
the reasoning behind the individual’s decision to do so, manipulating temporal and
spatial elements such that historical events in a contemporary dimension flashback
to a past and zoom forward to a present, in one case fictional, to present a complex­
ity that written, academic history tends to avoid.15 The visual element engages the
audience more closely with the event than does a text-driven presentation. Film
historian Robert A. Rosenstone writes:

Portraying the world in the present tense, the dramatic feature [of the his­
tory film] plunges you into the midst of history, attempting to destroy the
distance between you and the past and to obliterate—at least while you are
watching—your ability to think about what you are seeing. Film does more
than want to teach the lesson that history hurts; it wants you, the viewer, to
experience the hurt (and pleasures) of the past.16

Rosenstone advises critics of history-based film who focus on the detours that this
medium takes in their narration to focus on the ‘overall sense of the past that [films]
convey’ rather than the ‘specific details’. Film delivers

rich images and visual metaphors . . . for thinking historically. You may also
see the history film as part of a separate realm of representation and dis­
course, one not meant to provide literal truths about the past (as if our writ­
ten history can provide literal truths) but metaphoric truths which work, to
a large degree, as a kind of commentary on, and challenge to, traditional
historical discourse.17
106 Mark E. Caprio

History-based films thus float in a grey area trapped between entertainment and
documentary, fiction and ‘truth’, that enables viewers to imagine a story line but
still encourages them to reflect on an issue or event as if it were reality regardless of
whether the scenes can be verified by documented truth. In the words of historian
and literary critic Tzvetan Todorov, through history the reader (and here viewer)
‘constructs the imaginary universe on the basis of his [or her] own information (the
text, the plausible)’.18
This is evident in the two films considered here, where pro-Japanese Korean
collaborators are granted a more subjective understanding that incorporates the
complexities (and thus human-ness) behind their decisions, a practice supported by
such contemporary research on collaboration as that of Yumi Moon in her work on
the Ilchinhoe [Advance in Unity Society], a Korean populist group that encouraged
Japan’s 1910 annexation of the Korean peninsula. In her survey of collaboration
research, Moon adds that collaborators made ‘their choices with diverse and in
some cases even “ethical” motives, but they faced a political and moral crisis if
they failed to justify the validity of their choices more broadly among the occu­
pied’.19 Timothy Brook, writing on Chinese collaborators under Japanese wartime
rule, criticises their contemporary accusers’ privy to a completed history unavail­
able to those they accuse. He imagines the collaborator possibly ‘engaging in a
calculus of options and risks different from the simplicities that hindsight, and the
nationalist narrative that thrives on it, hands to us’.20 The two films considered here
allow the male protagonists to recognise the gap between their motives, ethical or
otherwise, and the aims of their Japanese employers in time to convert to a patriotic
mission, avoiding the legacy of a collaborator.

The Korean Male as Collaborator

Among the few Koreans found guilty of collaboration by the 1948 National Traitors
Act, the only one sentenced to death was a former colonial policeman, Kim Tŏk-ki,
a penalty deemed appropriate for his brutal handling of independence fighters.21
2009 Lost Memories opens with the scene of a second-generation Japanese Bureau
of Investigation (JBI) detective, Sakamoto Masayuki, gunning down members of
the rebel anti-Japanese Korean Liberation Alliance (Chosǒn haebang tongmaeng;
to the Japanese the Furei senjin [rogue Korean; hitherto KLA]) underground gang.
The KLA had raided the Itō Hirobumi Culture Center during an exhibition of arte­
facts collected by Japan’s second governor general in Korea, Inoue Kaoru. They
both exist in a history falsified by time travel. This drives the gang’s interest in one
particular item, the Lunar Soul, that when mated with the magical Temple Stone
allows its bearer to travel back to the past. This artefact had been used by a member
of the Inoue family to return to the past to create a history that allowed Japan to
retain control over Korea through 2009.
The confrontation with the gang climaxes with a standoff between Sakamoto
and the gang’s leader, Captain Kim Chonhwan, whose gun is pressed to the neck
of Sakamoto’s Japanese colleague. Sakamoto reveals his Korean heritage at this
point, as he steps forward to negotiate Kim’s surrender in the leader’s language.
 Screening Collaboration 107

The conversation leading up to the shooting of Captain Kim creates a space that
partitions the Korean collaborator from the Korean patriot.

Sakamoto: Drop your gun!

Kim: Are you Korean?
Sakamoto: Drop your gun!
Kim: I asked if you were Korean! How can you shoot at us?
Sakamoto: You’re just criminals.
Kim: Criminals? How can an attempt to get my country back be a crime?
Sakamoto: I’m going to count to three.
Kim: I am Captain Kim Chonhwan of the Korean Independence Army.
Sakamoto: One.
Kim: Give them this message.
Sakamoto: Two.
Kim: Korea is an independent country! Japan has committed a crime by
forcefully invading Korea. We . . .
Sakamoto: Three (then shoots him dead).

Although Sakamoto has committed an act similar to that for which Kim Tŏk-ki
would receive a death sentence, the film allows him time and space to exonerate
himself as a Korean patriot, an opportunity denied Kim Tŏk-ki at his trial.22
It is the falsified history that saves Sakamoto. In 2008, a member of the Inoue
family was able to turn back the hands of time. Discovering the crescent-moon-shaped
Lunar Soul in his family’s collection, Inoue uses it to return to the Harbin train
station to prevent An Chung-gŭn from assassinating Itō Hirobumi. His success
rewrites history. The Itō-Inoue diplomatic line replaces the Katsura-Terauchi mili­
tary line, allowing Japan to fight World War II as a member of the Allied rather
than Axis forces. Berlin, rather than Hiroshima, is the recipient of the world’s
first atomic bomb.23 Japan, allowed to retain the Korean peninsula in its post-war
empire, also gains a seat on the United Nations Security Council. Korea’s legacy
of historical and contemporary heroes is further distorted in this false history, with
the sixteenth-century invader of Korea, Hideyoshi Toyotomi, replacing Admiral Yi
Sun Sin atop the majestic statue that casts a shadow over the GKK building, which
this false history has now resurrected from its 1995 demolition by the Korean gov­
ernment that celebrated a half-century of Korean independence. Korean athletes
now compete under the Japanese flag at the 1988 Olympiad, held in Nagoya rather
than in Seoul. Inoue’s timing is also critical, coming just in time to disrupt an
agreement between North and South Korea to reunify. The conflict between the
Japanese and the KLA is thus a race between the Japanese and the KLA to protect
the revised history or to return it to its original form. At stake are the existence
of two shameful chapters of history: the Japanese ‘unfortunate history’ of aerial
attacks and atomic bombings that the revised history erased, and Korea’s perpetual
submission to Japanese rule that the revised history preserved.
Modern Boy’s collaborator-turned-hero, Yi Haemyung, could not be more dif­
ferent from Sakamoto. In contrast to the JBI detective, who lives to work, Yi works
108 Mark E. Caprio

to live. Yi, employed by the GGK as first-class officer of city planning, sees his job
as a lifeline to sustain his affluent lifestyle. From the opening scene, the self-dubbed
‘god of romance’ demonstrates a character of shallow morals, a dreamer most inter­
ested in the material side of life. The film contrasts his extensive wardrobe, shiny
red automobile, and adventurous lifestyle with the dullness of traditional black and
white Korea. The film opens with Yi going to Seoul Station accompanied by a
harem of modern girl companions to welcome the arrival of his former Tokyo Uni­
versity classmate, Hidaka Shinsuke. They then adjourn to Yi’s modern house for
a wild lawn party to indulge in food, drink, music, and fun. Yi and Hidaka then
take in a floor show at a local club, apparently oblivious to the significance of
the early July 1937 news: the escalation of conflict with the Chinese at the Marco
Polo Bridge by Japan’s Kwantung Army (Rukōkyō jiken). Yi’s attention is seized by
Laura, the star of the club’s main attraction, ‘Laura and the Modern Boys’, when he
sets eyes on her for the first time. Yi quickly falls head over heels for the ultramod­
ern dancer, and Hidaka develops a scheme to bring the two together.
He, and later Laura, however, see personal value in Yi, which eventually places
the Korean between a rock and a hard place: Hidaka using Yi to gain information
on Terror Pak, whom the Japanese official (mistakenly) believes to be Laura’s hus­
band, and Laura romancing Yi to use him as a mule to carry explosives into the
GGK complex where he works.
Yi’s shallowness makes his conversion to patriotism easier, even though it
requires him to forgo modern luxuries. He attempts to justify his collaboration
with the colonial government to Laura as necessary simply to satisfy his desire for
a life of luxury. He flashes back to a conversation he once had with her where he
explained his reasoning:

Laura: When you were young, what was your dream?

Yi: When I was in the first grade, during the school play, we all took turns tell­
ing our future dreams.
Laura: What did you say?
Yi: I said I wanted to become a Japanese. It’s just, watching my father and
uncles, they wanted to become richer and live in comfort. So, I wanted to
become Japanese and be rich too.

On another occasion, he justifies his employment by relating a prophecy once

made concerning his future to explain that by working with the GGK, he is actu­
ally hastening Japan’s collapse.

My father once had my fortune read where I was told that I will be so unlucky
for the next ten years that everywhere I work is destined to go under. So,
working for the colonial government is helping Korea get its independence.
It’s a very important job.

Both Sakamoto and Yi are held hostage by their pedigree. Sakamoto’s father
Masao was also a member of the Japanese police force charged with investigating
 Screening Collaboration 109

the rogue KLA group. His downfall occurred in 1985 when he was suspected of
abetting, rather than combating, an attack by the group during an exhibition that
the Inoue Foundation sponsored in the Russian city of Vladivostok, leading to his
being shot by a police force colleague and sealing his reputation as a traitor, a
source of shame for his son. Yi’s father fits a pattern adopted by several Koreans
in history: patriot-turned-collaborator. Once a devoted subject of Emperor Kojong
(r. 1864–1907), the elder Yi’s realisation that he could enjoy little hope of happiness
under a Korean administration caused him to throw his support to the Japanese
colonial government. He proudly showed his son a full-page newspaper article on
his 10,000-yen donation to Japan’s military campaign. With their conversion to
Korean patriotism, both sons complete cycles initiated by their fathers: Sakamoto
finishes the task that turned his father from his police loyalties, and Yi restores his
family honour by accepting the elder Yi’s initial loyalties.
Had Korea gained its independence prior to their conversion and had a new
Korean administration been able to successfully enact anti-traitor legislation, Saka­
moto, and perhaps Yi as well, would have been targeted for arrest as pro-Japanese
collaborators, with Sakamoto potentially paying with his life for his crimes against
independence-seeking patriots. Yi’s case would depend on the highest rank to
which he advanced within the GGK and whether he followed his father’s example
and supported Japan’s military efforts with financial donations. These acts might
have gained him a short prison term, a potential loss of property, and forfeiture of
his civil (suffrage) rights. Given the relative tolerance of the United States occupa­
tion forces for colonial-era collaborators and the useful skills that they had acquired
through Japanese training, however, the two men most probably would have been
granted leniency, particularly if they demonstrated remorse for their actions. Such
tolerance is reflected in the two films, which attempt to justify Sakamoto and Yi’s
fall from grace, before assigning the men more patriotic roles. Their conversions,
however, are expediated by the betrayals of their closest Japanese colleagues,
Saigō Shojirō and Hidaka Shinsuke.

The Japanese Male as Betrayer

At the start of both films, Sakamoto and Yi appear quite comfortable in their
working environments due in large part to their friendships with Japanese col­
leagues whom they met while students. Sakamoto and Saigō became acquainted
at the police academy and Yi and Hidaka at Japan’s apex of higher education, the
University of Tokyo. The Koreans’ friendship with their Japanese colleagues does
not assume equality in their social status; however, Sakamoto and Saigō share
equal rank as partners, but their living arrangements suggest their differences in
social status.
While Sakamoto resides in a functional apartment, Saigō enjoys a rather spa­
cious house with a sprawling traditional Japanese garden. Yi’s position in the GKK
is distinctly lower than that of his former classmate, indicating that Hidaka has
climbed the promotion ladder more quickly. Despite their differences in social sta­
tus, both Koreans maintain relations with their Japanese colleagues that extend
110 Mark E. Caprio

beyond their professional careers. Sakamoto feels comfortable conversing with

Saigō’s wife while dining at their house, and Yi freely shares intimate details with
Hidaka about the development of his budding relationship with Laura. This shifts
as both Japanese turn on their Korean friends to reveal their friendships as con­
ditional, based on the Korean colleague’s willingness to cooperate in a Japanese
manner.
Saigō’s betrayal of Sakamoto begins when the Japanese detective realises his
partner’s Korean side. He is thus forced to retract a previous declaration that ‘not
even once had he thought of [Sakamoto] as a Korean. We are both Japanese.’ In
his overzealous determination to uncover the connection between the Inoue Foun­
dation and the KLA, Sakamoto crosses an ethnic line. Saigō realises Sakamoto’s
non-Japanese side when the Korean detective hurls accusations at the CEO of the
powerful organisation; he sees his partner venturing down a path that no Japanese
would dare tread on his own, without clearance from his supervisor. Saigō is then
given the uncomfortable task of informing his friend that he is being taken off the
case because he ‘is Korean’. Sakamoto’s downfall also might have resulted from
his rather rogue actions, reminding senior police force members of his father’s
actions in Vladivostok, as, unbeknown to Sakamoto, his suspicions of the activi­
ties of the Inoue Foundation mirrored those uncovered by his father two decades
earlier. The fear that Sakamoto is close to a potentially damaging discovery trig­
gers caution in the JBI, among whom some understand that they are living in an
altered history that they must prevent the KLA from correcting. They see no choice
but to silence Sakamoto, as they previously silenced his father. An assassin from
the JBI infiltrates his apartment, by mistake killing Sakamoto’s Korean superior,
Chief Takahashi, who had assumed the role of surrogate father after his biological
father’s death, visiting Sakamoto to celebrate his birthday and explain the truth
behind his father’s death. The police, however, frame Sakamoto for Takahashi’s
murder. Saigō is tasked with interrogating his erstwhile friend, though he abets
Sakamoto’s miraculous escape from police headquarters, sending him off with a
warning never to return: ‘The next time we meet, it will be as enemies.’
Yi Haemyung’s situation is far less immediate but—to Hidaka Shinsuke—just
as critical. The opportunity to infiltrate Laura’s anti-Japanese operations, of which
Hidaka (but not Yi) is aware, falls into the prosecutor’s lap with his Korean friend’s
starry-eyed infatuation with the exotic singer/dancer. Hidaka knows that Laura is
but a stage name for a woman leading a double, even triple, life to mask her under­
cover operations. Through Yi, Hidaka hopes to uncover the identity, whereabouts,
and future plans of Terror Pak, a Korean malcontent responsible for a deadly bomb­
ing in Shanghai, whom he believes to be married to Laura. It is not clear, however,
whether the prosecutor has this scheme in mind when he accompanies Yi to her
night club. Hidaka’s prior knowledge and Yi’s ignorance of the modern dancer’s
true identity allow him to hatch such a plan, which he forwards by being so coop­
erative in bringing the two together.
Hidaka’s betrayal of his classmate begins after Yi brings bento lunch boxes that
Laura provided after nights of romance into the GGK complex. The first bento
exploded after Yi innocently arrived for work, while the second bento is politically
 Screening Collaboration 111

explosive, arranged in the shape of an illegal symbol of Korean independence, the

t’aegŭkki Korean flag. Yi quickly rearranges the pattern to resemble that of the
more appropriate Japanese rising sun [hi no maru] flag, but the damage was irre­
tractable. Hidaka, who was aware of the origins of the first explosive bento, now is
convinced that Yi’s infatuation with Laura is interfering with his cooperation in the
investigation of the underground gang. More direct measures are required to get Yi
to talk. After interrogation fails to make Yi reveal Terror Pak’s identity, the inter­
rogator turns to harsher measures, using scissors to cut off one of Yi’s ears. Still
silent—Laura has tried to keep her patriotic life secret from him—Hidaka himself
continues the interrogation, slapping Yi across the face to demonstrate his annoy­
ance at his friend’s apparent unwillingness to cooperate. He startles Yi by reveal­
ing his suspicions of Laura and Terror Pak’s marital relationship, a betrayal that
Yi’s mind amplifies, incredulous at Hidaka’s accusation. Released and on leave (or
fired) from his job, Yi continues to pursue Laura. His quest leads him to the under­
ground resistance network, housed under the tailor shop where Laura works under
a Korean name, Cho Nansil. Captured by the anti-Japanese gang, Yi claims that
he himself is Terror Pak whose arrival they had been expecting, gaining him time
and the illusion that he is also, in fact, Cho’s husband.

The Korean Female Saviour/Martyr

The female protagonists in the two films serve as saviours, conduits that lead their
male counterparts to redemption. Both pay the ultimate price for their sacrifice,
martyrdom, to save the lives of their male counterparts. The two women, Laura/
Cho/Natasha for Yi and O Hyerin for Sakamoto, both prove elusive, as they enter
and disappear from the lives of the Korean men they are destined to save. It is their
elusiveness that lures both Yi and Sakamoto towards the patriotic roles they even­
tually assume. They have the opportunity to kill each other, but their tacit shared
understanding prevents them from doing so. Indeed, the women intervene on several
occasions to save the men’s lives, particularly from other rebels determined to put
the traitors away even before they join the forces fighting for Korean independence.
A reoccurring vision of Hyerin taunts Sakamoto by fading just before her face is
revealed. Through her, he is introduced to the Lunar Soul that her group, the KLA,
covets to unlock the door of time travel and allow the group to correct the false his­
tory that has frozen Korea in Japan’s colonial grasp. The vision shows Hyerin wip­
ing away leaves that cover the artefact before slowly scanning her body up to her
neck, where a replica of the Lunar Soul dangles seductively from a chain necklace.
The vision then moves to her face to reveal her inviting lips and dark, flowing
hair; her eyes, however, remain shielded by the Lunar Soul now in her hands. The
vision reveals enough to allow Sakamoto to recognise Hyerin as a participant in a
shootout with the KLA after the group intercepts a truck convoy transporting the
Inoue Foundation treasures through Pusan back to Japan. On this and one other
occasion—the other being when Sakamoto visits the bar that serves as a façade
over the group’s underground headquarters—she prevents her comrades from
shooting the now former-Japanese officer. No doubt she too is privy to the vision.
112 Mark E. Caprio

Hyerin literally breaks Sakamoto’s fall when the JBI agent collapses in the bar
that serves as the gang’s façade after taking a bullet in the shoulder during his
desperate escape from police headquarters. She nurses him back to health, feeds
him, and again shields him from her resistance comrades, who are understandably
upset by his presence. Sakamoto is introduced to the group’s venerable elder, who
informs Sakamoto of the history of the Lunar Soul and the trouble it has caused
Koreans ever since Inoue falsified history. He further tells Sakamoto the heroic role
his father assumed in Vladivostok, and the mission that Sakamoto Masayuki must
accept to correct the false history in which they are entrapped. Sakamoto’s conver­
sion is completed when he befriends Minjae, the son of Captain Kim Chonhwan,
whom he orphaned during the KLA raid on the Itō Hirobumi Culture Center. His
success in correcting history, we soon learn, is key to Minjae’s future. Now an
accepted member of the resistance, he joins his new comrades in battling the police
forces who have raided KLA headquarters. The ensuing shootout takes Minjae’s
life, and Sakamoto now realises there is no turning back. He consummates his
allegiance to his new comrades by turning his automatic weapon on his former
police colleagues in a manner reminiscent of that displayed by the KLM members
at the start of the film. They reward his efforts by forming a suicide shield to protect
Sakamoto, who must now flee to the past to fulfil his far more important mission:
to ensure that An Chung-gŭn completes his historic assassination of Itō Hirobumi.
Laura is as elusive as Hyerin, but in a different way. From the time they first meet
she engages Yi in a cat-and-mouse game, disappearing soon after their romance
begins. She meets Yi for the first time in the GGK complex when appearing with
Hidaka’s assistance to appeal to the prosecutor for her cousin’s release from prison,
a meeting arranged by Hidaka. Yi, posing as Hidaka in a ruse to impress Laura,
promises his release, which he eventually attains. Laura uses her multiple identities
to elude Yi. As Laura she is the modern-style dancer who initially attracted Yi; as
Cho Nansik she is the seamstress at the tailor shop where Yi orders multiple suits
in a ruse to draw closer to her. She is also Natasha, the behind-the-curtain ven­
triloquist singer for the otherwise tone-deaf Japanese heartthrob, Ishida Yoko. All
three identities combine to lure Yi closer to his patriotic mission. Laura provides
the initial attraction through her dance/song routine at the club, encouraging him
to visit Cho at the tailor shop, beginning their romance. Natasha’s singing is a
lure that keeps Yi on her trail and eventually leads to their reunion. She suffers
a schizophrenic-like love–hate dilemma in their relationship. While genuinely
attracted to Yi as a lover, her conscious views require her to hate this ‘pro-Japanese
weasel’ [ch’inilp’a ppaenchiri] in order to complete her patriotic mission. After
each love encounter, she distances herself from him by vacating her apartment.
Still, Yi’s position is tempting, as it gives her indirect access to the apex of the
Japanese colonial administration, which she skilfully exploits, whether to facilitate
her cousin’s release or to plant a bomb in the GGK complex.
Her dilemma reaches its peak when Cho, donning Terror Pak (which, contrary
to Hidaka’s suspicions, is not a person but an explosive-laden jacket that Cho tai­
lored), must decide between her love for Yi and her country. Does she follow him
to Manchuria to raise a family, or does she kill Japanese officials by detonating
 Screening Collaboration 113

herself at a celebration of Japan’s military victory in Manchuria? Yi, to demon­

strate his renewed patriotic sentiments, demands that he assume the identity of
Terror Pak—thus assuming the role of her husband—by donning the jacket to kill
his former employers. The jacket that Cho prepares for him, however, has been
defused. She replaces the jacket’s pocket handkerchief triggering the explosion
with a harmless but nonetheless damaging t’aegkki flag. His life is saved, but his
display of the illegal flag and his Chosŏn Mansei [long live Korea] declarations
lead to his arrest and the disappointment and embarrassment of Yi’s father and his
former classmate, both in attendance. En route to prison, Yi is rescued by his new
resistance comrades, who roll explosives in front of the police wagon carrying
him, destroying the vehicle and killing his Japanese guards, but allowing Yi to sur­
vive virtually unscathed. Carrying Laura/Cho’s memory, he arrives in Manchuria
to join the anti-colonial Korean resistance rather than to build a home with his now
deceased lover.

Conclusion
Both heroines eventually choose death over life to allow the men to carry out
their missions. Both films end with scenes of their reunion, if only (in Yi’s case)
in memory. Sakamoto’s correction of history resurrects Hyerin but freezes them
both in 1909, granting the former collaborator a new life as resistance hero. Pass­
ing through the spacious Independence Memorial Hall (Tongnip kinyŏn kwan)
on a class excursion, elementary school students in this corrected history gaze up
at a group photograph of national heroes that now includes Sakamoto Masayuki
and O Hyerin. Their relaxed postures and smiling faces, his arm casually draped
across her shoulders, amid a sea of stiffly posed comrades, reveals the two as
products of another period. Among the students is Minjae, whose smile reveals his
recognition of the two, whose heroic deeds restored history and thus his life. Yi,
having cashed in his modern urban lifestyle for one in a rustic primitive environ­
ment, recalls Laura as he marches through the snowy hills of Manchuria in search
of a cache of rifles left for his anti-Japanese resistance troop. His vision of Laura
has her burying her Natasha identity by singing Ishida Yoko’s hit song in Korean,
rather than in Japanese, while the two contemplate the release of her own debut
album as Cho Nansil.
The two films, by creating stories around fictional, rather than historic, char­
acters, allow directors to imagine creative patriotic endings of redemption for
characters who would otherwise be considered traitors to the Korean nation. They
introduce Sakamoto and Yi as unpatriotic collaborators enjoying lifestyles within
a colonial environment under circumstances that the film’s viewers would surely
understand as successful, if not enviable, under non-colonial circumstances. In
stark contrast, the resistance is confined to a squalid underground system of unat­
tractive mazes, carved to confuse raiding colonial police and facilitate their safe
escape. The differences between the two worlds begs the audience to contemplate
what they would do if placed in a similar situation. The male protagonists’ choice
of grime over glitter highlights their sacrifice and celebrates their conversion to
114 Mark E. Caprio

patriotism; the films’ explanations of the circumstances of their collaboration adds

credibility to their conversion, suggesting that even the most grievous decisions,
both before and after conversion, deserve comprehensive consideration. They
complicate the decisions of real-life ‘traitors’: even policemen who murder inde­
pendence fighters potentially have a core sense of patriotism that, if tapped, can
overcome the ‘false historic interpretation’ that caused their initial traitorous acts
of betrayal.
These films, particularly 2009 Lost Memories, offer viewers the opportunity
to consider alternative scenarios to Korean history by reinterpreting the period of
Japanese colonial occupation and people’s reaction to it. Concerning the issue of
collaboration, one still relevant seven decades after liberation, an engaged viewer
might debate the choices made by the protagonists: did the factors that encouraged
their collaboration justify their decisions? They also, as Robert A. Rosenstone sug­
gests, provide a ‘kind of commentary on, and challenge to, traditional historical
discourse’.24 The film 2009 Lost Memories queries which history is ‘correct’ and
which is ‘false’. Was the decision to send Sakamoto back to 26 October 1909, the
day when Korea’s most famous patriot An Chung-gŭn gunned down Japan’s most
revered political figure Itō Hirobumi, the best choice? Might a different date have
saved Korea from even its three-plus decades of colonial rule? Moreover, was his
correction of history that ended Japanese colonial rule in 1945 the best alternative
for Korea’s twentieth century? Was the history it returned to Korea a better history
than the false history that Japan created that avoided the tragedies of the post-
liberation decades of destructive civil war, totalitarian governments, and national
division? Along with Modern Boy, the films thus challenge traditional value deci­
sions to encourage viewers to reflect on not only a past they can only imagine but
also the present, with which they have a more direct relationship.

Notes
1 History Daily assembled a collection of pictures depicting French female collabora­
tors and showing their treatment after liberation. Accessed May 6, 2021, https://histo­
rydaily.org/nazi-collaborator-girls-in-world-war-ii. See also “An Ugly Carnival,” The
Guardian (online version, June 5, 2009), accessed May 6, 2021, www.theguardian.com/
lifeandstyle/2009/jun/05/women-victims-d-day-landings-second-world-war.
2 Benjamin Frommer, National Cleansing: Retribution against Nazi Collaborators in
Postwar Czechoslovakia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 73. For trials
in other European states see the respective chapters in István Deák, Jan T. Gross, and
Tony Judt, eds., The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
3 I cover this process in Mark E. Caprio, “The Politics of Collaboration in Post-Liberation
Southern Korea, 1945–1950,” in In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire: Imperial Violence,
State Destruction, and the Reordering of Modern East Asia, edited by Barak Kushner
and Andrew Levidis (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2019), 22–49.
4 One of the first to appear was Chinilpa 99 in [99 Members of the Pro-Japanese Faction],
edited by the Research Center of the Anti-N Issue [Panminjok munje yŏn’gu so], 3 vols
(Seoul: Doseocheulgwan dolpyegae, [1993] 2002).
5 Ahn Byung-Ook, ed., Truth and Reconciliation: Activities of the Past Three Years
(Seoul: Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 2009), 22. The six categories were 1)
 Screening Collaboration 115

anti-Japanese movements, 2) overseas Koreans and their efforts to protect Korea’s sov­
ereignty, 3) massacres, 4) post-15 August 1945 efforts to end authoritarian regimes,
5) terrorist acts, and 6) human rights abuses, massacres, and suspicious deaths; and other
incidents.
6 For example, Ch’inilpa minjok haengwi jinsang kyumyeongwiwonheui [Committee for
Investigating Truth in Pro-Japanese Activities against the (Korean) Nation], edited by
Chinilpa nminjok haengwi kwanke saryochip [Materials Related to Anti-(Korean) Peo­
ple Activities by Pro-Japanese] (Seoul: Seongdaekyeong, 2007).
7 Both films were rather popular, with Modern Boy grossing $3.8 million and the joint
Japanese-Korean production 2009 Lost Memories grossing $12.05 million.
8 Darcy Paquet dates the liberation of Korean cinema from 1992, when a ‘new-found
freedom [allowed it] to explore themes and ideas that had been banned for decades’.
Darcy Paquet, “The Korean Film Industry: 1992 to Present,” in New Korean Cinema,
edited by Chi-Yun Shin and Julian Stringer (New York: New York University Press,
2005), 32–50.
9 For attempts to enact pro-Japanese collaborator legislation see Caprio, “The Politics of
Collaboration in Post-Liberation Southern Korea.” U.S. documents include the Military
Government’s view of the South Korean attempt to try collaborators in 1947 as well as
1948 see Han’guk Charyo Kaebarweon (comp), 11 (1995): 193–208, 519–28 and Cap­
rio (2019).
10 Jeong-Chul Kim considers this recent effort to punish collaborators in “On Forgive­
ness and Reconciliation: Korean ‘Collaborators’ of Japanese Colonialism,” in Routledge
Handbook of Memory and Reconciliation in East Asia, edited by Mikyoung Kim (Lon­
don: Routledge, 2016), 165–6.
11 I consider charges against Yun more broadly in Mark E. Caprio, “Loyal Patriot? Trai­
torous Collaborator? The Yun Ch’iho Diaries and the Question of National Loyalty,”
Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 7, no. 3 (2007) (e-journal).
12 Yun Ch’i-ho, Yun Ch’i-ho ilgi [Yun Ch’i-ho diary], vol. VII (March 2, 1919) (Seoul:
Kuksa pyeonchan wiweonhoe, 1973–1986).
13 Yun Ch’i-ho ilgi, vol. VIII (June 5, 1920).
14 Yun Ch’i-ho ilgi, vol. IX (October 5, 1931).
15 One Korean film that skilfully manipulates temporal dimensions is The Korean Penin­
sula (Hanbando, dir. Kang Usǒk, 2006), which tells the story of Japanese intervention
in Korean affairs in late Chosǒn, focusing on a treaty signed between the two gov­
ernments; King Kojong allegedly invalidated the document by imprinting it with an
improper royal seal.
16 Robert A. Rosenstone, History on Film; Film on History (London: Routledge, 2018), 15.
17 Rosenstone, History on Film, 7.
18 Quoted in Mike Chopra-Gant, Cinema and History: The Telling of Stories (London:
Wallflower, 2008), 20.
19 Yumi Moon, Popular Collaborators: The Ilchinhoe and the Japanese Colonization of
Korea, 1896–1910 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), 5.
20 Timothy Brook, Collaboration: Japanese Agents and Local Elites in Wartime China
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 9.
21 See Ch’inil panjok haengwi chinsang kyumyŏnguiwonhui, 12, 225–28 (Panminjok
munje yŏn’gu so, ed., Ch’inil p’a 99 in, 2, 103–08).
22 Apparently, Kim escaped execution by the authorities. The listing of his death in 1950
suggests that his luck ran out after the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea forces
advanced down the peninsula that year.
23 This point becomes critical towards the end of the film, as the Hiroshima-born wife and
child of Sakamoto’s Japanese partner, Saigō Shojirō, would never have been born had
history not been falsified.
24 Rosenstone, History on Film, 7.
116 Mark E. Caprio

References
Ahn Byung-Ook. ed. Truth and Reconciliation: Activities of the Past Three Years. Seoul:
Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 2009.
Brook, Timothy. Collaboration: Japanese Agents and Local Elites in Wartime China. Cam­
bridge: Harvard University Press, 2005.
Caprio, Mark E. “Loyal Patriot? Traitorous Collaborator? The Yun Ch’iho Diaries and the
Question of National Loyalty.” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 7, no. 3
(2007).
Caprio, Mark E. “The Politics of Collaboration in Post-Liberation Southern Korea, 1945–
1950.” In Reconstruction of East Asia, 1945–1965, edited by Barak Kushner and Andrew
Levidis, 22–49. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2019.
Ch’i-ho, Yun. Yun Ch’i-ho ilgi [Yun Ch’i-ho Diaries]. Seoul: Kuksa p’yǒnch’an wiwǒnhoe, 1986.
Ch’inil panminchok haengwi chinsang kyumyŏng wiwonhŭi [Committee for Activi­
ties Related to Anti-(Korean) Activities]. ed. Ch’inilpanminjok haengwi kwanke sary­
ochip [Materials Related to Anti-(Korean) People Activities by Pro-Japanese]. Seoul:
Sǒngdaekyǒng, 2007.
Chi-Yun, Shin, and Julian Stringer. eds. New Korean Cinema. New York: New York Uni­
versity Press, 2005.
Chopra-Gant, Mike. Cinema and History: The Telling of Stories. London: Wallflower, 2008.
Deák, István, Jan T. Gross, and Tony Judt. eds. The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World
War II and Its Aftermath. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Frommer, Benjamin. National Cleansing: Retribution against Nazi Collaborators in Post­
war Czechoslovakia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Han’guk Charyo Kaebarweon (comp), Mi Kungmuseong han’guk kwan’gue munseo/Inter­
nal Affairs of Korea, 1945–1949, vol. 11. Seoul: Arǔm Ch’ulp’ansa, 1995.
Moon, Yumi. Popular Collaborators: The Ilchinhoe and the Japanese Colonization of
Korea, 1896–1910. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013.
Panminjok munje yŏn’guso [Organization for Research on Traitors]. ed. Ch’inil p’a 99
in [99 Members of the Pro-Japanese Group]. 3 vols. Seoul: Tosŏch’ulgwan dolpyegae,
[1993] 2002.
Paquet, Darcy. “The Korean Film Industry: 1992 to Present.” In New Korean Cinema, edited
by Chi-Yun Shin and Julian Stringer. New York: New York University Press, 2005.
Rosenstone, Robert A. History on Film; Film on History. London: Routledge, 2018.
Part III

How to Remember the

Korean War, Its Origin
and Aftermath
8 Ghostly Imaginings and
Alternative Reckonings in
Reiterations of Dissent
Seunghei Clara Hong

Ghosts
Black crows slowly ascend into flight from an elevated angle. From afar, the camera
follows a single crow as it gracefully glides over the snow-capped crater of Halla
Mountain. As the cawing intensifies, a large flock of crows criss-crosses the screen.
In a wild, empty forest, they whirl about dizzily amid the barren branches and
mangled brambles. The grating cawing juxtaposes with the silent landscape and
creates a deathly eeriness. Suddenly, a low voice rips through the harsh sounds,
and the camera moves inward as if inviting viewers into this pallid and cluttered
landscape. Filmed with a handheld camera, the image shakes ever so slightly as an
unidentified male voice1 speaks of the Cheju 4.3 Incident (hereafter ‘Cheju 4.3’).2
His recollection of Cheju 4.3 as a feast for the crows is both terrifying and
poetic: ‘The crows were the only ecstatic ones. People were petrified in fear not
knowing when they would die. Crows danced crazily, and the blackened police
forces were puffed up like crows’.3 His story of beheadings, slaughter, and corpses
continues against a close-up sequence of nature: black lava rocks, deep viridian
leaves, golden reeds, budding wildflowers, and dark crevices. Just as his testimony
ends and is followed by two voices emphatically reciting poems about the grievous
dead of Cheju 4.3, the camera gradually zooms out and reveals gravestones behind
the golden reeds and a cave by the wildflowers.
Confusion, dissonance, and cacophony occur from the outset of Jane Jin Kai­
sen’s Reiterations of Dissent (2014).4 Viewers are pulled into this ghostly, haunt­
ing landscape without any knowledge of location, time, or narrator. Relegated to
a position of not knowing, viewers are forced to piece together the fragments of
images and voices presented on the screen. However, the images and voices further
deny resolution. A seemingly tranquil landscape reveals itself—in both image and
voice—as an unmarked mass grave, and voices speaking for the dead continuously
struggle to be heard against the incessant cawing of crows. Meaning is not neatly
presented but rather demanded. The effect is ghostly and unsettling.
In Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, sociologist
Avery Gordon theorizes ghostliness as the residue of an ‘unrememberable past’.5
Problematizing visibility as necessarily conditioned by power structures, she calls
for ‘putting life back in where only a bare trace was visible to those who bothered

DOI: 10.4324/9781003279013-11
120 Seunghei Clara Hong

to look’.6 To study ghosts, then, is to trace the palimpsests of history and revise
what we normally see, know, and understand of our present world. Gordon’s notion
of ghosts allows us to rethink those who suffered injustice and were rendered invis­
ible. Accordingly, ghosts suggest a political and ethical urgency; they act as an
avenue for ethical engagement with the present.
Framing Reiterations of Dissent as a ‘ghost story’, I argue that Kaisen stages
a ghostly imagining of and interruption into Cheju 4.3 through her postmemory
aesthetics.7 Kaisen traces fragments and incongruities and, in turn, leaves behind
fragments and incongruities for viewers to re-trace. She insists that viewers negoti­
ate between what is seen and unseen and make contact with what is painful, dif­
ficult, and unsettling. She challenges viewers to be at once surprised, imaginative,
and critical in order to understand historical knowledge as a demanding, process-
oriented, and partial endeavour. In doing so, Kaisen offers an alternative way of
seeing Cheju 4.3 that unsettles viewers and draws them to feel and recognize rather
than to ‘know’.

