Transnational modernity, national identity, and South Korean melodrama (1945-1960s)

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TRANSNATIONAL MODERNITY, NATIONAL IDENTITY, AND SOUTH
KOREAN MELODRAMA (1945-1960s)

by

Eunsun Cho

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CRITICAL STUDIES)

December 2006

Copyright 2006 Eunsun Cho
ii

Table of Contents

Abstract iii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 Mode of Shinpa and Korean Nationalism 22
I Mode of Shinpa at the Periphery of Korean National Culture 23
II Figuration of nationalism in Ch’oe In-kyu’s Viva
Freedom and The Night before Independence 43
III Conclusion 70

Chapter 2 Melodrama of the 1950s: Transition from the Mode
of Shinpa to Modern Melodrama 72
I Changes in Political Discourse of the 1950s 74
II Fantasy of Modernity and Female Identity in Flux 81
III Emergence of Modern Melodrama 95
IV New Female Icons and Re-enactment of Shinpa in
Modern Melodrama 113
V Conclusion 130

Chapter 3 Nationalism and Melodramatic Excess in
Historical Drama of the 1960s 131
I Industrialization and Changes in the Environment
of Film Production 134
II Use of the Melodramatic in Nationalist Discourse of the 1960s 140
III Reproduction of Nationalist Discourse in Historical Drama 149
IV Melodramatic Mode and Excess in Historical Drama 154
V Mourning and Excess 169
VI Conclusion 179

Chapter 4 Realism, Modernism, and Melodrama 181
I Italian Neo-Realism and South Korean Cinema
(from the mid-‘50s to early ‘60s) 186
II The Stray Bullet, National Realism, and Melodrama 191
III Modernism and South Korean Cinema 203
IV Conclusion 229

Epilogue 230

Bibliography 234
iii
Abstract
The Korean proto-melodramatic form, shinpa, derived from Japanese theatrical
mode, developed into a major mode of popular theater, literature, and cinema
duringthe colonial period. Since the colonial period shinpa or the shinpaesque has
always been in (South) Korean modern popular culture, it has never been accepted as
a legitimate cultural form and thus, was figured as a mere shadow of (South) Korean
modernity.
In the first chapter I analyze Ch’oe In-kyu’s two post-liberation films, which
have long occupied the pantheon of South Korean national cinema, Viva Freedom
(1946) and The Night before Independence (1949). In the analysis I deconstruct the
binary opposition of the national and shinpaesque and demonstrate that the
nationalist critique that the culture of shinpa is the detrimental remnant of
colonialism which puts sacred nationalist missions in danger describes the
problematic embedded in nationalist discourse itself.
In the second chapter I discuss the dynamics engaged between postwar South
Korean melodrama and shinpa. South Korean postwar melodrama and shinpa
interacted with each other in order to create images of modern female identity that
questioned and challenged the patriarchal gender order of the period. I argue that
through transnational cultural hybridizations melodrama and shinpa articulated
modern gender identities excluded from the terrain of the national.
In the third chapter I discuss how the melodramatic mode of historical drama of
the ‘60s was doubly engaged in the relation to narrative of nationalist discourse.
iv
‘60’s South Korean nationalism was primarily drawn to melodramatic rhetoric,
deploying it as a discursive apparatus to mobilize the people for the state-initiated
modernization project. Historical drama reproduced the rhetoric in its representation
of history, but at the same time, by the excessive display of melodramatic
sentiments, ruptured the narrative of nationalist discourse, especially its linear
temporal structure engineered to move forward the future.
In the last chapter I explore how realism and modernism were discussed in South
Korean film discourse of the ‘50s and ‘60s and the conventions of shinpa was
positioned in the discourse. I address the ways in which film discourse posited the
conventions of shinpa in order to legitimize realist and modernist modes of film.

1

Introduction
There are two things which have been so pervasive in modern Korean cinema and
culture, yet, not quite definable: shinpa, a proto-melodramatic form originated from
Japanese theatrical mode, and melodrama. As I will discuss in detail later, shinpa
was heavily drawn to sentimentality and female victimhood and developed into a
major mode of popular theater, literature, and cinema during the colonial period. But,
because of its permanent association with its Japanese origin and, more importantly,
the general perception of shinpa as a cultural form of escapism which impeded the
nationalist ideal of the construction of an independent, modern nation-state, it was
not registered as a legitimate cultural mode in hegemonic discourse of the period.
Although shinpa ceased to be the major mode of South Korean cinema, the
shinpaesque is still present in recently made blockbuster male weepies that trigger
tears for the nation like Silmido (Silmido, Kang Woo-suk, 2003) and Tae Guk Gi:
The Brotherhood of War (Taegukki huinalimyo^, Kang Je-gyu, 2003), or in the more
immediately visible form in television soap operas such as Winter Sonata (Kyo^ul
yo^nga, 2002) and Lovers in Paris (P’ariu^i yo^nindu^l, 2004). Since it became a
primary popular culture mode in colonial Korea, shinpa or the shinpaesque has
always been in (South) Korean modern popular culture. But it has never been
accepted as a legitimate cultural form and thus, was figured as a mere shadow of
(South) Korean modernity. Because this shadowy presence has hardly been brought
to light, there is a void in grasping the nature of the modernity of Korean cinema and
culture.
2
Melodrama in South Korea developed in the postwar period through the
reception of and hybridization with Hollywood cinema. The position of melodrama
in South Korean cinema and culture of the period was established through its relation
to shinpa. In the discussion of melodrama, postwar South Korean film discourse
centered around the dichotomy between melodrama and shinpa: the former was seen
as a more advanced and more modernized film form than the latter, or, the former
was marked with western modernity in contrast to the latter which was the index of
pre-modern, underdeveloped culture. The privileged positioning of melodrama in
film discourse was constructed through the relation to its inferior opposite, shinpa.
Melodrama was placed above shinpa, which was at the bottom, and under realist
and modernist cinema that were held to be “authentic cinema” at the top of cultural
hierarchy. The cultural and cinematic discourse of South Korea constructed the
topology of the nation’s postcolonial modernity on the basis of these three modalities
and binary oppositions set among them: opposition between “authentic cinemas” and
shinpa/ melodrama and opposition between shinpa and melodrama.
The central concern of my dissertation is to re-think these oppositions and to re-
configure the relations between shinpa, melodrama, and “authentic” cinemas in
terms of postcolonial cultural modernity. I will articulate this concern by focusing on
two themes: first is the exploration of the hegemonic discourse of postcolonial Korea
and the ways in which it constructed and mobilized shinpa and melodrama as part of
its apparatus. Second is the demonstration of how shinpa and melodrama were
3
engaged in the configuration of modernity and gave shape to modern identities left
outside hegemonic construction.
In order to do so I will explain how shinpa remained as a residual component in
the South Korean history of subsequent cultural periods from the post-Liberation to
the mid to late ‘60s. I will analyze the changing modes in the production of South
Korean cinema as well as how those modes operated as apparatuses mediating the
social and historical determinants and texts of shinpa, melodrama, and “authentic”
forms of cinemas throughout the period. For instance, I will discuss how the film
production of post-Liberation South Korea negotiated with ideological conflicts by
using the aesthetics of shinpa for the configuration of pro-American nationalism. In
the case of the ‘50s and ‘60s, I will address how local film distributors as a major
film financing source and the re-structuring of film industry by the establishment of
Motion Picture Act in 1961 and its revisions created the contestations between
shinpa, melodrama, and “authentic” forms of cinemas.

