Abstract
This chapter is a study of the late colonial era films released from 1940 to 1945, including Homeless Angels, Love and Vow, Volunteer, Portrait of Youth, and Suicide Squad at the Watch Tower. They are enlightenment films, which assume the position of the audience to be that of pupils and thus aim to educate and transform them. The colonial audience was always already targeted as collective recipients of knowledge and education from the beginnings of Korean cinema. Taking this as the point of departure, my reading of the abovementioned films focuses on the intertwined issues of colonial enlightenment and propaganda, as well as of ethnography, censorship, and narrative strategies of the films. Lastly, the chapter will conclude with a consideration of the postcolonial desire for a national cinematic tradition, and the implied ethics of film-viewing in postcolonial worlds.
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Notes
- 1.
I refer to all films from the colonial period I discuss in this chapter as Korean film, as Korea is not divided until 1953.
- 2.
Ham Ch’ungbŏm also considers 1940 as the beginning of the end of the colonial era.
- 3.
Japan’s so-called fifteen years of war began with the invasion of Manchuria in September 1931. This term is commonly used to refer to the war-ridden 1930s and the first half of the 1940s.
- 4.
Also see Mamie Misawa’s discussion in Chapter 7 of this book, which studies the underexplored phenomenon of the Taiwanese national anthem films and their screenings, focusing on film regulations and their goal of national cohesion. Though the KMT government set up the program in 1952, later than the one set up by the American occupying government in South Korea in 1949, there are obvious similarities between the two national contexts, including the emphasis on ideological control of the masses.
- 5.
Shin Sang-ok (1926–2006) is one of the most famous South Korean directors, who enjoyed both critical and financial success during Korea’s cinematic golden age. Many of his films are considered classical Korean cinema . For a longer discussion, see Chung (2014). See also Fischer (2015) for how Kim Jong-Il supposedly arranged to kidnap Shin Sang-ok and his ex-wife, the South Korean actress Choi Eunhee , in 1978 in Hong Kong , hoping that they could help improve the inadequate North Korean film productions.
- 6.
Yu Hyŏnmok (1925–2009) is one of the most critically acclaimed directors in Korean cinema history. His most representative work, Aimless Bullet (1961) is considered one of the best-made examples from the cinematic golden age.
- 7.
Chŏng was a productive director who made approximately 40 films between 1951 and 1968. He also collaborated with the film industry in Hong Kong since the early 1960s.
- 8.
The naval branch of the Imperial Headquarters of Information Board oversaw the film script.
- 9.
From 1925 to 1944, the Government-General of Korea made sixty-seven films for Japanese designed to promote Korean tourism and to spread the news from the colony to the metropole (naichi). See Kim Ryŏsil (2006, 76).
- 10.
On the other hand, Ha Sinae (2009, 233) points out that the propaganda made natural by local and folk rituals could have had as strong an impact in imperialization and colonial identification in Korea as the modern imperial rituals and that “[these] rituals didn’t remain a fixed object of exoticism or localism”; rather, they were “re-contextualized by imperial intention and acted as a motivational power of Imperialization.”
- 11.
Regarding how colonial propaganda films such as this almost completely excise narrative from cinema and glorify mobilization and spectacle, see Workman (2014).
- 12.
See Misawa’s Chapter 6 for a longer discussion on “anonymity and synchronism” as a film narrative technology in propaganda films .
- 13.
For instance, when Japan began mobilizing and enlisting Korean men in the Japanese imperial army, it also began universal compulsory education in the colony (Kim 2004, 119).
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Wakaki sugata [K: Chŏlmŭn mosŭp; Portrait of Youth]. 1943. Dir. Shiro Toyota. VOD. Seoul: Korean Film Archive.
Filmography
Ai to Chikai [K: Saranggwa maengsŏ; Love and Vow]. 1945. Dir. Ch’oe Ingyu and Imai Tadashi, VOD. Seoul: Korean Film Archive.
Bōrō no kesshitai [Suicide Squad at the Watchtower]. 1943. Dir. Imai Tadashi, DVD. Tokyo: DeAgostini Japan (Toho Co. Ltd.).
Chayu manse [Hurrah! For Freedom]. 1946. Dir. Ch’oe Ingyu, DVD. Seoul: Korean Film Archive.
Chipŏpnŭn ch’ŏnsa [Homeless Angels]. 1941. Dir. Ch’oe Ingyu, DVD. Seoul: Korean Film Archive.
Chiwŏnbyŏng [Volunteer]. 1941. Dir. An Sŏkyŏng, DVD. Seoul: Korean Film Archive.
Kunyongyŏlch’a [Military Train]. 1938. Dir. Sŏ Kwangje, DVD. Seoul: Korean Film Archive.
Mimong [A Beautiful Dream, a.k.a. A Lullaby of Death]. 1936. Dir. Yang Chunam, DVD. Seoul: Korean Film Archive.
Obalt’an [Aimless Bullet]. 1961. Dir. Yu Hyŏnmok, DVD. Seoul: Korean Film Archive.
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Jeong, K.Y. (2019). Militarism, Enlightenment, and Colonial Korean Cinema. In: Lin, Py., Kim, S. (eds) East Asian Transwar Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3200-5_8
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