Imaginative Interruption
Reiterations of Dissent is composed of six narratives: ‘Ghosts’, ‘Jeju Airport Mas­
sacre’, ‘Lamentation of the Dead’, ‘The Politics of Naming’, ‘Retake: Mayday’,
and ‘Island of Endless Rebellion’. Originally presented as a five-channel video
installation in 2011, Kaisen edited the narratives into a single-channel film in
2014.8 In the multi-channel installation, the videos were looped and displayed on
independent monitors that were configured circularly (Figure 8.1). Because the
videos differ in duration and were unsynchronized, the images and sounds of the

Figure 8.1 ‘Reiterations of Dissent’, ArtSpectrum, Leeum Samsung Museum, 2016

Source: Photo by Hyunsoo Kim at Halo Studio. Courtesy of janejinkaisen.com
 Ghostly Imaginings and Alternative Reckonings 121

videos compete for attention. The crescent layout also makes the work dependent
on the viewer’s entry-point, position, and movement.9 Impossible to grasp in any
totality, the installation destabilizes linear conceptions of time and space and per­
forms the fragmented, conflicting, and layered nature of Cheju 4.3. It implicates
viewers in the process of meaning-production and prompts them to see how wit­
nessing is selective and subjective.
Notwithstanding its thrust as a multi-channel installation, Kaisen believed that
a single-channel film version would allow for easier and wider access.10 She thus
returned to the editing room to create what she calls an ‘experimental art film’.
Re-produced as a film, Reiterations of Dissent shows the six narratives one after
another, with title interstitials separating them. While played in order, the film does
not narrativize a sequential causality between the narratives. Rather, it simultane­
ously repeats, builds, deconstructs, juxtaposes, and challenges one narrative with
and against another. Although some effects are lost in translation, Reiterations of
Dissent acquires more layers as an experimental art film.
Kaisen abandons cinema-vérité realism for a studied, interpretive, often slow-
motioned, and highly expressionistic representation—almost always against a jar­
ring, hypnotic soundscape. In that sense, Reiterations of Dissent resembles what
Stella Bruzzi calls the ‘performative documentary’: in lieu of a seemingly unme­
diated and ‘objective’ rendering of reality, it incorporates performative gestures
to emphasize the very ‘impossibilities of authentic documentary representation’.11
The film shows how Kaisen operates under a clear sense that traumatic, compli­
cated pasts, like Cheju 4.3, cannot be transparently represented; they are subject
to mediation and construction by the filmmaker and to the gaps and fissures that
characterize any narrative of experience. As such, Reiterations of Dissent bears
strongly Kaisen’s imprints.
Kaisen, who was born in Cheju in 1980 and adopted to Denmark that same year,
discovered her grandfather’s memoir on Cheju 4.3 and learned first-hand about
the event from her family, neighbours, and activists in Cheju.12 It left an indelible
imprint, and she devoted herself to creating Reiterations of Dissent over numer­
ous years.13 Having worked with a varied community of transnational adoptee art­
ists, writers, filmmakers, and activists, Kaisen had been committed to confronting
dominant ‘official’ histories and to imagining alternatives within the fissures of
such seemingly totalizing narratives. Reiterations of Dissent was the opportunity
to further explore this imaginary potential between the gaps of inter- and transgen­
erational memory.

The Shape of Her Hand

‘Jeju Airport Massacre’ opens with an image of Yongduam and the Ramada Hotel.
After a fairly long ten-second take, the camera (as with the crows) pans west to
follow an airplane as it nears the landing strip of Cheju International Airport. Sev­
eral airplanes are seen arriving and leaving in the background while fork cranes
and bulldozers, bearing the logos of global corporations Volvo and Doosan, dig
into the soil in the foreground. The metallic and repetitive sound of drilling and
122 Seunghei Clara Hong

grazing form an unpleasant and irritable undercurrent throughout the narrative.

What seems at first glance to be a portrait of rampant global development in Cheju
Island today turns out to be about the excavation of a mass grave from Cheju 4.3
and a belated cremation and mourning ritual for the dead. Here, Kaisen vacillates
between mundane images of the landing strip and archival images of the excava­
tion in 2006 and the unfolding of the cremation ceremony in 2011. Kaisen reveals
the tourist and honeymoon destination Cheju, signified by airports, hotels, beach-
side resorts, and tourist sites, as built upon corpses. The opening sequence literally
uncovers what lies buried beneath.
Unlike the other narratives, which feature heavily contrasting images with
an off-screen voiceover, ‘Jeju Airport Massacre’ relies on synchronic real sound
and performs a vérité sense of capturing events as they happen. Movement plays
against a constant, static-like buzzing of mourners. Once in a while, their laments
pierce through the sharp metallic non-diegetic rat-a-tat of the fork cranes. The cam­
era is shaky and shot at an even angle so that tall people are cut from the frame. In
tight close-ups, the camera focuses on the facial expressions of the bereaved, which
are drawn so close as to lose focus. Combined with the crowd at the crematorium,
the effect is claustrophobic. At one point, a passing mourner briefly stares into the
camera and acknowledges the camera’s presence. Her steely expression is startling
and somehow seems to rebuke our viewing from afar. Then, to make this distance
known, the camera switches to medium and long shots so that the most frequent
scene is that of the mourners’ backs, each made indistinguishable by their black
hair and black funereal garb—and eerily reminiscent of the crows.
Pulling out to wide shots and observing the mourners as a collective, the camera
not only emphasizes Cheju 4.3 as a massacre but also invites viewers to reflect
upon the solemn 63-year delay of ritual, for the sheer violence of Cheju 4.3 wrested
the right to grieve and commemorate from the living. In After the Massacre: Com­
memoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai, Heonik Kwon brilliantly
details how mass ‘grievous deaths’ during the Vietnam War complicated the Con­
fucian order of mourning and offered a moral dilemma in terms of commemo­
ration.14 Beyond mass deaths, disorderly killings, and hidden bodies, Cheju 4.3
complicated mourning by transforming the dead from ‘grievous’ to ‘dangerous’.
Within a nation that took anti-communism as its founding principle and virulently
sought to contain its society from ‘impure elements’ (pulsun punja), even kinship
ties were pitted in a friend versus foe binary.15 Since the dead of Cheju 4.3 were
deemed to be ‘communists’, ‘insurgents’, and ‘reactionaries’ by the state, to mourn
them in public constituted a dangerous act. Regardless of how strongly the dead
may have been grieved in private, for the living to engage in the social act of ritual
was to risk becoming ‘impure’ and being punished accordingly. Inviting viewers
to the charnel house more than 60 years later, Kaisen transcends and transgresses
spaces of mourning and informs of the need to mourn properly.
Mourning continues in ‘Lamentation of the Dead’.16 Here, Kaisen returns to
the deserted woods from ‘Ghosts’ to show a shaman performing kut (shamanic
ritual) for the unmourned spirits of Cheju 4.3. The mangled roots and branches
and the rhythmic cawing of crows seem uncannily familiar. Two voices speak
 Ghostly Imaginings and Alternative Reckonings 123

in turns: while anthropologist Kim Seong-Nae (identified in the closing credits)

calmly explains the political role of shamanism in the ‘public secret’ that is Cheju
4.3, the shaman’s impassioned lament is made further incomprehensible by his
strong Cheju dialect (it is through the English subtitles that his lament is made
known). Kim Seong-Nae explains that the repressed memory of Cheju 4.3 bore
many ghosts, and the only people who can console these grieved ghosts and help
them into the netherworld are shamans. In a milieu where public mourning is dan­
gerous (and the order of standard ancestor worship (chesa) gets muddled), kut acts
as a powerful ‘public discourse’.17 The most crucial element of kut is offering space
and voice for the dead to publicly express their grief and grudges through the sha­
man’s speeches and songs.18
Much like the funeral and ritual scene in ‘Jeju Airport Massacre’, ‘Lamentation
of the Dead’ captures the site of a belated mourning ritual for the tragic dead. How­
ever, the shaman’s incomprehensible (and barely audible) language and the abrupt
change to slow-motion subvert our common notions of knowledge and time-space.
The shaman calls upon each wandering spirit, then enacts the consolation perfor­
mance. Kaisen slows the scene to establish a sense of ritual time arrested outside
of ordinary time and space. As the trance-inducing music, composed of shrilly
clanging gongs against boomingly sonorous drums, amplifies and accelerates, the
shaman’s dance is slowed even further. Amid the dissonance of slowly drawn-out
movements that do not match the fast beat of the percussions, Kaisen alternates
between medium shots of the shaman and tight close-up shots of his bell-shaking
hands, his light dancing feet, and his colourful gown from multiple angles. Lasting
three whole minutes, the performance scene is dizzying and breaks any sense of
narrativity.
Writing about pain, language, and subjectivity, Elaine Scarry claimed that pain
destroys language and leads to unshareability and isolation:

Intense pain is language-destroying: as the content of one’s world disinte­

grates, so the content of language disintegrates; as the self disintegrates, so
that which would express and project the self is robbed of its source and
subject. Word, self, and voice are lost.19

In the face of the shattering of language and inexpressibility, the ritual language
of kut allows for pain to be uttered and heard in public. Since spirit possession
(sindŭllim) occurs when the grievous dead (spirit) has something to say, the sha­
man’s dirge-like laments and rhythmic movements, even if incomprehensible and
unintelligible, constitute a belated testimony. Kut then allows for the dead to speak
and, in doing so, rescues them from isolation and re-situates them within the social.
Kaisen offers the possibility of an alternative mourning by imagining a reunion
with the ghosts in dissonance, fragments, and non-linear passing of time; and,
for this, the site of kut (kutp’an) to which Kaisen invites audiences is thoroughly
political.20
The penultimate video ‘Retake: Mayday’ opens with a black and white image
of a gloved hand pointing over a map of Cheju Island. This archival footage of
124 Seunghei Clara Hong

hanbok-clad civilians committing arson in a village is revealed to be a propaganda

film from 1948, titled Mayday on Chejudo. Made by the U.S. military to justify their
brutal actions on Cheju Island, the film frames ‘communist guerrillas’ as wreaking
havoc in Ora Village. In reality, rightist youth groups, along with the South Korean
police, attacked and set the village on fire. ‘Retake: Mayday’ intercuts between
archival footage from Mayday on Chejudo and images of Kim Tongman, a Cheju
documentary filmmaker who has dealt extensively with Mayday on Chejudo (and
with Cheju 4.3), manipulating the propaganda film. Through this cross-editing,
Kaisen simultaneously criticizes both the ‘truth’ of documentary footage and the
truth of American military involvement in Cheju 4.3.
Kim Tongman was interviewed in an editing studio with two monitors next
to him. As he talks, he repeatedly plays with Mayday on Chejudo; at certain
moments, he pauses the film to show how the ‘actors’ were staged and recorded
over multiple takes (noted by the clapperboard). Kaisen captures Kim Tong­
man’s hand in extreme close shot for 12 seconds, as it busily forwards, rewinds,
pauses, and commands the images. By breaking the temporal flow through
pausing, rewinding, and forwarding, the critical re-examination of the U.S.
propaganda film disrupts its linear logic made to conceal the real occurrence of
events. These hands could very well be Kaisen’s as she too ‘retakes’ Mayday on
Chejudo for Reiterations of Dissent and offers a meta-critique on the construct­
edness of documentary.
‘Retake: Mayday’ ends with Kim Tongman explicitly incriminating the U.S.
for Cheju 4.3: ‘The U.S. was directly involved in 4.3 and is responsible for the
tragedy that occurred. It should apologize not only to the people of Cheju, but also
to the Republic of Korea’.21 While several voices in Reiterations of Dissent reflect
upon the conflicted nature of Cheju 4.3 that consigned it to silenced history, it is
the filmmaker who indicts the U.S. by showing how visual documents can serve
as visual evidence and critical intervention in the present moment. By rewinding
and fast-forwarding ‘history’ through the footage, Kim Tongman shows how eas­
ily malleable what we understand and take as ‘objective truth’ can be. ‘Retake:
Mayday’ picks at the scabs of lies that have covered over the inaccessible originary
event and reveal truths as necessarily contingent.

Peace Island
Cheju 4.3 was the precursor to the Korean War. Bruce Cumings wrote, ‘Cheju is
a magnifying glass, a microscope on the politics of postwar Korea, for in no place
else were the issues so clear as on this windswept, haunted, magnificent island’.22
Numerous, complex factors are intertwined in the silenced history of Cheju 4.3,
but one of the primary reasons was the islanders’ opposition to the U.S.-sanctioned
and U.N.-sponsored election for a separate South Korean nation-state. When ten­
sions escalated between the civilians and the police, violent suppression tactics
were directed by the U.S. military and executed by the Korean police, even though
U.S. occupation had ostensibly ended by this time, and the U.S. had no mandate to
intervene in Korean internal affairs.
 Ghostly Imaginings and Alternative Reckonings 125

After South Korea was established in August 1948, President Syngman Rhee
deemed the frequent uprisings in Cheju a ‘crisis in his sovereignty’ and sought to
‘reinstate sovereign power’ by declaring emergency martial law (the first of many
such instances).23 Under the rhetoric of keeping democracy safe from communist
insurgents, he sanctioned and legalized violence in Cheju with the approval and
backing of the U.S. military. Such state violence continued well into the 1990s,
silencing memories so effectively that the prevailing narrative of Cheju 4.3 has
always been that of a ‘communist rebellion’. Accordingly, to critically engage
Cheju 4.3 is to engage in the dangerous act of questioning the very foundation of
the South Korean nation and the underlying motivations for continued U.S. mili­
tary presence in South Korea.
That the war has not officially ended (no peace treaty was signed and the nation
remains partitioned) makes Cheju 4.3 a troubling and controversial event to this
day. Adding to Kim Tongman’s censure of the U.S. military is Kaisen’s inquiry
into how the discourse of Cheju 4.3 is made and remade in South Korea. ‘The
Politics of Naming’ opens on the vast memorial altar at the Cheju 4.3 Peace Park
(Figure 8.2). Two blank columns bookend each side of the screen: these are memo­
rial stones left blank because the naming of the event is still being disputed. From
‘communist rebellion’ to ‘people’s uprising’, Cheju 4.3 is now primarily conceptu­
alized as a ‘civilian massacre’.24

Figure 8.2 The memorial altar at the Cheju 4.3 Peace Park in ‘The Politics of Naming’
Source: Courtesy of jeju43peace.or.kr
126 Seunghei Clara Hong

Thanks to the Herculean efforts made by the survivors, bereaved, and second
generation of Cheju 4.3, the event has managed to gain national attention. Since the
passing of the Cheju 4.3 Special Act in 2000, work to restore honour to the dead
and the bereaved has been abundant.25 However, once former President Roh Moo­
hyun officially acknowledged Cheju 4.3 as a ‘past wrongdoing by government
authorities’ and offered his ‘wholehearted apology’ as ‘the President in charge of
national affairs’ in 2003, the political focus and tenor of Cheju 4.3 has shifted—from
‘rebellion’ and ‘massacre’ to ‘reconciliation’ and ‘peace’.26 Standing in front of the
Memorial Altar at the Cheju 4.3 Peace Park, Roh Moo-hyun claimed Cheju 4.3 as
the ‘victimization of countless innocent people’ and ‘one of the biggest tragedies in
modern Korean history’ to have occurred through the ‘wrongdoing of state power’
and offered his ‘sincere apology and consolation’. He then addressed the people of
Cheju with the idea of peace:

From the ashes of the massacre, you rebuilt this beautiful and peaceful island
with your bare hands. We can accomplish true reconciliation by righting
past wrongs and learning from 4.3. It is now time for Cheju Island to stand
proudly as a symbol of human rights and as an island of peace.27

‘The Politics of Naming’ evolves around the annual Cheju 4.3 Joint Memorial
Service (hapttong ch’umoje) at the Cheju 4.3 Peace Park in 2011 (while Kaisen
lived in Cheju). In stark contrast to the intimacy of the shaman ritual in ‘Lamenta­
tions of the Dead’, Kaisen captures an immensely public and formal orchestration
of mourning in ‘The Politics of Naming’. On an overcast and drizzling day, a politi­
cian, aided by uniformed men, lays a towering chrysanthemum wreath at the altar
as people seated in an endless row of chairs solemnly look on. We are all audience
members of this spectacle. Shot afar from the spectator’s point of view, the nar­
rative shows how even the participants—the bereaved families—are made mere
audiences of this public commemoration.28
Here, Kaisen shifts abruptly to full-screen footage of Roh Moo-hyun’s apology
from 2003 to show how Cheju 4.3 is remade by the state. Korean Studies scholars
Cho Myŏng-ki and Chang Seyong problematized Roh Moo-hyun’s designation
of Cheju as an ‘island of peace’ in his official apology.29 They argued that the
designation as such tries to ‘incorporate’ the tragedy of Cheju 4.3 ‘into a neoliberal
capitalist production system’ and thereby ‘limit the scope of the civilian massa­
cre and further ignore the detriments of neoliberalism’. For Cho Myŏng-ki and
Chang Seyong, Roh Moo-hyun’s apology marks the turning point when the
nation-as-perpetrator becomes a nation-as-agent-and-sponsor-of-peace. Hence, it
is not coincidental that the 4.3 Peace Foundation was founded to oversee the Peace
Park after Roh Moo-hyun’s apology and speech in 2003.
Cho Myŏng-ki and Chang Seyong claimed that this emphasis on peace goes
hand in hand with the state’s legal designation of Cheju as a ‘Free International
City’ (kukje chayu tosi) in 2002 and the subsequent proclamation of Cheju Island
as a ‘Special Self-Governing Province’ (t’ŭkbbyŏl chach’ido) in 2006. Defining
Cheju as ‘the hub of East Asia’ wherein ‘companies are free to do business, and
 Ghostly Imaginings and Alternative Reckonings 127

people, goods, and capital can move freely’ exchanges ethical morality for eco­
nomic feasibility.30 The promise of a better economic future in ‘peaceful Cheju’ is
how the nation exploits and reconciles with Cheju 4.3. In this sense, the juxtapo­
sition of ‘Lamentation of the Dead’ and ‘The Politics of Naming’ shows how an
intimate familial and communal affair performed by survivors and the bereaved
has been replaced by a grandiose national affair orchestrated and manoeuvred by
the state.31
While it is tempting (and justified) to point fingers at the state, this narrative nev­
ertheless reduces the complexity of mourning Cheju 4.3. Repressed by the nation’s
anti-communist regimes for decades, Cheju 4.3 created what Heonik Kwon called
‘political ghosts’: ‘family-ancestral identities whose historical existence is felt in
intimate life but is traceless in public memory’.32 The significance of kut for Cheju
4.3 is twofold: it not only publicly re-calls these ghosts but also recovers their
status as ancestors.33 Since Roh Moo-hyun’s official apology, these ancestors have
acquired recognition—by the state—as ‘victims’ of state terror.34 With honour and
dignity restored to the dead and missing, public commemoration does not end with
the official ceremony. Heonik Kwon poignantly illustrated how ‘the voice of kin­
ship’ reverberates after the ceremony when families disperse to various corners of
the Peace Park to perform their ancestral rites—replete with food offerings in cer­
emonial utensils (chegi). Performing the intimacy of mourning in public is testa­
ment to how the islanders manoeuvre the dialectics between the state and the civil.
Kaisen’s Reiterations of Dissent warns of how an event and its memory can
become prescriptive when the nation becomes the main agent of remembering. The
nation determines the scope of the commemoration (as national) and the nature of
the memory (as a massacre of innocent civilians that must be reconciled and subli­
mated), and sutures any tensions that remain (like the guerrillas who rose in armed
resistance against the South Korean military and police). ‘The Politics of Naming’
teaches us that while it is important to remember, remembering in itself does not
guarantee political possibility; rather, we need to see how and why we remember,
for what purpose, and for whom. Kaisen continues to inquire how an unending
struggle for memory, always in the process of becoming, can occur in its dissent.
Thus, she closes ‘The Politics of Naming’ with a voice that contests this peacefully
sutured narrative:

4.3 is not finished. We should talk more about resistance. This is still taboo
because the main agents of resistance are claimed to be communists. . . . But,
regardless of ideology, 4.3 is about how a community resisted violence. . . .
4.3 is about how we must resist in the face of oppression.35

Unfinished Resistance
The title of the final narrative is telling: ‘Island of Endless Rebellion’ plays with
and against the state’s branding of Cheju as ‘Peace Island’. Kaisen revisits past
images and contrasts them with new images through repetitive cross-editing.
128 Seunghei Clara Hong

Previous shots of caves and bunkers (used by the Japanese military during the
colonial period) and jets and submarines that still cut through the skies and waters
of Korea are placed in a silent montage sequence that ends with three protests:
the Kangjŏng Village protests against the construction of the U.S. Naval Base and
remilitarization of Cheju Island in 2011, the mass democratization protests against
the authoritarian military regimes in the 1970s and 1980s, and the Cheju protests
calling for Cheju 4.3 Truth Clarification in the 1990s. Kaisen not only repeatedly
juxtaposes past and present but also interrupts the flow of narrative progress with
abrupt slow-motion. Hence, Kaisen extends dimensions of time and space and
reconfigures Cheju 4.3 within a longer history of foreign military aggression and
communal resistance.
The insistent imposition of the past onto the present disrupts the notion of cause
and effect as being reducible to a single event and makes the past a present concern.
Writing about the claims of memory, political and moral philosopher Ross Poole
asserted that the act of remembering puts ‘the present self at the site of the past
events’ and, as such, transmits accountability and morally implicates one in the
events recalled: ‘Memory puts the past on our current moral agenda’.36 Images in
‘Island of Endless Rebellion’ call the past into the present and reveal both violence
and resistance to be unfinished in Cheju. Moreover, as historians Alon Confino
and Peter Fritzsche claimed, ‘Memory [is] a symbolic representation of the past
embedded in social action; it is “a set of practices and interventions” ’.37 In its
roundabout repetition, ‘Island of Endless Rebellion’ displays a series of interven­
tions through which civilians bring multiple traumatic pasts into the present.
Repetition forms the main visual vocabulary of Reiterations of Dissent. Writing
about the performativity of gender, Judith Butler argued that what we take to be
‘essential’ (like gender) is often produced, regulated, and maintained as if ‘natural’
and ‘true’ through the repetition of socially sanctioned acts. In repetition, however,
there are bound to be slippages, and, for Butler, it is in these slippages that the very
fiction of ‘essence’ and ‘truth’ can be revealed and subverted.38 As seen in Kaisen’s
replication of images and reproduction of fragmented and non-linear structures,
repetition becomes a mode of politics in Reiterations of Dissent. The film simulta­
neously calls taken-for-granted truths about Cheju 4.3 into question and also sug­
gests the possibility that such repeated viewing and unsettling may reveal what was
unseen and invisible at first sight.
Yet, repetition of the final narrative fosters some confusion. Like the earlier
narratives, ‘Island of Endless Rebellion’ rejects a teleological linearity by repeat­
edly cross-referencing old and new images and interrupting the progression of time
with past and present events. However, this repetition appears, at times, didactic
and edifying, as if enacting rote learning. Since Kaisen’s mediation is felt and seen
strongly in the selection and cross-referencing of images, the narrative suspends
any illusion of documentary objectivity, but the privilege afforded to the space
and the persons of Cheju as truthful ends up representing resistance in a familiar
manner.39 This does not seem unrelated to Kaisen’s own liminal positionality
vis-à-vis Cheju and South Korea. For Kaisen, who is and is not a Cheju islander
or a Korean citizen, the ambivalence and insistence on ‘lest we forget’ reads like
 Ghostly Imaginings and Alternative Reckonings 129

a manifestation of her responsibility and indebtedness to the history of Cheju and

South Korea.
Perhaps for that ambivalence, ‘Island of Endless Rebellion’ feels somewhat
tacked on. However, this also testifies to the power of Kaisen’s marginality. Cheju
has long been peripheral to Korea. That Kaisen can question and highlight the
history of Cheju may be her privilege as a Cheju- and Korean-born transnational
adoptee, at once kin, citizen, and stranger, for inquiring into what lies between
the fissures of history—that which resists suturing and returns incessantly to
haunt—requires a certain (creative) flexibility that is not bound to and oppressed
by borders, categories, and definitions. Against a mainstream history intent on
progressing forward under determined notions of ‘freedom’ and ‘peace’, Kaisen
shows that histories of violence cannot be attuned with such closed narratives but
must be imagined through alternative temporalities and multiple fragments, voices,
genres, and images.
As Gordon argued, to feel, imagine, and see the ghost occurs only when one
tries to recognize erasure.40 Making visible what is invisible is not a pursuit of safe
recovery, but rather a dangerous and courageous act of entering wholly into the
power structure that erased or silenced it in the first place. Kaisen’s Reiterations of
Dissent makes us reconsider what we see, hear, believe, and know and reminds us
that recalling the past is never an easy task. We must continuously and repeatedly
look for shards of the past and try to re-collect and reassemble them as they flash
up in moments of danger.41 In bringing the difficulty of representing the past to the
fore—especially from a generational and geographical remove—Reiterations of
Dissent shows how an ethical remembering consists of enduring this ongoing pro­
cess so that reckonings with ongoing violence can take place; it is to pay attention
to the fragmentary dynamics of memory and remember the need to reconstruct and
re-present the past time and again in the now.

Notes
1 While the voice is unidentified on-screen, the closing credits show that these opening
words are uttered by novelist Hyun Ki-young, the first writer to bear witness and testify
to the Cheju 4.3 Incident in his novel Aunt Suni (Suni samch’on, 1978).
2 I follow the McCune-Reischauer system for the Romanization of Korean words and the
Korean convention of family name first. Exceptions are made for places and people with
commonly recognized English transliterations (e.g. Seoul, Syngman Rhee).
3 Jane Jin Kaisen, Reiterations of Dissent (Denmark: Statens Kundstrad, 2014).
4 While Reiterations of Dissent exists as both video installation and film, this chapter
focuses on the latter.
5 Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minne­
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 4.
6 Ibid., 22.
7 I draw this term from Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory as an inter- and
transgenerational transmission of ‘memory’. As an ‘inherited’ memory, postmemory
is always ‘mediated by imaginative investment, projection, and creation’ through pre­
formed ‘stories, images, and behaviors’ among which the ‘generation after’ grew up.
Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the
Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 5, 36.
130 Seunghei Clara Hong

8 ‘Reiterations of Dissent’ was first exhibited at the Århaus Art Building in Denmark as
part of a larger multi-media exhibition titled Dissident Translations. Here, Kaisen also
showcased ‘Island of Stone’, a single-video installation featuring islanders’ resistance
to the U.S. naval base construction in Kangjŏng, Cheju, and ‘Light and Shadow’, a tex­
tual installation of 22 framed photographs and prints from her grandfather’s memoir on
Cheju 4.3. Interview with Jane Jin Kaisen, Seoul, March 18, 2015. Since the interview,
Kaisen added two more narratives, ‘Nightfall’ and ‘Tides’, to complete Reiterations of
Dissent as an eight-channel video installation in 2016.
9 Interview with Jane Jin Kaisen.
10 In Korea, the six-channel video installation was exhibited at the Cheju 4.3 Peace Park in
April 2014, at Zandari Gallery, Seoul, in August 2014, and at Leeum Samsung Museum,
Seoul, in March 2016. As a film, Reiterations of Dissent was screened as the opening
film at the 14th Seoul International New Media Art Festival in August 2014 and as
one of the ‘Jeju 4.3 Is Now Our History’ exhibits commemorating the 70th anniver­
sary of Cheju 4.3 at the National Museum of Korean Contemporary History, Seoul, in
April 2018.
11 Stella Bruzzi, New Documentary (New York: Routledge, 2000), 153.
12 Activists here include individuals who have worked tirelessly towards truth, reconcili­
ation, and commemoration, including poets, writers, shamans, historians, and members
of the Jeju 4.3 Research Institute.
13 Interview with Jane Jin Kaisen.
14 Heonik Kwon, After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My
Lai (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006). According to Kwon,
the Vietnamese distinguish between a ‘good death’ that occurs ‘inside’ and a ‘bad death’
that occurs ‘outside’. Since the ‘grievous dead’ give birth to ‘political ghosts’, those
whose existence are felt in intimate life but erased in public memory, the Vietnamese
struggle to find alternative and creative ways to mourn and commemorate the grievous
dead and challenge the state’s official mourning of ‘heroes’.
15 Heonik Kwon, Korea’s War and Peace: An Intimate History (Seoul: UIC Shinhan Pub­
lic Lecture, November 23, 2018).
16 The title ‘Lamentation of the Dead’ borrows from the Cheju dialect ‘yŏnggye ullim’,
which refers to the words and stories told by the shaman on behalf of the spirit in
possession.
17 Jane Jin Kaisen, Reiterations of Dissent. I do not situate the chesa and kut as antitheti­
cal. Rather, I suggest that it is possible to consider how kut as a bodily act can open up a
possibility to console and heal those who were denied by other mourning or commemo­
rative acts, such as the chesa.
18 Kim Seong-Nae, “Shamanism in Cheju: Historical Discourse of Violence [Cheju musok:
p’ongryŏk’ŭi yŏkssajŏk tamron],” Religious Study [Chongkyo-sinak yŏn’gu] 4 (1991): 9–28.
19 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1985), 35.
20 While shamanism is crucial in recovering the ghostly status of Cheju 4.3 victims, it
can be problematic when aesthetic representations of violent pasts rely uncritically
on kut as a salve to tragedy, thereby dangerously essentializing tradition. As Michel
Foucault warned us, we need to be vigilant about the ways in which newly recovered
knowledge can be subsumed in yet another regime of truth. Michel Foucault, “Film
and Popular Memory,” Foucault Live, edited by Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Martin Jordin
(New York: Semiotext(e), 1989), 89–106; also “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Language,
Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, edited by Donald F.
Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 139–64.
21 Jane Jin Kaisen, Reiterations of Dissent.
22 Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War: The Roaring of the Cataract, 1947–
1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 251–2.
 Ghostly Imaginings and Alternative Reckonings 131

23 Su-kyoung Hwang, “South Korea, the United States, and Emergency Powers During the
Korean Conflict,” The Asia-Pacific Journal 12, no. 5 (2014): 1–21.
24 Jane Jin Kaisen, Reiterations of Dissent.
25 Work on Cheju 4.3 decelerated drastically during the conservative Lee Myung-bak
and Park Geun-hye administrations. Since Moon Jae-in was elected president in 2017,
efforts to right past wrongs have been revitalized on the national stage.
26 Cheju 4.3 Peace Park Brochure.
27 Ibid.
28 On his first presidential visit to the Cheju 4.3 Peace Park on 3 April 2018, Moon Jae-in
began his procession towards the Memorial Service Altar from the Tombstone Park for
the Missing (a mass cemetery dedicated to the missing dead at the side of the altar).
His doing so was significant in that it allowed him to cross paths and meet with the
bereaved and civilians. Signalling a marked change from previous administrations, the
commemoration also invited many bereaved family members and residents to partici­
pate on-stage.
29 Cho Myŏng-ki and Chang Seyong, ‘Cheju 4.3. sakkŏn kwa kukka ŭi rokŏlkiŏk p’osŏb
kwajŏng’ [Transference and Subsumption of Local Memory], Yŏksawa segye [History
and the World] 43 (2013): 205–35, 235.
30 Ibid., 225–6.
31 The ‘usurpation’ of Cheju 4.3 by the nation was made clearer when the ancestral tablets
belonging to the armed resistance fighters (mujangdae) were violently removed from
the site before the opening of the Cheju 4.3 Peace Park in 2008.
32 Heonik Kwon, “The Ghosts of War and the Ethics of Memory,” In Ordinary Ethics,
edited by Michael Lambek (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 400–13.
33 Seong-Nae Kim, “The Work of Memory: Ritual Laments of the Dead and Korea’s Cheju
Massacre,” In A Companion to the Anthropology of Religion, edited by Janice Boddy
and Michael Lambek (New York: Wiley, 2013), 223–38.
34 It is at once ironic and problematic that the very state that perpetrated the violence is
seen as the agent that can and should act to console, restore honour, and enact justice. As
‘victims’, the dead are always ‘innocent’; hence, those who dared to act and challenge
the state continue to remain outside the official state-sanctioned recognition of ‘victim’.
35 Jane Jin Kaisen, Reiterations of Dissent. We do not know the speaker, but he continues
to repeat how 4.3 was a ‘resistance’ not a ‘rebellion’ or an ‘insurgence’. He repeats the
phrase, ‘if suppressed, we resist’ (t’anabimyŏn hang’jaeng halsubakke ŏptta) and claims
that we need to speak of the ‘resistant spirit’ of Cheju 4.3.
36 Ross Poole, “Memory, History, and the Claims of the Past,” Memory Studies 1, no. 2
(2008): 149–66, 155.
37 Alon Confino and Peter Fritzsche, “Introduction: Noises of the Past,” in The Work of
Memory: New Directions in the Study of German Society and Culture, edited by A.
Confino and Peter Fritzsche (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 5.
38 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York:
Routledge, 1990).
39 It bears noting that this may be a culturally determined response. Faced with Cheju’s
remilitarization, the narrators of ‘Island of Endless Rebellion’ speak out with urgency.
That their voices are unyielding, that their acts are political, and that Kaisen captures
them with nuance are undebatable. What I suggest as ‘familiar’ has more to do with how
working through contentious pasts in South Korea often privileges the notion of truth.
40 Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters.
41 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and
Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books,
2007), 254–64.
132 Seunghei Clara Hong

References
Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations: Essays and
Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, 254–64. New York: Schocken
Books, 2007.
Bruzzi, Stella. New Documentary. New York: Routledge, 2000.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Rout-
ledge, 1990.
Cho, Myŏng-ki, and Chang Seyong. “Cheju 4.3. sakkŏn kwa kukka ŭi rokŏlkiŏk p’osŏb
kwajŏng [Transference and Subsumption of Local Memory].” Yŏksawa segye [History
and the World] 43 (2013): 205–35.
Confino, Alon, and Peter Fritzsche. “Introduction: Noises of the Past.” In The Work of Mem­
ory: New Directions in the Study of German Society and Culture, edited by A. Confino
and Peter Fritzshce, 1–24. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002.
Cumings, Bruce. The Origins of the Korean War: The Roaring of the Cataract, 1947–1950.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.
Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” In Language, Counter-Memory, Prac­
tice: Selected Essays and Interviews, edited by Donald F. Bouchard, 139–64. Ithaca: Cor­
nell University Press, 1977.
Foucault, Michel. “Film and Popular Memory.” In Foucault Live, edited by Sylvère
Lotringer, trans. Martin Jordin, 89–106. New York: Semiotext(e), 1989.
Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the
Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.
Hong, Seunghei Clara. Interview with Jane Jin Kaisen, Seoul, March 18, 2015.
Hwang, Su-kyoung. “South Korea, the United States, and Emergency Powers During the
Korean Conflict.” The Asia-Pacific Journal 12, no. 5 (2014): 1–21.
Kaisen, Jane Jin. Reiterations of Dissent. Denmark: Statens Kundstrad, 2014.
Kim, Seong-Nae. “Shamanism in Cheju: Historical Discourse of Violence [Cheju musok:
p’ongryŏk’ŭi yŏkssajŏk tamron].” Religious Study [Chongkyo-sinak yŏn’gu] 4 (1991): 9–28.
Kim, Seong-Nae. “The Work of Memory: Ritual Laments of the Dead and Korea’s Cheju
Massacre.” In A Companion to the Anthropology of Religion, edited by Janice Boddy and
Michael Lambek, 223–38. New York: Wiley, 2013.
Kwon, Heonik. After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My
Lai. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006.
Kwon, Heonik. “The Ghosts of War and the Ethics of Memory.” In Ordinary Ethics, edited
by Michael Lambek, 400–13. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010.
Kwon, Heonik. Korea’s War and Peace: An Intimate History. Seoul: UIC Shinhan Public
Lecture, 2018.
Poole, Ross. “Memory, History, and the Claims of the Past.” Memory Studies 1, no. 2 (2008):
149–66.
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1985.
9 Korean War Films
Generational Memory of North
Korean Soldiers, Partisans, Brothers,
and Women

Hyunseon Lee

Generational Memory and Korean War Films

The Korean War, actively fought from 1950 to 1953, is one of the most significant
events in the modern history of the Korean Peninsula. The Korean War has played
an important role in the history of Korean peninsula cinema. Among the films
produced in the post-war period, which were mostly related to the Korean War
anyway, there were a considerable number of war films. Their most visible traces
can be found in the 1950s and 1960s, and then again in the Korean New Wave
movement from the late 1980s. The latter remains the focus of many studies and
research interests to this day: young, talented, and ambitious directors saw the need
to address the Korean War and its aftermath, as it still casts a large shadow over
Korean society and the nation as a whole.
This chapter uses a selection of films—notably the early war films—to exam­
ine a current of Korean War cinema whose connections can be found in the early
partisan and war films and the films of the 1990s that have been exaggerated in
the blockbusters of the new millennium. What are the differences between the
re-enactments of the war in the late 1950s, 1960s, 1990s, and later years?
Focusing on the portrayal of gender and the transition from the performance
of living history to its melodramatic remembrance—in terms of Johannes von
Moltke, ‘from collective memory to cultural memory’1—this chapter will exam­
ine the characteristics and aesthetic devices of the selected films as well as the
changing and persisting ways of dealing with the Korean War and memory decades
later. This allows for a discussion of the cultural imagination of unspoken war in a
broader context, including the concepts of generational memory and postmemory.
Robert Burgoyne explores how the genre of war film reflects a changing
approach to history by different generations. He draws on Hermann Kappelhoff’s
‘formula for pathos’; using familiar audio-visual conventions, the war film is
designed to generate emotions that can be readily applied to larger messages about
nation and sacrifice. By framing the discourse of emotion within an elaborate appa­
ratus of authenticity, the war film defines the soldier’s face and body—the body
at risk—as the site of messages of national cohesion. By adapting to the soldier’s
expressive gestures, the sense of pathos and the meaning of national sacrifice can
be naturalized, communicated to the viewer as emotions, and experienced as forms

DOI: 10.4324/9781003279013-12
134 Hyunseon Lee

of affective identification—a way of creating a new culture of commemoration that

serves the political needs of the present.2
The memory of a generation crystallizes the historical narrative of a genera­
tion. It is striking that the representation of war in film has changed greatly over
time. In relation to the genre of the war film, there are certain elements that, when
considered together, constitute a code of representation associated with the war
film. The image and sound, the emotionality, and the choice of subject matter all
combine to create a clearly defined form to which most war films conform. Bur­
goyne particularly discusses the war film as ‘a flexible form, responsive to the
pressure of historical events and cultural needs—a genre that, like memory itself,
is rewritten and reshaped by changing perspectives of the present’.3 For example,
topics can be depicted in war films today that were unspeakable 30 years ago,
such as North Korean army, soldiers, partisans, and women, which will be a
focus of this chapter.
Of particular interest is the largely unique portrayal of the Korean War in main­
stream war films: the depiction of North Korean partisans (Ppalchisan) and soldiers
in early post-war films also draws attention to a forgotten and repressed element
of national history that remains largely unseen elsewhere. In South Korean war
films of the post-war generation of the 1990s, ideologically conflicted brothers
became cinematic emblems of the nation, as did GI bride–Western Princess [Yang­
gongju]—referring to a woman who prostituted herself to foreigners, particularly
sex workers for American soldiers. This period especially celebrated the cinematic
comeback of the ideologically opposed soldiers/brothers who had disappeared
from both history and cinema, while the women and the Yanggongju narrative still
remain largely invisible and unheard.
The analysis that follows refers to the cinematic performances of Piagol (P’iagol,
dir. Lee Kang-cheon, 1955) and other early war films (namely films by Kim Ki­
duk [Kim, Ki-dŏk], Lee Man-hee [Yi Manhŭi], Shin Sang-ok [Sin Sangok], and
Yu Hyun-mok [Yu Hyŏnmok], among others). Also included in the discussion are
The Taebaek Mountains (T’aebaek sanmaek, dir. Im Kwon-taek [Im Kwǒnt’aek],
1994) and Nambugun (Nambugun, dir. Jeong Ji-yeong [Chung Jiyǒng], 1990),
as well as more recent blockbusters such as Shiri (Swiri, 1999), Taegukgi: The
Brotherhood of War (T’aegŭkgi hwinallimyŏ, 2004), both directed by Kang Je-kyu
[Kang Che-kyu], J.S.A. (Joint Security Area/Kongdonggyŏngbiguyŏk cheiesŭei,
dir. Park Chan-wook [Pak Ch’anuk], 2000), Welcome to Dongmakgol (Welk’ŏm
t’u tongmakgol, dir. Park Kwang-hyun [Pak Kwang-hyŏn], 2005), and The Front
Line (Kojijŏn/Battle of Highlands, dir. Jang Hoon [Chang Hun], 2011).