Scholarship on South Korean Cinema
During the last decade domestic and overseas, especially North American and
British, academic fields have been increasingly producing significant studies on
South Korean cinema. Domestically published books on South Korean melodrama
include: So-yong Kim’s Sinema, t’ech’no munhwau^i p’uru^n kkok [Cinema, the
Blue Flower of Technology] (Seoul: Yo^lhwadang, 1996) and Ku^ndaeso^ngu^i
yuryo^ngdu^l [Phantoms of Modernity] (Seoul: Ssiasu^l ppurinu^n sarandu^l, 2000),
4
Yu-shin Chu ed., Korean Cinema and Modernity (Hanguk yo^nghwawa
ku^ndaeso^ng) (Seoul: Sodo, 2001), So-yo^n Kim et al., Korean Cinema of the 50s:
the Age of Attraction and Chaos (50nyo^ndaeu^I hanguk yo^nghwa: maehokgwa
hondonu^i sidae) (Seoul: Sodo, 2003). English-language books on South Korean
cinema include Hyangjin Lee’s Comtemporary Korean Cinema: Identity, Culture,
Politics (Manchester University Press, 2000), David E. James and Kyung Hyun Kim
eds., Im Kwon Taek: the Making of a Korean National Cinema (Wayne State
University Press, 2002), Kyung Hyun Kim, The Remasculinization of Korean
Cinema (Duke University Press, 2004), Kathleen McHugh and Nancy Abelmann
eds., South Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre, and National Cinema
(Wayne State University Press, 2005), Justin Bowyer and Jinhee Choi eds., The
Cinema of Japan and Korea (24 Frames) (Wallflower Press, 2004) and Chi-Yun
Shin and Julian Stringer eds., New Korean Cinema (New York University Press,
2005).
The Korean-language books on South Korean cinema are of great significance in
that they fully bring discussion of South Korean melodrama into the arena of
academic film criticism. These books revisit long-forgotten film history of golden
age South Korean cinema (from the late ‘50s to late ‘60s) and reassess the critical
values of major films produced in the period. Of interest is that these books primarily
concentrate on melodrama, which had hardly entered the realm of any type of serious
film criticism in previous eras. The attention drawn to melodrama occurred
alongside a strongly revived interest in the history of South Korean cinema which
5
began in the early 1990s, when the quick, dramatic transference of the collective
energy invested in the Minjung movement into the arena of popular culture, cinema
in particular, were taking place. The transferred energy first found the object of its
passion in the Korean New Wave, yet the passion soon expanded to film history, or
more accurately to the recovery of film history. The past of South Korean cinema
had been relegated into oblivion since its demise from the early 70s, when the
absolute dictatorship of the Park Chung Hee regime was guaranteed by the
establishment of Yushin constitution (1972), up to the 90s. When a historical
awareness of the absence of historiography of South Korean cinema was awakened,
South Korean film discourse first got back to the golden age and discovered the
melodrama that dominated the period.
English-language studies on South Korean cinema have been generating
productive outcomes since the early 2000’s. James and Kim’s Im Kwon Taek: the
Making of a Korean National Cinema offers an in-depth and comprehensive
understanding of a body of works of Im, interweaving a wide range of issues such as
cultural and religious tradition, nationalism, gender, auteurism and transnational
cinematic reception registered in the formation of South Korean cinema of the last
three decades. McHugh and Abelmann’s South Korean Golden Age Melodrama:
Gender, Genre, and National Cinema is also a significant introduction to the golden
age of South Korean Melodrama for English readers.
These national and transnational critical receptions have enriched and deepened
understanding of South Korean cinema, but, as I addressed earlier, there still exists a
6
void, an elusiveness, in the comprehension of South Korean cinema, its history and
its modernity. The elusiveness is caused by the long-held dimunition of the primary
portion of cinematic and cultural repository of popular modern experience. This
experience, registered in the culture of shinpa, has largely remained unarticulated or
articulated merely in derogatory terms, and has been persistently excluded from the
realm of the legitimate modern experience of the Korean public. The elusiveness
surfaces when the modern or modernity is put into discourse without acknowledging
the presence and meaning of shinpa. The common statement that postwar South
Korean melodrama signaled the cinematic modernity of South Korea, for instance, is
troubling from the beginning. It is because the cinematic modernity is addressed
without connecting to or explaining its historical precedent. The cinematic modernity
is, thus, discussed as if it had appeared out of nowhere. The absence of the
discussion of shinpa, which was posited as a pre-modern mode of cinema, and
enabled the identification of postwar South Korean melodrama as such, causes the
lack of an understanding of the historicity of the cinematic modernity.
More problematic is the tendency that American cinema and culture are
considered only parameters in the shaping of the modernity of postwar South Korean
melodrama. The tendency results in the unacknowledgment of the ways in which
shinpa was altered and aligned with postwar modern melodrama, thus became part of
it. This unacknowledgement leaves the comprehension of postwar South Korean
cinematic modernity partial and incomplete. My dissertation aims to shed light on
the obscurity in the history of South Korean cinema from postliberation period to the
7
60s. By unearthing the substratum of melodrama and modernity of South Korean
cinema during the period my dissertation will contribute to the clarification of the
cultural meaning of melodrama and modernity in South Korean cinema and to the
addition of an enriching interpretive layer to it.

Korean Nationalism as Hegemonic Discourse on Modernity
While Benedict Anderson states that the national community is “imagined both as
inherently limited and sovereign,” the modern nation-hood of Korea invites a far
more compromised description. The boundary of the national community of modern
Korea was not limited by other nations beyond its boundary, but collapsed by other
nations coercively entering into the boundary. The sovereignty, the non-divine
secular governing authority on which western nations were founded, was already
taken away by the time the Koreans collectively began to acknowledge this notion.
Changing global economic and political circumstances such as imperialism,
colonialism, U.S. global hegemony and the cold war significantly diminished Korean
people’s control over the shaping of their destiny. Going through national traumas
like the colonization by Japan, subjugation by the U.S. neo-colonial hegemony, the
Korean War, and the ensuing permanent partition of the nation, the purity of the
unified oneness of the imagined community of Korea was fundamentally threatened
from its root. The unified one-ness of the nation, thus existed virtually only in
imagination. Under the circumstances of the absence of the modern national state
and enforced modernization the task of constructing a modern, independent national
8

state became absolutely prioritized. Under the rubric of constructing a modern,
independent national state nationalism was established as the hegemonic discourse of
Korean modernity.

Shinpa as the Other of Nation
During the colonial period the cultural modernity of Korea was formed through
the adaptation and alteration of western and Japanese modern cultures. The core of
Japanese culture .which was adapted into and shaped the core of popular culture of
colonial Korea, was shinpa. Shinpa was a new Japanese theatrical mode which
emerged as an alternative to traditional theater, kabuki, in the Meiji period (1868-
1912) and the term meant “new school,” thus a new school of theater.
So^ng-ku Yim, who established the first Korean shinpa theater group named
Hyo^ksindan (meaning a group of people who renovate) in 1911, learned about
Japanese shinpa when he worked for a Japanese theater in the southern area of Seoul
called Namch’on, where the Japanese residential and commercial population
settled
1
. After Yim’s theater group performed the first Korean shinpa drama titled
Pulhyo ch’o^nbol, (meaning that not following filial obligation brings a punishment
from the heaven), a number of shinpa theater groups, including Munsuso^ng,
Yuildan, Choso^n Munyedan, and Singukjuwa, were founded and opened the era of
shinpa theater.
2

1
Yo^ng-min Yu, Hanguk ku^ndae yo^nku^ksa [History of Korean Modern Theater], ( Seoul: Tan’guk
Taehakkyo Ch‘ulp‘anbu, 1996), p. 56
2
Ibid., pp. 57-58
9

The early to late teens was the period in which Korean shinpa dramas were
predominantly adapted from Japanese ones. For instance, a majority of repertoires of
shinpa theater, including Pulyo^guwi (Never Return), Changhanmong (A Long,
Sorrowful Dream), Ssangongru (Two Streams of tears), Musajo^k kyoyuk (Military
Education), etc., were adaptations of Japanese shinpa dramas or novels. Shinpa
dramas of the period were performed using an improvisational method borrowed
from Japanese theater, which meant there were no written scripts, and made it
difficult to research. They used male actors performing female roles, another
adaptation of the conventions of onnagata in Japanese theater.
In the early phase, shinpa drama was divided into four different categories:
military, detective, moral, and family drama. Military drama followed the narrative
pattern of soldiers fighting for the nation and bringing victory. It was hardly related
to the historical circumstances of Korea of the period; rather, it was a direct imitation
of Japanese shinpa drama which represented the Sino-Japanese war (1905).
3

Detective drama was more oriented toward entertainment than the other categories. It
employed motifs of robbers using sleight of hand, the police chasing robbers,
commotions of village people raided by robbers, and a young, smart policeman who
bravely solves the problem and gives a moral lesson to the robbers. Moral drama
purported to deliver enlightening messages of changing feudalism, love of a husband
and a wife, or love of siblings. Family drama (kajo^ng piku^k) was the staple of
shinpa dramas and enjoyed the most popularity. It told the stories of conflicts

3
Ibid., pp.64-65
10

between family members that revolve around love, hatred, and revenge, a fight for
family wealth, and dilemmas between romance and marriage.
4

The boom of shinpa theater soon spread to the field of popular literature and film.
A Long Sorrowful Dream, which I will discuss more later, was the adaptation of a
Japanese shinpa novel, The Golden Demon, written by Ozaki Koyo and serialized in
the newspaper, Maeil Sinbo, in 1913. It gained a phenomenal popularity and became
one of the prime shinpa texts in Korea. It was performed on stage numerous times
and made into a kino-drama, a combined form of theater and film in 1920, and also
made into a film twice in 1926 and 1931. The first film version was made by the
adaptor of the novel, Il-che Cho, who founded a film company named Kyerim film
company.
For the two to three years prior to when film form was fully established in Korea,
kino-drama flourished. Before A Long, Sorrowful Dream was made into a kino-
drama, one of the early shinpa theater groups, Singukjuwa, led by To-san Kim,
made a kino-drama titled Loyal Revenge (U^rijok kutu) in 1919. Loyal Revenge was
the story of a man named Song-san who gets revenge on his stepmother who is
trying to take wealth left by his dead father. It was the first Korean film ever made in
history and gained a noticeable commercial success.
Loyal Revenge‘s success major motivated other shinpa theater groups to start to
make kino-dramas. Shinpa theaters, which were waning since the late teens, were
inspired by the success of Loyal Revenge and found a way out from the decline in the

4
Ibid., pp. 65-67
11

production of kino-drama.
5
The production of kino-drama by shinpa theater
groups set the path of filmmaking in the early period of Korea silent cinema (1919-
26). During the period, shinpa became the dominant style of film as it had in the
fields of popular theater and literature. In South Korean film history such a path of
filmmaking was described as a regrettable one because it circumscribed the quality
of early Korean films as “no better than cheap shinpa.”
6

Around 1923 the mode of film production started to transition. Before then, film
production was primarily financed by the capital of movie theaters. For example,
Su^ng-pil Pak, who ran a movie theater, Tanso^ngsa, financed and produced, Loyal
Revenge and Tale of Changhwa and Hongryo^n. Yet, film production companies
soon began to displace movie theater-initiated film productions and by 1926 nine
film production companies were established. The majority of films made by the
companies were shinpa films: Sorrowful Song of the Sun (Hau^i pikok, 1924), A Bird
in a Closet (Nongjungjo), Two Streams of Tears, A Long, Sorrowful Dream (1926),
The Bandit Captain (Sanch’aewang, 1926), Falling Flowers, Flowing River (Nakwa
yusu,), etc. They time to time adapted Korean folktales into films as well like Tale of
Hu^ng-po (1924) and Tale of Shim Ch’o^ng (1925).
The production of shinpa film was one of the ways the companies chose to
survive. Their financial base was severely unstable and the film market had not been
developed yet, thus most of them lasted only one or two years.
7
Under the
circumstances they selected either shinpa films with high expectations of commercial

5
Young-Il Lee, Haguk yo^nghwa cho^nsa [History of Korean Cinema], (1969), pp. 61-63
6
Ibid., p. 61.
7
Ibid., p. 78
12
success or adaptations of folktales which the audience were already familiar with,
and would be easily attracted to.
After the liberation, shinpa was retroactively constructed as an index of
transnational culture which carried negative connotations opposed to the ideal of a
modern, independent nation purported by Korean nationalism. Shinpa was, above all,
figured as the culture of the colonizer, thus anti-national as well as a sign of the
feminine form of lower mass culture. In addition, the positioning of shinpa in
opposition to the vision of the modern, masculine nation pursued by hegemonic
discourse attached to it the label of an anti-modern form of culture, which
contradicted the fact that shinpa was an integral part of the colonial modernity of
Korea from the beginning. The culture of shinpa in colonial Korea was configured as
things that were not embraced by the hegemonic discourse of nationalism. The
culture of shinpa served as a space for cultural residues not incorporated into the
“imagined community” of colonial Korea.
While Japanese colonial discourse constructed the colonized Korean people as
subjects who were subjugated to and emasculated by the colonial power, Korean
nationalist discourse attempted to configure the modern, independent, patriarchal
nation through the imaginary removal of the determinants: the colonial subjugation
and the feminized positioning of colonized Korea. In other words, Korean
nationalism was a discursive practice aimed at eradicating the transnational registers
that othered colonized Koreans. The construction of the imagery of the nation
without the transnational registers necessitated the fabrication of an object upon
13
which the otherness inscribed in the national and gender identity of colonized
Korea could be projected. The culture of shinpa was identified as the object, which
carried what was carved out of the imagery of the nation. The culture of shinpa, the
object onto which the otherness of colonized Korea was displaced, was the abject of
the nation imagined by nationalist discourse. Pejorative perception of melodrama as
a cheap, feminine, mindless lower form of culture and cinema seems to be
universally shared in all cultures But in addition to the gender-specific derogatory
label of failed aesthetics, Korean proto-melodramatic form was imposed with the
shame of an anti-national form of culture and cinema.

Melodramatic Nation—When Your Nation Calls You, It Does So
Melodramatically
In the late ‘60s Anglo-Saxon film criticism started to pay attention to melodrama
and re-conceive the value of melodrama in terms of its potential subversiveness to
bourgeois ideology. Christine Gledhill in her seminal essay, “The Melodramatic
Field: An Investigation,” an introduction to Home Is Where the Heart Is, explicated
the trajectory of the critical reception of melodrama in Anglophone film studies as
follows:

What allowed melodrama to emerge with full force into this reconstituted
critical field was a new emphasis on the operation and ideological affectivity of
aesthetic form….The neo-Marxist perspective [which emerged at the end of the
60s] looked to stylistic ‘excess’ and narrative disjuncture for their ‘exposure’ of
contradictions between a mainstream film’s aesthetic and ideological programs.
14

Formal contradiction became a new source of critical value because it allowed
apparently ideologically complicit films to be ‘read against grain.
8

The value of melodrama, she argued, was found in the genre’s formal ability to
reveal and disrupt bourgeois ideology. Even though the relation between ideology
and melodrama is doubly mediated, thus melodrama as “mainstream film” is
“apparently ideologically complicit,” the “stylistic excess” of melodrama can
simultaneously be read as a rupture of ideology.
This view of the relation between ideology and melodrama defined in the Anglo-
Saxon critical field can be effectively applied to Korean melodrama. The ideology
which had been mediated and challenged by Korean melodrama from the colonial
period to the 60s, however, should be specified as nationalism. Korean nationalism
was the core hegemonic discourse that represented the interests of indigenous
bourgeois and the subversive potential of Korea melodrama can be found in its
relation to nationalism. Reading subversive potential in Korean melodrama,
however, becomes a more complicated task than it is in melodrama in the west
because Korean nationalism is imbued with melodramatic rhetoric. “Stylistic
excess,” which is a primary locus where melodrama discloses the contradictions of
ideology, is a primary component of the very ideology of nationalism.
Socio-political and historical specificities of colonial Korea formed the narrative
of nationalism that Koreans should stand up from the sadness and pain of the loss of
the nation and be fully devoted to the regaining of their national sovereignty. This

8
Christine Gledhill, The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation,” Gledhill ed., Home Is Where the
Heart Is (British Film Institute, 1987), p. 8.
15

narrative was passed down to modernization discourse in postcolonial South
Korea and generated a variation that South Koreans must overcome the tragic,
national legacy of poverty and achieve the historical mission of modernization.
Chatterjee argues that Bengali nationalism as a hegemonic project of the indigenous
middle-class appropriated the popular as part of discourse during the colonial period.
She writes:

The popular becomes the repository of natural truth, naturally self-sustaining
and therefore, timeless. It has to be approached not by the calculating analytic of
rational reasoning but by “feelings of the heart,” by lyrical compassion. The
popular is also the timeless truth of the national culture, uncontaminated by
colonial reason. [The popular] is the form in which a middle-class culture,
constantly seeking to “nationalize itself, finds nourishment….
The popular is also appropriated in a sanitized form, carefully erased of all
marks of vulgarity, coarseness, localism, and sectarian identity….
The popular enters hegemonic national discourse as a gendered category. In its
immediate being, it is made to carry the negative marks of concrete sexualized
femininity. Immediately, therefore, what is popular is unthinking, ignorant
superstitious, scheming, quarrelsome, and also potentially dangerous and
uncontrollable. But with the enlightened leadership, its true essence is made to
shine forth in its natural strength and beauty; its capacity for resolute endurance
and sacrifice and its ability to protect and nourish.
9

Chatterjee defines the popular in the sense of the folkloric that signifies “natural” and
“timeless truth” “uncontaminated by colonial reason” rather than in the sense of
mass, entertainment culture. The ways in which the popular was mobilized by
Bengali hegemonic national discourse, nevertheless, shows similarities to the
strategy of Korean nationalism’s use of shinpaesque/ melodramatic mass culture.
Korean nationalism constructed a particular narrative pattern which transferred the