Early Korean War Films

Post-War North Korean Partisans in Piagol (1955), Directed

by Lee Kang-cheon

One of the most remarkable factors of the Korean film industry is the fact that
many films were produced immediately after the Korean War and even during
 Korean War Films 135

the war, as the so-called Golden Age of Korean cinema began in the late 1950s
and continued until the Park Chung-hee [Pak Chŏnghŭi] regime (1961–79)
began to control the South Korean film industry and censor the films produced
with its Youshin policy from 1972. Under the influence of cultural politics in the
post-war period, most South Korean war films became anti-communist films,
as even the most talented filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly vet­
eran war filmmakers such as Shin Sang-ok and Lee Man-hee, could not escape
the censorship of the Youshin period, not to mention internal censorship by the
directors themselves.
In this context, the 1955 film Piagol, directed by Lee Kang-cheon (1921–93),
occupies an unique position among Korean War films of the period, as it was
not originally intended as an anti-communist film. Instead, it focuses on extreme
human conditions based on the hopeless situation of lost communist soldiers who
became partisans in Piagol. Piagol (gol meaning valley) is located in the Jiri Moun­
tain in the middle of the Taebaek Mountain Range, which became a favourite par­
tisan battlefield before and after the Korean War.4
Piagol presents partisans fleeing because the North Korean military is likely to
lose the war in 1953. In their despair over defeat, hunger, and dwindling hope for
survival, they fight not only South Korean army and police forces but also, more
importantly, each other to the death. No one can trust the other; they simply kill the
comrades who are not communist enough in their eyes, only for a small piece of
food or to escape their own punishment; rape and sexual assault of female partisans
become almost normal as they do not treat each other as friends or comrades, and
there is little opportunity to develop friendship or camaraderie.
There is no brotherhood in this film, biologically or socially, not even among
ideologically united partisans. Despite the absolute absence of brotherhood, this
film is significant in terms of both visual narrative development among Korean
War films of the period and the discontinuity of cinematic discourses on brother­
hood. The most striking features of this film are the depiction of female partisans,
which was completely uncommon in early Korean War films, and the portrayal
of communist partisans as human beings, albeit with their instinctive dark sides.
North Korean partisans were never a subject, let alone main characters or positive
heroes, in Korean film history until the 1990s. North Korean military personnel
were neither a sought-after subject nor fascinating characters, as we only see
them in the films of the 1990s, starting with Nambugun, The Taebaek Mountains,
and J.S.A.
So, the depiction of female partisans as sexual beings wearing feminine makeup
even on the frontline of the war drew the attention of audiences, as women are
rarely filmic objects in war films. So-ju, a female partisan whose beauty and charm
make her the object of desire for greedy male partisans, is unable to defend herself
as she eventually becomes a rape victim of her fellow communists. Ae-ran, on the
other hand, is a beautiful and strong partisan whose massive physical presence fills
the screen; she never makes herself a victim and is instead the main character, in
love with the intellectual protagonist Cheol-soo, with whom she flees to the South
Korean police in the end (Figure 9.1.1).
136 Hyunseon Lee

Figure 9.1.1 North Korean partisans in Piagol (1955)

Most surviving male partisans, who are communists, are portrayed as greedy
and corrupt, and there are no gentle men whose bravery and masculinity, both
mental and physical, would appeal to the audience. Thus, in the end, there is neither
a hero nor a positive character with whom the audience can identify. Cheol-soo
seems to be an exception, a conflicted figure, for he still suffers from his philo­
sophical thoughts, and his powers of observation at least do not allow him to attack
female partisans. A piece of bread, however, can confront him with the choice of
taking it just for himself or sharing it with his colleague, and he presents no strong,
ideally identifiable masculinity. Ultimately, he abandons his ideal of communism
when he tries to defect to South Korea.
The close-ups and the bodies of the greedy soldiers and their desire are remi­
niscent of the naturalistic attempt to capture ‘true’ human nature. It can be seen,
beyond the cinematic representation of war, as a filmic approach to the depths of
human psychology and the materiality of the human body. Female partisans and
their sexuality are also not a common theme in Korean War films, especially their
strong, attractive bodies.
The highlight of the film also lies in the landscapes as cinematic objects—often
without music, without battles, without acoustics. Produced in 1955, this film
shows surprisingly modern techniques, such as a slow but exciting score and well-
composed staging and visual images (consisting of long and dynamic shots), that
is, not old-fashioned cinematography.
At the end of the film, the gender stereotypes are reversed, as the intellectual
Cheol-soo and physically appealing ultra-feminine communist Ae-ran become
 Korean War Films 137

close, and after losing the war and their communist hopes, they are on the way to
surrender to South Korean enemy forces (Figure 9.1.2). The only survivor of this
dark drama is Ae-ran, the radical strong female partisan, who is going to defect
and convert to South Korean democracy, which is symbolized by the Taegukki,
the South Korean national flag. It is said that the shooting of this last scene was
forced by the censors. However, the film, with its humanizing portrayal of com­
munist partisans, may not have been anti-communist enough to be shown. Screen­
ing of this film was banned for several decades due to the Anti-Communism Act,
which was in effect from 1961 to 1980, and it was not shown publicly again until
the 1990s.
This unique original 1955 film does not belong to the conventional war
film genre, as it does not contain aesthetic conventions such as battle scenes
and war spectacles. The costumes are North Korean military uniforms, and the
language consists of Communist Party jargon and often North Korean dialectics.
Even though this film is set at the end of the Korean War and is about the military
and partisans, this dynamic drama about unfulfilled human longings could be
set in almost any other time and place. Nevertheless, I would count this film as
Korean War cinema rather than Korean War film, because I understand the term
Korean War cinema in a broader context than just ‘films about war’ and films
set in war. War film refers more to filmic genre conventions, while war cinema
(Kriegskino), which refers more to cinema (Kino, cinema hall, movie theatre), has
more to do with the performative aspect of film, film as performance that asks the
viewer to think and act.

Figure 9.1.2 To the South—female partisan Ae-ran and intellectual anti-hero Cheol-soo
Source: Courtesy: Korean Film Archive
138 Hyunseon Lee

The North Korean Soldiers and Brotherhood in 1960s Anti-Communist Films

by Kim Ki-duk and Lee Man-hee

The film Five Marines (Oinŭi haebyŏng, dir. Kim Ki-duk, 1961) is regarded as
the first Korean War film that showed its ability to appeal to audiences with the
potential for commercial success. The debut feature of Kim Ki-duk (1934–2017)
is set at the time of the Korean War, when the Chinese People’s Army is advanc­
ing into the southeast, and begins with typical battle scenes of the genre film: the
acoustics of battles—flying planes, bombardments, fighting soldiers, and a parade
of giant tanks.
The film indulges in the typical structures and ingredients of the war film, such
as exposition (setting, mise-en-scène) and narrative development: before a major
decisive battle takes place, the soldiers prepare for battle and explore the positions
of themselves and their opponents, and the size, hierarchies, and members of the
battalions become visible. In between and at night, the soldiers remember their
homes, their families, their partners and friends, and yet in the conflict-ridden,
tense atmosphere of the front, there are always heartfelt moments and, above all,
brotherhood among the soldiers. As cinematic ingredients, there is usually an unex­
pected incident or character and funny comrades (often led by a comedian; in this
film even two—the then-famous Park No-shik [Pak No-sik] and Kwak Kyu-seok
[Gwak Gyu-sŏk]).5
The movie runs towards decisive combat and battle as a spectacle before the
finale. After a rather long exposition of two-thirds of the time, in which the pla­
toon leader dies during his reconnaissance, its voluntary four marines and another
leader, Oh Deok-soo, are selected for a mission in enemy territory. They success­
fully carry out their mission, but four of the five are killed before they can return.
The sole survivor, Oh Deok-soo (played by Shin Young-kyun [Shin Yŏng’gyun],
a big star of the time), is the veteran officer and son of General Oh, the commander
of the entire force. Their relationship was almost broken from the son’s point of
view, as the son became the victim of domestic violence by his father and older
brother, the latter of whom also ended up as a soldier in the military. Before Oh
Deok-soo leaves for battle, a reconciliation between father and son takes place, and
his brother eventually turns out to be a stepbrother. His true family and brothers
still seem to be the platoon soldiers with whom he shared his life until their deaths.
While the five marines are portrayed as strong, good-looking, humorous, and
nice guys, culminating in Deok-soo’s masculinity, leadership, and humanity, the
enemy—Chinese or North Korean-‚ soldiers are present only briefly—contourless,
voiceless, and faceless shadows.
The 1960s was, on the one hand, the Golden Age of Korean cinema, when vari­
ous talented filmmakers produced remarkable films, during which time some con­
temporary filmmakers continued to make films that dealt with cultural patriotism
and national issues, and used ‘propaganda’ more subtly than before; however, it
was, on the other hand, the period in which the strictest regulations, controls, and
surveillance were enforced in the name of anti-communism, supposedly to protect
the country from Cold War enemies. The military Park Chung-hee regime came to
 Korean War Films 139

power through a coup d’état on May 16, 1961; the Ministry of Public Information
(MPI) was created on May 20, 1961, the National Film Production Center (NFPC)
on June 22, 1961, and the Motion Picture Law (MPL) on January 20, 1962.

[T]he MPI achieved near-total administrative control over production, exhi­

bition, import and export activities with the aim of converting the film indus­
try into a propaganda factory. The Ministry engaged in two types of overt
propaganda—a two-pronged weapon consisting of the direct propaganda
produced by the NFPC, composed of newsreels and short message films,
and the more oblique material produced by the private film industry such as
anticommunist and ideologically driven (‘enlightenment’) feature films, all
directed by the exigencies of the MPL.6

In this environment, Park’s regime enforced the legal suppression of cultural

life. The Anti-Communist Law was enacted on July 3, 1961, to regulate the con­
tent of anti-state activities related to activities of the communist line. After the
assassination of Park Chung-hee on October 26, 1979, the Anti-Communist Law
was incorporated into the National Security Law on December 31, 1980, and the
main contents of the law, which related to activities such as praise, encouragement,
meeting, communication, escape, infiltration, and convenience, were amended
when the Anti-Communist Law was repealed.
The film Seven Women Prisoners (7 In-ui Yŏp’oro, dir. Lee Man-hee, 1964),
released in 1965, is a prime example of the application of the Anti-Communist
Law. The film tells the story of seven prisoners, including a nurse. A North Korean
military officer stops a Chinese officer from raping a female prisoner captured by
the South Korean Army. Enraged by the attack, the North Korean officer kills the
Chinese officer, a member of the Chinese Communist Party, and rescues the pris­
oners, but is ultimately unable to return to North Korea, falling with the prisoners
into the the hands of the Free Rangers. The problem arose when the female prisoner
said to the North Korean officer: ‘You are a wonderful man’. The Public Security
Department of the Seoul District Prosecutors’ Office announced in December 1964
that the film praised the North Korean People’s Army while portraying the South
Korean military as helpless and impotent with sentimental nationalism. Also, the
depiction of the misery of the two Western Princesses was a problem as they were
abused by the US military, thereby promoting a trend against foreign powers and
encouraging the withdrawal of US forces. Consequently, director Lee Man-hee and
producer Lee Jong-soon were charged with violating Anti-Communist Law.
This case illustrates how arbitrarily this law was interpreted and applied. In
1964, at a time when anti-Japanese protests were loud in Seoul and public opinion
was deteriorating, Seven Women Prisoners was investigated for alleged violations
of the Anti-Communist Law. This was the first time that the content of the film was
questioned, and the director was even briefly arrested for violations of Article 4 (1)
of the Anti-Communist Law, including praise. Since films that violated the Anti-
Communism Law could be prosecuted, Seven Women Prisoners became a problem
in February 1965, shortly after the National Assembly passed the Vietnam Dispatch
140 Hyunseon Lee

Law. The film was seen as problematic because the rescue of the female prison­
ers by the North Korean military was portrayed so bravely and beautifully and so
‘shamelessly’ positively. After censorship, the film was cut more than 30 minutes,
and the final scenes of the film were not even shot by Lee Man-hee, according to
cinematographer Seo Jeong-min. As a result, the film was a commercial failure and
received negative reviews from critics. However, those who had seen the original
film before the censorship called it a masterpiece.7
Lee Man-hee (1931–75) served in the military from 1950 through 1955, includ­
ing fighting in the Korean War. He produced several war films, mostly anti-war
films; they belong to the productions of the first generation of war memory. His
films have often featured characters who struggle against the hardships imposed on
them by fate and overcome them through their own will. His war films present the
best of these characters, as do the films The Marines Who Never Returned (Toraoji
annŭn haebyŏng, 1963), Legend of Ssarigol (Ssarigol-ui Shinhwa, 1967), and The
Wild Flowers in the Battle Field (Deulgughwaneun pi-eossneunde, 1974).
The Marines Who Never Returned is set during the Korean War. After the suc­
cess of Operation Chromite in September 1950, the South Korean army has retaken
Seoul, but is forced to retreat when Chinese troops enter the war. The film follows
a platoon of South Korean marines forced to retreat. It opens with a battle against
North Korean army in the rubble of a street, and at the beginning of the film, as
mentioned earlier, an unexpected event and character appears—in this case Young­
hui, a little girl desperately trying to escape from the Chinese soldiers with her
mother, who is shot. The South Korean marines rescue the girl in time and immedi­
ately hide her from their higher-ranking commanders. At their camp, Young-hui is
ordered to continue hiding out of fear that the general will send her to an orphanage.
Young-hui’s presence makes the film fascinating in three ways. First, as the
platoon takes care of her, she becomes its ‘mascot’, and her existence turns the film
into a melodrama. A child on the battlefield and in the military is so unexpected
that even the strongest masculine men become a caring maternal collective, giving
this war film a feminine side, as this emotional excess is typically associated with
melodramas and women.
Second, another coincidence ensures that Young-hui Marines Choi Jeong-ik and
Koo are villagers, expressing the theme of separated brothers that becomes one of
the film’s central themes about the Korean War. On the battlefield, Koo discovers
his own sister among the dead villagers killed by the North Koreans. Young-hui
also enlightens Koo that his sister was killed by the brother of Choi, his friend and
comrade in the platoon.
The family division is evident here, as the Choi brothers are separated militarily
and ideologically. The brothers fight against each other in their battalion, regardless
of whether they join the North or South Korean army voluntarily or under duress.
In this film, too, there is no clear figure of a North Korean soldier. At best, their
contours can be discerned from a wide-angle or bird’s-eye view. However, it is
often clear here that the soldiers belong to the Chinese People’s Army because they
speak Chinese. The brothers, who joined the North Korean military as communists
from the South, cannot simply be called soldiers of the North, since they could
become partisans or volunteer soldiers. In the early South Korean war films, North
 Korean War Films 141

Korean soldiers and military are portrayed as anonymous, characterless, and even
evil. Their main function, however, despite their weak presence or even absence, is
clearly that of a disruptor and peace-disrupting enemy, an antipode.
Third, the soldiers show their humanistic sentiments, expressed primarily
through their care for the girl, but also through the surrogate mother role of the
platoon leader Kang Dae-shik, played by Jang Dong-hwi, a man who expresses his
gender fluidly, a man who shows maternal concern as he leads his men to impend­
ing death but also the requisite paternal severity as he issues orders. In the first half
of the film, the marines focus on entertainment, led by comedian Koo Bong-seo,
and take care of the girl in order to ease the burden of war. Towards the end of the
film, the marines leave Young-hui and move to the mountains, where they become
involved in a fierce battle against the Chinese volunteer army (Figure 9.2.2).
The Western Princesses are seen only briefly in this film, as the soldiers are
allowed to drink and socialize the night before the final battle, two days before
Christmas, although the ladies refuse to receive them because they work for United
Nations soldiers and American GIs. The presence of these GI brides supports the
South Korean war film as a ‘mixture of genres’, thus preserving the male preroga­
tives of the war film. Persuaded by the charmingly humorous coquetry of Koo Bong­
seo, who playfully uses the English word ‘sexy’, the prostitutes at the bar eventually
allow the marines access to their commodified bodies (Figures 9.2.1 and 9.2.3).
Although this scene can also be interpreted as a point of ‘cultural resistance’, as
the marines seek access to the bodies that are denied to them by the ‘colonial’Ameri­
can forces and to which they are ‘entitled’ as Korean men, this is still a masculine and
national conceit that requires women to subjugate their bodies for the nation’s men.8

Figure 9.2.1 Celebrating Yanggongju—Western Princesses, from The Marines Who Never
Returned (1963)
142 Hyunseon Lee

Figure 9.2.2 Brotherhood of Marines in battle

Figure 9.2.3 Erotic bodies of GI brides at war

Source: Courtesy: Korean Film Archive

In 1967 war film by Lee Man-hee, Legend of Ssarigol, the village life of
Ssarigol is full of tension as North Korean and South Korean soldiers come and go.
As the Korean War develops, so too does the power of the village. Second Lieuten­
ant Kim asks Kang, an old citizen of Ssarigol village to hide eight stranglers from
his unit, and then Kim leaves to follow his ranks. Pyo, an armed force official from
the North side, who used to be a farm servant of Ssarigol, enters the village with
 Korean War Films 143

armed forces and threatens the villagers, wanting them to hand over the hidden sol­
diers from the South side. The eight South Korean soldiers cannot but start a fight
with the North Korean soldiers. By the time Second Lieutenant Kim’s unit arrives
at the village to help them to defeat the enemy, Ssarigol has restored peace as usual.
This anti-war film shows a peaceful rural village caught up in the maelstrom of war
and destroyed, asking questions about the meaning of war and ideology. It is bril­
liantly shot and acted, they say, but also shows the limitations of anti-communist
films that pit the South Korean National Army against the North Korean People’s
Army in a schematic, simplistic good versus evil.
The Wild Flowers in the Battle Field was a large-scale, government-commissioned,
anti-communist war movie produced in 1973 and released the following year. The
film was promoted directly by the Korean Motion Picture Promotion Corporation on
a large budget and scale. However, Lee Man-hee’s ambition went beyond that of a
simple anti-communist propaganda movie. Despite strong pressure from the govern­
ment for him to make an anti-communist war film, Lee avoided such propaganda
messages in his version and instead envisioned more of an anti-war film. As a result,
the government and the Korean Motion Picture Promotion Corporation refused to
allow him to direct the film, and because Lee Man-hee was not allowed to finish, the
resulting released version of the film was far from what Lee had originally intended;
it was too chaotic, with too many protagonists, disjointed and sporadically scattered
dialogue, and a shaky narrative.
During the production process of The Wild Flowers in the Battle Field, Lee Man­
hee and then-chief of the Ministry of Culture Yoon Ju-young fought regarding the
film, according to Lee Suck-ki, a cinematographer at the time: ‘I even hear that Lee
threw a copy of the scenario at him. Then, eventually Lee gave up on the film. His
interests and what the government was asking him to do could not coexist’.9 Baek
Gyeol, a screenwriter, also recalls Lee Man-hee’s view of war in a similar way:

If someone asks what the war means to Lee Man-hee, the answer is this:
Violence, small or big, exists in the world. A gang member beats a random
pedestrian who is passing by; that is a form of violence. A dictator regime
oppresses the people; that is also a form of violence. Violence at its extreme
is the war. Whether justified or not, the war is in the end, a violence. That is
Lee Man-hee’s view.10

GI Brides, Brave Women, and Brothers in Dispute: Shin Sang-ok

and Yu Hyun-mok

War films predominantly focus on men, not women. Ralph Donald and Karen Mac­
Donald note that ‘most war films, especially the more intense combat films, focus
on men fighting their wars’; they draw on Susan Jeffords and Eric Leed’s 1989
assertion that ‘war, as a gendered activity, is one of the few remaining “male expe­
riences” in our society’.11 Nevertheless, the issue of gender in war is of particular
interest in relation to the idea of the gendered nation in Korean War films, as the
intertwining of masculinity and war played an important role in the formation of
nationalist sentiments; female power was also central to representation, in both the
144 Hyunseon Lee

partisan films and the war films featuring GI brides. Women do not play an insig­
nificant role in the early Korean War films: mother and fiancée also often appear
as female characters pining for their beloved soldiers, or vice versa; in some films,
women play crucial roles, even the part of protagonists. In this context, it is worth
noting David Scott Diffrient’s claim that the South Korean war films of the Golden
Age (1955–72) ‘de-gendered’ the genre by deliberately embracing the emotional
excess normally associated with melodramas and women’s films.12
As mentioned earlier, female North Korean soldiers and partisans play a central
role in Piagol and Seven Women Prisoners, even if they are exceptional cases that
were ultimately excluded from official screenings for four decades. Western Prin­
cesses are also often visible figures, as shown in the film The Marines Who Never
Returned, and Young-hui, as the mascot of the platoon in that film, also illustrates
the extent to which genderlessness, gender neutrality, and feminization exist in
Korean Golden Age war films. In several of Shin Sang-ok’s films from the 1950s,
Western Princesses become important objects of cinematic spectacle, although
they generally play only a marginal role in other examples of post-war films.
Shin Sang-ok (1926–2006) is the best-known filmmaker to have put women at
the centre of war films and also to have featured glamorous, erotic female bod­
ies. His early films of the 1950s—The Evil Night (Akja, 1952), A Flower in Hell
(Chiok’wa, 1958)—star Western Princesses, while equally glamorous women are
visually striking in the 1960s war films Red Muffler (Ppalgan Mahura, 1964) and
To the Last Day (I Saengmyŏng Tahadorok, 1960), which won the Silver Bear
and the Extraordinary Jury Prize (for child star Jon Young Sun, who played the
role of Young-hui in The Marines Who Never Returned) at the 12th Berlinale in
1962. The latter early war films focus on the struggles of a brave female pro­
tagonist during the war and her efforts to survive, while in The Evil Night and
A Flower in Hell the Western Princess embodies a seductively lascivious yet
fascinating femme fatale. All of the leading roles in the above films were played
by famed actress Choi Eun-hui [Ch’oe Ŭnhŭi, 1926–2018], Shin’s lifelong muse
and partner.
In films like A Flower in Hell, directed by Shin Sang-ok, and Aimless Bullet
(Obalt’an, dir. Yu Hyun-mok, 1961), one sees both the Western Princesses and the
brothers. The theme of the brothers drifting apart due to the war becomes more
apparent, even though they are not yet ideologically divided and do not fight on
the battlefield but instead differ greatly in their thinking, worldview, and outlook
on life; otherwise, they feel emotionally connected and are still strongly bonded.
Other elements, such as the children’s observations and childhood memories and
the (often marginalized) role of women, are also recurring themes. Especially in A
Flower in Hell, we see how strong the bond is between the brothers, even though
both Young-shik and Young-ho are in love with the same woman, Sonia, a GI pros­
titute and a femme fatale who will ruin the life of the older brother, Young-shik; he
eventually kills her, while Young-ho ends up refusing to love her for his brother’s
sake, choosing instead a village life with another decent GI bride who embodies
Confucian values and ideals. In Aimless Bullet, we also see brothers whose values
are very different. The younger brother becomes a bank robber, while the older
 Korean War Films 145

brother, a humble, frustrated office worker, remains weak, sceptical, and power­
less, has his long-sick mother escaped from the North lying on the bed, and even
loses his sick, pregnant wife; and his sister becomes a Western Princess, causing
him to lose his manhood completely. These films, however, are not exactly war
films in the sense of the genre, as they are not set on the battlefield but rather in
post-war Seoul, where the scars of war are everywhere, but especially in the GI
camp towns and disrupted family lives (Figure 9.4).
Red Muffler, also known as Red Scarf and Operation Air Raid-Red Muffler,
is an air war film set during the Korean War. This is one of the most famous
Korean War films produced by Shin’s film company, Shin Films, in collaboration
with the Republic of Korea Air Force (ROKAF). Its aerial shots, especially the
final showdown between the ROKAF’s F-86 Sabres and the Korean People’s Air
Force’s MiG-15s, became its signature, almost an emblem of Korean War film,
making it the first Korean-style blockbuster of the 1960s and thus the forerun­
ner of the boom in blockbuster South Korean war films in the new millennium13
(Figure 9.3.1).
The film is about an adventurous war experience and a love affair on the part
of Major Na Gwan-jung while the main character of the film is still Ji-seon, the
female beauty of the film. Na spends most of his time during the Korean War, 1952
to be exact, on the ground drinking with his co-pilots in a bar where the pretty
young women in western dress serve the Air Forces. These bar girls, however, do
not qualify as Western Princesses, as they work for the Korean Air Force and not
for American soldiers. Na, despite everything, is still considered one of the best,
coolest, and bravest pilots in the air because he can take out the enemy directly
and quickly without complications. The camera often shows Na in close ups in a
composed concentrated courageous format. His attitude of drinking and enjoying
the moment with his comrades stems from his witnessing and experiencing the
countless deaths of pilots in wartime.
The beautiful war refugee Ji-seon becomes the wife of a pilot during her escape,
but becomes a widow shortly after her marriage. To survive the difficult wartimes,
she has no choice but to become a bargirl. Na becomes a saviour who helps her earn
a living by preventing her from becoming a bargirl and almost falling in love with
her. However, since she is the widow of a close comrade, he does not dare love her
out of brotherly honour and instead sets her up with Bae Dae-bong, a brash pilot
who has just been transferred to his unit (Figure 9.3.3).
To prevent Ji-seon from losing another beloved man, Na risks everything to
rescue Bae, a downed pilot in danger. During the rescue operation and in the action
scenes, the South Korean pilots are portrayed as strong, good looking, and victori­
ous, and they complete their operation in a glorious manner. However, Na is killed
in the dogfight. After the unit returns to base, Na’s will is read, stating that his pos­
sessions, including the red muffler that all pilots wear, should be divided among
his comrades. Na’s mother comes to visit her son with a load of beer, only to find
that her son has been killed in action. She distributes the beer to his comrades.
When Na’s new girlfriend, the bar madame, learns of Na’s self-sacrificing death,
she presses his red scarf to her heart and weeps inconsolably.
146 Hyunseon Lee

Figure 9.3.1 Poster of Red Muffler

In Red Muffler, solidarity, friendship, comradeship, i.e., brotherhood between

soldiers, are more prominent than romance, and this male solidarity, fraternal
manhood, or brotherhood is portrayed as one of the virtues of Korean mascu­
linity. Accordingly, not only the physical dimension of masculinity, but also the
self-sacrificial attitude of the pilots toward the war, the country, and its men and
 Korean War Films 147

Figure 9.3.2 The dialogue between masculine men and feminine women in 1964 Korean
War film Red Muffler. From left Ji-seon, Na, Bae and Bar madame

Figure 9.3.3 Na sets up Ji-seon and Bae, even though he loves her, for the sake of the broth­
erhood in Red Muffler
Source: Courtesy: Korean Film Archive
148 Hyunseon Lee

Figure 9.4 Brothers in dispute and sister, a Western Princess, on the poster for Aimless Bul­
let (1961)
Source: Courtesy: Korean Film Archive

women are depicted in grandiose form, often in close ups, in this war film. Even
the women—Ji-seon and Na Gwan-jung’s mother and his lover—are committed to
a higher virtue than their own selfish pursuit of profit (Figure 9.3.2).
Ralph Donald and Karen MacDonald, in their 2014 book, have introduced a
dozen major roles that women play in films about war: ‘The Madonnas; women as
chattel; prostitutes, loose women, camp followers, and the unfaithful; the Hawk­
sian woman: GI Janes and female fighters; and nurses and doctors’.14 They also dis­
covered a considerable variety of characters that offer alternative visions for future
female characters in war and adventure films. Some of the roles discussed reflect
‘the restrictions on women dictated by the eras in which the films were made’.15
The women in Shin Sang-ok’s Korean War films deviate from this description,
as they usually embody the traditional values of Korean culture, shattered by war
and ideological division, yet overcome this fate with their virtue and strong will.
In To the Last Day, the main female character Hyekyung is seductive, beautiful,
desired, and fascinated by a younger man, but remains loyal to her injured hus­
band and family and adheres to Confucian gender norms, as does Ji-seon in The
Red Scarf. Shin’s portrayal of and focus on women in war films are exceptionally
unusual in the post-war period, as most Korean war films focus on military mascu­
linity and anti-communism. In A Flower in Hell, which is not a war film per se but
 Korean War Films 149

is shaped by the war and its aftermath, we see one of the most fascinating femme
fatales in Sonia, while most of the other female characters in this film are prosti­
tutes for American GIs, struggling to survive and make a living—so they suffer
from their situation, their fate, and adhere to the traditional Korean ideal of a ‘wise
mother, good wife’ [hyŏnmo yangch’ŏ].
In Shin Sang-ok’s war films, the brothers, whether actually related by blood or
just united in their troop, show their strong cohesion and brotherhood. While Na
Kwan-jung gives up his love for Ji-seon for his comrade in Red Muffler, Young­
shik in A Flower in Hell is not seduced by Sonia in the end but holds on to his love
for his older brother, who even kills Sonia for his younger brother.
The brothers in Yu Hyun-mok’s films are even more clearly at odds, as mentioned
earlier in the film Aimless Bullet (1961). In the later film Rainy Days (Jangma,
1979), Yu Hyun-mok (1925–2009), the canonized Korean master filmmaker, fur­
ther divides the uncles of a boy named Dong-man much more ‘ideologically’.
In the film Rainy Days, an adaptation of Yun Heung-gil’s novel of the same
title, Dong-man’s mother’s younger brother, a university student and intellectual
supporter of democracy, joins the South Korean army, while his father’s brother, an
uneducated but vital, fun-loving, and strong character who supports North Korean
communism, joins the partisan movement. The partisans eventually flee to the Jiri
Mountains while the North Korean army retreats to the North. The women in this
film are mostly committed to the ideal of the ‘wise mother, good wife’ and embody
this convention in their bodies and images, even in connection with the shamanistic
tradition, while the men typically, even radically, represent the myth of primitive
savage partisan masculinity versus the sensible cultured intellectual masculinity of
democratic South Korean civilization.