9
Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton
Universoty Press, 1993), pp.72-73.
16
heart-breaking story of national traumas into mind-absorbing patriotism. As
Bengali nationalism took recourse to “feelings of the heart” expressed in the popular
in order to articulate the opposite to colonial reason, Korean nationalist discourse
was designed to bring its agenda to the people’s hearts. Korean nationalism
appropriated shinpaesque/melodramatic sentiment and transformed it into a sanitized
form. By repressing “derogatory” perceptions attached to shinpaesque/melodramatic
sentiment like feminine, cheap, and lacking national consciousness Korean
nationalism fabricated pure passion for the nation out of the sentiment.
Such a use of shinpa/melodrama by Korean nationalist discourse conflicts with
the derogatory positioning of the former by the latter. As aforementioned, shinpa was
constructed as the transnationally contaminated feminine other of Korean national
identity, yet, the latter simultaneously created its own affinity to the former. This
inherently contradictory twofold mediation between nationalism and
shinpa/melodrama was one of the pivotal axes on which Korean national and modern
identity were configured and contested.
In the first chapter I demonstrate that an emotive transaction between South
Korean nationalism and mode of shinpa exists. This demonstration is intended to
deconstruct the binary opposition of the national and shinpaesque, and evince that
nationalism’s positioning of shinpa as its inferior opposite is the process of
projecting the otherness embedded in nationalism. I analyze Ch’oe In-kyu’s two
post-liberation films, Viva Freedom (Chayu manse, 1946) and The Night before
Independence (Tonglip cho^nya, 1949), which have long occupied the pantheon of
17

South Korean national cinema. In these films, sacrilegious patriotic feeling is cued
by “formulaic, cheap” sentimentalism of shinpa. Hyperbolic emotion, an index of the
lower quality of shinpa, is drained off to become the aura of exalted nationalist
passion without being credited. The boundary demarcating nationalist discourse and
the mode of shinpa is blurred by the self-undermining cross-over of the former.
I also demonstrate that the nationalist critique that the culture of shinpa is the
detrimental remnant of colonialism which puts sacred nationalist missions in danger
describes the problematic embedded in nationalist discourse itself. The configuration
of the culture of shinpa as such is a way of casting upon it the colonized-
consciousness behind the façade of nationalist discourse. The nationalist critique on
the ant-national inheritance of shinpa, therefore, should be turned to nationalist
discourse itself.

Shinpa and Melodrama
Even though melodrama in the west and in South Korea shares similar cultural
debasement, the status of melodrama in the ‘50s and ‘60s South Korea was quite
different than in the west. In Melodrama and Asian Cinema Wimal Dissanayake
states that “none of the Asian languages has a synonym for the word, melodrama”
and that the usages of terms which indicate melodrama in Asian cinema are “recent
coinages.”
10
The reception of the term as well as texts of film melodrama resulted
from the historical and cultural process of westernization inscribed with modernities

10
Wimal Dissanayake, “Introduuction” to Wimal Dissanayake ed., Melodrama and Asian Cinema
(Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 3.
18

of Asian countries. In the case of South Korean cinema the term melodrama
started to gain popular usage in the ‘50s. It designated a genre of film that was more
advanced, modernized, and similar to Hollywood cinema’s formal aesthetics
compared to shinpa. Even though melodrama, which was specifically labeled as
“modern melodrama” in the 50s South Korea, was still positioned in a lower place
than realist national cinema in the cultural hierarchy, it was figured as an index of
modernity opposed to shinpa. Though not fully legitimized as the authentic national
cinema, melodrama was conceived as carrying higher cultural and cinematic value
than shinpa.
The difference between shinpa and melodrama has never been clearly defined,
rather it was thought of as a matter of sensibility. Young-Il Lee, who was one of the
central figures in South Korean film criticism of the period, for example, explained
the difference of the two as follows:

Because difference between melodrama and shinpa is not clearly discernable,
they are usually distinguished in terms of feeling. However, it’s not impossible
to distinguish these two. Shinpa films…portray destiny of characters from one
extreme to another. The main narrative of shinpa consists of coincidences,
repeated victimization of women and men’s abandonment of women to whom
they owe their social success. Shinpa features the exaggeration and extreme
contrasts of characters and drama….On the other hand in melodrama there are
rational thinking and control of emotion… [which contrasts to] intended
exaggerations found in shinpa. We cannot but discern melodrama and shinpa
through difference of feelings and they are evidently distinguished by feelings.
11

Although Lee points out that shinpa features plots centered around the victimization
of women, coincidence as a major narrative component, and hyper-dramatization,

11
Young-Il Lee, Lee Yo^ng-ilu^i hanguk yo^nghwasa kangu^irok [Yo^ng-il Lee’s Lecture Notes on
History of Korean Cinema] (Seoul: Sodo, 2002), p. 125
19
these are all characteristics of melodrama as well. Thus, the issue of
differentiation of melodrama and shinpa, as he claims, tended to come down to the
matter of “feelings.”
The cultural implications of the difference between shinpa and melodrama were,
however, far beyond the matter of feelings because the difference formed the
dichotomy of pre/ anti-modern versus modern in South Korean film discourse of the
period. In the second chapter I explore the ways in which melodrama, both the term
and formal features, were received in postwar South Korea. I discuss the dynamics
engaged between melodrama and shinpa especially in light of the representation of
the modern femininity of postwar South Korean women. I demonstrate that, different
from the paradigm of postwar South Korean film discourse which was drawn to the
binary opposition between modern melodrama and shinpa, the two interacted with
each other in order to create images of modern female identity that questioned and
challenged the patriarchal gender order of the period. Through the discussion I intend
to show that shinpa was modernized as well vis-à-vis its hybridization with
transnational cultural registers and was mobilized to articulate gender identities
excluded from the terrain of the national.
In the third chapter I discuss how the melodramatic mode of historical drama of
the ‘60s was doubly engaged in the relation to narrative of nationalist discourse.
Another case of hegemonic discourse’s appropriation of the popular, the ‘60s South
Korean nationalism was primarily drawn to melodramatic rhetoric and deployed the
rhetoric as a discursive apparatus to mobilize the people for the state-initiated
20
modernization project. Historical drama reproduced the rhetoric in its
representation of history, but at the same time ruptured the narrative of nationalist
discourse, especially its linear temporal structure engineered to move forward the
future. The rupture of the hegemonic temporal configuration was enabled by the
maximum display of melodramatic sentiments. The display of melodramatic
sentiments functioned to express the mourning of loss which was oppressed by
hegemonic discourse. The display of melodramatic sentiments served either to
reclaim the South Korean public’s right to lament over historical traumas or to
acknowledge the female sexual desire existing outside the regulation of hegemonic
gender and national discourse.
In the last chapter I explore how realism and modernism were discussed in South
Korean film discourse of the ‘50s and ‘60s and the convention of shinpa was
positioned in the discourse. I address the ways in which film discourse posited the
convention of shinpa in order to legitimize realist and modernist modes of film and
the role which the privileged signifier of Italian neo-realism played in the
legitimization. Pia Valley (P’iaggol, Yi Kang-ch’o^n, 1955), The Stray Bullet
(Obalt’an, Yu Hyo^n-mok, 1961) and Mist (Ange, Kim Su-yong, 1967) will be
analyzed to exemplify the relations among South Korean cinematic realism/
modernism, shinpa and Italian neo-realism of the period. I especially provide a
detailed analysis of Mist and demonstrate that the identity of a South Korean male
modernist of the ‘60s was constructed through male narcissism, which was enabled
21
through the repression and displacement of shinpaesque femininity of South
Korean women onto an ideal male image.

22
Chapter 1 Mode of Shinpa and Korean Nationalism
In this chapter I explore the relation between the mode of shinpa from the colonial
period (1910-1945) to the immediate post-liberation period. Since its inception in the
early colonial period the mode of shinpa was devalued as a cheap, feminine, popular
cultural form by Korean nationalist discourse. Along with this gendered depreciation
due to its Japanese origin the mode was subject to the criticism that it lacked national
authenticity and that it significantly undermined the nationalist vision of establishing
an independent, modern nation. In this way the mode of shinpa was perceived as an
anti-national and anti-modern entertainment culture opposed to the nationalist ethos
prevalent in the colonial and post-liberation period. Such a perception has continued
to dominate the field of literary and cultural criticism as well as the mind-set of the
Korean public up to the present.
I analyze the ways in which Korean nationalist discourse positioned the mode of
shinpa from the colonial to immediate post-liberation, concentrating on the binary
opposition set between the two. First, I provide an overview of the cultural meaning
of the mode of shinpa in colonial times; and a brief explanation of one of the master
texts of shinpa literature, A Long, Sorrowful Dream in comparison to The Heartless
(Mujo^ng, Yi Kwang-su, 1917), the first Korean modern nationalist novel.
I then offer a detailed analysis of two films, Viva Freedom and The Night before
Independence in the post liberation period. These two films have been appreciated as
the paradigmatic examples of nationalist films, which inherited the legacy of Korean
23
national cinema originated from Arirang (Na Un-kyu, 1923) and passed it down to
The Stray Bullet.
Through the analysis of the films I elucidate the workings of the binary
opposition framing the relation between nationalist discourse and the mode of shinpa
and how the authenticity of nationalist discourse is constructed and justified through
the opposition. The relationship between the two, however, does not neatly fit into
the frame of opposition. As I discuss later, the films generate nationalist pathos by
borrowing the affective properties of the mode of shinpa, thus suggesting that
nationalist discourse took recourse to its inferior opposite, betraying the premise of
the opposition. By deconstructing the opposition in this manner I will evince that the
boundary demarcating nationalist discourse and the mode of shinpa is blurred by the
self-undermining cross-over of the former
I also demonstrate that the figuration of nationalism in the films is embedded with
colonized consciousness, therefore the nationalist criticism implied in the films, that
shinpa is the detrimental remnants of colonial culture, is fundamentally self-
contradictory. Such a self-contradiction, I argue, points to the fact that the colonized
consciousness was intrinsic to Korean nationalist discourse of the post-liberation
period, thus, the critique should be turned to nationalist discourse itself.

24

I Mode of Shinpa at the Periphery of Korean National Culture
In the early period, shinpa plays performed in Korea aimed at social edification
and enlightenment, yet their pattern rapidly transformed into that which is described
as sentimental entertainment “creating flood of tears.”
12
This change was largely
caused by the censorship of the Japanese colonial government, which banned the
production of any cultural texts that delivered political messages opposed to its
policies.
13
Korean shinpa plays and novels feature components to western
melodrama: the binary opposition of good and evil, the victimization of innocent
heroines, unlikely coincidences and strong emotionalism. These components are
combined to render allegorical portrayals of the colonized nation, where good, but
helpless Korean women are exploited and afflicted by Japanese male landowners or
capitalists.
Since its inception, the mode of shinpa has carried the pejorative implications of
an anti-national, anti-modern, mindless, feminine popular cultural form. Shinpa has
been subject to the criticism that it was a site of escapism that held back the Korean
people with complacent pleasure and set a major obstacle to the construction of an
independent, modern nation. As Hwa Yim, one of the leading literary historians and
critics in the colonial period pointed out, the mode of shinpa was caught in the
conflict between popular reception and critical depreciation from the outset. He
wrote:

12
Yo^n-ho So^, Hanguk Kundae Higoksa (A Study of the History of Early Modern Korean Drama),
(Seoul Minjok Munhwa Yo^nguso, Korea University, 1982), p.62
13
Soon-shim Jung, “The Shaman and the Epic Theatre: the Nature of Han in the Korean Theatre,”
New Theatre Quarterly, 2004, (Cambridge University Press), p.4.
25

A Long, Resentful Dream! No writer today would be content with being
labeled as an author lesser than that of this cheap piece.

But, as to the question, “Who is the one that created a better prototypical
character than Yi Su-il and Shim Sun-ae [the male and the female protagonist of
A Long, Resentful Dream]?” I’m quite doubtful if there is anyone who can
immediately answer. Yet, if someone in the field of literature comes forward
saying with artistic pride and courage, “It’s me,” readers would laugh at him
waving their hands.

“[They would say] [h]e is truly silly and nonsensical.” In fact, it’s very
unfortunate to Korean readers, but, true that a character, whom they would feel
familiar with and close to as much as Su-il and Sun-ae or Ch’un-hyang of older
times, has not been found in Korean high literature. . . .

[Su-il and Sun-ae] have been loved and remembered by people, for which there
is only one reason that these characters, whether sensible or not, universally
embody part of the general ideal of contemporary readers through man-woman
and father-son relationships.”
14

As Yim argued, the significance of shinpa as the cultural matrix that shaped the
“general ideal” of Koreans of the colonial period never received critical
acknowledgment. Literary criticism of the colonial period responded to the growing
popular reception of shinpa with constant condemnation. The condemnation operated
as both part of and a working tool for nationalist discourse of the period. Shinpa was
described as a mode which was not qualified for modern, masculine and high-brow
national literature. Shinpa was figured as the exterior to the ideal of national
literature, which thereby defined and legitimized the boundary of what national
literature was and should be. The mode of shinpa was positioned as the inferior other
of national literature.

14
Hwa Yim, “Uidaehan nangman cho^ngshin [Great Romantic Spirit],” in Logic of Literature
(Munhaku^i nolli) (Seoul: Hagyesa, 1940), p. 45.
26

This hierarchically differentiated positioning of shinpa has been reinscribed
throughout the historiography of Korean literature. In the field of present-day Korean
literary criticism shinpa still means “shallow comfort” to colonized Koreans
15
and a
“negative factor in the social, historical progress of Korea.”
16
The binary opposition framing the positioning of shinpa and national literature
was transferred onto the field of film criticism when film became a major medium of
collective national culture in Korea. The film discourse surrounding the relation of
the two was especially precipitated by the emergence of a Korean film, Arirang. The
title of the film was taken from a Korean folk song, and after its release the song
become an anthem of for the Korean independence movement. The film narrates the
story of a college student named Yo^ng-chin (played by Na himself), portrayed as
suffering from mental illness in order to avoid censorship, who kills a pro-Japanese
landowner who attempts to rape his sister. The film has been remade a number of
times and celebrated for setting the path for the realist rendering of nationalist
resistance, which defined the aesthetics and politics of Korean national cinema since
then.
The binary opposition shaped in literary criticism was adapted and re-played in the
discourse of national cinema in the form of opposition between national and
shinpaesque film. Lee Yo^ng-il summarized the historical significance of Arirang
(1926) as follows: “Arirang is a national film that represents national sadness and

15
Wo^n-sik Ch’oe , “Chnghanmong kwa wianu^iroso^u^i munhak [A Long, Sorrowful Dream and
Literature as Comfort],”in Minjok munhakui nolli [Logic of National Literature], (Chagjakgwa
P’ipyo^ngsa, 1982), p 27.
16
Min-yo^ng Yu, History of Korean Modern Play (Hanguk hyo^ndae higoksa) (Seoul: Honso^ngsa,
1982), p. 26.
27

burning spirit of nationalism,” and “elevated Korean cinema to a higher artistic
stage, which by then was merely thought of as the cinema of old-fashioned shinpa or
as that overly drawn to the adaptations of Japanese shinpa novels.”
17
His comment
repeated the longstanding accusation that shinpa merely imitated Japanese culture,
associating it with the anti-national and anti-modern (“old-fashioned”). Shinpa film
was burdened with the similar indictment as shinpa literature had been: that it
hindered Korean cinema from reaching a “higher artistic stage” capable of
embodying the authentic nationality.
Contradictory to the claim that Arirang was absolutely superior to shinpa films
that were made prior to the film, it admittedly bore the formal features of shinpa,
particularly an excessive emotional component. As Lee himself remembered,
“Everyone, except for none, who sees the film burst into tears.”
18
In her Ph. D.
dissertation, A Study on the Mode of Shinpa during the Colonial Period, Yo^ng-hi
Kang, a Korean cultural critic, also points out that although “there has been a wide
acquiescent agreement that Arirang has shinpaesque components,” film discourse
has demarcated and dissociated the film from the body of shinpa-coded films. The
film’s emotional quality was lifted up to high-minded “national romanticism,”
19

categorically distinguished from the third-rate sentimentalism for which shinpa was
blamed for. Korean national cinema was born out of this hierarchical dichotomy set

17
Yong-Il Lee, History of Korean Cinema, p. 86.
18
Ibid, p. 88.
19
Yu Hyo^n-mok, “A Study on Na Un-kyu’s National Romanticism” (“Na Un-Kyu’s minjokjo^k
nangmajuu^i kochal”), Film Art (Yo^ngsang Yesul), vol.5 (Korean Film Committee, 1985, Oct.).
28

between national and shinpaesque, which endorsed the authenticity of the former
at the expense of the latter from the outset.
20