How to Remember the Brothers Who Went to the North

After decades of the South Korean film industry producing mainly anti-communist
war films, other war films were finally made in the early 1990s, such as Nambu­
gun (dir. Jeong Ji-yeong, 1990) and Taebaek Mountains (Taebaek sanmaek, dir. Im
Kwon-taek, 1994).
Initiating the movement of Korean New Wave, Im’s film no longer focuses on
anti-communist sentiments but rather on the unspoken, forgotten history of the
Korean War and deals with ideological combat immediately before the outbreak
of the war, while Jeong’s film depicts the reality of the partisans at the end of the
Korean War and is reminiscent of the 1955 film Piagol. These cinematic depictions
of the Korean War, its prehistory, and its aftermath, show characters and events that
had not been the focus of representation for decades, in not only film but also lit­
erature and public discourse. These New Realism films also sparked great debates
among leftist Korean students, intellectuals, and cultural movement activists in
South Korea. In the era of film movements and the reviving film industry, they
brought the film productions that allowed the Korean War to be reintroduced into
South Korean film discourses.
150 Hyunseon Lee

North Korean Partisans Come to the 1990s Screen

In 1990s Korean New Wave films, we see the return of marginalized, forgotten,
suppressed subaltern figures, to use Gayatri Spivak’s term, to the centre of filmic
performance. The depiction of North Korean partisans—in particular female
partisans—in the Jiri Mountains is the link between Nambugun (1990), Taebaek
Mountains (1994), and 1955’s film Piagol. The scale of Nambugun—meaning
North Korean Partisan in South Korea—is much bigger and the partisan troops are
systematically organised, and so the viewer find lots of South Korean intellectuals
who have gone over to the communists. These are figures with whom the audience
is encouraged to identify—they are identificatory figures.
Ppalchisan (Partisan) is here referred to as a ‘commie’, not synonymous with
communist or socialist, but rather hateful in the memory of the South Korean pub­
lic, as expressed by the police chief in the film Taebaek Mountains. In this film the
historical event is not the war itself but rather the 1948 Yeosu-Suncheon Rebel-
lion,16 which remains a crucial conflict in Korean history. After the declaration of
independence from the Japanese in 1945, the dispute and struggle between left and
right parties intensified. Two brothers of Yum family in the south-west province of
Bulkyo are ideologically deeply divided and fighting each other.
In October 1948, the elder intellectual brother, Yum Sang-jin, a leader of the
left, and other leftists dominate the village of Beolgyo and purge opposition forces
until they retreat to Mount Jogye to escape rebel attack. The right-wing party and
police, returning to the village, control the leftists and their families. The younger
brother, Sang-gu, a chief inspector of the Daedong Youth Party, misbehaves out of
anger against Yum Sang-jin. Rape, sexual assault, and violence against women are
commonplace. Policeman Sang-gu almost regularly rapes the wife of Communist
Kang Dong-jin in the presence of their son, and the suicide of the raped woman
seems to be only an episodic beginning of the continuing tragedies that follow the
Korean War and the armistice.
In Korean film history of the 1990s, partisan films (Ppalchisan Yonghwa)
enjoyed great popularity. Some of the most successful screenplays for parti­
san films are based on novels: the multi-volume novels Jirisan (1972–8) by Lee
Byung-joo and Taebaek Mountains (Taebaek Sanmaek, 1983–2002) by Cho Jung­
rae were published as serialized novels. The film Nambugun is also based on the
autobiographical memoirs of Lee Tae [Yi T’ae], who was a war reporter at the
time. His book Nambugun (North Korean Partisan in South Korea, 1988) became
a sensational publication and was especially successful among students and leftist
movements.
The most visible change in the Korean War films of the 1990s can be seen in the
increased presence and humanization of North Korean soldiers and partisans. GI
brides also return to the cinematic stage: while Western Princesses were marginal­
ized in early Korean War films, they take centre stage more in the 1990s in films
such as Address Unknown (Suchwiin bulmyeong, dir. Kim Ki-duk, 2000), Spring
in My Hometown (Arŭmdaun sijŏl, dir. Lee Kwang-mo, 1998), and others. In these
films, a recurring mode of memory is a boy’s recollection of a woman—whether
 Korean War Films 151

mother or sister—who was raped by the American soldier and made into an GI
bride in order to survive.
In Silver Stallion (Ŭnmanŭn oji annŭnda, dir. Jang Kil-su, 1991), a son watches
his raped mother sell her body to American soldiers, while all the beautiful women
of the village became GI brides. Silver Stallion, an adaptation of a 1990 novel by
An Chŏnghyo, is a film about his mother and the other women who were forced
to become GI brides during the Korean War. What Crashes, Has Wings (Chula­
ghaneun geos-eun nalgaega issda, dir. Jang Kil-su, 1990), a film adaptation of the
1988 novel of the same title by Lee Moon-yul [Yi Munyŏl, b. 1948], features a
provocatively threatening woman as the protagonist Yoon-joo, played by Kang
Soo-yeon. She is not necessarily a prostitute by default. Her sister is a Western
Princess, whom the reader learns about only through a typical Yanggongchu nar­
rative; she has fulfilled her American dream of marrying an American soldier and
going to America. This former Western Princess invites her sister Yoon-joo, who
is studying at an elite university and has an intense, passionate relationship with a
Korean law student, to come to America. Their love story ends in a fatal tragedy,
as she cannot give up her dream of going to America, where she will associate with
American men. Since she has had experiences with them and thus also become a
kind of Western Princess, as Koreans—even in the film Aimless Bullet—say, she
can no longer be happy with a Korean man.17
The narrative of the Western Princess—Yanggongchu narrative—already pro­
cessed in Aimless Bullet, becomes a painful reminder of the past when, in the
1998 film Spring in My Hometown, directed by Lee Kwang-mo (b. 1961), the son
watches with a friend in a shed as his own mother offers her body to an American
soldier, even as compensation for his lost laundry. While the boy left the village
forever, his friend’s pregnant sister is still waiting for the return of her fiancé, an
American soldier who had enabled their father’s job in the GI camp, so also their
prosperous family life.
Similarly, in the 2000 film Address Unknown, directed by Kim Ki-duk (1960–
2020), a GI bride, the mother of the Korean mixed-race boy Chang-guk, is still
waiting for the return of a ‘black’ American soldier, her boy’s father, while Eunok,
a school girl, sells her body to a ‘white’ soldier to undergo eye surgery but even­
tually returns that eye to be with the village boy Jihum—a new kind of Western
Princess. In this film, the war is still raging in post-war Korea, as the village near
Camp Town is still full of soldiers who long for the village women. There are three
abandoned teenagers who embody the scars of the Korean War: Chang-guk, Jihum,
and Eunok. A notable character is the mixed-race black boy Chang-guk, whose job
is to kill dogs, and who even beats his GI bride mother, who is now the girlfriend
of the cruel dog meat dealer. In comparison, Jihum appears almost normal and, as
the film’s identification figure, ‘observes’ events in the village, including the sex
scene between his beloved girl Eunok and the ‘white’ soldier. These young people
hanging around the villages, observing what was happening, and carrying painful
scars and memories, can be classified as generation 1.5, not quite the post-memory
generation, because they were still too young to participate in the war as soldiers,
but old enough to observe and remember what happened during the war.
152 Hyunseon Lee

The Postmemory Generation’s Cinematic War in the New Millennium

In terms of generational memory, the concept of postmemory is a kind of second-

generation trauma memory, the way children of survivors of collective trauma
‘remember’ the traumatic events through the stories and images they grew up
with—these are ‘so powerful, so monumental, as to constitute memories in their
own right’.18 Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up
dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are
displaced by the stories of the previous generation, who are shaped by traumatic
events that can neither be fully understood nor recreated.
Under the military dictatorship of the 1960s and 1970s, the first war generation
of veterans was extremely reluctant to disclose their traumatic experiences related
to the Korean War, as they could cause them psychological distress as well as
social disadvantages. Even today, apart from official government documents, there
is simply not enough personal testimony and information about the Korean War.
The difficulty in encouraging civilians to report missing family members from the
Korean War to help gather information is also due in part to the long history of
suspicion that missing persons are ideologically dubious, as well as the stigmatiza­
tion of families whose members were once accused of being communists under the
military dictatorship.
Thus, compared to the older generation that witnessed the war and grew up
in an anti-communist atmosphere, the younger generation knows less about the
historical background of the Korean War and the ideological division; they also
see the relations between South and North Korea less antagonistically. Given
the significant differences of opinion on ideological issues between the different
generations, it is not surprising that artists of the postmemory generation feel a
high degree of confusion, bewilderment, and even guilt—especially when con­
fronted with the details of their older generation’s tragic stories. In her recent
work, Dong-Yeon Koh explores how Korean media art and culture has had a
broader cultural impact on the revival of historical awareness of the Korean War
and collective memory in South Korea. Koh points out that the autobiographical
documentaries about the Korean War made in the last two decades show not only
the tragic lives of ordinary Korean War victims and their families in an ideologi­
cally divided South Korean society, but also how the memory of the war has not
been discussed in Korean families for the last five or six decades. The artworks
are an ‘invitation to the audience’s active engagement and independent interpre­
tation without overwhelming the audience with shocking and violent images’19
and an interaction between the past and the present, between the forgotten histori­
cal tragedy and the contemporary Korean landscape and population. They also
provide an opportunity to imagine an ‘alternative history’ of ideological conflicts
in Korea, rather than formulating specific critical and political positions. Koh
draws attention to the silence of the older generation, which can be illustrative of
historical, social, and ideological circumstances of the Korean peninsula, on the
one hand, and different attitudes toward the Korean War and Cold War among
generations, on the other.20
 Korean War Films 153

Earlier Korean War films in the 1950s and 1960s were produced by first-generation
filmmakers who experienced the Korean War, either by being involved in the war
(such as Shin Sang-ok and Yu Hyun-mok), participating in the war (e.g., Lee Man­
hee), or observing it during their childhood (Im Kwon-taek). The new generation
of filmmakers in the 1990s had not lived through the war but had heard about
it from their first-generation parents and grandparents. The younger postmemory
generation of filmmakers produced numerous genre films about the Korean War
around 2000 and into the twenty-first century, including Shiri (1999), J.S.A. (2000),
Taegukgi: The Brotherhood of War (2004), Welcome to Dongmakgol (2005),
71: Into the Fire (P’ohwa sokŭro, dir. Lee Jae-han, 2010), The Front Line (2011),
The Battle of Jangsari (Changsari: it’yŏjin yŏngungdŭl, dir. Kwak Kyung-taek and
Kim Tae-hoon, 2019), and others.21
Commercially successful Korean War films around 2000 to a certain extent
adopt genre and style conventions from abroad, especially Hollywood. The box
office success of Shiri established a formula for the ‘Korean-style blockbuster’
and reinforced this trend by highlighting the breaks from earlier South Korean war
films.22 Two different types of films about the Korean War are considered the big­
gest commercial successes: Welcome to Dongmakgol focuses on the unity between
the North and South Korean people, while Operation Chromite highlights the con­
frontation between the North and South.23
Korean War films appeal to the audience’s emotions by focusing on the Con­
fucian ideal of family. The theme of the ideologically divided family, especially
divided brothers, is used almost as a synonym for a divided nation, as a kind of
South Korean trauma that needs to be overcome and healed. Together with ‘Yang­
gongju as an allegory of the nation’,24 ‘divided brothers’ has become a ‘cinematic
emblem of modern Korean history’25 (Figure 9.5).
Shiri is considered the first successful South Korean blockbuster. Here, broth­
erhood is expressed through the strong bond between two South Korean secret
agents, Yu Jung-won and his partner Lee Jang-gil. Yu is engaged to a North Korean
spy disguised as Myung-hyun—Lee Bang-hee, who eventually falls in love with
Yu even though she is an agent under the supervision of Park Mu-young, a North
Korean terrorist leader who has feelings for Bang-hee. On the one hand, the frater­
nization, the bond between the two South Korean agents, is so strong that the two
can even risk their lives; on the other hand, Shiri is seen as the equally strong par­
ties of the North and South Korean secret agents. It emphasizes that the agents, ter­
rorists, and soldiers from the North can also be as ordinary people like ‘us’, South
Koreans, even attractive. The women of the North can be even more powerful, as
they not only follow the gender norm of ‘wise mother and good wife’, but can be
combative women, strong-willed and beautiful lovers, spies, and terrorists at the
same time. They may be more militant and thus portrayed as the other—different
from South Korean women.
The role of the ‘other’ woman and femininity in the film J.S.A. (also known as
Joint Security Area or Gongdonggyeongbiguyeok JSA) is played by the mixed-
race Korean-European Sophie, a Swiss woman who acts as a neutral mediator in
the dispute between the North and South Korean militaries. J.S.A. is based on the
154 Hyunseon Lee

Figure 9.5 The Statue of Brothers at the War Memorial of Korea in Yongsan, Seoul
Source: Photo provided by Eunha Kwack

novel DMZ (1996) by Park Sang-yeon and features North and South Korean sol­
diers at the DMZ border. The story is literally a tragedy. The apparent enemies on
the border discover their brotherhood by crossing the border between South and
North Korea at night and playing cards until it becomes a matter of national secu­
rity. The state of war between North and South Korea is here projected onto the
relationship between four men who metaphorically and literally cross the border,
some of whom even pay the ultimate price. The film shows its strongest side espe­
cially in the portraits of the North Korean soldiers on the screen: human, humorous,
friendly, and attractive. The return of the North Korean soldiers is reinforced on
 Korean War Films 155

the screen. The fraternization between North and South Korean soldiers is not only
clearly visible in the border area of the DMZ, but also fascinating, finally eliminat­
ing the alienation and exclusion of North Korean soldiers, partisans, and guerrillas.
Produced by Myeong Films on a budget of $3 million, the film attracted nearly
half a million viewers in its first week in Seoul alone. Within 15 days of its release,
the film reached 1 million viewers, and by early 2001, J.S.A. was the highest-
grossing film in Korean film history. Other blockbusters followed later, such
as Friend (Ch’in’gu, dir. Kwak Kyoung-taek, 2001), which attracted 8 million
viewers nationwide, followed by Silmido (2003) by Kang Woo-suk, which dealt
with the history of the North and South Korean conflict and ushered in the era of
Ch’ŏnman Younghwa, i.e., the era of films that attract more than 10 million view­
ers to theatres.
Kang Je-kyu (b. 1962) also produced the Asia–Pacific war film My Way (Mai­
wei, 2011), in which the fraternization between Korean and Japanese soldiers,
however, does not work well. Kang most forcefully portrays the theme of brother­
hood in the 2004 box office hit Korean War film Taegukgi: The Brotherhood of
War. The film contains a form of post-memoir as it is structured as a narrative of
Jin-seok, the younger brother, telling his story to his granddaughter and sharing his
memories of the war in which he, an intelligent student at Seoul National Univer­
sity, is forced into military service during the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950,
while the older, uneducated shoemaker brother Jin-tae joins the South Korean, later
North Korean, army to save and protect his younger brother, a family treasure.
It also shows that the film is a place of commemoration—a memorial, as it is
framed by riveting archival footage of the excavation of bones, skeletons, and bul­
lets, as well as forensic examinations, as a young Korean man conducts archaeo­
logical investigations to locate the remains of dead soldiers on a newly discovered
Korean War battlefield, and Jin-seok, after more than 50 years of waiting, finally
finds the remains of his older brother, Jin-tae, who went to the North. The celebra­
tion of Korean masculinity and the humanization of North Korean soldiers, par­
tisans, and communists can also be found in other blockbusters, and the imagery
of Korean War blockbusters is almost transnational and transcultural, just as the
physical struggles of war and masculinity as spectacle has become almost universal
in global war films and Hollywood blockbusters.
While mainstream blockbusters have been produced primarily by male directors,
there are also autobiographical documentaries related to the Korean War made by
female directors of the postmemory generation, such as the autobiographical docu­
mentaries of Yang Yonghi. Whereas commercial films about the Korean War and
its victims reveal images of women passively accommodating the sexual desires of
violent men that were prevalent in post-war Korean society, Yang’s documentaries
address the silence of their parents’ generation and the different generational atti­
tudes toward the Korean War. They also invert the hierarchy established between
images of violent Korean masculinity and images of female victims in post-war
Korean cinema, challenging the hierarchical relationship between personal memory
and official narratives and presenting a discourse of counter-memory—‘memory
that challenges the interests at stake in collective memory’.26
156 Hyunseon Lee

Yang Yonghi’s autobiographical documentaries, such as Dear Pyongyang

(2005), Sona, the Other Myself (Itoshi no sona, 2009), and Our Homeland (Kazoku
no kuni, 2012), which deals with her family life in Osaka and Pyongyang, explore
her father’s past, silence, and memories of sending her brothers to Pyongyang, the
so-called socialist paradise in North Korea, beginning in the 1970s as part of the
repatriation project. In her recent autobiographical documentary, Soup and Ideol­
ogy (2021), Yang now learns more about how her family history, diaspora, and
even her current life are largely shaped by the memories of her parents, who expe­
rienced Jeju 4.3, an outpost of the Korean War, as a boy and girl—the mother still
traumatized. The film features her mother, Kang Jeong-hi, who escaped to Japan,
after the Jeju 4.3 Uprising in 1948.27

Conclusion
South Korean war cinema of the 1990s and the new millennium refers to early war
films rather than to the history itself. The re-enactment of the Korean War was an
important theme in South Korean war films of the early post-war period; however,
they tend to portray certain entertaining genre elements and war film narratives that
go beyond the late 20th century. Early Korean War films follow genre conventions
with various cinematic traditions, whether the realistic pursuit of depicting North
Korean partisans in 1955’s Piagol or the melodramatic Korean War films of the
1960s with their typical battle scenes and narrative developments, such as come­
dic features, for the purpose of an entertaining genre aesthetic that includes femi­
ninity with caring soldiers, children, and women, especially Western Princesses,
while North Korean soldiers remain invisible according to anti-communist laws
and ideology.
Significant aesthetic devices include the establishment of divided brotherhood
as a symbol of the divided nation in modern Korean history, and the Yangkongchu
narrative, revived after decades of agony in the Korean New Wave film movement
of the late 1980s. On the one hand, South Korean war films of the 1990s celebrate
the cinematic comeback of the notion of ideologically opposed brothers. On the
other hand, the portrayal of communist partisan figures and women à la American
GI brides draws attention to a forgotten and repressed element of national history
that remains largely unseen elsewhere, allowing for an inter- or transgenerational
remembrance of the unspoken war.
A generation’s memory, built up from events and emotions viewed from a par­
ticular perspective in space and time, crystallizes the historical narrative of a gen­
eration. This is true of Korean War film, as the representation of war in film has
changed greatly over time: the first generation foregrounded the figures of North
Korean partisans, soldiers, women, and GI brides, often as protagonists at the cen­
tre of cinematic spectacle, while they disappeared in the 1960s, 1970s, and mid­
1980s. These marginalized figures would return to the screen in the late 1980s in
the New Realism and Korean New Wave movements.
 Korean War Films 157

The narratives of these films, mostly produced by male filmmakers, are often
based on the trauma of national division embodied in fratricide, and especially the
mainstream Korean War films around the year 2000. While viewers enjoy the spec­
tacle, they should remember that North Koreans are equally human beings, that
they killed and were killed by each other in the Korean War, and that their families
have been through things they couldn’t remember or didn’t want to remember for
many decades. These compelling tragic elements are now coming to the screen and
could be described as commemoration of the war by the postmemory generation
and cinematic effects of historicizing national trauma.
Ideologically divided brothers began to occupy Korean cinema from the early
Korean War films and became a cinematic emblem of national history. Family
values uniquely occupy a place of central importance in Korean War cinema. With
the post-memory generation of filmmakers, we can observe the shifts from the split
brothers to united brotherhood. They also put the characters, who used to be mostly
on the margins, at the centre of the portrayal, such as the subaltern figures of North
Korean partisans and soldiers, lost invisible brothers, and women fighters. The
shift from the representation of living history to the cinematic performance of war
memory takes place particularly in the modus of generational memory, resulting in
a rewriting of Korean history that is largely unknown due to what happened during
the war and particularly to women.
Donald and McDonald finish their book with an assertion that

Women in war films come in several varieties, but through the years, they
still all share one common identity: They are the ‘other’ to whom men com­
pare themselves and whom they draw distinctions with, fought for, or pursue
for both legitimate and illegitimate intentions.28

As for women in Korean War films, even filmmakers of the post-memory genera­
tion still treat women as ‘the other’ rather than as ‘normal’ Korean women. The
Yanggongchu narrative reappears but does not dominate the Korean War films of
the new millennium; instead, fighting North Korean women, partisans, and soldiers
appear; and a very different woman’s existence is shown in the film Welcome to
Dongmakgol, as she is indeed a crazy, insane girl who still unites North and South
Korean soldiers, and in the film J.S.A., Sophie is from Switzerland.
Ultimately, this chapter offers an analysis of the potential of war films to com­
memorate historical sacrifice, act as historical archives of events, and rethink the
contribution of the epic genre in relation to ideologies within a nation. The analy­
sis also reveals the freedom of postmemory generation filmmakers to ‘represent’
the tragedy of their ancestors in more active and liberal ways, as they no longer
shy away from addressing taboo subjects such as North Korean soldiers, partisans,
and GI brides. However, the divided brothers with their quarrels, solidarity, and
brotherhood continue to be portrayed in a melodramatic, male-centred way that
attracts millions of viewers not only in Korea but also around the world. The war
drama depicts the connection between nation and family, national division, and
158 Hyunseon Lee

ideological split between family members and villagers, which are popular themes
in Korean literature and Korean War films. Putting the subaltern characters and
ideologically divided brothers, forgotten for decades, at the centre of cinematic
representation is taken up and intensified by the blockbusters from the late 1990s
and culminates in the war films of the new millennium.

Notes
1 Johannes von Moltke, “Sympathy for the Devil: Cinema, History, and the Politics of
Emotion,” Der Untergang? Nazis, Culture, and Cinema: New German Critique 102
(2007), 17–43. Durham: Duke University Press, accessed December 20, 2022, www.
jstor.org/stable/i27669204.
2 Robert Burgoyne, “Generational Memory and Affect in Letters from Iwo Jima,” in A
Companion to the Historical Film, edited by Robert A. Rosenstone and Constantin Par­
vulescu (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).
3 Ibid., 349.
4 The Taebaek Mountains are a mountain range stretching across North and South Korea.
They form the main ridge of the Korean peninsula. The mountain range has a total
length of over 500 kilometres and an average height of about 1000 meters.
5 Park No-shik starred in another war film at the time, Beat Back (Gyeogtoe, dir. Lee
Kang-cheon, 1956), and another comedian, Koo Bong-seo, in The Marines Who Never
Returned (1963) directed by Lee Man-hee; see more below.
6 Brian Yecies and Ae-Gyung Shim, “Power of the Korean Film Producer: Park Chung
Hee’s Forgotten Film Cartel of the 1960s Golden Decade and its Legacy,” The Asia-
Pacific Journal 10, no. 3 (December 24, 2012), accessed October 4, 2022, https://apjjf.
org/2012/10/52/Brian-Yecies/3875/article.html.
7 Korean Film Archives, “Director Lee Man-hee: His Life and Movies,” Google Arts &
Culture, accessed October 1, 2022, https://artsandculture.google.com/story/director-lee­
man-hee-his-life-and-movies-korean-film-archive/1AUxA8dEGhoA8A?hl=en.
8 Koreanfilm.org, 1960–1969, Short Reviews, The Marines Who Never Returns (1963),
accessed December 14, 2022, www.koreanfilm.org/kfilm60s.html#marines.
9 Korean Film Archive, “Director Lee Man-hee: His Life and Movies,” accessed
October 1, 2022, https://artsandculture.google.com/story/director-lee-man-hee-his-life­
and-movies-korean-film-archive/1AUxA8dEGhoA8A?hl=en.
10 Ibid.
11 Ralph Donald and Karen MacDonald, Women in War Films. From Helpless Heroines to
G.I. Jane (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2014), 1.
12 David Scott Differient, “Han’guk Heroism: Cinematic Spectacle and the Postwar Cul­
tural Politics of Red Muffler,” in South Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre,
and National Cinema, edited by Nancy Abelmann and Kathleen McHugh (Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 2005), 162.
13 Its remake was produced as the aviation action film R2B: Return to Base (Alt’upi:
Rit’ŏnt’u Peisŭ, dir. Kim Dong-won, 2012).
14 Ralph Donald and Karen MacDonald, Women in War Films, 242.
15 Ibid., 243.
16 The so-called Yeo-Sun Rebellion took place from October to November 1948 in Yeosu,
Suncheon, and various surrounding areas in South Jeolla Province. The rebellion was
led by 2,000 leftist soldiers stationed in the area, and they opposed the Syngman Rhee
regime and its way of dealing with the Jeju 4.3 Uprising.
17 Hyunseon Lee, “Broken Silence: The Taboo of Korean Prostitutes During American
Occupation and Its Depiction in the Korean Films of the 1990s,” KultuRRevolution.
Zeitschrift für angewandte Diskurstheorie 47 (2004): 68–71, accessed December 11,
 Korean War Films 159

2022, https://sas-space.sas.ac.uk/2287/. Hyunseon Lee, “Schweigen der Subalternen:

GI-Bräute in Literatur und Filmen von Korea,” in Metamorphosen der Madame Butter­
fly. Interkulturelle Liebschaften zwischen Literatur, Oper und Film, 331–46. Heidelberg:
University Press Winter, 2020.
18 Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the
Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 5.
19 Dong-Yeon Koh, The Korean War and Postmemory Generation: Contemporary Korean
Art and Films (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2021), 45.
20 Ibid., 17–9.
21 There are several commercially successful films dealing with national division, the US
Army, and North Korean soldiers in the new millennium, such as Host (Koemul, dir.
Bong Jun-ho, 2006), Welcome to Dongmakgol (2005), Flu (Kamgi, dir. Kim Sung-su,
2013), Operation Chromite (Inch’ŏnsangnyukchakchŏn, dir. Lee Jae-han, 2016), Steel
Rain (Kangch’ŏlbi, dir. Yang Woo-suk, 2017), and Ashfall (Paektusan, dir. Lee Hae-jun
and Kim Byung-seo, 2019), among others. For a further examination of these films see
Chapter 10 in this volume.
22 Hyunseon Lee, “The South Korean Blockbuster and a Divided Nation,” International
Journal of Korean History 21, no. 1 (2016): 259–64, accessed December 11, 2022,
https://ijkh.khistory.org/upload/pdf/ijkh-21-1-259.pdf.
23 Mun-won Lee, “10nyŏn’gan 9p’yŏn . . . 6·25yŏnghwa holtae pannŭn 2kaji iyunŭn [9
Films over 10 Years . . . Two Reasons Why Korean War Movies Are Received Poorly],”
Chosun Ilbo, May 19, 2021.
24 Hyunseon Lee, “Broken Silence”; Hyun Sook Kim, “Yanggongju as an Allegory of the
Nation: Images of Working-Class Women in Popular and Radical Texts,” in Danger­
ous Women. Gender and Korean Nationalism, edited by Elaine H. Kim and Chungmoo
Choi, 175–202 (New York; London: Routledge, 1998).
25 Hyunseon Lee, “The South Korean Blockbuster and a Divided Nation.”
26 Chris Weedon and Glenn Jordan, “Collective Memory: Theory and Politics,” Social
Semiotics 22, no. 2 (2012): 143–53. DOI: 10.1080/10350330.2012.664969, 150.
27 Hyunseon Lee, “A Minority among Minorities: Yang Yong-hi’s Zainichi Film Tran­
scending Japanese and Korean Culture,” in Japan Beyond Its Borders: Transnational
Approaches to Film and Media, edited by Marcos Centeno and Nori Morita, 249–69
(Tokyo: Seibunsha, 2020). Hyunseoon Lee, “Jeju 4.3—The Postmemory Aesthetics of
Memorial Images in Memorialising the “Ground Zero”. Narrating Sites of Mass Crime
through the Camera Lens, edited by Sánchez-Biosca and Marcos Centeno-Martin
(Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023/forthcoming).
28 Ralph Donald and Karen MacDonald, Women in War Films, 243.

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National Cinema. Edited by Nancy Abelmann and Kathleen McHugh, 151–84. Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 2005.
Donald, Ralph, and Karen MacDonald. Women in War Films. From Helpless Heroines to
G.I. Jane. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2014.
Eberwein, Robert. Armed Forces: Masculinity and Sexuality in the American War Film.
New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007.
160 Hyunseon Lee

Kim, Hyun Sook. “Yanggongju as an Allegory of the Nation: Images of Working-Class

Women in Popular and Radical Texts.” In Dangerous Women. Gender and Korean
Nationalism. Edited by Elaine H. Kim and Chungmoo Choi, 175–202. New York, Lon­
don: Routledge, 1998.
Kim, Kyung Hyun. “Is This How the War Is Remembered?: Deceptive Sex and the
Re-Masculinized Nation in the Taebaek Mountains.” In Im Kwon-Taek. The Making of
a Korean National Cinema. Edited by David James and Kyung Hyun Kim, 197–222.
Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002.
Koh, Dong-Yeon. The Korean War and Postmemory Generation: Contemporary Korean
Arts and Films. Oxfordshire: Routledge Publishing, 2021.
Lee, Hyunseon. “Broken Silence: The Taboo of Korean Prostitutes During American Occu­
pation and Its Depiction in the Korean Films of the 1990s.” KultuRRevolution. Zeitschrift
für angewandte Diskurstheorie 47 (2004): 68–71. Accessed December 11, 2022. https://
sas-space.sas.ac.uk/2287/.
Lee, Hyunseon. “The South Korean Blockbuster and a Divided Nation.” International Jour­
nal of Korean History 21, no. 1 (2016): 259–64. Accessed December 11, 2022. https://
ijkh.khistory.org/upload/pdf/ijkh-21-1-259.pdf.
Lee, Hyunseon. “A Minority among Minorities: Yang Yong-hi’s Zainichi Film Transcending
Japanese and Korean Culture.” In Japan beyond Its Borders: Transnational Approaches
to Film and Media. Edited by Marcos Centeno and Nori Morita, 249–69. Tokyo: Seibun­
sha, 2020a.
Lee, Hyunseon. “Schweigen der Subalternen: GI-Bräute in Literatur und Filmen von
Korea.” In Metamorphosen der Madame Butterfly. Interkulturelle Liebschaften zwischen
Literatur, Oper und Film, 331–46. Heidelberg: University Press Winter, 2020b.
Von Moltke, Johannes. “Sympathy for the Devil: Cinema, History, and the Politics of Emo­
tion.” In Der Untergang? Nazis, Culture, and Cinema: New German Critique, vol. 102,
17–43. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Accessed December 20, 2022. www.jstor.
org/stable/i27669204.
Weedon, Chris, and Glenn Jordan. “Collective Memory: Theory and Politics.” Social Semi­
otics, 22, no. 2 (2012): 143–53. DOI: 10.1080/10350330.2012.664969.
Yecies, Brian, and Ae-Gyung Shim. “Power of the Korean Film Producer: Park Chung Hee’s
Forgotten Film Cartel of the 1960s Golden Decade and Its Legacy.” The Asia-Pacific
Journal 10, no. 52/3 (2012). Accessed October 4, 2022. https://apjjf.org/2012/10/52/
Brian-Yecies/3875/article.html.

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Culture. Accessed October 1, 2022. https://artsandculture.google.com/story/director­
lee-man-hee-his-life-and-movies-korean-film-archive/1AUxA8dEGhoA8A?hl=en.
Koreanfilm.org. “1960–1969. Short Reviews. The Marines Who Never Returns.” 1963.
Accessed December 14, 2022. www.koreanfilm.org/kfilm60s.html#marines.
10 Between Protector and Oppressor
Representation of the United States
as a Geopolitical Entity in Korean
Blockbusters

Chonghyun Choi

Introduction
The United States has always played a critical role in South Korean politics, from
its formative influence through the United States Army Military Government in
Korea between 1945 and 1948, to its current efforts to denuclearize the Korean
peninsula. Accordingly, US influence on South Korea, especially its political and
military aspect as embodied in the Korea–US alliance, has long been a controver­
sial topic. International political events in Northeast Asia, especially those involv­
ing North Korea, often spark heated debates about whether the US presence in the
region serves the interests of South Korea, as well as those about the type of rela­
tionship that South Korea should pursue with the United States. Positions in these
debates run the gamut from extreme anti-Americanism that views the United States
as a neo-colonial oppressor of the Korean people to outright pro-Americanism that
views the United States as South Korea’s protector, without whom the country’s
survival would not be viable. The debates may seem dormant at times, but they
resurface time and again and capture national attention when current events serve
as sufficient catalysts. For example, when Donald Trump visited Seoul as the US
President in November 2017, both the anti- and pro-American camps staged pro­
tests in downtown Seoul, portraying the United States (and President Trump as
its embodiment) respectively as the source of the threat to peace in the Korean
peninsula and South Korea’s ultimate guardian against potential North Korean
aggression.1
Not surprisingly, the United States as a geopolitical entity has been featured in
various Korean films thus far, and its representation has been shaped and at times
has shaped the broader political debate regarding the United States and its influ­
ence. A well-known example would be accusations of anti-Americanism directed
toward Bong Joon-ho for including the dumping of formaldehyde into the Han
River by US military personnel in the plot of The Host (Koemul, dir. Bong Joon­
ho, 2006). This depiction was based on a real-life scandal in 2000, in which the top
civilian official in charge of running the morgue at the US military base in Seoul
at the time ordered his subordinates to dump formaldehyde mixtures into the Han
River.2 Bong was quickly criticized by the political right, who claimed that he
was using his movie to disseminate anti-American propaganda.3 Though less well

DOI: 10.4324/9781003279013-13
162 Chonghyun Choi

known than the brouhaha over The Host, similar controversies arose for many other
movies as well throughout the early part of the twenty-first century.
These very movies and the political debates that they stem from and also helped
to invigorate form the main topic of the current chapter. More specifically, this
chapter traces the representation of the United States as a geopolitical entity in six
Korean blockbuster movies: Welcome to Dongmakgol (Welk’ŏm t’u tongmakkol,
dir. Park Kwang-hyun, 2005), The Host (2006), Flu (Kamgi, dir. Kim Sung-su,
2013), Operation Chromite (Inch’ŏnsangnyukchakchŏn, dir. Lee Jae-han, 2016),
Steel Rain (Kangch’ŏlbi, dir. Yang Woo-suk, 2017), and Ashfall (Paektusan, dir.
Lee Hae-jun and Kim Byung-seo, 2019). In doing so, the chapter also discusses
the political criticisms against and defenses of these movies that have been put for­
ward. While some suggest that there is an anti-American bias in the Korean movie
industry, I argue that this claim is only half-right. On the one hand, it is true that
the United States has generally been painted negatively in Korean blockbusters. On
the other hand, it is hard to find evidence that the negative portrayal of the United
States reflects a deep-seated resentment against the country or an intent to propa­
gate anti-Americanism. Instead, the unfavorable depiction of the United States is
more likely due to the desire to make the movies more commercially successful.
This is because the nature of the subject matter in many of these movies—crisis in
the Korean peninsula arising from non-human threats—happens to be conducive
to scenarios where introducing the United States as the ultimate antagonist easily
adds more drama and suspense without the story becoming outlandish.
I limit my analysis to blockbuster movies for two reasons.4 First, war and other
crises generally form the main plot in blockbusters, and it is these exigencies that
have the potential to highlight the political presence of the United States in the
Korean peninsula and Northeast Asia and how its choices can critically shape
the unfolding of events. Second, analyzing blockbuster movies also fills a lacuna in
the literature, as existing works have generally focused on the representation of the
US military stationed in Korea or US citizens more broadly in mostly non-blockbuster
movies.5 In these works, the analysis largely centers on the relationships between
the US military and the Korean civilian population or the cultural representation of
the United States through the individuals featured. Moreover, little attention, if any,
has been paid to the societal debates or controversies surrounding the movies that
are examined. In contrast, this chapter focuses squarely on the representation of the
country as a geopolitical entity and the political influence that the country wields in
crisis situations, both real and fictional. In doing so, it also discusses the debates that
these movies have either given rise or contributed to.

United States During the Korean War: Welcome to Dongmakgol

and Operation Chromite
While there have been numerous Korean films on the Korean War—Taegukgi: The
Brotherhood of War (T’aegŭkki hwinallimyŏ, dir. Kang Je-gyu, 2004), 71: Into
the Fire (P’ohwa sokŭro, dir. Lee Jae-han, 2010), and The Battle of Jangsari
(Changsari: it’yŏjin yŏngungdŭl, dir. Kwak Kyung-taek and Kim Tae-hoon, 2019), to
 Between Protector and Oppressor 163

name just a few produced in the twenty-first century—two movies stand out among
them in assigning a significant role to the United States in the plot: Welcome to
Dongmakgol and Operation Chromite.6 Interestingly, neither movie received
enthusiastic support for its depiction of the United States, but each managed to
attract criticism, albeit from different sides of the political spectrum.
Welcome to Dongmakgol is set in a secluded village in the mountains in the
midst of the Korean War (1950–53). The villagers apparently have not interacted
with the outside world in a long time, as they have no idea that a war is ravaging
the peninsula and are unaware of modern technology. The main story begins when
three North Korean soldiers, who just escaped ambush by South Korean troops,
find their way to Dongmakgol, where they encounter two South Korean deserters
who also arrived in the village by chance. Their standoff leads to the accidental
explosion of the village storehouse, blowing up the stockpile of grain for the com­
ing winter. Feeling guilty about the destruction they have caused, the two sides
come to a truce and agree to work together and with the villagers to restore the
stockpile. Gradually, they build a bond between themselves, and their affection for
Dongmakgol and its simple way of life also deepens.
The United States enters the plot through the presence of Navy pilot Captain
Neil Smith, who arrived in Dongmakgol before the Korean soldiers, after his
plane crashed into the mountains. After being found and brought back to health
by the villagers, he desperately waits for a rescue team to come and recover him.
Although he initially feels dejected, he joins the Korean soldiers in the daily field
harvest. In the process, he too gradually warms up to the villagers as well as the
Korean soldiers.
Things take a dramatic turn when the United Nations forces led by the United
States (also referred to as Allied forces) move forward with the rescue mission for
Captain Smith. Wrongly believing that Captain Smith has been taken hostage by
North Korean troops, the Allied commander plans to bomb the enemy base after
recovering Smith, when in reality that base is Dongmakgol. In the midst of a festive
harvest feast, and unfortunately while Smith is temporarily away, Allied paratroop­
ers storm the village and round up the villagers and the Korean soldiers, who are by
now dressed in clothes given to them by the villagers. The Allied rescue team sus­
pects that the villagers are communist sympathizers colluding with North Korean
troops and threatens to kill them one by one until they reveal the whereabouts of
the soldiers they are hiding. Eventually, a gunfight erupts between the Allied and
Korean soldiers, in which only one of the rescue team survives.
The Korean soldiers and Smith learn from the sole survivor of the rescue team
that an aerial bombardment targeting the village will soon begin. Not about to let
Dongmakgol be destroyed, the soldiers team up to divert the Allied bombers by set­
ting up a decoy, while leaving Smith with the villagers in case further attacks follow.
Ultimately, they successfully save Dongmakgol but end up sacrificing their lives.
In the movie, while Smith as a US officer is portrayed as a relatable person
who develops a connection with the innocent villagers, the United States itself is
depicted not only as the force that disrupts the fictional paradise of Dongmakgol
but also as a great power that single-mindedly pursues its strategic objectives. The
164 Chonghyun Choi

following dialogue from the Allied operational meeting that decides to bomb the
Dongmakgol area illustrates this.