During the postwar period the icons of dangerous women such as a “madam
freedom” and a “western princess” (yanggongju, a pejorative term for prostitutes
who serve for the U.S. soldiers in South Korea) glamorized the screen in South
Korea. With all the controversies around the inappropriateness of gender
representations which the icons carried, they were inarguably welcome for the one
reason that they created Korean cinematic images that were not possible in the
tradition of shinpa. The films that made major contributions to the proliferation of
those icons, Madam Freedom (Chayu puin, Han Hyo^ng-mo, 1956), a film about a
demure housewife’s fall into dance fever and extra-marital affairs and Hell Flower
(Chiokhwa, Shin Snag-ok, 1952), which features a dangerously seductive “western
princess” who ends up being murdered by her lover,
21
were celebrated as the heralds
of “modern” Korean melodrama. This prestigious labeling, modern melodrama, was
attributed to a particular body of films to be differentiated from shinpa film.
Although it was only partially prestigious, in that modern melodrama has never been

20
Yo^ng-hi Kang , Ilche kangjo^mgi sinp’a yangsik yo^ngu [A Study on the Mode of Shinpa during
the Colonial Period], Ph.D. Diss. (Seoul National University, 1989), p. 14. Kang’s approach to
Arirang is clearly distinguished from the previous critical reception of the film in that she positions
the film in line with the mode of shinpa without a hierarchal differentiation as has been made in the
historiography of Korean cinema. However, regarding the evaluation of the mode of shinpa, she takes
a similar position with that of established literary discourse, which critic sizes it as a source of a
shallow comfort and the embodiment of the world view of defeatism.
21
Hell Flower is noteworthy in many respects: it showcases the provocative and glamorous image of
a woman of the lowest of the low, a military prostitute, which is rarely found in Korean cinema of any
of the following periods. This type of representation of sexually “degraded” women, which stresses
the fascination with their sexuality rather than the imposition of guilt and criticism, is one major
characteristic of the '50s melodramas. Even though the female protagonist, Sonya, seduces her lover’s
brother, and is eventually killed by her revengeful lover, the alluring image of her body wrapped in
low-cut black dresses and her haughty attitude that carries no guilty feeling offers the pleasurable
spectacle of female sexuality, indicating the meaning of modern in modern Korean melodrama.
29

placed in the pantheon of Korean national cinema unlike realist films that
inherited the legacy of Arirang, it gained a relatively high cultural value by its
distinction from shinpa film which was put at the bottom of hierarchy within film
discourse of the period.
22

In the late 1960s when Bitter, but Once Again (Miwuo^do tasi hanbo^n, Cho^ng
So-yo^ng, 1968), a maternal melodrama that sympathetically portrays a woman who
hands over the custody of her male child begotten outside of wedlock to his wealthy
biological father for the child’s happiness, was grossing record-breaking box office
revenue, the success of the film brought many concerns and worries to South Korean
cinema. The criticism that the film reversed the historical progression of South
Korean cinema fiercely responded to the flood of shinpaesque tears that the film
brought back to the screen. The prevalence of shinpa-coded melodrama in the late
‘60s
23
is often regarded as a harbinger of the dark era of Korean cinema that began
around the establishment of the Yushin system (1972-79).
24
The dominance of
shinpa-coded melodrama in the period was also figured as a symptom of nostalgic
conservatism expressed by the masses who were marginalized in the state-initiated

22
Young-Il Lee claims that Korean melodrama produced between 1954-57, which includes Madam
Freedom and Hong So^ng-ki’s melodramas like Lovers (Aein) (1956) and Star of the Lost Paradise
(Sillagwo^nu^i Pyo^l) (1957), showed a sound spirit of filmmakers, and were different from shinpa-
coded melodrama in that they presented the morality and manners of society. History of Korean
Cinema, pp.204- 219.
23
Two sequels of Bitter, But Once Again, Pae Cho^ng-cha, Evil Woman (Yohwa pae cho^ng-cha, Yi
Kyu-ung, 1966), A Snowy Evening (Nun narinu^n Pam, Ha Han-su, 1968), Yun Shim-to^k (An
Hyo^n-cho^l, 1968), A Lady at Myo^ngwolgwan (Myo^ngwolkwan Assi, 1967)
24
The Park Chung Hee administration introduced a new constitution, known as the Yushin
(Revitalizing Reform) constitution, which greatly expanded presidential powers and allowed Park to
remain in office indefinitely. This constitution was designed to repress any type of political
opposition, and resulted in the darkest and most oppressive political period in Korean history until
Park was assassinated in 1979.
24
Ibid, p. 294
30

modernization project governing the period.
25
Such a view still replicates the
framing of the mode of shinpa as opposed to the modern, although it acknowledges
that the mode served as a vehicle for the expression of public sentiment for given
social circumstances.
26

When Marriage Story (Kim U^i-so^k, 1992) set box-office records in the
domestic film market, it was appreciated as the pioneer of a new possibility of South
Korean cinema. The fresh and light-hearted romantic comedy genre introduced by
the film, which is also well-known for the first attempted conglomerate (Samsung)-
financing in the history of South Korean cinema, was celebrated as the beginning of
a new era of South Korean cinema. One of the major achievements made by the film,
reviews said, was that it successfully created a filmic form “totally unlike the tear-
jerking style typical of Korean cinema up to that point.” As at many previous
moments of transition in Korean cinema, with the emergence of the new filmic style
the discourse drawn to the polarity of shinpaesque and new came into play in order
to confirm the value of the new. Even though there seems to be no more
contemporary Korean films that fully embody the mode of shinpa, when South
Koreans encounter an out-of-style image or a story filled with “too much” sadness
and tears and too unbelievable coincidences, they still make a derisive statement,
“It’s so shinpaesque!” (shinpajo)

31

I-1 Rise of Korean Nationalism and the Mode of Shinpa
Korean nationalist discourse played a major role in the operation of the
hierarchical discourse that determined the place of the mode of shinpa in the cultural
sphere of Korea. Modern Korean nationalism intensely arose from the late 19
th
to
early 20
th
century, when the nation was faced with the aggression of a number of
different imperial forces and the eventual loss of its sovereignty to Japan. As for the
period when the concepts of the modern nation and national identity of Korea first
emerged, however, there are still much heated debates. For example, a group of
Korean historians argue that Benedict Anderson’s widely accepted claim of nation as
a modern construct does not fit the case of Korea because Korea has formed a
unified nation comprised of one ethnicity since the establishment of the Koryo^
dynasty in the10
th
century.
27
Yet, this argument is also contested by studies that
foreground the differences between pre-modern ethnic collectivity and modern state
identity. Henry H. Em, for instance, contends that pre-modern kingdoms of Korea
“were not interested in “nationalizing” their subjects,” and that their major “solution
to the problem of maintaining political stability was to tolerate local distinctiveness
and maintain status distinction.”
28

27
Chung-so^k So^, “Hanguk esou^i minjokgwa kukka: puru^joa hogu^n chibae kechu^ngu^l
chungsimu^ro [Issue of Nation and State in Korea: on the Perspective of Bourgeois or Ruling Class],”
in Kundae kungmin kukkawa minjok munje [Modern Nation-State and the Issue of Nation],”
Hanguksa Yo^nguhoe (Institution of Korean History) ed., (Seoul: Chisik Sano^psa, 1995).
28
Henry H. Em, “Minjok as a Modern and Democratic Construct: Shin Ch’aeho’s Historiography,” in
Gi-Wook Chin and Michael Robinson ed., Colonial Modernity in Korea (Harvard University Press,
1999). Carter Eckert also argues that prior to the late 19
th
century “there was little, if any, feeling of
loyalty toward the abstract concept of Korea as a nation-state, or toward fellow inhabitants of the
peninsula as Koreans. Far more meaningful at the time, in addition to loyalty of the king, were the
attachment of Koreans to their village or region and above all their clan, lineage, and immediate and
32