(The commander is listening to his officers.)

Officer 1: He’s guessing, sir. How can we make a quick decision based on ambigu­
ous data?
Officer 2: The Allied forces are moving north. We have to consider the fact that our
winning or losing depends on the ability to move weapons and supplies.
Officer 1: We are overreacting. We need more time to investigate.
Officer 2: How can you say that? Obviously, the enemy is there.
Officer 1: There is a chance of civilian casualty.
Officer 2: We don’t have the option of being sympathetic. And right now, we don’t
have the time either.

Conservative commentators were quick to accuse Welcome to Dongmakgol of

being pro-North Korean and anti-American—with the movie’s commercial success
likely contributing to their ire.7 One columnist for New Right at the time wrote that

I was aghast at the fact that the American B29 bombers are portrayed as the
main threat to Dongmakgol’s peace. . . . The outside forces that disrupt the
quiet and peace of Dongmakgol should have been the Soviet T34 tanks and
the gongs used by the Chinese Army, not B29 bombers.8

Politicians chimed in as well. For example, Kim Moo-sung, who at the time was
Secretary General of the conservative Grand National Party (GNP) and later
became the leader of the same party (after a name change to Saenuri party), com­
mented that ‘Dongmakgol was fun when watching, but later it seemed that North
Korean soldiers are depicted as humanists and our own and American soldiers as
war maniacs’.9
Others soon rallied in support of the movie. Film critic Sim Yeong-seop defended
Welcome to Dongmakgol by saying ‘Dongmakgol is painted as a hometown in eve­
ryone’s heart where all ideology is gone and everything can be forgiven. . . . It is
a contradiction to apply ideological criteria to such a movie’.10 The actors, when
asked about the criticism that the movie is inculcating a pro-North Korean and anti-
American ideology, answered that ‘American soldier Smith appears in the movie
as a friend, and there is also a line saying that the Korean War was provoked by the
North’.11 In the same group interview, director Park Kwang-hyun responds to the
critics by stating that ‘I have no ill feelings toward the United States, and the movie
is not about ideas or ideology’.12 Overall, most of the movie’s defenders empha­
sized that the US bombardment is just part of a fictional plot, and that one should
not try to read too much into it, suggesting that the disapproving critics are actually
the ones who have a political agenda.
The tables turned about a decade later in 2016 when Operation Chromite was
released. It is a movie about the Incheon Landing during the Korean War, the code
name of which the movie uses as its title. The plot involves a fictionalized version
 Between Protector and Oppressor 165

of the intelligence operation called X-Ray, for which 17 soldiers from the South
Korean Navy intelligence unit infiltrated Incheon, then occupied by North Korea,
ahead of the amphibious landing operation by the UN forces that was the Opera­
tion Chromite.13 The main mission for the soldiers was to gather information on
naval mine placements in the offshores of Incheon. Unlike the actual operation,
the soldiers in the movie infiltrate the North Korean command center in Incheon,
disguised as a North Korean inspection unit. Throughout the movie, the X-Ray
operation crosscuts with scenes from the United Nations Command headquarters
in Tokyo, where General Douglas MacArthur pushes through the plan for Inchon
Landing against the objections of other American military leaders, who worry that
the narrow channel and strong tides near Incheon make an amphibious operation
unacceptably risky. MacArthur insists that such conditions will lead North Kore­
ans to not expect a landing at Incheon and give the Allies a chance to catch the
North Koreans by surprise. As is well known, the Incheon Landing is successfully
executed, turning the tide of the Korean War in favor of the UN forces. Only two
of the X-Ray squad died during the operation in reality, but all end up sacrificing
their lives in the movie.
Critics were almost unanimously scathing in their appraisal of Operation Chro­
mite. For example, all five reviewers for the popular Korean movie magazine Cine
21 gave the film four stars or fewer out of ten.14 In part, the negative reaction arose
from what was perceived as the movie’s brazen appeal to patriotism to attract more
viewers. Many accused Operation Chromite as being a movie of kukppong,15 a
pejorative term used in Korea to describe ultranationalist sentiment (literally mean­
ing ‘intoxicated with nationalism’). According to this view, the movie sees things
as black and white, turning a blind eye to the intricacies of history and depicting the
characters as one-dimensional heroes or villains.16
An important part of the critique concerned the glorification of MacArthur. For
example, Hwang Jin-mi, one of the reviewers for Cine 21, remarked that Opera­
tion Chromite is ‘an ode to MacArthur dipped in anti-communism and heroism’.17
Indeed, MacArthur is portrayed as a charismatic yet warm-hearted general who,
for example, is deeply touched by a brave South Korean soldier he meets on the
battlefield. He displays a deep commitment to winning the war and successfully
conducting Operation Chromite, which he sees as essential to the former goal. Also
giving MacArthur a special aura are many of his lines in the movie, which draw
from the literary quotes that he is known to have used, such as those from Samuel
Ullman’s ‘Youth’: ‘Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles
the soul’. In all, it is hard to deny that MacArthur is portrayed as the ultimate true
soldier. And to the extent that MacArthur personifies the US effort in the Korean
War, we can say that the image of the United States that pervades the movie is that
of a protector determined to defeat the North Koreans no matter what.
As mentioned, the critics pointed out that Operation Chromite oversimplified
history, depicting the Korean War as a clash between good and evil. Regarding
MacArthur, the main critique was that the movie neglects his controversial state­
ments and stances—for example, his antipathy toward pacifism and insistence
that the Chinese mainland be bombed as part of the war effort in Korea, despite
166 Chonghyun Choi

President Harry S. Truman having made clear his opposition to such a plan.18 Some
also point out that the movie’s Manichean view extends to its broader understand­
ing of the Korean War. For example, one review notes that the movie

cannot avoid the criticism that it completely neglected the historicity of the
Korean War, which resulted from the explosion of the confrontation between
the two camps in the Cold War system headed by the United States and the
Soviet Union. This is because the movie highlights, throughout its running
time, a black-and-white historical understanding that categorizes the Repub­
lic of Korean Army and the Allied forces as ‘good’ and the North Korean
army as ‘evil’.19

This time, it was those on the right that accused the critics of being ideologi­
cally motivated. Hong Joon-pyo—then Governor of Gyeongsangnam-do and later
the presidential candidate for the Liberty Korea Party (a successor party to Saenuri
party)—posted on Facebook that

some critics are said to have given three out of ten stars to the movie. . . . It
has been a long time since some parts of the Korean movie industry have
become clearly left-leaning, but it is sad that critics have to be so harsh even
on movies like this because of ideology.20

In addition, supporters suggested that the real message transcends ideology.

‘This not a movie aiming to glorify MacArthur; rather, it is an ode to everyone
who shed their blood in the battlefield without even leaving behind their names,
including our grandfather’s generation’, remarks Choi Jong-bu, a researcher
with the right-wing Center for Free Enterprise.21 Interestingly, not all defenses
of Operation of Chromite appealed to the movie’s ideological innocence. Most
notably, none other than the owner of the production company behind Operation
Chromite rather clearly acknowledged the ideological motivation behind the
movie: ‘[Operation Chromite] was made out of a wish that people would mentally
arm themselves and gain an awareness of the national security issues at least
through the movies’.22
Welcome to Dongmakgol and Operation Chromite illustrate that the United
States can be depicted from quite different perspectives even in relation to a rela­
tively well-researched historical event such as the Korean War. For Welcome to
Dongmakgol, the United States is mainly an external force disrupting peace at
Dongmakgol, albeit unintentionally; for Operation Chromite, the same country
is shown as a guardian figure as embodied by Douglas MacArthur, braving dif­
ficult operational conditions to fight back against North Korea together with the
South Korean forces. Moreover, the two movies and the critical discourse sur­
rounding them have exposed the political fault lines regarding the perceived role
of the United States in Korean history, and demonstrated that any future movie that
substantially engages with this topic will most certainly end up being controversial
as well.
 Between Protector and Oppressor 167

United States in Fictional Crisis Situations: The Host, Flu, Ashfall,

and Steel Rain
This chapter now turns its attention to Korean blockbusters that feature the
United States in plots involving fictional crisis situations. The four movies
chosen—The Host, Flu, Ashfall, and Steel Rain—all meet this condition and
additionally have attracted more than three million viewers, an admittedly arbi­
trary criterion used to focus only on movies that had the potential to spark a
broad societal debate. Reviewing the role of the United States in these movies,
it quickly becomes clear that the United States is generally portrayed in an
unfavorable light, arguably more so than in Welcome to Dongmakgol. If the
United States inadvertently posed a threat to Dongmakgol’s peace, in The Host,
Flu, and Ashfall, the United States actively attempts to thwart the protagonists’
plans in pursuit of its own, narrowly defined interest. Since the protagonists
personify ordinary Korean people (The Host) or are trying to save the Korean
people from catastrophe (Flu and Ashfall), the image of the United States we
encounter in these movies is that of an outside force that intentionally interferes
with the Korean people seeking to protect themselves. Only in Steel Rain can
we find a relatively more positive depiction of the United States, where the
country still pursues its own interests, but is also reasonably attentive to the
interests of Korea.
Diverse settings characterize The Host, Flu, and Ashfall, but as mentioned,
the United States serves as the main obstacle that the protagonists must over­
come. In The Host, Bong Joon-ho’s biggest commercial success before Parasite
(Kisaengch’ung, dir. Bong Joon-ho, 2019),23 the US military causes the prob­
lem to begin with—the creation of the monster that terrorizes Seoul—by spill­
ing toxic chemical into the Han River, as noted in the introduction. The United
States further plays the role of a villain by insisting that the monster may be
spreading a virus and that all who had contact with the monster be quarantined,
even though it is later revealed that there was no such virus. This hinders the
Park Gang-du family from chasing the monster, which holds Gang-du’s daughter
Hyeon-seo in captivity. Since the main storyline involves Gang-du, along with
his father and two siblings, shaking off the authorities and pursuing the monster
in a quest to recover Hyeon-seo, the United States is certainly one of the main
antagonists in The Host.
Notably, after Gang-du and his family escape from the hospital where they had
been quarantined, the United States declares that it will

intervene directly because the South Korean government is unable to handle

the situation on its own, coming to this conclusion based on the fact that two
carriers of the virus are still on the run and that the effort to track the monster,
which is the host of the virus, has failed.

The intervention comes in the form of a plan to release Agent Yellow, a fictional
chemical substance ‘which can eradicate all viral threats within tens of kilometers’.
168 Chonghyun Choi

Although at least some of the US authorities later realize that there is no virus
spreading around, the US military still releases Agent Yellow, even though many
Korean protesters were nearby and could be harmed by the toxic substance. Agent
Yellow nevertheless significantly weakens the monster, and Gang-du takes advan­
tage of the opportunity to pull his daughter out from inside the throat of the mon­
ster, although she has already passed away by this point.
Whereas the virus was an imaginary threat in The Host, in Flu, an actual viral
contagion forms the core of the plot. When stripped of the budding romantic rela­
tionship between the main characters, the plot boils down to efforts to contain the
spread of a deadly strain of the influenza virus, which takes hold in the city of Bun-
dang. In common with The Host, the United States also intervenes, but this time
explicitly takes over the whole operation. This leads to one of the main conflicts
in the movie between the Korean President and Leo Snyder, a US official whose
exact title is unknown, but apparently is at the top of the US command chain in
Korea. While the President insists on a course of action that can potentially save
the Bundang residents who are being quarantined by developing an antibody treat­
ment, Snyder is solely focused on keeping all Bundang residents within the city at
all costs.
Initially, after moving everyone into a makeshift camp in a sports complex,
the authorities tell the Bundang residents that the uninfected will be released in
48 hours. When the President learns that this promise has not been kept, he tries to
order the troops to release the uninfected. Snyder then steps in to ask the President
to withdraw the order: ‘This is not just about Korea anymore. If this virus spreads,
the impact on the world could be . . . [pause] Please remember, the eyes of the
world are on Korea right now’. Later, behind the back of the President, Snyder
pressures the Prime Minister to fire on the rioting citizens who are trying to get out
of Bundang. When the President finds out, he asks, in full of anger, ‘are we in the
middle of a war? Are unarmed citizens our enemy?’ The Prime Minister replies that
‘the command has been handed over according to the military agreement between
South Korea and the United States’. A few cuts later, the camera shows Snyder
directly ordering soldiers to fire at protesters crossing the line demarcating the
quarantine zone.
The standoff between the President and Snyder comes to a climax when the
former tries to override the latter’s order. The President asks Snyder to tell the
soldiers to hold fire, which Snyder simply ignores. When the President extends his
arm to turn on the microphone that connects the operation headquarters with the
commander on the ground, Snyder grabs the President’s wrist. As the President
shakes off Snyder’s hand and turns on the microphone to order the commander to
hold fire, Snyder speaks through his headset to deliver his own order to ‘launch
secondary strike as planned’ and ask ‘firebombers [to] confirm position’. Shocked
and furious that Snyder even prepared an airstrike against civilians, the President
mobilizes the Capital Defense Command, which remains under full direct control
of the Korean Army even in wartime, and asks the Capital Defense Commander to
fire surface-to-air missiles if and when fire jets appear in Bundang. The following
 Between Protector and Oppressor 169

dialogue captures the most intense moment of the confrontation between the Presi­
dent and Snyder:

Snyder: This is unacceptable. You have no authority to countermand my order.

President: See that girl, those people? They’re my people.
Snyder: Sir, I officially demand you withdraw your order.
President: Mr. Snyder, I officially warn you, I will shoot them down.

In the end, Snyder backs down and orders the jets to retreat. This action marks the
end of the film’s climax. The President’s proposed course of action is adopted, the
one focusing on developing an antibody treatment. He goes on to tell the protesters
that he has stopped all crack-down operations, and the people celebrate. Although
the virus is still very much alive and the treatment has yet to be developed, the
movie proceeds to give an appearance that all problems have been resolved and
quickly concludes.
Turning to Ashfall, the United States plays a similar role in that movie as well,
although in a different type of crisis situation. The movie starts with the erup­
tion of Mt. Paektu, an active volcano on the border of North Korea and China.
The accompanying earthquake brings North Korea close to total collapse and also
causes substantial destruction in South Korea. However, this is just the first in a
series of eruptions, and it is predicted that the fourth and last eruption, which will
happen in just around four days, will destroy nearly 50% of all structures through­
out the Korean peninsula. The South Korean government figures out that the only
chance of averting this scenario is by detonating a nuclear bomb underground near
the volcano, which would relieve enough pressure from the magma chamber to
prevent the final, apocalyptic eruption. Since South Korea has no nuclear arsenal of
its own, the President and his advisors devise a plan to first capture the fissile mate­
rial from the intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) in North Korea, which
has fallen into a de facto state of anarchy, and then detonate a nuclear bomb near
Mt. Paektu. Thus, they send a special forces troop—led by Captain Jo In-chang,
the main protagonist—into North Korea with a detonator, to be used to initiate the
explosion of the uranium extracted from the ICBMs.
Right after the South Korean special forces succeed in capturing the fissile mate­
rial, they are greeted by gunfire from unidentified soldiers, who later turn out to be
US Army Rangers. The United States intervenes because, before the earthquake,
North Korea had agreed to complete denuclearization with the United States and
was about to send off the ICBMs on a US Navy vessel. The US troops were there to
take the ICBMs before the last eruption. As the US and Korean soldiers exchange
gunfire in North Korean territory, back in South Korea, another group of US sol­
diers storm the Joint Chiefs of Staff situation room and ask everyone to cease
and desist. At around the same time, the US ambassador to South Korea visits the
Korean President at his office to demand that he abandon the mission. The ambas­
sador says, ‘as the OPCON [operational control] delegate, I must tell you that the
United States will not condone this mission’.24 From the remaining dialogue, it
appears the United States worries that setting off a nuclear bomb near the border
170 Chonghyun Choi

between North Korea and China can provoke China or destabilize the region in
other ways. When the disgruntled Korean President asks, ‘Are you saying that
we should just sit here and do nothing while a catastrophe is about to hit us?’ the
ambassador answers, ‘Should it come to such tragic ends, you can depend on the
United States to uphold its alliance with the Republic of Korea’. However, in North
Korea, Captain Jo manages to escape the ambush by the US Rangers and eventu­
ally detonate the nuclear bomb deep inside a mine close to Mt. Paektu, staving off
the apocalypse that would have engulfed the whole Korean peninsula.
Across the three movies, we can clearly detect a commonality in how the United
States is depicted: it ruthlessly pursues its national interest, turning a blind eye
to the suffering of people that may result in the process. In The Host and Flu, it was
the Park Gang-du family and Bundang citizens, respectively, that had to endure
the collateral damage; in Ashfall, all people in the Korean peninsula would have
suffered had the United States succeeded in stopping Captain Jo. Thus, in all three
movies, the United States can be seen as the ultimate antagonist that attempts to
block the main characters from achieving their righteous goals.
For this reason, all three movies have been labeled by some as anti-American.
In particular, partially because of its huge commercial success, The Host drew
much criticism from those on the right of the political spectrum due to its
alleged anti-American message.25 One reviewer lamented, ‘is the United States
a monster tormenting the good Korean people?’26 However, not all viewed the
anti-Americanism in the film as bad. For example, one commentator stated, in
a matter-of-fact style, that ‘from the beginning to the end, Bong slashes at the
US hegemonism and turns it into a monster’.27 As another example, a relatively
favorable review stated that ‘The Host sees the role of the United States in a nega­
tive light, as repressing the collective unconsciousness of the modern-day Korean
people. The Host is a political film that bluntly declares anti-Americanism’. For
the reviewer, this is both good and necessary because Bong is ‘attempting to
heal the archetypical wound buried inside the collective unconsciousness’.28 The
controversy surrounding the anti-Americanism of The Host grew to become quite
significant, such that the ticketing company Maxmovie even conducted an online
survey asking moviegoers whether they agreed with the statement that ‘The Host
is an anti-American film’, to which 64% responded ‘no’.29
Bong himself hesitated to call The Host an anti-American film, but was clear
that the United States was a target, saying that ‘It is a stretch to simplify [The Host]
as an anti-American film, but it is evident that there is a satire of and political com­
mentary on the United States, and I had clearly intended it as well’.30 Interestingly,
Bong also seems to hold the view that the United States, given its global stand­
ing, should accept the fate of becoming an object of satire. In an interview with
Hankook Ilbo, Bong argued that

the United States as a superpower is the number one target of satire in

our time. [Filmmakers] can fire arrows of satire at the United States’
wrongdoings and foolishness in ways that resonate with the rest of the world.
It was the case for Hollywood science fiction movies as well.31
 Between Protector and Oppressor 171

In other words, it is only natural that the United States attracts critical attention
because of the vast influence that the country wields.
If Bong is right, then perhaps the negative representation of the United States is
not a feature unique to Korean blockbusters. However, there seems to be a common
theme that is unique to the supposed anti-American Korean blockbusters regarding
the role assigned to the United States. That is, the United States takes control over
the operation from the South Korean government—in the case of Flu and Ashfall,
clearly against the latter’s wish. For most other countries, a storyline where the
United States takes over the decision-making power of a sovereign government
would be rather unthinkable. In the case of South Korea, however, it is not a stretch
to at least imagine such a scenario, because the wartime operational control of the
Republic of Korea (ROK) Armed Forces belongs not to the Korean government,
but to the ROK–US Combined Forces Command (CFC), which is led by a four-
star US general as the commander. This has given rise to a popular perception that
wartime operation control of the ROK Armed Forces lies in the hand of the United
States. Thus, in the context of emergency situations that bear similarity with war­
time, such as the ones we see in the three movies just discussed, the United States
assuming command of the military operation in Korea does not strike the Korean
audience as outlandish. The movies combine this widespread understanding of
wartime operational control with a view of the United States as always prioritizing
its own interest with little concern for other actors.
However, the exercise of wartime operational control shown in the above mov­
ies lacks grounding in reality. To begin with, the situations that form the back­
drop in all three would not qualify as wartime situations. ‘Wartime’ technically
begins when the alert level is raised to DEFCON (Defense Readiness Condition)
3 or above (that is, DEFCON 2 and 1), and DEFCON 3 is called when ‘tensions
develop which could lead to grave and negative consequences or a possibility for
military intervention exists’.32 A virus outbreak or occurrence of natural disasters
(and an ongoing clandestine operation to avoid it) would not count as such situa­
tions. Moreover, even if the alert level is raised to DEFCON 3, it is not the case that
the United States simply takes over the command of the ROK Armed Forces. With
DEFCON 3, the ROK–US CFC—a bilateral institution—begins to exercise con­
trol over not just the ROK Armed Forces, but ‘military personnel of all services, of
both countries’.33 Although a four-star US general has always been the commander
by tradition, a four-star South Korean general serves as the deputy commander. In
addition, the Combined Forces Commander takes strategic guidelines and opera­
tional directions from the National Command Authorities headed by the presidents
of South Korea and the United States.34 Finally, ‘the CFC receives strategic guid­
ance and instructions from a US-ROK Military Committee comprised of senior
US and South Korean defense officials’.35 In short, it is not possible for the United
States to make unilateral decisions regarding the deployment of Korean troops,
even in wartime.
Thus, the movies either willfully or unknowingly ignore the realities of the
military alliance between South Korea and the United States, as has been correctly
pointed out by a few columnists at conservative-leaning newspapers.36 However, no
172 Chonghyun Choi

clear evidence exists that this is motivated by anti-Americanism; after all, no

one involved in the production of the above movies has ever claimed that they
were driven by ill feelings towards the United States or publicly made any anti-
American statements. Although we cannot completely rule out that anti-American
motivations may have been present, in the absence of any evidence supportive of
that claim, it would be more reasonable to attribute the negative portrayal of the
United States to the desire to make the films more interesting by rendering the
storyline more dramatic, especially since these movies are blockbusters for which
commercial success is crucial. In this light, it would be difficult to think of a greater
adversity than having the global superpower actively trying to thwart your plan. In
fact, one of the conservative columnists that called out the false depiction in Flu
and Ashfall of how wartime operational control is exercised concedes that it was
probably an attempt to add zest to the plot and instead condemns politicians who
criticize the current arrangement on wartime operational control based on what is
shown in Flu and Ashfall.37
That said, it remains true that the United States as a geopolitical entity is gener­
ally depicted rather unfavorably in Korean blockbuster movies based on fictional
events. In this regard, Steel Rain appears to be the exception in terms of how the
United States as a great power is represented. In it, we find a more balanced por­
trayal of the United States. The main plot of the movie is as follows. The North
Korean military launches a coup by sending its troops into South Korea to hijack
a US Army MLRS (multiple launch rocket system) vehicle and then fire missiles
at an event attended by the Great Leader. This provides a convenient pretext for
the North Korean military to declare war on the United States and South Korea,
accusing them of the brazen attack. The Great Leader, although gravely wounded,
is rescued and taken to South Korea by the main character, Eom Cheol-woo, a
former agent of the North Korean Reconnaissance General Bureau. The rest of
the movie revolves around the efforts of Eom Cheol-woo and Kwak Cheol-woo, a
South Korean senior presidential secretary whom Eom meets while in the South, to
save the Great Leader’s life and prevent a war in the Korean peninsula.
The United States, in a virtual strategic meeting between the US Secretary of
State and the South Korean President, proposes a preemptive nuclear attack on the
North, arguing, based on the results of a simulation exercise, that the suggested
course of action will be much less destructive than an all-out conventional war
with the North. The right-leaning South Korean President ultimately agrees to the
proposed plan, and B-52 bombers carrying nuclear missiles take off from the US
mainland. However, after the missiles are launched, North Korea fires a nuclear
missile of its own towards them. The North Korean missile explodes mid-air, and
the resulting electromagnetic pulse takes down the US missiles. Shocked by the
unexpected countermeasure and alarmed by the North’s threat of nuclear retalia­
tion against Japan if any further attack ensues, the United States decides to not fol­
low up with a second nuclear strike. In explaining this decision, the US Secretary
of State tells the South Korean President, ‘We need to think about the collective
security of our entire treaty. Plus, they have already retracted their declaration [of
war]’. Dismayed by this, the President retorts, ‘are you saying that the Korea–US
 Between Protector and Oppressor 173

alliance is worthless compared to the Japan–US alliance?’ The Secretary of State,

however, does not budge.
Unlike in the previous movies, the United States does not make a unilateral
decision, which it technically cannot do to begin with, and presents the option of a
preemptive nuclear strike only because South Korea requests to activate Operation
Plan 5027, a basic war plan for the ROK–US Combined Forces Command. For this
alone, Steel Rain can be considered as showing the United States in a more real­
istic light. Moreover, the rationale offered by the United States for its choices—in
the case of nuclear preemptive strike, less destruction compared to a conventional
war, and in the case of not launching a second nuclear attack, the potential threat
to Japan—actually sounds reasonable. In essence, the United States is presented as
a geopolitical entity and an alliance partner with its own set of interests but with
whom a reasoned dialogue is possible.
Thus, not all Korean blockbusters based on fictional events depict the United
States unfavorably, although the exceptions are as yet few. Now, just as it is a
stretch to claim that anti-Americanism lies behind the negative portrayal of the
United States, grounds are lacking to assert that pro-Americanism has motivated
a more positive rendering of the United States. Rather than unwarrantedly attrib­
uting the difference in how the United States is represented to varying political
dispositions, it would help again to examine the nature of the subject matter. For
non-human threats—such as monsters (The Host), viral contagion (Flu), or natural
disasters (Ashfall)—finding an additional obstacle for the main characters as con­
vincing and formidable as the United States would pose a challenge, because the
South Korean government and the governments of the neighboring countries are
likely to share an interest in preventing or containing the calamity, as all are more
or less directly impacted by the event. The United States is the only entity that is
involved in the Korean peninsula and the Northeast Asian region more broadly,
yet sufficiently far away in terms of physical distance. Thus, in these types of situ­
ations, its interest may be different from those of South Korea and its neighbors.
In contrast, in the case of a war on the Korean peninsula or in Northeast Asia, a
scenario that pits South Korea against the United States, its most important ally,
would be difficult to think of even in the wildest stretch of imagination. Hence, in
a plot centering on a (potential) war as in Steel Rain, it is unlikely that the United
States would be featured as a source of adversity.

Conclusion
Overall, the representation of the United States as a geopolitical entity in Korean
blockbusters thus far has been closer to that of an oppressor than a protector. For
films on the Korean War, Operation Chromite provided a balance to the image
of the United States presented in Welcome to Dongmakgol. However, for films
based on fictional crises, the United States is generally depicted as a domineering
force hindering the main characters’ efforts, as in The Host, Flu, and Ashfall. Only
in Steel Rain do we see a version of the United States open to bilateral dialogue
and making decisions together with, rather than on behalf of, the South Korean
174 Chonghyun Choi

government. As discussed earlier, no convincing evidence exists that the generally

negative representation of the United States results from the dominance of anti-
American ideology within the Korean movie industry. Instead, the real driver is
more likely the nature of the subject matter combined with the desire to make the
movies more commercially successful.
If, as I claim, crisis situations arising from non-human threats are indeed more
conducive to scenarios where the United States plays the role of a villain, then
the image of the United States in Korean blockbusters may not change much in
the future. However, one also needs to consider the changing political landscape
among the general public and the pressures that it may exert on commercially
minded movie producers. Notably, in South Korea, public opinion is gradually
becoming more pro-American. When asked ‘Which country is the most important
for South Korea’s economy?’ and ‘Which country is the most important for South
Korea’s security?’ more and more people are answering ‘the United States’ for
both questions.38 A related trend is the increasingly negative feelings toward China
among all age groups but especially among the younger generations.39 Since ten­
sions between the United States and China are intensifying, the pro-American and
anti-Chinese sentiments are likely to become more entrenched by feeding off of
one another. Thus, the tendency noted in this chapter regarding how the United
States is depicted in Korean blockbusters may very well flip in the future, as we
can expect that a more pro-American audience will increasingly shun movies that
portray the United States in a negative way. If this proves to be true, then we would
witness another instance where films are influenced by the forces of history.

Notes
1 Adam Taylor, “South Koreans are Protesting against Trump’s Visit—and in Support of
It, Too,” Washington Post, November 4, 2017.
2 Bruce Wallace, “Who’s the Monster?” Los Angeles Times, November 1, 2006.
3 Choe Sang-Hun, “Bong Joon Ho’s Path from Seoul to Oscar Dominance,” New York
Times, February 13, 2020.
4 This also means that I limit my analysis to the twenty-first century, since the production
of Hollywood-style big-budget blockbusters only took off in Korea from around the
turn of the century with the success of Shiri (1999). Richard James Havis, “Korean New
Wave Cinema: How Shiri, Christmas in August and Other Movie Hits Put South Korea
on the World Map,” South China Morning Post, November 17, 2020.
5 Goh Dong-Yeon, “Chŏnhu han’guk yŏnghwae tŭngjanghanŭn chuhan migunŭi imiji:
Chiok’wa (1958) esŏbut’ŏ such’wiinbulmyŏng (2001) kkaji [Representing American GIs
in Postwar Korean Cinema: From The Flower in Hell (1958) to Address Unknown (2001)],”
Miguksayŏn’gu [Korean Journal of American History] 30 (2009): 147–75; Hwang Yeong
Mee, “Yŏnghwae nat’anan han’gukchŏnjaenggi migun’gwa min’ganinŭi kwan’gye—
Chakŭn yŏnmot, Welk’ŏm t’u tongmakkol, Arŭmdaun shijŏrŭl chungshimŭro [The Rela­
tionship between the U.S. Military and Civilian Population During the Korean War as
Depicted in Korean Films—Focusing on Spring in my Hometown (1998), Welcome to
Dongmakgol (2005), and A Little Pond (2010)],” Hyŏndaeyŏnghwayŏn’gu [Contemporary
Cinema Studies] 18 (2014): 159–85; Kim Dong Shik, “Han’gukyŏnghwae tŭngjanghanŭn
miguk ttonŭn miguginŭi imijie kwanhayŏ [How Americans Are Represented in Korean
Film],” Minjongmunhaksayŏn’gu [Journal of Korean Literary History] 36 (2008): 338–77.
 Between Protector and Oppressor 175

6 According to one commentator, these two movies each represent the biggest commercial
success, respectively, for two different types of movies on the Korean War: one focusing
on the unity between the North and South Korean people (to which Welcome to Dong­
makgol belongs) and the other highlighting the confrontation between the North and
South (to which Operation Chromite belongs). Lee Mun-won, “10nyŏn’gan 9p’yŏn . . .
6·25yŏnghwa holtae pannŭn 2kaji iyunŭn [9 Films Over 10 Years . . . Two Reasons Why
Korean War Movies Are Received Poorly],” Chosun Ilbo, May 19, 2021.
7 Welcome to Dongmakgol was the top-grossing film of 2005 in Korea, having attracted
6.4 million viewers. “Yŏndobyŏl paksŭop’isŭ’ [Annual Box Office],” Korean Film
Council (KOFIC) Korean Box Office Information System (KOBIS), accessed July 22,
2021, www.kobis.or.kr/kobis/business/stat/boxs/findYearlyBoxOfficeList.do.
8 Quoted in Jeong Hyeon-mok, “ ‘Ch’inbuginya sunsunya ttaeanin’ sasangnonjaeng hwi­
pssain ‘tongmakkol’ [‘Pro-North Korean or Innocent’ Dongmakgol Surrounded by
Unexpected Ideological Debate],” JoongAng Ilbo, August 25, 2005.
9 Kim Ji-eun and Lee Jong-ho, “ ‘Tongmakkol’ pogo maegadŏ tongsang ch’ŏlgŏharŏ
kanda?” [Go Take Down MacArthur’s Statute after Watching Dongmakgol?] Ohm­
yNews, September 13, 2005.
10 Jeong, “ ‘Ch’inbuginya sunsunya’ ttaeanin sasangnonjaeng hwipssain ‘tongmakkol’.”
11 Lee Ja-yeon, “Pŏlssŏ 500man? ‘Tongmakkol shindŭrom’ [Already 5 Million? Dong­
makgol Syndrome],” Chosun Ilbo, August 26, 2005.
12 Ibid.
13 Lee Yong-su, “X-rei chakchŏn . . . Haegun ch’ŏppodaewŏn 17myŏng inch’ŏn chamip,
puk’an’gun tonghyang maegadŏe pogo [X-Ray Operation . . . 17 Navy Intelligence Unit
Soldiers Infiltrated and Reported North Korean Movements to MacArthur],” Chosun
Ilbo, August 1, 2016.
14 “Inch’ŏnsangnyukchakchŏn [Incheon Landing Operation],” Cine 21, accessed July 18,
2021, www.cine21.com/movie/info/?movie_id=46338. Despite the negative reviews
by the critics, Operation Chromite was a commercial success and was the seventh-
most watched film in 2016, with slightly over seven million viewers. “Yŏndobyŏl
paksŭop’isŭ.”
15 Jeong Hyeon-mok, “Kukppong pan’gongyŏnghwa nollan hwipssain inch’ŏnsang­
nyukchakchŏn kwayŏn hŭnghaenghal su issŭlkka [Can Operation Chromite, Which Is
Mired in a Kukppong and Anti-Communism Controversy, Become a Hit],” JoongAng
Ilbo, July 27, 2016.
16 Lee Jin-uk, “ ‘Inch’ŏnsangnyukchakchŏn’ waegok nollan pul podŭt . . . Mihwa tansun­
hwa tŏch’e [Obvious That Operation Chromite Will Be Mired in Controversy Regard­
ing Historical Distortion . . . Caught in the Trap of Glorification and Simplification],”
No Cut News, July 27, 2016.
17 “Inch’ŏnsangnyukchakchŏn.”
18 Lee, “ ‘Inch’ŏnsangnyukchakchŏn’ waegok nollan pul podŭt . . . Mihwa tansunhwa
tŏch’e.”
19 Ibid.
20 Hwang Bong-gyu, “Hong Joon-pyo ‘Inch’ŏnsangnyukchakchŏn’ kŭkch’an . . . Muny­
egye chwap’ak’odŭ pip’an [Hong Joon-pyo Highly Praises Operation Chromite . . .
Criticizes the Left-Wing Orientation of the Arts World],” Yonhap News, July 29,
2016.
21 Center for Free Enterprise, “Yŏnghwa, inch’ŏnsangnyukchakchŏn nuga, wae hŭmjimnaegoja
hana [Who Nitpicks on the Movie Operation Chromite and Why],” accessed July 19,
2021, www.cfe.org:5004/20160831_11892.
22 Jeong, “Kukppong pan’gongyŏnghwa nollan hwipssain inch’ŏnsangnyukchakchŏn
kwayŏn hŭnghaenghal su issŭlkka.”
23 Within Korea, The Host remains the film that attracted the most moviegoers among the
films directed by Bong with just over 13 million admissions. In comparison, Parasite
176 Chonghyun Choi

had 10.3 admissions. “Yŏktae paksŭop’isŭ [All-Time Box Office],” Korean Film Coun­
cil (KOFIC) Korean Box Office Information System (KOBIS), accessed July 20, 2021,
www.kobis.or.kr/kobis/business/stat/offc/findFormerBoxOfficeList.do.
24 The Korean subtitle that appears on the screen for this line translates slightly differently
to ‘I must tell you that the United States, as the country that exercises wartime opera­
tional control, cannot condone this mission’.
25 Although some netizens decried the anti-Americanism in Flu and Ashfall, only few
commentators publicly called out these films for the negative portrayal of the United
States and did so in a fleeting manner. This is likely because these two movies were
much less successful than The Host. Flu attracted 3.1 million viewers, and while Ashfall
did much better at 8.2 million, it still falls far short of matching the record by The Host.
“Yŏnghwajŏngbo [Movie Information],” Korean Film Council (KOFIC) Korean Box
Office Information System (KOBIS), accessed July 25, 2021, www.kobis.or.kr/kobis/
business/mast/mvie/searchMovieList.do.
26 Lee Yeong-min, “Migukŭn ch’ak’an hanminjokŭl koerop’inŭn koemuriran marin’ga [Is
the United States a Monster Tormenting the Good Korean People],” Monthly Korea
Journal 207 (2007): 138–43.
27 Son Nam-won, “2006nyŏn han’gukyŏnghwa k’iwŏdŭnŭn ‘panmi’ [‘Anti-Americanism’
is the Keyword for Korean Movies in 2006],” OSEN, December 28, 2006.
28 Ha Jae-bong, “Soshimin ŏgap’anŭn koemure kyŏnggo [A Warning to the Monster
Oppressing the Ordinary People],” Kyunghyang Shinmun, August 9, 2006.
29 Maxmovie Reporting Team, “Net’ijŭn 64% Koemul panmiyŏnghwa anida [64% of
Netizens Say The Host Is Not an Anti-American Movie],” Maxmovie, August 4,
2006.
30 Yoon Go-eun, “Bong Joon-ho kamdok mainŏ yŏnghwa k’wŏt’ŏ p’iryosŏng chegi
[Director Bong Joon-ho Raises the Need for Minor Films Quota],” Yonhap News,
August 7, 2006.
31 Lee Dae-hyun, “Hŭnghaeng 1wi kirok ssŭn “koemul” pongjunho kamdok [Bong Joon­
ho, Who Became the Most Commercially Successful Director],” Hankook Ilbo, Septem­
ber 3, 2006.
32 Kim Gwi-geun, “2015nyŏn 12wŏl chŏnhwandoenŭn chŏnshijakchŏnt’ongjegwŏniran
[What Is the Wartime Operational Control That Is Being Transferred in Decem­
ber 2015],” Yonhap News, June 27, 2010.
33 “Mission of the ROK/US Combined Forces Command,” United States Forces Korea,
accessed July 24, 2021, www.usfk.mil/About/Combined-Forces-Command/.
34 Baek Gi-in, “Hanmi yŏnhapsaryŏngbu [ROK-US Combined Forces Command],”
National Archives of Korea, accessed July 24, 2021, www.archives.go.kr/next/search/
listSubjectDescription.do?id=006382&pageFlag=&sitePage=1-2-1.
35 Sara Bjerg Moller, “Here’s the Big Change Seoul Wants to Make to the US-South
Korean Military Command Relationship,” Modern War Institute at West Point, accessed
July 24, 2021, https://mwi.usma.edu/heres-big-change-seoul-wants-make-us-south-korean­
military-command-relationship/.
36 Kim Sang-on, “Yŏnghwaŭi saekkkal [Color of Films],” Kukmin Ilbo, January 13,
2015; Lee Gi-hong, “Hŏgu iyonghan ‘kaehyŏk’, chitpaphinŭn konghwaje [Reform
by Utilizing Fiction, Republicanism Trampled upon as a Result],” Dong-a Ilbo,
February 7, 2020.
37 Lee, “Hŏgu iyonghan ‘kaehyŏk’, chitpaphinŭn konghwaje.”
38 Lee O-seong, “Chungguge taehan pan’gam, kŭ pandaep’yŏne ch’inmiga itta [On
the Opposite Side of Hostility toward China Is Pro-Americanism],” SisaIN 721
(July 12, 2021).
39 Lee O-seong, “Chunggugŭi modŭn kŏsŭl shirŏhanŭn haekshim chiptan, nugulkka?
[Who Is at the Core of the Group That Dislikes Everything about China?]” SisaIN 717
(June 17, 2021).
 Between Protector and Oppressor 177

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ical Debate].” JoongAng Ilbo. https://www.joongang.co.kr/article/1662902, publication
August 25, 2005, accessed June 20, 2021.
Jeong, Hyeon-mok. “Kukppong pan’gongyŏnghwa nollan hwipssain inch’ŏnsangn­
yukchakchŏn kwayŏn hŭnghaenghal su issŭlkka [Can Operation Chromite, Which Is Mired
in a Kukppong and Anti-Communism Controversy, Become a Hit].” JoongAng Ilbo. https://
www.joongang.co.kr/article/20366037, publication July 27, 2016, accessed August 2, 2021.
Kim, Dong Shik. “Han’gukyŏnghwae tŭngjanghanŭn miguk ttonŭn miguginŭi imijie
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[Journal of Korean Literary History] 36 (2008): 338–77.
Kim, Gwi-geun. “2015nyŏn 12wŏl chŏnhwandoenŭn chŏnshijakchŏnt’ongjegwŏniran [What
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accessed August 22, 2021.
178 Chonghyun Choi

Kim, Ji-eun, and Lee Jong-ho. “‘Tongmakkol’ pogo maegadŏ tongsang ch’ŏlgŏharŏ kanda?
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20, 2021.
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hankookilbo.com/News/Read/200609032331402127, publication September 3, 2006,
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com/news/East/MainNews/article/all/20200207/99578356/1, publication February 7, 2020,
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082670365.html, publication August 26, 2005, accessed June 20, 2021.
Lee, Jin-uk. “ ‘Inch’ŏnsangnyukchakchŏn’ waegok nollan pul podŭt . . . Mihwa tansunhwa
tŏch’e [Obvious That Operation Chromite Will Be Mired in Controversy Regarding His­
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August 4, 2021.
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[Nine Films over Ten Years . . . Two Reasons Why Korean War Movies are Received
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C2GXXMRHNZG7XJW3CMHW3SGOXU/, publication May 19, 2021, accessed Sep­
tember 11, 2021.
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the Core of the Group That Dislikes Everything about China].” SisaIN 717 (June 17, 2021b).
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Lee, Yong-su. “X-rei chakchŏn . . . Haegun ch’ŏppodaewŏn 17myŏng inch’ŏn chamip,
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Ilbo. https://www.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2016/08/01/2016080100221.html, pub­
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 Between Protector and Oppressor 179

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Part IV

Archiving Contact Zones

11 The Agonistics on the Borders In
Between Two Koreas
The Politics of Cinematic
Representations in Documentary
Films on Borders Since 2018

Woohyung Chon

Representation of the Border Area After the 4.27 Panmunjom

Declaration in 2018
This chapter aims to investigate a trend in Korean documentary films that rep­
resents the boundaries and borders between the two Koreas after the inter-Korean
summit and the Panmunjom Declaration on April 27, 2018. The Panmunjom Declara­
tion is an important starting point in changing the form and meaning of the “cultural
memory” of the inter-Korean border, in that it was the first agreement between the
two Koreas on the end of the war. Cultural memory is a comprehensive memory of
history based on normative text, and representative art directly intervenes in its forma­
tion, diffusion, and cracks.1 The language and art of representation, from voice to text
and video, have declared a war on memory that combines multilateral and multiscale
memories as historical memory that exists as one. Historical and political instruments,
such as the declaration of the end of war, inspire art that represents more memories.
In this process, representative arts continue to identify the history of the past as a cur­
rent problem by staying in solidity with different agonistics. After the Panmunjom
Declaration, the story of the inter-Korean border began to pay attention to meeting and
contact, especially contact zones of forgotten history and culture, rather than discon­
nection. To what extent is it valid to diagnose this phenomenon as simply a reflection
of the phase of inter-Korean reconciliation? It is necessary to pay attention to the fact
that what this meeting revealed was that there were many “forgotten or concealed
records and memories” as much as meeting and contact. This chapter, therefore, aims
to identify the way art intervenes in the representation of cultural memories as soon as
society and communities become afraid of losing or eager to erase certain memories.
After the Panmunjom Declaration, a number of works containing new changes,
including the subject, method, and effect of the representation of the inter-Korean
border, appeared. Stories about this appeared in more popular mediums such as
movies and exhibitions, and they shared a commonality in that these are devices
that make them present events and not past stories. Notable works include docu­
mentary films such as The Children Gone to Poland (2018), Good Bye My Love
North Korea: Red Youth (2019), Shadow Flowers (2019), Pyongyang Bookstore
(2018), NNSC: Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission DMZ Photo Exhibition

DOI: 10.4324/9781003279013-15
184 Woohyung Chon

(2018), Made in Joseon from England (2019), and DMZ (2018). In addition, the
23rd Wonju Human Rights Film Festival in 2018 screened the film Comrade Kim
Goes Flying (2012), which was a collaboration between North Korea, the UK,
and Belgium, as its opening film and presented it as a special feature showcas­
ing North Korean films. In the same year, the Pyeongchang International Peace
Film Festival was newly established in Pyeongchang, the host city for the Winter
Olympics, where a unified team from the two Koreas participated. The PIPF has
been held three times since then. Considering that this is a multilateral and multi-
scale emergence across various fields, and in particular, considering the noticeable
increase in cultural productions, the need to confirm the new trend of reproduc­
tion after the 4.27 Panmunjom Declaration has naturally been raised. Above all,
it is worth remembering that the border area represented in these works is based
on disconnection but simultaneously pays more attention to new encounters. This
new encounter is the discovery of a memory that had not been recorded in the past
or aims for a future of solidarity, reconciliation, and coexistence, so the border
evolves into both borderlands and contact zones.
The border area taken up in this chapter is a path to access the history and cul­
ture created by said border area, and strongly evokes the desire for revisiting border
areas centered on the public good of reconciliation and coexistence. The contact zone
proposed by Mary Louis Pratt more than 30 years ago is a concept with multiple
meanings, in that it starts with the asymmetric relationship between the empire and
the colony, but draws the imagination of other relationships by paying attention to the
representation and appropriation of colonial history and culture.2 In addition, since
a contact zone is a subjective event in which contact between heterogeneous things
occurs, rather than it being an exceptional product of the border, the border area
moves and expands to a more three-dimensional field through multilateral dynamics.
This approach allows the border area to be viewed as the periphery of the center, but
also as a source of contact, hybridization, and the creation of new things everywhere.
The border area is a place where connections are established while creating divi­
sions,3 so it is also a way to construct spaces including surrounding territories.4 In
this case, the contact zone is a place and community that proliferates through various
hybrid entities. Based on this, the contact zone will be expanded to a site built with a
hard border in contact with regions, ethnicities, and countries and a soft border in con­
tact with culture, religion, class, gender, and daily life. It is evident that contact zones
were sites of conflict and struggle between regions, ethnicities, and countries as well
as other adjacent or distant border areas, and are still an extension of these. Thus, the
possibility of a zero point—the origin of reconciliation and coexistence—also exists.5
The contact zone, therefore, is an archive of ecology and daily life as well as the his­
tory and culture before the establishment of the border and is home to a community
that has protected life at the forefront of the post-border crisis.
This chapter focuses on documentary films that represent the history of the bor­
der area, while presenting a history that was incorrectly recorded or could not be
recorded. In this regard, the contact zone represented in documentary films is both
real and a representation of a certain world. This certain world is beyond the pre­
sent, so the contact zone as a representation performs a kind of politics of cinematic
 The Agonistics on the Borders In Between Two Koreas 185

representation. The politics of cinematic representation is a narrative strategy lik­

ened to Walter Benjamin’s impact effects6 that moves and positions the object of
reproduction to a vector different from the existing image. Thus, recently produced
documentary films representing the inter-Korean contact zone are devices and jour­
neys of the re-recognition of borders or boundaries. In these documentary films,
borders are no longer exceptional but rather mundane, so they seem to be the only
home for us and our lives. This does not just suggest that borders are dangerous or
that standing on them puts us at risk. Instead, meeting others creates the possibility
of borders, and borders as a Mobius strip are connected by conflict, discrimination,
reconciliation, and coexistence. This approach considers the historical aspect of the
Borderlands, and for those living in the border areas, the border often operates as
an extended channel of communication and exchange.7 In addition, new representa­
tions of the border area pay more attention to the possibility of errors inherent in
borders or boundaries. In this way, borders are not left unattended in history but are
called upon as current problems requiring trajectory of change and where modifica­
tion is archived. In the end, these representations have certain performances, which
are redefined as communities and public good for the coexistence of all that exists
at the border through narratives that lead to the meeting of people on the border and
the cracks in the border areas that will make them sustainable.
The Children Gone to Poland (Sangmi Chu, 2018) and Shadow Flowers
(Seungjun Yi, 2019) are two documentary films that demonstrate a new trend in
representing the history of border areas. They represent unfamiliar subjects, such
as war orphans dispatched from North Korea immediately after the ceasefire and
women struggling to repatriate after defection. In addition, the language of repre­
sentation is mainly based on memory or illegal reality; above all, the represented
time and space, and the fact that humans are multilateral and contain multiple
meanings, suggest much more in itself. I argue that this method of representation is
likely to be a strategy to present history beyond simple representation and is closely
linked to the possibility of errors within boundaries as the object of representation
at its current location. In The Children Gone to Poland and Shadow Flowers, the
devices of representation may be strategies of the politics of cinematic representa­
tion that reconstruct meaning by reaching the truth of the object in conjunction
with a new position. Until now, the nature of the border has always been related
to otherness, so it has been perceived as violent, and its location is, of course, the
geopolitical site of the Cold War. This not only refers to the location of the Korean
Peninsula, the last site of the Cold War in the post-Cold War era, but also calls for
the false consciousness of the post-Cold War, which was perhaps overlooked or
tolerated by the Panmunjom Declaration on April 27, 2018. I interrogate and map
how these two documentaries open a new field of contention (agnostics) by assum­
ing the dominant, familiar attitude and perspective in relation to the border.8

The Crevasse of Non-Nationals

The Children Gone to Poland tracks the memories of North Korea’s war orphans
sent to Poland during the Korean War. The Korean War solidified the geopolitical
186 Woohyung Chon

fault line devised by the Cold War as the border between the two Koreas. Never­
theless, we are still blocked by locking the Korean War into a narrow perspective.
North Korea’s war orphan migration project covered by the movie was part of the
history of the Korean War, which created a very important opportunity in the pro­
cess of forming the proletariat solidarity of the people, which was a key concept
within the socialist camp. However, it has rarely been talked about in novels or
movies, or in academic discussions. Since our interest in the Korean War had been
heavily focused on neck-and-neck battles and a frame of ideological confrontation,
there must be a significant portion of history that was forgotten. Still, it is difficult
to alienate memories of the massacre of civilians by their own fellow citizens.
The Children Gone to Poland experiments with the possibility of hospitality while
being aware of the violent nature of the border by talking about events that have
not been recorded or remembered from the Korean War and the history of the inter-
Korean border. The war between the borders, an external area, is a terrible event
in itself because traces of boundaries are engraved at the level of everyday life.
Therefore, discovering and rescuing numerous “border people” scattered at the
most prosaic point is the starting point for true reconciliation and coexistence. The
Children Gone to Poland makes this more problematic, and through a device that
observes and records North Korean defectors, the conflict of the past of the border
area is reproduced and proliferated through current daily life.
The NNSC: Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission DMZ Photo Exhibition
was held at Camp Greaves, a returned U.S. military site in the DMZ, in Octo­
ber 2018, almost at the same time as the preview of The Children Gone to Poland
(Sangmi Chu, 2018) was showing at the Busan International Film Festival. Two
texts both cover North Korean war orphans sent to Poland, with this linked to
present life at the inter-Korean border, which is called the DMZ. The documentary
film The Children Gone to Poland reproduces Polish teachers’ memories of the
eight years that 1,200 North Korean war orphans spent in Poland, while the photo
exhibition represents photographic records of war orphans between migration and
repatriation. What is interesting about the two texts is that they presuppose this his­
tory as a political event that flaunts the friendship between North Korea and social­
ist countries in Eastern Europe, and at the same time evokes the absence or error of
memory. These two texts of the history of North Korea’s war orphans’ migration
to Poland strongly suggest the possibility of error in the division and disconnection
of the inter-Korean border on the Korean Peninsula, beyond the political events
of the Eurasian anti-U.S. front. From the moment they were sent to Poland, the
children’s history was neither recorded nor maintained, while the division of the
inter-Korean border remained a factor in leaving this history incomplete. Although
it is said that they are of North Korean nationality, due to the nature of the ongo­
ing war across boundaries, war orphans have no choice but to prove their uncon­
firmed state at the border at the basic level of identification in daily life, such as
parents or their hometown. The work of revisiting the history of the inter-Korean
border may begin with ironing out the wrinkles of memories and records as well
as finding unrecorded facts. Since the fact that North Korea’s war orphans were
sent to Poland and then back to North Korea was not remembered, the represented
 The Agonistics on the Borders In Between Two Koreas 187

text, created after nearly 70 years, sparks confusion regarding the orphans’ nation­
ality and inter-Korean borders again.
We know at the level of common sense that Korean society during or after the
war sent war orphans abroad, according to the ideological orientation of each of
the two Koreas. Not only has their story been rarely adopted in representational
art such as novels, plays, and movies, but they have also rarely been discussed in
academic journals. Professor Hae-sung Lee of the Department of Korean Studies
at the University of Brotswaw, Poland, coincidentally discovered a Korean monu­
ment while picking up a child who participated in a Korean church event in Pra­
kovice, and analyzed it in the paper “Retracting the footprints of the war-orphans
from North Korea in Poland” (2014).9 Apart from this, studies on the migration and
consignment education of North Korea’s war orphans are limited to two master’s
theses that have investigated sites in Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania.10 In this
situation, there is no way to learn more about North Korea’s war orphans who went
to Poland. Of course, in the 1950s, the socialist realist novel Dom odzyskanego
dziecinstwa (1953) had already been published in Poland, but it has never been
introduced in Korea.
However, this incident is found in contemporary novelist Yŏn-su Kim’s No
Matter How Lonely You Are or Who You Are (2007). Professor Jeong, whom the
main character Jung Min met in Berlin, overhears a waitress at a Berlin restaurant
saying that she dated his friend when she was young. Thousands of North Korean
war orphans migrated to Eastern Europe, including Poland, Hungary, Czechoslo­
vakia, Romania, and Bulgaria, “for the spiritual education of socialism and the
international” (p. 164), and a friend of the waitress was one of the children who
came to Silonsk, Poland. The waitress telling the story hummed the folk song “Bal­
loon Flower,” and the fact that his friend was one of the children who escaped
while being repatriated to the North serves as a narrative opportunity to deeply
intervene in the life of Professor Jeong, an exile from Korea. This rumor that a
North Korean war orphan was there leads to a typical narrative in which Professor
Jeong asks questions about his uncle living in Pyongyang, and eventually contacts
North Koreans and goes to North Korea. As a result, he is sentenced to death under
Park Chung Hee’s Yushin regime and labeled a left-wing figure. The history of
the border between the two Koreas exists everywhere in the form of fragmentary
rumors in the story, and the moment everyone accesses it, their fates are decided by
an irreversible event. The reproduction of such cliches evokes the existence of an
absolute distance, a kind of crevasse that makes the rumor turn a blind eye to the
truth. Therefore, this novel represents a situation in which the absence of records
or false records of events on the border are dangerous to normative history and cul­
tural memory, and even the moment of reproduction is quickly volatilized. Consid­
ering that Kim’s work is a novel serialized in the literary journal Munhak Tongnae
from the winter of 2005 to the spring of 2007, familiar narratives of this unfamiliar
subject matter have important implications for thinking about boundaries.
The history of the inter-Korean border, that is, the story of orphans of the
Korean War sent to Poland, was not remembered or was remembered distortedly
even though it had been reproduced in the past. No matter how popular a writer
188 Woohyung Chon

Kim Yŏn-su is, or the fact that the topic has been covered on TV, it did not become
part of most people’s memories. On June 22, 1992, MBC News reported on North
Korea’s war orphans sent to Poland. Given the anchor’s statement that the video
was first obtained from Charnowo, Poland, it is possible that this report was the
first testimony to this piece of history in South Korean society. Twelve years after
the MBC report, in 2004, the story reappeared on TV. The KBS Wednesday Spe­
cial “Mircioiu, My Husband Is Cho Jung-ho” introduced the affectionate story of
Georgeta Mircioiu, a Romanian grandmother waiting for her husband, whom she
had met at the People’s School of Korea, which served as a bridgehead for North
Korea’s war orphan Eastern Europe migration project. Moreover, the folk song
“Balloon Flower,” which appears at the end of the MBC news report as well as in
Kim’s novel, suggests a mutual textual relationship with Yŏn-su Kim’s 2005–2007
serialized novel.
What about The Children Gone to Poland, which was produced in 2018? It is
encouraging that works putting the history of this border at the forefront of the
narrative appeared simultaneously as documentary films and exhibits. As soon as
the North Korean war orphans dealt with the rumor, they were free from the cliche
narrative that faced different fate. The film and the photo exhibit do not hesitate
to ask questions that were previously considered taboo. However, as the subject
still remains at the level of suspicion, the truth of the rumor also exists only as one
of countless rumors. The truthfulness of rumors or the subculture of truth is more
broadly linked to the unconsciousness of boundaries that have been infiltrated into
our consciousness for a long time. The othering of boundaries not only causes the
boundaries to turn a blind eye to the fact that they have approached our daily lives,
but also to leave anything about those boundaries in an uncertain state.
The Children Gone to Poland was reproduced as a documentary film 14 years
after the KBC TV documentary. Its final production was made possible by a series
of works that came before it. Fourteen years earlier, the TV documentary produc­
tion was possible due to director Chan-wook Park’s suggestion during an over­
seas screening of Old Boy, while the production of The Children Gone to Poland
(2018) was made possible by the Polish novel Skrzydla aniola (Angel Wings),
written by Yolanta Krzovatta, a Polish radio journalist and producer at the Polish
Radio Wrocław, and by the TV documentary “Kim Ki Dok” (2006), which was
screened on Polish TV TVP by playwright Patrick Yoka. In addition, the fact that
the then Polish President Bronisaw Komorovsky, who visited Korea during the
same period, revealed at a Blue House luncheon that his mother was a teacher who
taught music to North Korean orphans for two years from 1955 also served as an
opportunity. In this way, The Children Gone to Poland puts all of us on the border
of the border triggered by the Korean War.
In addition to the release of the film, the Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean
Human Rights published the North Korean Archives Project,11 a document discov­
ered by the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) in 2019. The book confirmed
that North Korea sent 1,500 North Korean children to Poland in 1951 and cited
an article from a Polish Silesian historical journal stating that the number reached
1,720, of whom 1,270 were in a nursery in Pwakowice, Poland. The Citizens’
 The Agonistics on the Borders In Between Two Koreas 189

Alliance for North Korean Human Rights later discovered records of children sent
back to North Korea in Polish government records, including identification cards
containing photos, names, and birthplaces of children, setting the stage for future
discoveries. According to the records, the children were born in 1933–40 and aged
12–19 years at the time. Some children were marked as orphans; some were born
in China but were of North Korean nationality. Joanna Hosaniak, deputy director
of the Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights, also stressed that this
suggests that the children of anti-Japanese armed independence activists may have
been included.12 Some North Korean children, whose parents died during military
activities but were born in China, have also been located, supporting Hosaniak’s
speculation. In particular, some of the North Korean children’s birth records were
confirmed to have names of South Korean regions, such as North Gyeongsang
Province and Gyeongju, cementing the possibility that war orphans from the two
Koreas were mixed and sent to Poland. At the end of 2018, the Alliance released
a North Korean Archives website (northkoreanarchives.org) that allows users to
view data related to North Korea, accumulated by secret intelligence agencies of
the then Polish Communist Party. Deputy Director Hosaniak said,

We hope that the younger generation of Koreans will be able to use the
knowledge related to the history and activities of communist security agen­
cies to investigate facts and support victims by using it to claim the respon­
sibility of North Korea.

She added, “We dedicate this project to the younger generation of the two Koreas
who are interested in the process of pursuing and clarifying the truth and remem­
bering it and implementing justice.”13
Of course, these follow-up discoveries are not necessarily attributed to The
Children Gone to Poland. However, the film actively reproduces the moment when
the inter-Korean border seemed to exist clearly, like the armistice line, the maritime
limit line, and the DMZ, but also the uncertainty it implicates all of our lives. By
bringing up this subject, the documentary makes the audience and visitors uncom­
fortable. This discomfort seems to stem from the ambiguity of the movie, but the
result also makes us encounter a fundamental void that causes us to orbit around the
questions and rumors. At this time, this fundamental void is inherent in the text, yet
at the same time is related to our prejudice or ignorance. One of the primary ques­
tions the film poses is the actual nationality of the children who went to Poland.
We encounter insufficient knowledge of the boundaries at this point. Questions
about whether all war orphans sent to Poland were from North Korea, and rumors
that a large number of South Koreans were included, remind us of our ignorance
of the boundaries or only considering things as overly unilateral and simple. The
children who went to Poland are stateless in a figurative sense, acquiring (non-)
nationality through the event of being sent to Poland and later repatriated to North
Korea. Their non-nationality is related to the movement of the front line during the
war, and their nationality is defined only by the front line of North Korea’s socialist
ideology through the anti-U.S. alliance front in Eastern Europe and Asia. In other
190 Woohyung Chon

words, raising suspicions regarding the origin and nationality of the children sent to
Poland and later repatriated reveals the bare face of the collective ignorance caused
by being wary of boundaries. Finding out that boundaries—which, in their process
of gathering, moving, moving again, or leaving, are never simple—are being cre­
ated, changed, and extinguished is an important point in order for the children who
went to Poland to return permanently. These events comprise a journey in which
we struggle to retrieve accurate memories of the history of mis-established and
mis-recorded boundaries.

North Korean Defectors: The Shadow of Red Complex

If The Children Gone to Poland compiled the records of North Korea’s war orphans
and the narrative of the transfer of North Korean refugee youths shortly after the
Korean War, then Shadow Flowers compiled the narratives of a North Korean
defector, Ryun-hee Kim, and the record of a long-term prisoner who was detained
in South Korea after the Korean War. In the two documentary films, North Korean
youth defectors and non-converted long-term prisoners are methodological devices
that present history and approach the current historical origin, respectively. Youth
defectors are a mirror that projects the present of war orphans who went to Poland,
and long-term prisoners reflect the past and future of North Korean defectors who
are struggling to return. Boundaries and the absence of records and memories of
boundaries are both reflected in these mirrors. Since the four figures showcased in
the films originated from the border between the two Koreas, their lives were selec­
tively recorded and therefore their memories were already destined to exist frag­
mentarily. Interestingly, however, this methodology provides a view that prevents
us from seeing the North Korean war orphans and Ryun-hee Kim’s return strug­
gle, for more than a decade after defection, as exceptional or isolated events. It is
clear that each is an individual life, but it is an important phase that constitutes the
present of the two Koreas, with subjects ranging from war orphans, North Korean
defectors and women, and non-converted long-term prisoners. Nevertheless, the
reality that is not recorded or remembered has a kind of a shock effect. Rather
than focusing on conveying the unfamiliar incidents of a North Korean war orphan
who went to Poland for more than a decade and a North Korean woman who is
struggling to return, the two films point to the fact that these events are inevita­
bly unfamiliar. Therefore, the North Korean defector fighting for return and the
Korean war orphans have a shock-like effect on our perceptions of and approaches
to boundaries. By doing this, these two films link with the imagination of other
contact zones that exist beyond the language of taboos and antagonism, such as
division and ideology.
This shock effect creates cracks in cultural memory by recreating moments
when we all lived a life derived from boundaries and were indifferent to the life
standing on them. In fact, this absence of memory occurs in the process of the pre­
emptive standardization of political or economic records and memories in relation
to boundaries. It is also because historical trauma of war and division have been
entrenched in national memory, but we unconsciously ignored such history and life
 The Agonistics on the Borders In Between Two Koreas 191

on the boundaries. In other words, war within the same community neutralized the
meaning of the border itself, and the ideological border that emerged after the divi­
sion became an absolute other, inaccessible from either side. In the meantime, the
history and life of the border itself were not remembered as much as events beyond
the border, or were misrepresented. What is more problematic is that nobody could
ask anything about this border. In 2018, there was a qualitative shift on the Korean
Peninsula as the last geopolitical border of the Cold War; it became a border area
that opened up an era of reconciliation and coexistence. High-level talks between
the two Koreas and the U.S. and political and business meetings were held fre­
quently at the DMZ, which is in the middle of the geopolitical border. The DMZ,
both the “Demilitarized Zone” and the highest fortress, is also undergoing practi­
cal procedures of demilitarization, and these images have been revealed through
media around the world in real time. However, what we should pay attention to is
the past of the DMZ. This is because, as mentioned earlier, we have been unaware
of or misunderstood it; we have not even been curious about it. We are not aware
of how North Korean defectors live in South Korean society, or how they cannot
endure their hardships and re-migrate to the United States or Western Europe for a
better life.14 Ryun-hee Kim confesses that the most shocking thing she has experi­
enced in South Korean society is the fact that “we are completely unaware of each
other; we know each other from such a distorted perspective to the extent that it is
miserable.”15
The two films come close to restoring the history of the boundaries between the
two Koreas, so as to not allow the prohibition of changes in the present to conceal
the past. In The Children Gone to Poland, North Korean defector Song Lee stands
in the position of an observer and bypasses the position of attention. The observer’s
gaze often overlaps with the camera’s gaze, and Song Lee’s presence even disap­
pears behind the camera. The observer would have been in a deliberate position
to capture Song Lee’s view of the war orphans who went to Poland, but Song Lee
was able to conceal herself by standing in that position. In this way, the observer’s
gaze and concealment of her presence are exceptional to South Korean society,
and there is a good possibility that it is an unconscious foreign being stirred by the
North Korean defector’s inner side. As soon as Song Lee’s psychological defense
mechanism begins to function as an exceptional and heterogeneous being, the film
cannot talk about her. The relationship between the director, Sangmi Chu, and Song
Lee remains calm throughout the movie, but in the end, they frequently bump into
each other when trying to put the defector narrative at the center of the story. If the
position of the observer, as occupied by Song Lee in the movie, was a place to hide
her existence, then at least the position of the observer to the North Korean defector
in reality is languid or alienated. Most people in South Korean society turn a blind
eye to her position; they do not know much about North Korean defectors, nor do
they want to learn more. In addition to the intentional device used to place North
Korea’s war orphans in the present, the position of Song Lee as an observer in The
Children Gone to Poland mediates the non-contact zone of North Korean defectors
in South Korean society. The contradiction of those who cross boundaries thereby
becoming a border is a reality that exists strictly for North Korean defectors. In
192 Woohyung Chon

this case, how is it possible to liberate North Korean defectors from this borderless
state of contact?
The documentary film Shadow Flowers, however, returns North Korean defec­
tors to being an active object of the gaze. Shadow Flowers was first screened at
the DMZ International Documentary Film Festival in 2019 and won Best Picture
among Korean competitors. The film had already won the grand prize in the Asian
Vision Competition category at the 12th Taiwan International Documentary Film
Festival and was invited to the 2020 Hot Docs International Documentary Film
Festival World Showcase Program, to receive favorable reviews. The movie is
about Ryun-hee Kim, who defected from North Korea in 2011 and requested repa­
triation as soon as she entered South Korea. She seems to have thought of her
defection as a kind of smuggling, a way to earn money from South Korea and
return to North Korea. During the actual defection process, Ryun-hee Kim found
that defection was different from what she had imagined and expressed her inten­
tion to give up, but claimed that she was forcibly defected by a group of North
Korean defectors who were concerned about security exposure. Considering her
activities in South Korea after defection, such as refusal of South Korean citizen­
ship, smuggling, passport forgery, false confession of espionage, self-harm, and
the fact that she claimed that she was a “people of Democratic People’s Republic
of Korea” and “citizen of Pyongyang” in lectures and the media, and her constant
appeal to the North Korean art troupe and Pyeongchang Olympics visitors in 2018
for repatriation, it is likely that Kim was forced to defect. The fact that she moved
to China to pay for and receive treatment when she suffered from cirrhosis and
could not be treated in North Korea, that her husband worked as a doctor at a hos­
pital at Kim Chaek University of Technology in Pyongyang, and that her daughter
received higher education also make her claim seem valid to some extent. Above
all, it is possible that her defection was influenced by the transnational living envi­
ronment16 and national network formed at the border area between North Korea
and China rather than by her individual will.17
That does not, however, mean that this chapter is trying to test the authenticity
of her claims. Rather, the fact that the authenticity cannot be measured is the core
of this case. For Kim, who had to pay for treatment and living expenses in China
while she was ill, South Korea was a suitable place to realize better economic prof­
its than China, and it is possible that she expected national hospitality.18 Even so,
it is fundamentally indeterminate, as it is not possible to take legal action equiva­
lent to the act, and it was an illegal border movement, even if not defection. This
uncertainty is the essence of her struggle for defection and return. Ironically, the
fact that she still has not crossed the boundaries between the two Koreas makes
Kim’s defection not actually defection. Shadow Flowers represents her crossing
the boundaries all the time, and the struggle for return is its starting point. Due
to this reproduction strategy, her defection is replaced by her state before cross­
ing the border. The movie is cold-hearted towards making her story known to the
world. To be sure, it is not the romanticized story of a person who desires to defect
from North Korea due to her illness and come to South Korea to earn medical
expenses. So, her struggle for return, which is introduced in the video, translates to
 The Agonistics on the Borders In Between Two Koreas 193

the North–South struggle, strictly speaking. The film focuses on her position at the
border by persistently tracking situations where even the simplest systems, such as
the issuance of passports needed to go to North Korea, do not work. The film main­
tains a certain distance while capturing each and every word and action of Ryun­
hee Kim, who constantly faces conflict in South Korean society. Paradoxically, she
claims herself in a rather radical tone in the movie, so she often quarrels. This is
why she is represented on a still border between strict control and disconnection.
Although documentary films about North Korean defectors are rare, Ryun-hee
Kim keeps an extreme distance from the North Korean defector’s defense mecha­
nism against the gaze of others in South Korean society. The camera of Shadow
Flowers contemplates her attitude rather than shooting close-ups. Here, the film
explicitly reveals a form and trend of documentary films. The film aims to face
the truth in the form of direct cinema, allowing the event to flow without interfer­
ence. Therefore, the film captures her desperate actions and events in her strug­
gle to return, such as infiltration of the Vietnamese embassy in South Korea for
asylum and contact with the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics athletes, from a
relatively long distance. This distancing and silencing of the camera strongly show
Ryun-hee Kim’s lethargy, and at the same time gradually move her to a certain
border and situate her presence on that border from North Korean defectors. This
cinematic device deviates from portraying Ryun-hee Kim as the foreign object of
“North Korean defectors” and discovers the individual identity of boundaries and
people on those boundaries. The border is the geopolitical border of the Cold War,
and Ryun-hee Kim is a person standing on the border. Ryun-hee Kim represents the
contact zone in that she entered South Korean society with boundaries engraved on
her body rather than crossing the border. The film uses a voiceover of the director
reading Kim’s trial records from the beginning, and the provisions of the National
Security Act, which frequently appear, to show Kim’s embodiment of the border.
Interestingly, however, South Korean society is also placed on this border through
the frame of the film, which distances itself from Kim. The conflict between Kim
and the people around her, caught by a camera tracking Kim, does not cross any
boundaries and records the events they all face on the boundaries. For instance,
the scene of Ryun-hee Kim looking at a car with the phrase “anti-communism and
extinction” imprinted on it is impressive because it creates a new moment of cul­
tural memory about the North–South border. Now, the inter-Korean border exists
in various places in a fluid form rather than only as a geopolitical border.19
Shadow Flowers becomes the archive of signs of boundaries as revealed by
Ryun-hee Kim’s everyday life. It records the legacy of the Cold War in the post-
Cold War era. After the dissolution of the communist camp in the late 1980s, in
1993, the Korean government began to distance itself from the Cold War perspec­
tive on North Korean defectors, but the difference in time between the system
and daily life remains. Movies reveal institutions that are stingy about granting
freedom to those who cross boundaries in search of cultural, political, or economic
freedom. Shadow Flowers starts with Ryun-hee Kim, who works in a rural fac­
tory. Subsequently, word spreads that she is a North Korean defector and is under
protective supervision for violating the National Security Act through a phone call
194 Woohyung Chon

with an inspector in which she omitted information about her prior visits to other
regions. Kim complains to public officials over the phone, saying that due to her
probation period, if she fails to meet their working hours, she will be fired from this
workplace as well. However, the opening scene of the movie is not much different
from the general appearance of North Korean defectors. Rental housing and basic
living expenses provided to North Korean defectors are the highest boundaries
faced by North Korean defectors. This border is the gateway that leads defectors to
become individuals under social protection rather than members of South Korean
society, and it shows that their predicament of being stranded on the border is
ignored or forgotten by South Korean society.
The movie further suggests that the ability to move freely that is enjoyed by
North Korean defectors who enter South Korea is a benefit earned as a result of
accepting numerous obligations. The moment that Kim denies her defection from
North Korea and insists on returning home goes against the conditions of North
Korean defectors as recognized by the South Korean government. Thereby, her
movement is extremely restricted. Throughout the movie, the problem of refusal
to issue the passport necessary to enter the North from abroad after departure is
important; fortunately, the passport is issued due to the administrative change of
the South Korean government in 2017, but the movie ends with the ban not lifted.
Instead of following Kim, who walks into downtown Seoul, the film ends with the
juxtaposition of camera stopping and a voiceover for conversation about the return
with her daughter in 2015, when the filming began overlapped, representing the
indefinite suspension of her return home.
The ending scene of the movie reflects her fate as a disoriented, long-term
prisoner. The movie frequently exposes Ryun-hee Kim, who continues her life
in South Korea as an unconverted long-term prisoner. Kim and the unconverted
long-term prisoner are both victims of the Cold War system in the era of division
and victims of anti-communist ideology, which is still dominant in South Korea.
In particular, the “Red Complex,” which is purported to be of bygone days, still
prominently exists in South Korean society. The film records interviews, lectures,
and street demonstrations by Ryun-hee Kim. In the struggle to defend herself and
return to North Korea, she is embroiled in unfair rumors such as being a spy or
scammer, and is constantly in conflict with others. The clashes she has stem from
a variety of reasons, such as her praise for North Korea and its propaganda mecha­
nisms, providing camouflage to protect the remaining families or providing aid to
them, betraying the South Korean government’s special social benefits and finan­
cial aid, and struggling to escape her inferior position. Even if these are words that
usually appear in disputes with audiences who are sympathetic to her position,
they are not fundamentally different from the words “Go back to North Korea!”
hurled by people passing by her street demonstration. The perception of North
Korean defectors in South Korea is formalized as hospitality, but this is linked to
signs of the collapse of the North Korean system, such as returning soldiers, and
bears traces of Cold War relations.20 Like North Korea, which appears in the rheto­
ric of North Korean defectors since the Cold War, North Korean defectors are
destined to disappear soon.21 The best life, which often appears in anthropological
 The Agonistics on the Borders In Between Two Koreas 195

reports on the life of North Korean defectors in South Korea, requires preventing
their identity from being revealed to those around them, or even to other defec­
tors. In the end, Ryun-hee Kim reveals that South Korean society’s hospitality for
North Korean defectors is in the shadow of the Red Complex. Shadow Flowers
is a journey towards the border of South Korean society where North Korean
defectors cultivate their lives and prove their existence, and people indifferent to
this coexistence. The reality that Shadow Flowers faces while watching Kim as
an event is that of the border between the post-Cold War, the Cold War, hospital­
ity, and the hatred referred to as the Red Complex. Therefore, the ending scene
of Ryun-hee Kim, who walks into the city of Seoul, represents the imagination of
a different contact zones that go beyond the taboos and hostility of division and
ideological conflict.