The nationalizing process arguably corresponds with a particular type of
historical writing which emerged in the early 20th century Korea. Korean history
written by Ch’ae-ho Shin,
29
a much revered nationalist historian and activist, offers
a paradigmatic example of nascent national consciousness distinguished from the
ethnic collectivity that had existed prior to this period. His 1908 essay, “Toksa
Sillon” (“A New Way of Reading History”) is the “first and most influential
historical narrative that equates Korean history (kuksa) with Korean national history
(minjoksa),” where the Korean people are identified as the common descendants of
Tangun, the mythic figure who founded Korea about 5000 years ago, and as the
basis of national sovereignty.
30
Shin also used the epic narrative style of history-
writing, displacing the traditional Confucian styles such as chronicles
(p’yo^ngnyo^nch’e) and annal-biographies (kijo^nch’e). The narrative and style
utilized in his historiography manifest a visibly conscious effort to establish a
singular genealogical origin of Korean people and the timeless presence of their
nationality through the configuration of historiography in the western, modern sense.
The two primary features of Shin’s history-writing, the creation of a unique
historical origin and the idea of the popular sovereignty, engage in the core ideas
definitive of the modern nation-state. They display the self-awareness of national
identity constituted only by the difference from other nations as well as the
acknowledgement of the people-based sovereignty, radically distinguished from that

extended family.” Offspring of Empire: The Koch’ang Kims and the Colonial Origins of Korean
Capitalism 1876-1945 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), pp. 226-27.
29
Em, p. 339.
30
Ch’ae-ho Shin, “Toksa Sillon,” TSCHC, 1:471-72.
33

of feudal monarchies. The notion of popular sovereignty brought forth the idea of
sharing the same collective identity as the members of the nation regardless of class,
gender, and region, which was historically unprecedented. Such an all-embracing
identification was the base constitutive of their subjectivity as well as various
independent movements deployed at the time. This identification shaped the
“comradeship” of the “imagined community” of Korea at the moment of the
historical crisis and failed transition from monarch to modern nation-state.
Korean nationalism did not establish the seemingly all-embracing modern
national identity without the construction of its other.
31
The other was obviously the
Japanese colonial force which disabled the presence of Korean nationality itself. This
infallibly recognized enemy, however, was not the sole counter-force to the idealized
nationhood. The external enemy was internally projected upon and re-configured
into that which existed within national culture. The transnational origin and
feminine and popular cultural association of the mode of shinpa, which began to
flourish almost concurrently with the rise of nationalism, was conveniently figured
as the internalized enemy. The culture of shinpa was thereby constituted as an alien
element illegitimately added to the imagined homogeneity of the nationhood of
Korea. The rejection of the colonial force, or more accurately, the rejection of the
nationhood transnationally tainted by the colonial force, was thus displaced onto the

31
Such a positioning of Korean subjects evidently displays the repressive discursive function of
nationalism. Yet, as Em argues, it renders the democratic ideal visible on the national agenda. He
contends that “nationalist historiography focusing on Shin’s historical writings “resisted the degrading
assertions of Japanese colonialist historiography and helped to create a modern form of civil society in
Korea. At the same time . . .this nationalist historiography has inhibited the deepening of democracy
by suppressing heterogeneity and discontinuity in Korean history.” Colonial Modernity in Korea,
p.343.
34

repulsion of the culture of shinpa. To re-contextualize Judith Butler’s argument on
the construction of gender identity for national identity, the culture of shinpa, which
was part of the Korean colonized nationhood, was configured as the “defiled
otherness” of nationhood in order to construct and consolidate the imaginary purity
and coherence of the nation identity.
32

I-2 Bourgeois Nationalism, Enlightenment Discourse, and Modernity
Even though nationalism was the predominant zeitgeist of Korea during the
colonial period, it did not form a single and united discourse. Under the shared rubric
of the achievement of an independence of nation, a number of different sectors of
nationalism existed, competing and conflicting with each other. Varied groups of
people with distinctive class and gender interests, generated different types of
nationalist discourse and proposed different routes to the independence of the nation.
The distinctiveness of those routes was evidently presented especially as to the issue
of modernity and its relation to the independence of the nation. The conservative
sector of nationalist movements (wijo^ng cho^ksa p’a) claimed that western, modern
forms of political systems and culture ought to be cleared in order to defeat foreign
imperial forces and regain national sovereignty.
For the conservative group to protect the nation from the modern, which signified
the index of “western enemies” (yang yi), and preserving the traditional form of
nation and culture was the authentic way to build a new nation. The revisionist sector

32
He also includes Manchuria in the territory of Korea, which suggests his emphasis on the northern
line of Korean dynasties, Koguryo^ in particular and in doing so makes visible the Korea’s past glory.
35

(kaehwa p’a), on the contrary, argued that the reception of the western political
and social systems was the right path to the strengthening of the nation power.
33

Male bourgeois groups associated with the indigenous ruling class of colonial
Korea, prioritized the growth of economic and cultural power over the regaining of
national sovereignty. Such a prioritization de-emphasized immediate resistance
against the colonial force and was not intended to serve the interests of the Korean
public in general. It was, rather, designed to promote the interests of the indigenous
ruling class in line with the colonial force.
34
The indigenous ruling class, who sought
to empower their position within the national political realm, did not necessarily
need to break its association with the colonial capital. They rather attempted to
employ the economic association as a key way to strengthen and consolidate their
position. The exclusive stress on the growth of economic and cultural power which
resulted from such a class-specific agenda, consequently served as a significantly
compromised factor in nationalist movements
This compromised position taken by the indigenous ruling class was embodied
through Enlightenment Discourse (kyemong tamron), which was shaped and
circulated by writings of bourgeois male intellectuals. Enlightenment Discourse,
following the logic of the ruling class-initiated nationalist movement, advocated
changes in the realm of culture and education. The changes were predominantly
oriented towards the re-shaping of cultural and educational systems into a western

34
For the historical overview of the Korean ruling class’ dependence upon the imperial capital and
their exploitation of nationalism see Chung-so^k, So^, “The Issue of Nation and State in Korea: on
the Perspective of Bourgeois or Ruling Class.”
36

fashion. Enlightenment Discourse grew to be a national-scale movement under
the catch phrase, the building up of New Education (shin kyoyuk) and New
Civilization (shin munmyo^ng).
Enlightenment Discourse was embedded with the perception that western modern
economic, political, and cultural systems and values were more advanced than and
superior to those established in the east. Enlightenment Discourse served to inscribe
in the mind-set of Koreans the idea that adopting western systems and values was the
best and perhaps the only path to win over the colonial domination and to the
establishment of an independent nation.
Enlightenment Discourse played a crucial role in the formation of Korean modern
literature as well. Korean modern literature, which grew out of Enlightenment
Discourse and was designated as “nationalist enlightenment literature” afterwards,
disseminated the message that Koreans should truly realize that they needed to be
enlightened and be committed to the empowerment of their nation by learning the
New Civilization and New Education. The Heartless
35
lay the foundation for
nationalist enlightenment literature and is acknowledged as the presumably first
Korean modern novel (ku^ndae soso^l).
The plot of the novel is as follows: Yo^ng-ch’ae, the female protagonist of the
novel, becomes a courtesan in order to bail out her father who was imprisoned for his
involvement in national independence movements. Yet, she holds her chastity for

35
Along with Ch’oe Nam-so^n he was one of the major figures who led nationalist literature
movement in the colonial period. Although he has been appreciated as the father of Korean modern
literature, he created notorious “theory of renovation of the nation” (minjok kaejoron) and later turned
into a pro-Japanese literate.
37
Hyo^ng-sik, the orphan taken care of by her father and betrothed to her. After
years pass, Hyo^ng-sik meets So^n-yo^ng, a daughter of a bourgeois family which
wants to marry her to him and supports their studying abroad. Meanwhile Yo^ng-
ch’ae and Hyo^ng-sik meet again. Even though he suffers from a guilty feeling, and
hesitates to marry So^n-yo^ng, the event of Yo^ng-ch’ae’s rape by other Korean
men (he comes to rescue, but it is too late) pushes him to choose So^n-yo^ng.
Yo^ng-ch’ae decides to go to the Taedong River in Pyongyang and attempts to
commit suicide there, but on the train she happens to meet a New Woman named
Pyo^ng-uk. She “enlightens” Yo^ng-ch’ae on the issues of female sexuality and
subjectivity and convinces her that there is no need to kill herself because of her loss
of chastity. Later, when Yo^ng-ch’ae along with Pyo^ng-uk takes a trip to foreign
countries to study, she happens to meet Hyo^ng-sik and his newly wed wife, So^n-
yo^ng on the train. At first the traumatic memory and tension involving their former
relationship prevail. But, the memory and tension suddenly evaporate when they
witness a flood devastating a village which the train is passing through. They decide
to hold a music concert for a relief fund on the spot and the people gathering there
for the concert are all moved by their heart-warming activity. After the concert is
over, they have an intense conversation about how to create a long term plan to help
Korean people in desperate need. In the conversation scene, Hyo^ng-sik is
foregrounded as a leading intellectual who is passionate about the future of the
nation and people and who teaches the female disciples to recognize their callings for
38