Conclusion
This chapter attempted to confirm the composition and transformation of cultural
memories of the inter-Korean borders and boundaries as captured in documentary
films after the Panmunjom Declaration, which included consultations on the end
of the war plan in April 2018. The Children Gone to Poland and Shadow Flowers
carry out politics of cinematic representation that create a new moment of cultural
memory about borders, which are normatively standardized by indifference and
hostility. The two documentary films place the camera on the border of the Cold
War, which was not recorded, or was mis-recorded, on one side of the border,
thereby connecting the past and the present. Captured in the cracks of fragmented
and cracked boundaries is the effectiveness of the post-Cold War era. The two
films archive the time and space and events of the Cold War that filled the period
called the post-Cold War. Both films question the nationality granted to orphans
of war and the hospitality of South Korean society to North Korean defectors.
Questions such as whether all war orphans repatriated to North Korea after mov­
ing to Poland were born in North Korea make us face the history concealed by the
situation of division. They are non-nationals in the dimension of being stateless, or
multinational depending on the position of the border, and thus disrupt the borders
that have continued since the Cold War. However, the struggle of North Korean
migrants to return to North Korea reveals the indifference and hostility of South
Korean society, confirming the Red Complex, which exists as a shadow of hospi­
tality for North Korean defectors. In this way, the two films invite us to confront
the history of the border through war orphans or to acknowledge that the border has
expanded infinitely through an individual of ambiguous identity such as a North
Korean defector.
The history of boundaries and borders has always been absent, concealed, or
even manipulated due to the universal nature of othering or marginalization. In
fact, due to the history of division and conflict experienced by the boundaries
between the two Koreas, no historical data have approached it alone. Therefore,
the memory of representing the history of the border between the two Koreas
has more meaning than just a means of supplementing feed. Memories of the
196 Woohyung Chon

history of borders may evoke the existence of something concealed between the
two Koreas or suggest directions for integrated historical narratives beyond the
borders. This chapter responds to the need to start with discovering the history of
borders and contacts that were not recorded or remembered in either the South or
the North before the inter-Korean history and reconciling disagreements. The two
documentary films covered in this chapter mediate a kind of shock effect. This is
related to dismantling the audience’s customary thoughts and senses, as in Benja­
min’s point of view. It is hoped that this approach will examine the gap between
the history of the border between the two Koreas and the texts reproducing it and
identify the fundamental cause of the difference. The gap is usually considered
to be related to the parallax of memory, but the possibility that it originated from
the nature of the border cannot be overlooked. Therefore, this chapter can be seen
as a process of approaching the reality of the history of borders. The border is the
order of strict discipline and control itself, but paradoxically, it is also an event
that constantly proves its delay and absence. In order to make up for delayed and
absent discipline and control, boundaries create representations that cannot be
returned to before. As I hope I have shown, in the process, the border rises verti­
cally from a fixed position, but it is also the point where it meets other boundaries
while moving.
Since 2018, the representation of inter-Korean borders and boundaries has
focused on meeting and exchange rather than division and control. The two films
were a discovery of indifference, hostility, and even taboos. This strategy of
politics of cinematic representation re-recognizes the border between the two
Koreas as a gateway to dialogue and coexistence, that is, contact zones, instead
of leaving it as a barrier of disconnection and separation. This chapter aimed to
examine the fragmented and cracked points presented in the documentary films
The Children Gone to Poland and Shadow Flowers, and to demonstrate that this
is linked to the location of the border between the two Koreas on the Korean Pen­
insula and our position on the border. This inter-Korean border was the object
of unconscious neglect due to the trauma of war and division, but it was also a
geopolitical border of the Cold War that evoked our indifference. The two films
move the contact zones from the border to everyday life. War orphans, North
Korean defectors, and unconverted long-term prisoners in the films are figures
that carry events caused by boundaries into our daily lives. They clearly show
that we stand on the border with them, and this cracks the cultural memory that
has determined our attitude toward boundaries. The two texts, which arrived late
considering their topics, questioned whether the children who went to Poland
were North Korea’s war orphans and examine the sincerity of hospitality offered
to North Korean defectors, providing an opportunity to reorganize the nature and
history of the border. Boundaries are not fixed, but moving, and these two films
suggest that it is the new meaning of the border to be read in such a way as to
uncover some truth that history is thus imprinted on the body moving along the
border, and this truth ultimately represents contact zones that exist beyond the
language of taboo and hostility.
 The Agonistics on the Borders In Between Two Koreas 197

Notes
1 Refer to Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des Lulturel­
len Gesdächtnisses (The Space of Memory: The Form of Cultural Memories and Their
Transformation), trans. Hak-soo Byun, Yeon-suk Chae (Seoul: Greenbi, 2011).
2 Refer to Mary Louise Pratt, Emperial Eyes: Writing and Transculturation, trans. Nam­
hyuk Kim (Hyeonsil Munwha, 2015).
3 Turner, who approached research on border areas through the establishment process of
the United States, defines the border area as an open space for expansion and change
and a mobile place under continuous formation. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier
in American History, trans. Byung-kwon Sohn (Somyung Chulpan, 2020).
4 Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, Border as Method, or the Multiplication of Labor,
trans. Changsoo Nam (Galmuri, 2021), 43.
5 Refer to Yong-gu Cha, “From Borders (Grenze) to Contact Zones (Kontaktzone)―A
Study of 20th Century Germany’s West Borders.” Joongangsaron 47 (2018): 299–335,
Institute of Historical Studies, Chung-Ang University.
6 Refer to Walter Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzier­
barkeit, trans. Sungman Choi (Seoul: Gil Chulpansa, 2007).
7 A. K. Henrikson, “Border Regions as Neighbourhoods,” in The Ashgate Research Com­
panion to Border Studies, edited by D. Wastl-Walter (Surry: Ashgate Publisher, 2011).
8 Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically, trans. Jeong-yeon Suh
(Nanjang, 2020).
9 Refer to Hae-sung Lee, “Retracing the Footprints of the War-Orphans from North Korea
in Poland,” in The Central and East European Society of Koreanology Collection of
Papers on Academic Conferences, The Central and East European Society of Koreanol­
ogy, 2014, 5.
10 In 2017, “Friendship Politics Within the Socialist Camp in the Early Cold War” (Ruzsa
Katalin) and “People’s Solidarity and North Korean Aid Between Socialist Countries in
the Early Cold War” (Daniel Rupanov) were submitted simultaneously at the Depart­
ment of East Asia at Sungkyunkwan University.
11 Joanna Hosaniak, Rafał Leskiewicz, Citizens’Alliance for North Korean Human Rights.
“North Korean Archives Project,” trans. Ji-yoon Lee. Life and Human Rights, 2019.
12 Refer to Joanna Hosaniak, “Personal Files of Korean War Orphans Residing in Poland
and of American and British Prisoners of Korean War,” North Korean Archives Project
Homepage, October 21, 2021.
13 https://northkoreanarchives.org/about/about-archives/ (2021.10.21.)
14 Refer to Myung-kyu Park, Byung-ro Kim, Soo-am Kim, Young-hoon Song, and Woon­
chul Yang, North Korean Diaspora (Seoul: Institute for Peace and Unification Studies,
Seoul National University, 2011); Hee-young Lee, “Post-Division and Actor-Network
of International Migration: Case Study on the Life and Human Rights of ‘Traveling’
North Korean Refugees,” Journal of the Korean Association of North Korea Studies,
Korean Association of North Korea Studies (2013): 355–93.
15 Ryun-hee Kim, “The Experience of a North Korean Woman in the South” and “Women
and Peace,” Korea Institute for Women and Peace 6 (2020): 183.
16 It refers not to official agreements or diplomacy and rather to networks or ongoing
exchanges maintained across borders between actors (non-state actors), not between
countries (Steven Vertovec, Transnationalism (New York: Routledge, 2009), 3, pp. 21–6).
17 Sung-kyung Kim pays attention to the long-established transnational and national
network of communities on the border between North Korea and China (Sung-kyung
Kim, “Experiencing North Korea-China Borderland and Routes of Mobility: ‘Border
Crossing’ of North Korean Border-Crossers and the Expanding of Transnational Ethnic
Spaces,” Space and Environment 22, no. 2 (The Korean Association of Space and Envi­
ronment Research, 2012): 114–58.
198 Woohyung Chon

18 Byung-ho Chung identifies North Korean defectors’ drive for migration as economic
reasons and expectations of their superior position over other Korean migrant groups,
including citizenship, settlement fees and residence facilities, settlement education, and
employment support. (Byung-ho Chung, “Cold War Politics and Penetrant Transna­
tional Strategies of North Korean Migrants,” Modern North Korea Studies 17, no. 1
(The Simyeon Institute for North Korean Studies, University of North Korean Studies):
50–2.)
19 E. Balibar argued for the advent of an era in which borders do not exist as a line in
standardized specific areas or on a map but are mobile through examples of borders
in various forms in diverse areas such as daily life, imagination, and reproduction.
(E. Balibar, “The Borders of Europe,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond
the Nation, edited by P. Cheah and B. Robbins, trans. K. Swenson (London and Min­
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 216–33.)
20 Byung-Ho Chung, “Between Defector and Migrant: Identities and Strategies of North
Koreans in South Korea,” Korean Studies 32, no. 1 (2008): 1–27.
21 Refer to Byung-ho Chung, Woo-taek Jeon, and Jinkyung Chung, Welcome to Korea:
North Koreans’ Life in South Korea (Seoul: Hanyang University Publishers, 2006).

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 The Agonistics on the Borders In Between Two Koreas 199

Foreign Works
Assmann, Aleida. Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des Lulturellen Ges­
dächtnisses [The Space of Memory: The Form of Cultural Memories and Their Transfor­
mation], trans. Hak-soo Byun and Yeon-suk Chae. Seoul: Greenbi, 2011.
Balibar, E. “The Borders of Europe.” In Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the
Nation, edited by P. Cheah and B. Robbins, trans. K. Swenson, 216–33. London; Min­
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.
Benjamin, Walter. Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, trans.
Sungman Choi. Seoul: Gil Chulpansa, 2007.
Chung, Byung-Ho. “Between Defector and Migrant: Identities and Strategies of North Koreans
in South Korea.” Korean Studies (University of Hawaii Press) 32, no. 1 (2008): 1–27.
Henrikson, A. K. “Border Regions as Neighbourhoods.” In The Ashgate Research Compan­
ion to Border Studies, edited by D. Wastl-Walter. Surry: Ashgate Publisher, 2011.
Mezzadra, Sandro, and Brett Neilson. Border as Method, or the Multiplication of Labor,
trans. Changsoo Nam. Seoul: Galmuri, 2021.
Mouffe, Chantal. Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically, trans. Jeong-yeon Suh. Seoul:
Nanjang, 2020.
Pratt, Mary Louise. Emperial Eyes: Writing and Transculturation, trans. Nam-hyuk Kim.
Seoul: Hyeonsil Munwha, 2015.
Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Frontier in American History, trans. Byung-kwon Sohn.
Seoul: Somyung Chulpan, 2020.
Vertovec, Steven. Transnationalism. New York: Routledge, 2009.
12 A Walk Into History With Kim
Hong-joon
Hong-joon Kim and Seung-Ah Lee

I met and interviewed Kim Hong-joon, who calls himself a cinephile. Kim is, with­
out question, one of the most appropriate persons to interview on the history of
Korean cinema. He depicts a history that is not just fragmented but also composite
and alive. The Korean film market was arguably dominated by Hollywood films
during the 1960s and 1970s, the era of military dictatorship. To protect the Korean
film market, the government launched a system of regulation under which movie
production companies should produce Korean films to obtain permits to import
foreign films, mostly Hollywood films. For that reason, most Korean films were
produced with the low budgets and poor quality. Yet, Korean movies were not com­
pletely shunned by movie goers. Occasionally, good movies were produced, and
Kim went to see Korean movies with his parents during his childhood. However,
French films put up a good fight by targeting a niche market, and Kim enjoyed
these films, even during his schooldays. He internalised these experiences.
In the 1980s, Korea was engrossed in the issue of democratisation. Eventu­
ally, the final curtain was drawn down the military government, and a new era
of civilian government began in 1993. This was when Kim Hong-joon directed
his first movie. Towards the end of the 1990s, Korea moved into a new IT indus­
trial age. Through this transition, Kim experienced an unfamiliar movie industrial
system, a transition period from the old apprentice system to a new, modernised
production system. He also witnessed the political nature of the film industry under
the Screen Quarter System during a major crisis in the contemporary Korean film
industry. Kim has had multi-directional experiences in filmography as a veteran
and observer. Kim is currently a professor of film directing and screenwriting at
the Korea National University of Arts. He was once a director, directing two com­
mercial feature films in two different production systems, an author and film critic,
and an executive member of the Korean Film Council, managing the first fantastic
film festival (Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival) in Korea. Interview­
ing Kim will lead us to a better understanding of Korean film history.

Q: You have played many roles as a cinephile. How do you locate your position
in the history of Korean films?
Kim: In my teenage years, I was a kind of model student, and my only devia­
tion was movies. When I was a college student in 1970s, I started making

DOI: 10.4324/9781003279013-16
 A Walk Into History With Kim Hong-joon 201

amateur 8mm films with my friends. But, when my friends joined the army,
I stopped making 8mm films. Later, I joined the group Yallashyeong, a
movie club of Seoul National University students who made 8mm films.
There were some movie clubs in universities at that time, but none of them
made films. To the best of my knowledge, there were students who made
films in the film and theatre departments in universities but not in the clubs.
Therefore, we identified our club as a creative group instead of a film review
or film theory club. Afterwards, I went to the U.S. to study visual anthro­
pology, so maybe [you could have called me a] ‘half-cinephile’? I wrote
about the movies after I returned to Korea. I quit my studies as an ABD,
All_But_Dissertation (laugh), and wrote about movies under the penname
Gu Hoe-young. I did not mean to get involved in the film industry at first.
I just loved movies.
Q: I heard you really loved to watch French films when you were a high school
student.
K: That’s right. Since high school. Mostly at the Centre Culturel Françaìs in
Seoul. However, I didn’t think of making films back then. It was just my
hobby.
Q: However, that’s not what ordinary high school students typically do, right?
K: Right. I went to Kyunggi High School in the 1970s, and there was the Cen­
tre Culturel Françaìs right in front of the high school. I passed by the place
every day on the way to school. I was learning French back then for my
second foreign language requirement. German was somewhat too stiff, so
I was learning French. One day, I saw a poster saying that there would be a
French film screening. So, out of curiosity, I went to see that movie alone.
I think it was one of the early Nouvelle Vague films by Godard or Truf­
faut. It was fun, so I just kept coming back to watch movies. It was like a
deviation from being a model student, not doing what everyone else was
doing. In the early 70s, it seemed that there were mainly Hollywood films
in Korean cinemas. French films, which cast actors like Alain Delon, had
their own niche in the film market. Movies I saw at the Centre Culturel
Françaìs were shocking to me. I watched many Korean movies when I was
a child, like Sad Story of the Self-Supporting Child (1965). Being able to
watch movies was an important diversion of the middle class in Seoul. It
was a cultural activity. My father liked Western films, while my mother
enjoyed melodramas. I went to watch movies with them, so I actually have
more memories about movie theatres like Daehan Cinema than about the
movies themselves. I was born in the 1950s, which means I belong to the
first generation that grows up with the television and the last generation to
experience the old-style grand movie theatres. I liked movies, but I never
thought of making them my occupation.
Q: You began to write about movies when you returned to Korea after graduat­
ing Temple University in the USA. What are those writings about?
K: I didn’t write to gain work as a professional in the film industry. Back then,
there was no word like ‘cinephile’, but in any case, as a movie lover, it was
202 Seung-Ah Lee

like a kind of hobby. I still remember that, when I was at Temple University,
I used to go to the library and read magazines like Film Comment and Sight
and Sound in the periodicals section whenever I wanted to take a break or
rest. If you have to read those magazines because of your major or research,
then it would have felt like studying. However, for me, it was leisure. Even
now, whenever I want a break, I read books or watch DVDs, although that
is considered work for film professionals. Anyway, I read those magazines
since watching movies was my only hobby. After I read about Jim Jar­
musch, I went to a theatre to watch Stranger Than Paradise (1984) and
felt the atmosphere of that theatre as well. If Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel
said, ‘Two Thumbs Up!’, then I would watch the movie. All these kinds of
experiences piled up in my life, and my writings about those experiences
were published in 1991 titled, Two or Three Things You Want to Know About
Movies. My selection of resources and my perspectives on movies might
have been interesting and fresh to readers in Korea at that time. Some say
that I am a movie critic, but I’m not. I never was. I just wrote about what
I saw, felt, and heard about movies as a movie lover. I wrote articles for a
year without doing anything else. I wrote about 20 pages of magazine arti­
cles per month.
There were not many things I could do after I quit school. I realised after
spending a year writing about films that filmmaking might be my only occu­
pational choice. I wanted to have professional experience in the field. There
were actually several occasions where I could have been involved in the
movie industry. For example, I met director Lee Jang-ho when I was a col­
lege student. However, for some reason, I avoided all opportunities to work
in the movie industry.
Many college students watched movies, but there were not many col­
lege students who watched Korean films like myself. I watched most of the
director Im Kwon-taek’s films. I watched many of his films in the 80s in
theatres. I wanted to work on director Im’s team and learn from him. I didn’t
want to become a director back then. I was fully satisfied with being a new
member of Im Kwon-taek’s team.
Q: As a fan?
Kim: Yes, as a fan, and he also gave me the feeling that even a person like me
can work in the Korean film scene. Director Im was that kind of figure for
my generation. In other words, it’s slightly off topic, but we are kind of
orphan generation in terms of movies. My generation was involved in film,
not because we loved Korean films, but rather because we were attracted to
foreign films. Therefore, we didn’t have much interaction with older Korean
filmmakers. We thought that we had no such traditions or teachers to learn
from. Moreover, if we looked at the Korean film industry one step closer
or deeper, we only saw the negative sides. There were no role models or
masters we could look up to, and we found corruption and misery as we
got closer. The only exception seemed to be Im Kwon-taek. If there were
no Im Kwon-taek, then it would be more difficult for us to enter the Korean
 A Walk Into History With Kim Hong-joon 203

film industry. For such reasons, I joined Im Kwon-taek’s directing team and
began to follow this path.
Q: When did you become an assistant director?
Kim: In 1991, with Gae-Byuk: Fly High Run Far.
Q: Weren’t you afraid of becoming involved? Back then, working in the movie
industry was not considered a proper job.
K: It was a disgrace to the family, as if you were an incompetent person.
According to superiors who worked in the film industry in the 60s, the
field was like an area of extraterritorial jurisdiction; few of the staff mem­
bers served in the army because the draft notice could not be delivered
to any fixed address. Once the staff members reached a certain age, they
were exempted from military service. Therefore, many of them didn’t go
into the army. They said, like a joke, when they made war films in the 70s,
there were many government-sponsored films in which real soldiers par­
ticipated, but none of the staff members had experience in the real army
except those who had participated in the Korean War in the 50s.
Q: You debuted as a director in 1994. Was this a quick progression?
K: It was neither fast nor late. I worked in the industry for only three years.
However, I completed four films during that period. Today, making four
films might take up to ten years. Moreover, I joined Im’s team as an appren­
tice without any experience, and I climbed the ladder. I was not actually
ready to debut and did not even have a strong will. So, I feel sorry about
that. If I had made two more films with director Im, it would have been bet­
ter. I would have more stuff to talk about to my students now (laughter).
Q: Or you would have continuously worked as a director until now. You debuted
as a director with the film A Rosy Life (La Vie en Rose) in 1994. Around that
time, ‘reminiscences’ was a keyword even in literature depicting the guilty
feelings of survivors who went through turmoil of democratisation move­
ment of the 1980s. Did such trends affect your choice of motif?
K: If we look at it objectively, it can be seen as a ‘reminiscence’. The movie
was made in 1994, depicting the 1980s. But I actually made that film to
escape the discourse of ‘reminiscence’, a literary trend of that time. I chose a
comic book rental shop as the background space and included some aspects
of genre. I wanted to get out of the cliché ‘reminiscence’.
Q: The comic book rental shop is a very interesting space. Not only did college
students and labour workers participate in the democratisation movement,
but most people named minjung were involved in 1987. It was the huge cur­
rent that drew June 29 Declaration. However, most people who gathered in
that rental shop were outsiders who did not participate in the movement and
were excluded from the huge flow of history. Did you have actual models
for these people?
K: In the case of the novelist, Kim Young-ha is the example. He wrote a mar­
tial art story, but his book was banned because it indirectly criticised the
government.
Q: Is that right? Why did you focus on those outsiders?
204 Seung-Ah Lee

K: It might sound too academic, but the movie was made by a man who snooped
around the field of anthropology. Thus, the sentiment might be [based on it.]
Q: But you were not in Korea in the 1980s.
K: That’s right. When I was in Korea, I didn’t participate in the democratisation
movement. Of course, I was opposed to the dictatorship. While I was in the
U.S., I was just one of those people who did not actively participate in poli­
tics, but while reading books about freedom and democracy, I was always
concerned about Korea with a liberal mind. If I were in Korea, then I might
have a better description. However, I might also have certain limitations in
representation. It could be much more difficult to describe the Korea I had
experienced. I could imagine it from either perspective.
Q: Did you know that the comic book rental shop played such a role at that
time? How did you find out?
K: Some people I know entered factories as menial workers to help the labour
movement, hiding their high education background at that time. They told
me that they used to use the late-night comic book rental shop when they
were on the run from the police. It was the safest place for them. The late-
night rental shop was illegal anyway; they ran the shop with corrupt con­
nections with the police. Thus, the police wouldn’t search that place and
would notify them in advance if they had to search for the place. The rental
shop was the cheapest place for workers to stay overnight. Moreover, the
most interesting part was that people stayed in the rental shop and didn’t
bother to get to know each other. As a bonus, the rental showed pornogra­
phy videos at night (laughter). Therefore, I thought the rental shop was a
very interesting place.
I’m one of the last group of directors who debuted through the Chung­
muro’s apprentice system. As you climb up the ladder, you finally reach the
first A.D. (assistant director) position. If you become the first A.D., then
people begin to address you as ‘Director’. Once you joined the directing
team, you could stay as long as you wanted. However, once you reach the
highest level, you have to decide whether you debut as a director or leave
the team. Thus, becoming the first A.D. was like drinking poisoned wine.
Director Im once mentioned in an interview that the greatest concern he had
when he debuted as a director was a financial issue. If you remain the first
A.D., you get paid relatively well. But [he worried] how he could sustain
himself if a movie [he directed] flopped (laughter). He made his debut film
while he was worried. I got that feeling too. Becoming the first A.D. means
you are qualified to make a debut. So, once you become the first A.D., you
must prepare: writing screenplays or buying movie rights for fiction. Things
like that. If the producer asks you, you are expected to show what you have
prepared. Some first A.D.s prepared more than one screenplay in each
genre. But I wasn’t ready at all. There were so many things to do as the first
A.D. of director Im, so I didn’t have time to prepare. Director Im always
worked with the best staff, actors, and actresses. I wanted to be on the best
team. He did all the hard work, and I enjoyed following him and being on
 A Walk Into History With Kim Hong-joon 205

that team (laugh). Anyway, I wasn’t ready, and as you know, Seopyeonje
(1993) was a huge success. I was the first A.D. in the preproduction of The
Taebaek Mountains (1994), but the production schedule was delayed. It was
the end of the Roh Tae Woo regime, and we got a threatening call from some
government agency saying not to make a movie that was too ‘red’.
Q: But the book is not ‘red’?
K: Back then, the book was banned, and during Park Geun Hye’s regime it
was banned from the military library. However, the production company
said that it would not make it. And I don’t know whether it’s true or not,
but the company replied, since there would be a presidential election soon,
‘We’ll see whether you’ll remain in that position, but we’ll be here forever’
(laughter). Anyway, they got scared, so they postponed the production of
The Taebaek Mountains. Meanwhile they also made Seopyeonje. The civil
government was established, and President Kim Young Sam also watched
the movie. More than 1M people saw the movie at a single cinema. It was a
mega hit. I thought we would get into the production of The Taebaek Moun­
tains after the success of Seopyeonje, but one day, director Im, Lee Tae-won
(CEO of Taeheung Pictures), and I were in a car, and Lee asked me my age.
I told him I was 37. He told director Im that I should debut. I was in the
highest position under director Im, so I needed consent from him. Im also
said I should. They asked me if I had prepared anything, and I said, ‘noth­
ing’. They thought that it was ridiculous (laughter).
From the next day on, I sat in director Jang Sun-woo’s former office.
There were several offices that directors used at Taeheung Pictures at that
time. Im used the largest one, while the other directors used offices tem­
porarily while they were making movies. Once they finished the filming,
they left the office. The room was about 20–30 square feet, and I began
to agonise about the movie I should make in that room. Lee said, ‘Let me
know when you’re ready’. I should provide a synopsis within a single page
before I proceed and present it to him. This was similar to the pitching
process, although we didn’t have such a system back then. We just knew
that process by nature. If Lee approved the synopsis, we would proceed to
create the movie.
First, I thought about adapting a novel, and one of my acquaintances
introduced Yuk Sang-hyo to me. He was a reporter at The Daily Sports at
that time, who had great interest in the movie. We were two newbies trying
to put our heads together, like ‘dumb and dumber’. When we were ready, we
told Lee about the synopsis. After he heard it, he declined the idea, saying,
‘It won’t work!’ We agonised about what he would prefer.
Q: So, should the film be changed to make it perfectly palatable to the producer?
K: Yes. This is similar to the Hollywood mogul system. There were no market­
ing strategies. They just filmed what the producer wanted to make. This is
a completely old system. He was a producer and an investor: a king! I was
rejected five to six times in three or four months, and I came up with this
comic book rental shop story. This trend was similar to that of Marriage
206 Seung-Ah Lee

Story (1992). However, mine was a stock story with 80s political activists
and a comic book rental shop. I didn’t expect he would like it, but I just
tried it out. It was sour grapes. Guess what? He liked it. A Rosy Life was
the working title. We thought about several other titles such as The Comic
Book Rental Shop Story, Story of Day and Night, or Return of Him and Her,
but none of them worked well. While I studied abroad, I visited Korea in
1987. I felt awkward in Seoul at that time. I went to the U.S. in 1982, so
I was visiting after five years. I flew back to my hometown, but the social
atmosphere and culture were different. Interestingly, I noticed that there
were many cafes with names like Rosy Life. This was very impressive. That
was the image of Korea in 1987, and the movie was set in 1987. Therefore,
I decided to name the movie A Rosy Life. It was also named after a famous
French song, La Vie en Rose. Many people opposed that title. They said it
sounded like the title of an erotic film or that it sounded too old-fashioned.
However, I had no alternative. Therefore, we decided to proceed with A
Rosy Life.
Q: That’s interesting. La Vie en Rose sounds very classic.
K: That’s right. This is the full account of my first movie.
Q: Then, why Garibong-dong?
K: The man who told me about the rental shop said that the rental shop was in
Garibong-dong.
Q: It’s close to where Guro Industrial Complex was, right?
K: Right. It’s behind the complex where the Guro Industrial Complex Ogeori
(Five-Way Intersection) is located. Many menial workers lived there. In
order to provide cheap living space for them, honeycomb-like cheap liv­
ing spaces were built. Most of the workers were teenagers or in their early
twenties. Their cultural capital was different, as Bourdieu pointed out.
Shin Kyung-sook also wrote about their lives in her book, The Girl Who
Wrote Loneliness (1995). They visited the Garibong market when they
were off the clock, buying clothes, meeting friends, and watching movies.
Therefore, I chose Garibong-dong. Episodes in the movie were also things
that could actually have happened at that time in the Garibong-dong area,
although I did not represent them directly. Anyway, I still visit Garibong­
dong at least once a year with my students as a field trip while talking
about the movie.
Q: The rental shop was a gathering place for people who were considered out­
siders, such as menial labourers. The madame accepted them silently. Why
did they call her ‘madame’?
K: That’s just fiction. It is written all over her face that she does not belong
to that place. I just thought that people would call such a woman, ‘mad­
ame’. Now that I recall it, I might have been referencing Kim Ji-mi in
Ticket (1986).
Q: You won the new director award and presented the movie at foreign film
festivals as well.
 A Walk Into History With Kim Hong-joon 207

K: I actually wanted to make the movie like an animation. There are traces of it.
Overall, it looks like a realist film, but action scenes and scenes with gang­
sters were like animation. So, it’s uneven. The best praise I got on was from
director Ryu Seung-wan. He said that the action scenes were well taken. It
was an honour to my family (laughter). The film was shot when the screen­
play was not yet complete. I wrote some detailed dialogue on the night
before the shooting.
Q: In any case, it’s a successful movie.
K: It was, except at the box office. Well, it didn’t flop in terms of the box office
either. It fell short of the breakeven point. From the production stance, it
saved face, since it won the prize.
Q: So, did you get a second chance?
K: Yes. I received a call from Samsung. It was a transitional period of Korean
cinema, and they asked me whether I wanted to make a film in a completely
different system. Samsung invested money, and I established a production
company called Free Cinema. We made three films, Jungle Story (1996),
No. 3 (1997), and Doctor K (1999), and closed the company. We tried the
Hollywood-style production system. We all had separate roles: Samsung
invested money, and we produced movies. Back then, Samsung also estab­
lished the Samsung Entertainment Group, which focused on ‘one source
multi use’, and also invested in music, musical theatre, and TV productions.
They wanted to make a movie about music, so they could produce a music
album as well, fitting into the ‘one source multi use’ concept. Therefore,
I wrote Jungle Story with a music critic, Gang Heon. I might be a good
example of a man who produced a movie during the transitional period of
the change in the Korean cinema system. I made two films in two different
systems. The first was not so different from the movies of the 60s, like Im
Kwon-taek’s style, the so-called Chungmuro system. The second movie,
Jungle Story, was made 100% with Samsung’s capital. For this movie, the
trial of the new production system was as important as the movie itself.
Samsung wanted a clear investment plan for the movie, especially for
film expenses. They wanted to know the clear cut-down of budgets, includ­
ing the wages of staff. They wanted to create a budget manual for creat­
ing films. However, none of the production companies worked in this way.
They worked without a clear plan. So we said, ‘OK, we’ll do it’. Usually,
under the old system they calculated the expenses once a month, but when
we worked with Samsung, our staff calculated and reimbursed expenses
every day. Later, it became more burdensome than filmmaking, so we per­
formed the calculation once a week. In today’s terms, we almost reported
in real time. We kept our promise, providing a clear account of the budget
distribution. This became a very useful source for Samsung.
Samsung wanted to see if ‘one source multi-use’ worked. The prominent
Korean rock musician Shin Hae-chul produced, composed, and arranged
music for the movie, and Samsung profited from selling the OST CD,
208 Seung-Ah Lee

Figure 12.1 Kim Hong-joon

Source: Photo Provided by Kim Hong-joon
 A Walk Into History With Kim Hong-joon 209

although the movie flopped. What I learned from that experience is that one
should not approach making films with a big company’s mindset. This can
be slightly dangerous. For instance, ‘one source multi use’ means making
profit with the fusion of the movie production, OST CD, and DVD of that
movie. Jungle Story failed at the box office, and the DVD of the movie did
not do well either. However, Samsung profited from the OST CD; therefore,
in the final calculation, Samsung did not lose money. However, the movie
failed, and so did I as the director.
Q: After Jungle Story, you did not make the third movie. Did you just quit
your work?
K: No. I still had Free Cinema. I kept planning the next movie while visiting
the library. At that time, directors often visited libraries after their movies
failed, since it was free (laughs). I also occasionally ran into some of those
directors at the library (laugh). Meanwhile, Jungle Story was invited by
the 1st Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) in 1996. I attended it as a
director, and in the following year, director Lee Jang-ho wanted to see me.
He asked me to be a programmer at Bucheon International Fantastic Film
Festivals (BiFan). I didn’t know what it was about. I asked him, and he
said I’d just go to film festivals overseas and select movies to be shown in
the BiFan. So, I first went to the Sundance Film Festival in 1997. I wasn’t
sure about what a programmer did, so I asked around, learned about it, and
watched various movies there as well. I came up with film lists, and he told
me I should negotiate inviting those films and filmmakers to BiFan. I even­
tually managed BiFan with movies I chose in 1997. That is how I learned
about film festivals. Lee Jang-ho was a festival director, and I was a pro­
grammer. I was the only programmer, so I did all the work of showing 60
feature films and 40 short films. I don’t know how I did it, but I did it. That
was a turning point where I became involved in film festivals.
Q: What is the core point of the film festival? Isn’t it more than just showing
films that we cannot easily watch in Korea?
K: Right. Showing films to audiences is very important, but the Q & A with
audiences, we say that GVs (guest visits) in Korea are also very important.
We also hold seminars about movies and discussions.
Q: Once again, your role as a film festival programmer was successful.
K: I was involved in BiFan for seven years. The subtitling, volunteer system,
and various software management systems were implemented. Other film
festivals have also used these systems. It gradually became a major film
festival in Korea.
Q: How did audiences react to those films?
K: It was only 20 years ago, but most people were curious about whether Korea
was making films when I attended the Sundance Film Festival. From the
perspective of the Western movie world, Korea did not exist on the world
film map. So, sometimes I felt like they were eager to help me. For this rea­
son, I was able to invite some major filmmakers. Fantastic film is a minor
210 Seung-Ah Lee

genre, so there was solidarity that the minors helped each other. I also got a
lot of help from them. BiFan is now the largest fantastic film festival in the
world. As time passed, I realised that I needed a permanent job to support
my family. Fortunately, I became a professor at Korea National University
of Arts in 1998. However, I did not give up on directing films. I wanted to
go back to creating films, but I realised at one point that what I wanted to
do was just work on something about movies, not necessary directing my
own feature films, and for the sake of students, I focus more on teaching.
So, I gradually lost my identity as a film director and gained a new one as a
film educator.
Q: Can we talk about the Screen Quota System in the early 2000s?
K: This was the biggest issue in Korean film history in the early 2000s. Regard­
less of whether the Screen Quota System was right or wrong, the composi­
tion of the confrontation was between nationalistic Korean movie goers and
people in the movie industry who tried to protect the Korean market—they
were the good guys from our perspective—and Hollywood capital, multina­
tional corporations that tried to put us down with the Korean government’s
support—they were the bad guys. Hollywood tried to acquire dominant
shares in the Korean market, and we tried to stop them.
Q: Did nationalistic perspectives play significant roles during that time?
K: Broadly, nationalism had different roles depending on the historical con­
text. Nationalism during the colonial period provided a foundation for the
national liberation movement. Resistance to a foreign power in an independ­
ent nation-state is another thing. It acted differently in the case of the Screen
Quota System. Some foreign observers criticised it as ultra-nationalism or
selfishness, protecting the domestic market. In any case, nationalism is what
the Screen Quota System first appealed to the Korean public with. The com­
mon denominator that we found in the declaration and remarks at that time
between the older and younger generations of Chungmuro was national­
ism. However, as I look back now, the movement was led by the younger
generation, and the older generation might have felt excluded. The older
generation might have wanted the younger generation to fight in the front-
line, while the older generation could orchestrate from behind. However, in
reality, the younger generation did everything, while the older generation
was excluded.
However, we eventually faced the limitation of nationalism in this case.
It worked well with the Korean public, but it was seen as ultra-nationalism
and close-mindedness to the outsiders. Therefore, we needed a slogan
that was acceptable in foreign countries as well. In addition, we discov­
ered cultural diversity. We actively contacted foreign movie people via
film festivals such as BIFF and BiFan, and they told us that our fight to
protect the domestic market was eventually meant for cultural diver­
sity in the world. Our mission was to stop Hollywood’s monopoly on the
global film market to promote cultural diversity. We should not behave
like ultra-nationalists. France led this movement. We launched a new
 A Walk Into History With Kim Hong-joon 211

organisation called the Coalition for Cultural Diversity in Moving Images.

It was invited to an international forum dealing with the Korean screen
quota. The nationalistic perspectives of the young generation—they also
experienced nationalism via minjung culture and resistance culture in the
80s—upgraded to focusing on cultural diversity. Perhaps it was the screen
quota movement that suggested cultural diversity for the first time in Korea.
Q: It seems you have covered every part of movies. Writing about movies,
making films, managing film festivals, making policy for movies, and
teaching movies at college. You’re like a movie deokku (otaku) involved in
everything about movies.
K: Everything about film is so fun. I will always work on anything involving
film, like the Chungmuro International Musical Film Festival, where I have
worked as an artistic director since 2016.
Q: What is particular about Korean cinema?
K: I don’t think there is such a thing. Each movie has its own singularity, each
director has his/her own character, and each movie industry has its own par­
ticularity. I don’t think there is any specific particularity of Korean cinema
as a whole, such as so-called Koreanness. I would say there are movies that
Korean people can understand the most. That’s about it.
Q: This volume is about history and cinema, and historical representation in
film is quite successful in Korea. What do you think of the representation of
history in cinema? Does it have any role to play in cinema history?
K: I believe that Korea is the only country in which Confucian values are
still alive.
Q: What kind of Confucian values are you referring to?
K: The core and positive historical parts, especially parts people should learn
from history instead of merely delineating historical facts. The idea that
people should respect those who learn. I suggest that Korean audiences have
somewhat unique expectations when watching historical movies. They have
a kind of resistance against consuming historical movies as pure entertain­
ment in their collective subconsciousness. If the movie is set in the modern
period, then it’s acceptable to consider it pure entertainment. However, if
it’s a historical movie, it should not make a caricature of King Sejong or
interpret Admiral Yi Sun-sin like Monty Python. It’s a type of rigorism.
Q: History as mirror?
K: Right. Most of these protagonists are ideal Confucian heroes rather than
modern figures. I think that a Korean audience watching a movie is like a
political election.
Q: Political election?
K: Yes. When Korean people go to a theatre to watch a movie, the choice of
which movie to watch is like choosing which candidate or political party to
elect. I don’t know about other countries, but it works this way in Korea.
It is connected to box-office power. I am very sensitive to the box-office
score. Movie critics might not like it, but audiences want to know how
many other people like the movie they choose to watch. For instance, if
212 Seung-Ah Lee

the movie I watched had 3M attendees, it shows that many people support
the value of that movie like myself. You’ll be confident about your choices.
However, if only 500,000 people watched the movie, then you would feel
insecure that not many people share your thoughts. This is the mechanism
in the act of watching historical movies. This is why movies with over 10M
views become part of the zeitgeist. Therefore, pure entertainment movies
such as fantasy or science fiction have not been successful in Korea. Even
the Star Wars series did not do well in Korea. This kind of movie does not
have a certain agenda that resonates with the collective subconsciousness of
Korean people. Whether the historical movie portrays the Imjin War in the
Joseon Dynasty or the colonial period, it should connect to something about
today’s current agenda or sentiment. For example, depending on whether
the movie was made before or after the Sewol Ferry Incident, the conse­
quences will be different. For Korean audiences, watching movies can be
viewed as a political act. They want to know how many people share their
thoughts. Nobody has analysed it this way. This is just my intuition.
Q: This is an interesting analysis. Song Kang-ho mentioned that a movie can
influence history. What do you think about this point?
K: As many drops make a flood, if watching a movie is a political act as I men­
tioned, then such acts can accumulate to eventually influence society. Sup­
pose if The Attorney (2013) had failed at the box office, then Roh Mu Hyun
supporters might turn away, saying, ‘It’s over now’. The movie culture of
Korea and the characteristics of Korean audiences can influence Korean
daily life.
Q: This is an interesting point. You should write a paper on this topic.
K: That is what researchers should do. In particular, a movie with 10M audi­
ences is a political act. If we look at why that movie has a viewership of
10M, it usually fits into my theory. Why did more than 10M people watch
Train to Busan (2016)? The state will not save you. This is the message of
that movie. The title of the movie was also a metaphor for the BIFF. The
topic in every film festival was the BIFF. Thus, not only the Cannes Film
Festival but most film festivals wanted to show that film.
Q: Let’s move onto the blacklist that the former government enforced.
K: First of all, I wasn’t listed, so I guess I lived cowardly (laugh). To excuse
myself, I am a public servant, a professor at a national university.
Q: Did you know it existed?
K: There was no physical evidence, but we knew that the former government
could have done something worse than that.
Q: Did you have any disadvantages?
K: Although there were, movie people didn’t really care.
Q: It seems they’re different from other artists.
K: A man from the Ministry of Culture once complained that while other cul­
tural artists are well mannered, filmmakers are very tough. So I told him,
‘Don’t you know? None of the movie people ever listened to their parents.
 A Walk Into History With Kim Hong-joon 213

Whom should they listen to? They’re the least disciplined under the Confu­
cian order’ (laugh).
Q: You also published I, Cinephile. What does this mean?
K: At that time, I couldn’t find a word to define myself. I didn’t have as many
accomplishments as directors like Yi Chang-dong and Hong Sang-su.
I hadn’t contributed as much to film festivals as Kim Dong-ho did. I am a
professor at the university, but I don’t have enough research publications.
None of them really represented me, but I am a man who’d do anything
involving film like a dilettante. That’s me.
Q: I think you’re deeply in love with film.
K: In some way, yes. I was lucky. I could use all my experiences and the things
I learned. Directing, teaching, and working in film festivals, I never tried too
hard to obtain those positions, but I ended up there anyhow. I was pushed
into those positions. I didn’t have appropriate words to describe myself, so
I called myself a cinephile.
Q: You look happy. You look like a man who is doing what he wants to do.
K: In that sense, I am happy. A good thing about doing this work is that
I always can do something new. Since college, I have been unable to do
repetitive things. By working in the field of film, I made my living, gained
my social position, and met many good people. My second daughter works
in the film industry, but my wife is not happy about it. I can’t say anything
to my daughter since I chose film against my parents’ will. What can I say
to my daughter?
Q: Lastly, what is the most important part of the film field, if there is such a
thing?
K: Being curious about the object of concern and not being afraid to directly
face public criticism and unfamiliarity.
Index

Note: Numbers in italics indicate a figure on the corresponding page.

1919 Independence Declaration 105 Ashfall (film) 159n21, 162, 167–73,

2009 Lost Memories (film) 10, 105–6, 114, 176n25
115n7 Attorney, The (film) 42, 212

Abe Shinzo 53 Baek Gyeol 143

Accidental Gangster, The (Kibang nandong Baek Moonim 10, 69–82
sakŏn) 36 Bak Gi-chae 10
Asia Pacific War 9; My Way film about 155 Balibar, E. 198n19
Admiral, The (film) 17 Bamberg Rider (sculpture) 27, 28
Ae-ran (fictional character) 135–7, 137 Bang Han-jun 10, 77
Aimless Bullet (film) 144, 148, 149, 151 Battlefield Heroes (film) 42, 48n38
allohistory 64 Battle of Jangsari (film) 153, 162
Amistad (film) 39 Battle of Teutoburg Forest 25
ancestors: doctrine of common ancestors Battleship Island, The 41
(Ilsôn tongjoron) 18; German Benjamin, Walter 22, 28, 185, 196
narratives of 23, 25; Korean Bildhauer, Bettina 22
political ‘ghosts’ as 127; Korean bildungsroman 75, 81
war victims as 157 blockbusters 2, 133–4, 161–79; 1960s
ancestor worship see chesa 11, 145; 1990s 158; current 11;
An Chŏnghyo 151 ‘Korean-style’ 153; Korean­
Anderson, Benedict 28 war-related 5, 8, 155; recent
An, Jinsoo 99n9 examples of 134; United States as
An Sŏk-yŏng 74 geopolitical entity in 161–74
anti-Americanism 5, 161–2, 164, 170–4; Bong Jun-ho 159n21, 161, 167, 170–1,
see also Ashfall; Flu; Host, The 175n23
anti-colonial struggles 7, 113 borderlands 184, 185
anti-communism 89, 122, 127, 135, 137, borderless 192
148–9, 152, 164–5, 194 borders 129; geopolitical 191, 193;
Anti-Communist Act 137, 139 ideological 89; political 87, 195
anti-communist laws and ideology 156 borders between two Koreas 154–96;
anti-Japanese policies and sentiments 89, documentary films on 183–; see
91, 92–7, 106 also DMZ
anti-modernism 25 brotherhood in film: 1960s anti-communist
anti-traitor legislation 109 films and 138–43; absence in
anti-war films 140, 143, 149 Piagol of 135; cinematic depictions
April 19th Revolution 10 of war 11, 146, 149, 156–7; divided
Aryan master race 22, 24, 27 156, 157, 158; Korean masculinity
 Index 215

and 146; of marines in battle 142; Choi Jong-bu 166

medieval 24; see also Taegukgi Choi Ri 56
brothers in film 134, 140, 143–9; ‘divided’ Cho Jung-rae 9, 55, 58, 62, 150
44, 150, 153; ideologically opposed Cho Kŭng-ha 89; see also Jo Geung-ha
11; North Korean partisans 150 Cho Myŏng-am 69
Bruzzi, Stella 121 Cho Myŏng-ki 126
Bucheon International Fantastic Film Chon Woohyung 11, 183–97
Festivals (BiFan) 209, 210 Choo Soo-hyang 63
Burgoyne, Robert 8, 133–4 Chorus of Trees (film) 10, 89, 91, 96–8, 98
Burning Virgins (painting) 58 Choseon Dynasty see Chosŭn Dynasty;
Busan see Train to Busan Joseon Dynasty; Straits of Choseon
Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) 2, (film)
186, 209, 210, 212 Chosŏn Film Regulation 1940 72, 77;
Butler, Judith 128 see also Chosŭn Dynasty
byunsa 81 Cho Soo-hyang 63
Chosŭn Dynasty 35, 39, 41, 104, 115n15;
Cannes Film Festival 212 see also Joseon Dynasty; Straits of
Cantor, Norman 22, 30 Choseon (film)
Caprio, Mark E. 10, 102–14 Chu Chin-o 38
Capote, Truman 38 Chung Byung-ho 198n18
censorship of films by South Korean Chung Ji-young 42; see also Jeong
government 89; 1940s Korean Ji-yeong [Chung Jiyǒng]
colonial period 18, 20, 29; Chungmuro Musical Film Festival 12
1950s guidelines 90; 1960s Chungmuro system 207
representations of anything Chu Sangmi 185, 186, 191
Japanese 88; 1960s tightening cinema (South Korean): assimilationism
of 10; 1972 Youshin policy 135; via 19; as battlefield of history
Hyŏnhaet’an romance films 1–5; as commemorative space 7;
and 88–99; legality of 1; Park depression period of 4; emotional
Chung-hee regime 4, 98–9; Rhee attachment to the past built by 17;
administration 92; Seven Women Golden Age of 4, 135, 138, 144;
Prisoners (film) 139–40 Korean peninsula cinema 12n1;
Chang Chi-u 37 nationalist propaganda spread by
Chang Hoon 103 17–18; as tool for reconstructing
Chang Seyong 126 collective memory and nationalist
Chang Sun-woo 103 narratives 17–18; war cinema 11;
Chang Yŏng-ju 38 see also blockbusters
Cha, Yong-Ku 9, 17–29 cinephile 200, 201, 213
Cheju 4.3 10, 119–29; Peace Park 125, 126 Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human
Cheju Island 126, 128–9; Mayday on Rights 188–9
Chejudo (propaganda film) 124 Coachman, The (film) 96
chesa (ancestor worship) 23, 130n17 Cold War 4, 8, 87–8, 90, 103–4, 138, 152;
Children Gone to Poland (film) 183, post-Cold War division of Korea
185–191, 195–6 185–6, 191, 193–6; US and Soviet
Chin Sŏng-chŏl 47n21 Union involvement in 166
Chŏng Byŏng-sŏl 48n35 collaboration, pro-Japanese by Koreans
Cho Ch’ŏl-hyŏn 41, 48n35 102–14
Ch’oe Nam-sŏn 105 colonial past: contentiousness of 89;
Ch’oe Sŭng-il 74 memory of 93; overcoming 54–5
Choi Chonghyun 11, 161–74 Colonial Period, Korea 1–5, 35;
Choi Eun-hui [Ch’oe ŬnhŭI, also known as anti-colonial struggles in 7;
Choi Eun-hee] 144 collaboration, pro-Japanese
Choi In-gyu 19–21 102–14; Colonial Korean film
216 Index

18, 41; colonial memories in Ferro, Marc 33

postcolonial Korea 91, 98; film First World War see World War I
propaganda in Nazi Germany and Five Marines (film) 138
9, 17–29; Hyŏnhaet’an as metaphor Flower in Hell, A (film) 11, 144, 149
for 87; Japanese colonial historical Flu (film) 159n21, 162, 167–73, 176n25
dramas 37; nationalism during Fly High Run Far (Kaepyŏk) (film) 42
210; patriarchy and 63; war and Foucault, Michel 130n20
melodrama in 69–82 Franco-Prussian War 26
colonizer and colonized, dyad between 57, Frederick II (Holy Roman Emperor) 22
60, 69–71, 73, 88 Friztsche, Peter 128
comfort women 9, 52–64; alternative Front Line, The (Kojijŏn/Battle of
histories of 63–4; dominant images Highlands) (film) 134, 153
of 56–8; history-writing and Fujitani Takashi 73, 78, 79, 82
memory 60–3 Furei senjin (rogue Korean; KLA) 106–7,
Comrade Kim Goes Flying (film) 184 109–112
Confino, Alon 128
contact zones 18, 184 Gangneung International Film Festival
culture industry 8, 34 (GIFF) 12
culture of commemoration 134 gender 11, 53–4; fluidity 141; neutrality
Cumings, Bruce 124 144; norms 5, 148, 153; war and 143
gendered: desire 70, 73, 79; experiences
Daughter of the Governor General 61; hierarchy 88; performativity
(Ch’ongdok ŭi ttal) (film) 89, 91, of 128; portrayal of 133; power
94, 94–6, 100n15 relations 98; representation 90;
Davis, Natalie Zemon 39 stereotypes 136; terms 57
Daydream (film) 94 genderlessness 144
Dear Pyongyang (film) 156 gender politics of military service in war
Dear Soldier (film) 72–3, 77 films 11, 70–4
defectors, defection (North Korean) 11–12, Generation 386 (three eight six) 4
137, 185–6, 190–6, 198n18 GGK see Government-General
DEFCON (Defense Readiness Condition) ghosts: film and politics and 17–18; Gordon
171 on 10, 120, 129; metaphor of 29;
Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) 103, 154, political 127, 130n14; Reiterations
155, 189, 191; International of Dissent and 10, 119–29
Documentary Film Festival ghostliness 119
192; NNSC: Neutral Nations GI brides, films depicting 142, 143–9
Supervisory Commission DMZ Goering, Hermann 22
Photo Exhibition (documentary Goethe Institute, Seoul 4
film) 183, 186 Gong Midori 92, 93
Diffrient, David Scott 144 Good Bye My Love North Korea
DMZ (documentary film) 184 (documentary film) 183
Doctor K (film) 207 good death 130n14
Donald, Ralph 143, 157 good neighbours 88
good versus evil 54, 59, 96, 143, 165–6
Eco, Umberto 38 good wife 149, 153
Eom Cheol-woo (fictional character) 172 Gordon, Avery 10, 119–20, 129
Evil Night, The 144 Goryeo Film Company 19, 20
Ewha Womens University 53, 105 Government-General (GGK) 103, 108–10,
Ewiger Jude (film) 26–8, 29 112
Ewiger Wald (film) 25–6, 29 Governor’s Daughter (film) see Daughter
of the Governor General
faction (fact and fiction hybrid) 9, 35, 36–9 (Ch’ongdok ŭi ttal) (film)
faction films 36–7, 60 Guro Industrial Complex Ogeori 206
feminization 144 Gwangju Incident 1980 103
 Index 217

Han, sentiment or feeling of 5 Jang Dong-hwi 141

Handmaiden (Agassi)(film) 42 Jang Hoon [Chang Hun] 134
Heo Young 73 Jang Kil-su 151
Herman the German 26 Jangsari see Battle of Jangsari
Himmler, Heinrich 22 Jang Sun-woo 4, 205
Hirsch, Marianne 8, 10, 55 Japan: 1960s Korean cinema and colonial
history: falsified by time travel 106, 107, memories of 87–99; assimilation
112, 115n23; film and 105–6; policies of 18; colonial historical
history in film and historical dramas of 37; Fascist Period 46n4;
criticism 33–46 pro-Japanese collaboration 102–14;
history films, categories and criteria of pro-Japanese propaganda films 35;
40–44 war with China 18; WWII 53;
Hitler, Adolf 22, 23, 26 see also comfort women; Sino-
Hobsbawm, Eric 29 Japanese War
Hollywood 4; attempt to acquire dominant Japanese cinema 3; Korean man-Japanese
shares in Korean film industry romance in film 10, 87–99;
210; blockbusters 155, 174n4; propaganda films by 9–10
domination of Korean film market Japanese occupation of Korea 1, 9, 35,
1960s and 1970s 200, 201; 37, 41; anti-Japanese nationalism
historical films 5, 39; Korean- in Korea 96; forced labour
style blockbusters and 153; mogul during 41; Ilchinhoe 106; official
system 205; monopoly 210; annexation of Korea 18, 104;
production system 207; science see also collaboration; colonial
fiction movies 170; talkies, advent period, Korea
of 76 Jeffords, Susan 143
Homeless Angels (film) 19–20, 29 Jeju 4.3 Uprising 1948 156, 158; see also
Hongchŏnki 41 Cheju
Hong Joon-pyo 166 ‘Jeju Airport Massacre’ (Reiterations of
Hong Sang-su 213 Dissent) 120, 121, 122, 123
Hong Seunghei Clara 10–11, 119–29 Jeong Ji-yeong [Chung Jiyǒng] 134, 149
Hosaniak, Joanna 189 Jeongsindae 53
Host, The (film) 159n21, 161–2, 167–73, Jeon Yun-su 41
175n23 JFPC see Joseon Film Production Company
housewives 72, 84 Jo Geung-ha 10; see also Cho Kŭng-ha
Hwang Chin-mi 47n21 Jŏngjo (King) 41
Hwang Jin-mi 165 Joo You-shin 9, 52–63
Hyŏnhaet’an romance films 10, Jordan, Glenn 6, 8
87–99; Chorus of Trees (film) Joseon Dynasty 53, 56, 212; see also
10, 89, 91, 96–8, 98; Daughter Chosŭn Dynasty; Straits of
of the Governor General Choseon (film)
(Ch’ongdok ŭi ttal) 10, 89, 91, 94, Joseon Film Production Company
94–6, 100n15; Sea Knows, The (JFPC) 21
(Hyŏnhaet’an ŭn algo itta) (film) Joseon films 19–20
10, 89, 91–5 J.S.A. (Joint Security Area/
Kongdonggyŏngbiguyŏk cheiesŭei)
imagined community 7, 28 (film) 103, 134, 153
Im Kwon-taek [Im Kwǒnt’aek] 4, 134, 149, Jung Ji-woo 10; see also Chung Ji/Chi-woo
153, 202–3, 207 Jungle Story (film) 207, 209
Incheon Landing 164–6; see also
Operation Chromite Kaisen, Jane Jin 10, 120–9, 130n8
Institute of National Remembrance Kanako Michi 94
(IPN) 188 Kang Che-kyu 42
IPN see Institute of National Remembrance Kang Dae-jin 10
I Want to Go (film) 96 Kang Ha-na 56
218 Index

Kang Hyeong-cheol 42 Komorovsky, Bronisaw 188

Kang Il-chul 58 Koo Bong-seo 141, 158
Kang Je-kyu [Kang Che-kyu] 134, 155, 162 Korea Artista Proleta Federatio (KAPF) 74
Kang Jeong-hi 156 Korean New Wave 2, 4, 133, 149–50, 156
Kangjŏng Village protests 128 Korean War 4, 8, 152, 173; films 133–58;
Kang Soo-yeon 5, 151 United States as geopolitical
Kang Tae-chin 89, 96, 100n17 entity in Korean blockbusters 10,
Kang Usǒk 115n15; see also Kang 161–74; see also Incheon Landing;
Woo-suk Reiterations of Dissent
Kang Woo-suk 5, 155 Korean Wave 1, 7, 34
Kantorowicz, Ernst Hartwig 22, 27 kut, significance of 122–3, 127, 130n17,
Kappelhoff, Hermann 133 130n20
K-culture 1; see also Korean New Wave Kwak Cheol-woo (fictional character) 172
Kennedy, John F. 39; JFK (film) 39 Kwak Kyoung-taek 153, 155
Kim Byung-seo 162 Kwak Kyu-seok 138
Kim Chi-hun 103; see also Kim Ji-hoon Kwon Heonik 122, 127, 130n14
Kim Dae-jung [Kim Taejung] 4
Kim Dong-ho 213 Lacan, Jacques 21
Kim Hak-sun 53 Landsberg, Alison 6, 54
Kim Hanmin 17 Leed, Eric 143
Kim Hong-joon 12, 200–13 Lee Jae-han 153
Kim Hwarran (Helen Kim) 105 Lee Jang-ho 202, 209
Kim Hyang-ri 56 Lee Hana 9, 12, 33–46
Kim Jeong-Chul 115n10 Lee Hyunseon 1–12, 133–58
Kim Ji-hoon (Kim Chi-hun) 42 Lee Hwajin 10, 87–95
Kim Ji-mi 206 Lee Kang-cheon 134, 135, 158
Kim Ki-dŏk 35–7, 151 Lee Kwang-mo 150, 151
Kim Ki-duk see Kim Ki-dŏk Lee Man-hee [Yi Manhŭi] 134, 135, 139,
Kim Ki-jin 85n25 140, 142–3, 153
Kim Ki-pong 35–7, 45, 48n38 Lee Na-jeong 55, 60
Kim Ki-yŏng (Kim Ki-young) 10, 89, Lee Seung-Ah 12, 200–13
91, 92 Lee Si-myung 10; see also Caprio, Mark
Kim Ki-young see Kim Ki-yŏng Legend of Ssarigol (film) 140, 142
Kim Moo-sung 164 Liberty Korea Party 166
Kim Pong-han 42 localization see ‘lok’al colla’ strategy
Kim Ryun-hee 190–5 ‘lok’al colla’ strategy 84n17
Kim Sae-ron 56
Kim Seong-Nae 123 MacArthur, Douglas (General) 165–6
Kim Shin-jae 20 MacDonald, Karen 143
Kim Si-mu 37 Marines Who Never Returned (film)
Kim Sung-su 159n21, 162 140–1, 142, 144
Kim Tae-hoon 153 May 18 (film) 42, 103
Kim T’ak-hwan 38 Mayday on Chejudo (propaganda film) 124
Kim Tŏk-ki see 2009 Lost Memories medievalism 9, 21; Nazi 23–4
Kim Tongman 124–5 memory: claims of 129; collective 11,
Kim Yŏn-su 187–8 17, 55; collective, control of 7–8;
Kim Young-ha 203 collective cultural 2; collective
Kim Young-hee 83n9 Korean memory and Nazi Germany
Kim Young-sam ([Kim Yŏngsam]) 4, 205 29; colonial 93, 98; counter-
King and the Clown (Wang ŭi namja) memory 7, 155; cultural 11, 88,
(film) 36 183, 187, 190, 193; dialectic of
King’s Letters (film) 41 64; generational 133–4, 152, 156;
kisaeng 38, 80, 99n9 historical 3; history and memory
KLA see Furei senjin in film 5; history contrasted
Kojong (Emperor) 109, 115n15 to 6; history writing and 60–3;
 Index 219

ideological 59; inherited 129n7; Ode to My Father (Gukje Sijang)(film)

individual 59; narratives of the past 17, 42
and 1–13; national 21, 59; parallax Old Boy (film) 188
of 196; personal 155; politics of Once Upon a Time in a Battlefield
21, 61; postmemory 8, 10, 129n7; (Hwangsanbŏl)(film) 36, 37, 42
postmemory aesthetics 120; post- Operation Chromite (film) 11, 17, 140,
memory generation 4, 8, 151–6; 153, 159n21, 163–6, 167, 175n6
private 54’ ‘prosthetic’ 6, 54–5; re- Operation X-Ray 165
memory 63; repressed 123; struggle orphanage 20, 140
for 127; as symbolic representation orphan generation 202
of the past 128; transgenerational orphans 112; war 185–91, 195, 196
121; war 140, 157; war on 183; Our Homeland (film) 156
wartime 10
memory wars 54–6 Paektu volcano 169–70
Military Train (film) 80–1 pain: of comfort women 55–6; destruction
minjung culture 5, 203, 211 of language by 123
Modern Boy (film) 10, 37, 43, 102–3, 105, Painting Bureau, Chosŏn dynasty 41
107–8, 114, 115n7 Pak Kwang-hyŏn 37; see also Park
Moltke, Johannes von 7, 133 Kwang-hyun
Moon Embracing the Sun (TV drama) 46n9 Pak Yŏng-hŭi 74
Moon Jae-in 131n25, 131n28 pando 69, 70
Moon Yumi 106 Panmunjeon Declaration 2018 183–5, 195
Mo Yun-suk 81 Paquet, Darcy 115n8
Mulvey, Laura 5 Parasite (film) 167, 175n23
Mun Ye-bong 75, 84n21, 85n27 Park Chan-wook [Pak Ch’anuk] 42, 134,
My Heart is Not Broken Yet 188
(documentary) 64 Park Chung-hee 135
My Way (film) 155 Park Geun-hee 17, 53, 131, 205
Park Kwang-hyun [Pak Kwang-hyŏn]134,
naesŏn ilch’e policies 18, 69–71 162, 164
Nagamine Yasumasa 52 Park Kwang-su 4, 42
Nambugun (film) 134, 135, 149, 150 partisans in film 11, 133–7, 140, 144,
National Diet House of Peers (Kizoku-in) 149–50, 155, 156; see also Piagol
(Japan) 103 Piagol 134–5, 136, 144, 149–50, 156
National Security (Namyŏngdong) Poland see Children Gone to Poland
(film) 42 Poole, Ross 128
National Security Law 1940 (Kukka Portrait of Youth (film) 10
Poanbŏp) (Korea) 104 postmemory 8, 10, 129n7
National Traitors Act 1948 (Korea) 106 postmemory aesthetics 120
Naumburg Cathedral 27–8 post-memory generation 4, 8, 151–6
Nazi Germany 9; film propaganda in Pratt, Mary Louise 18, 184
17–29; nationalism of 21–2 Pyongyang 187; “citizen of” 192; Dear
New Realism 5, 149, 156 Pyongyang (film) 156; Pyongyang
New Wave see Korean New Wave Bookstore (film) 183
NNSC: Neutral Nations Supervisory
Commission DMZ Photo Exhibition Rainy Days (film) 149
(documentary film) 183, 186 ‘red complex’ 11, 190–5
No. 3 (film) 207 Red Muffler (film) 144–5, 146, 148, 149
Nora, Pierre 6 Red Scarf see Red Muffler
North Korea: in Admiral 17; brotherhood Red Youth (film) 183
as theme in 11; film history of 3; Reiterations of Dissent (film) 10, 119–29;
war films 1, 11, 133–58; see ‘Ghosts’ 120, 122–3; ‘Island of
also defectors, defecting; DMZ; Endless Rebellion’ 120, 127–9,
Pyongyang; two Koreas 131; ‘Jeju Airport Massacre’ 120,
North Korean Archives Project 188 121, 122, 123; ‘Lamentation of
220 Index

Dead’ 120, 122–3, 127; ‘Politics ‘Tongbaek Agassi’ 96; ‘Vie en

of Naming’ 120, 125–7; ‘Retake: Rose, La’ 206
Mayday’ 120, 123–4 Sonjevski-Jamrowski, Rolf von 25
Return of Martin Guerre (film) 39 Soup and Ideology (documentary film) 156
Rhee Syngman (Yi Sŭngman) 89, 92, 104, Southern Korea Interim National Assembly
125, 158n16 (SKINA) 103
Ri Chin or Ri Sim (factional figure) 38 Soviet Union 164, 166; Russia 109
Ricoeur, Paul 6 Spielberg, Steven 39
Righteous Revenge (film) 1 Spirits Homecoming (film) 9, 55–9, 62–3
Roh Moo-hyun (Roh Mu Hyun) 127, 212 Spivak, Gayatri 150
Roh Mu Hyun see Roh Moo-hyun Springer, Hanns 25
Rosenstone, Robert 5, 9, 33, 39–40, Steel Rain (film) 167–73
105, 114 Stone, Oliver 39
Russia 109 Story of Big Whales (film) 77
Straits of Choseon (film) 10, 70, 72, 77–80,
Sado (Prince) 41, 48 81, 84n19
Sad Story of the Self-Supporting Child subaltern 5, 61, 150, 157–8
(film) 201 Sunny (film) 42
Saenuri Party 164, 166
Sakai Naoki 90 Taebaek Mountain Range 135, 158n4
Scarry, Elaine 123 Taebaek Mountains, The (film) 134, 149,
Schramm, Percy Ernst 22 150, 205
Sea Knows, The (Hyŏnhaet’an ŭn algo itta) Taegukgi: The Brotherhood of War
(film) 10, 89, 91–5 (T’aegŭkgi hwinallimyŏ) (film)
Second World War see World War II 134, 153, 155, 162
Sejong (King) 41, 211 Taegukki (South Korean national flag) 137
Seo Jeong-min 140 Taxi Driver, A (T’aeksi unchŏnsa)(film) 103
Seven Women Prisoners (film) 139, 144 Third Reich 8; importance of Middle Ages
Sewol Ferry Incident 212 to 22, 23
Shadow Flowers (film) 11, 183, 185, 190, Throne, The (film) 41, 48n35
192–3, 195–6 Train to Busan (film) 212
shaman and shamanism 56, 62, 122–3, Trump, Donald 161
136, 149 Tuition (film) 19–20, 29
Shin Kyung-sook 206; see also Sin Turner, Frederick Jackson 197n3
Kyung-sook two Koreas 11, 183–96
Shin Sang-ok [Sin Sangok] 11, 134–5,
143–9, 153 United Nations: Security Council 107;
Shin Young-kyun 138 soldiers 141
Shinzo Abe see Abe Shinzo United States: American GIs 141; Cheju
Shiri (Swiri)(film) 134, 153, 174n4 Uprising and 10; as geopolitical
Silmido (film) 5, 155 entity in Korean blockbusters
Sin Kyung-sook 38 10, 161–74; Korean War and 10;
Sin Mi 41, 48n36 occupation of Southern Korea by
Sino-Japanese War 69, 71, 78 103, 109; Soviet Union and 166;
SKINA see Southern Korea Interim US-Japan Alliance and comfort
National Assembly women 53–4
Snowy Road (film) 9, 55–9, 62–3 Untold Scandal 35, 36, 42, 46n9
Sŏ Kwang-che 85n28 Uprising, The (Yi Chae-su ŭi na) (film) 42
Sona, the Other Myself (film) 156 Uta of Naumberg (film) 27
Song Kang-ho 212
Song Lee 191 Vietnam Dispatch Law, South Korea
songs in films 92, 112–13; folk (‘Balloon 139–40
Flower’) 187–8; military 92; Vietnamese Embassy, South Korea 193
 Index 221

Vietnam War 122 Yang Hyun Ah 64n2

Vigne, Daniel 39 Yang U-sŏk 42
Volunteer, The (film) 10, 73, 74–7 Yang Yonghi 155–6
volunteer soldiers 69–74; Korean Special Yasutaka Tsutsui 52
Volunteer Soldier System 71 Yeosu-Suncheon Rebellion 1948 106,
Vow of Love (film) 72 158n16
Yi Byŏng-hu 46n11
Wallace, David 23 Yi Chang-dong 213
war crimes 53, 54, 102, 107 Yi Chang-yong 19
war films 69–74; North Korea in 133–58 Yi In-hwa 38
War Memorial of Korea 154 Yi Jun-ik 36, 41, 48n35
war orphans see orphans Yi Kwangsu 105
Wednesday Demonstration 53, 56 Yi Seungjun 11, 185
Wednesday Special, KBS 188 Yi Sun Shin (Admiral) 3, 211
Weedon, Chris 6, 8 Yoka, Patrick 188
Welcome to Dongmakgol (film) 37, 134, Yŏ Kyun-dong 36
153, 157, 159n21, 162–4, 166, 173, YŏngJaeChongHwa 41
174n5, 175n7 Yŏn-su Kim 187
Western Princesses 139, 141, 141, 144–5, Yoon Je-kyoon 42; see also
150, 156 Youn Je-kyoon
Wild Flowers in the Battle Field (film) Yoo Soo-young [U Suyŏng] 19
140, 143 You and I (Kimi to Boku)(film) 73
World War I 22, 26 Youn Je-kyoon [Youn Chaekyun] 17
World War II 24, 53, 102, 107; see also Youshin period 135
Nazi Germany Yu Hyun-mok [Yu Hyŏnmok] 134,
143–9, 153
Yagi Yasutarō 19 Yun Chong-ch’an 37
Yanggongju narrative 134, 141, 151, Yun Chŏng-hŭi 96
153, 157 Yun Jeongok 53