the nation. The novel ends with the author’s epilogue stating that all the
characters finish their study and come back to Korea to help improve society.
The Heartless set the narrative pattern that centered around the realization of
enlightenment, which Korean enlightenment literary works produced afterwards
followed. The pattern highlights the role of male intellectuals, who primarily initiate
the realization and lead female characters to follow it. This gendered narrative
process often involves the sacrifice of female characters and their romantic
relationships for the achievement of missions for the nation. The recurrent motif of
the sacrifice of women suggests that national missions ought to be prioritized over
female desire; that collective Korean subjectivity should supersede the individuality
of Korean women.
The relationship among Hyo^ng-sik, Yo^ng-ch’ae, and So^n-yo^ng has similar
allegorical meanings to that of Sun-ae, Su-il, and Chung-pae presented in A Long,
Sorrowful Dream, which will be discussed later. Hyo^ng-sik’s choice of So^n-yo^ng
over Yo^ng-ch’ae is not much different from Sun-ae’s choice of wealthy Chung-pae,
forsaking her long-betrothed, yet poor Su-il, except that the genders are switched.
The similarity indicates that The Heartless and A Long, Sorrowful Dream share an
identical conflict patterned in the binary opposition of the traditional/ national
(Yo^ng-ch’ae, Su-il) and modern/ colonial (So^n-yo^ng, Chung-pae),
36
which
translates into the opposition of love and money, a clichéd repertoire of shinpa.

36
Yun-sik Kim, a critic and historian of Korean literature, explains the positions of three different
groups of Koreans in relation to colonialism as follows: Korea colonized for seven years was
represented by 1) the group of people associated with colonial power, who were embodied through
the Korean men who rape Yo^ng-ch’ae, 2) the group of people with an authentic value represented
39

The choice made by Hyo^ng-sik implies that he follows money, betraying the
genuine value of love. His choice, further, is loaded with a crucial self-undermining
drawback in that it excludes and victimizes disenfranchised people like a female
subject, Yo^ng-ch’ae, under the claim of enlightening people who suffer from
ignorance and poverty. The exclusion clearly reveals the contradiction in the promise
made by the enlightenment nationalist discourse that the pursuit of modernization
was to bring collective benefits to all Koreans. The promise fails to save the people
at the margins, as Hyo^ng-sik is incapable of rescuing Yo^ng-ch’ae, and it only
makes them be “fooled by love and crying over money.” The Heartless, however,
justifies the failure by providing a resolution of a male intellectual’s initiation of an
activity benevolent for the helpless people, symbolic of his help of the people
afflicted with the colonial subjugation. The establishment of the male intellectual’s
authority under the rubric of saving the nation—this was what Enlightenment
nationalist literature offered to solve the conflict between the traditional/ national and
modern/ colonial.
Enlightenment nationalist literature like The Heartless seldom spared room for the
presentation of colonial modernity from a feminine perspective. While the stories of

by Yo^ng-ch’ae, who was, yet, violated by the first group, and 3) the group of people with equivocal
and undetermined values represented by Hyo^ng-sik. The group 1) included the colonial rulers and
aboriginal bourgeois in collaboration with the rulers, for example, So^n-yo^ng’s father. The group 2)
means most of uprooted traditional conservative intellectuals like Yo^ng-ch’ae’s father and lower-
class people. Most problematic is the people of group 3) like Hyo^ng-sik, who believed that
enlightenment nationalism would save the nation. But this type of revisionist nationalism was no more
than in service of colonial ruling at best.
Kim continues to discuss that in 1917, when The Heartless came out, the power of the group 3)
was at apogee and that the phenomenal popularity of the novel evidences it. After the March First
Movement in 1919, the group 3) began to be explicitly incorporated into colonial power (group 1)), as
the author, Yi himself was. The Heartless probed the contestations of those three groups right before
the explicit incorporation occurred. See his Yi Kwang-suwa ku^u^i sidaeI [Yi Kwang-su and His Time
I], (Seoul: Sol Ch’ulpansa, 1999), pp. 599-600.
40

the construction of male-centered, national identity were elevated to the place of
high literature that represented the nation, the feminine experience of modernity was
not given any legitimate venues for its expression. The marginalized experience,
instead, found its voice in shinpa literature and theater. Shinpa literature and theater
served as vehicles to deliver Korean women’s desires and despairs, derivative from
the destiny of the colonized nation, yet not embraced by legitimate national
literature.
Shinpa literature emerged rather earlier than enlightenment literature,
incorporating Japanese shinpa literature and the popular form of modern Korean
literature called New Novel (shin soso^l). The first Korean shinpa novel, A Long,
Sorrowful Dream
37
The novel tells a clichéd story of a love triangle: after years of
Sun-ae’s painful marriage to Chung-pae, the son of a wealthy bank owner, she is
happily re-united with Su-il, her childhood sweetheart and former fiancé who she
forsook. This banal story sheds light on the Korean populace’s experience of
colonized modernization, which, was not allowed to articulate in the language of
legitimate literature. Sun-ae’s action to betray Su-il and marry Chung-pae, for
instance, allegorizes the Korean public’s attraction to the material power carried by
the colonial capital and modern commodities. Their attraction, however, is also
loaded with the conflict and guilt caused by the obvious fact that the capital and
commodities are present at the expense of the sovereignty of their country.

37
The newspaper, Maeil Sinbo, where the novel was serialized was published by the colonial
government and functioned as a main political and cultural venue for Koreans as well as an
ideological apparatus of the government.

41
Although A Long, Sorrowful Dream presents a similar dilemma as The
Heartless, its resolution takes a different direction than the latter. The former ends up
with the two old lovers being re-united, suggestive of returning to their old dream.
The resolution proposes an unrealistic way out: the two lovers recover the past which
has been already gone, as if nothing happened. This resolution shows a collective
wish-fulfillment of Koreans, who would dream of regaining their lost country, as if
the given social and historical conditions for the loss of the country had been non-
existent. The wish-fulfillment, however, does not simply signify the restoration of
genuine love for the national. It, rather, works for the female subject to have both of
two contradictory objects of her desire, the desire for the colonial capital and a desire
for a restored reputation as an innocent woman who still loves her nation. Such an
unrealistic welding of the two poles that structure the dilemma enables her to get
everything she wants without sacrificing either her desires or the sacred nationhood.
The solution of the dilemma offered by the novel shows a sharp contrast to that of
The Heartless, where a male nationalist’s abandonment of the marginalized female
subject is rationalized in the name of nation --thus, the ideal of nationalism is
achieved only at the expense of female subjectivity. Underlying the solution
presented by A Long, Sorrowful Dream, I argue, there are doubts and suspicions of
the enlightenment nationalists’ rescue projects that claimed to benefit all.
The doubts and suspicions grew stronger in shinpa literature of the later period.
Shinpa novels and dramas of the 1930s manifest the sentiments in the representation
of their heroines who were totally victimized by the social circumstances and lost
42
everything. Among many other stories of such female characters, a play titled
Fooled by Love, Crying over Money (Sarange sokko, tone ulgo), which aptly
summarizes their fate, written by So^n-kyu Yim in 1937, gained huge popularity and
still remains a prime shinpa text along with A Long, Sorrowful Dream.
As is illustrated by Sun-ae, Su-il, and Chung-pae’s triangular relationship
mediating love and money in A Long, Sorrowful Dream, in shinpa literature love
designates a genuine heart yet to be contaminated by the force of modernity, and is
linked to traditional moral code embedded with a nationalist sentiment. “Money,” on
the contrary, indicates the violent force of industrial capital implanted by
colonialism. Archetypal heroines of shinpa, with no exception, get caught at the grid
of these two axes, consumed with sighs and tears caused by the conflict of the two.
Likewise in Fooled by Love, Crying over Money the heroine, Hong-to’s love for her
husband is deserted because his family plots her husband’s disowning her by taking
advantage of her past as a courtesan and tricks him into doubting her faithfulness.
Enraged and desperate, she kills the former fiancée of her husband, who his family is
going to let him re-marry. Hong-to, at last, is arrested by her brother, who became a
police officer thanks to her financial support. Although she is a good sister and does
her best to be a good wife, she cannot be rewarded for either of them. The story
suggests that the colonial patriarchy of Korea demands women’s sacrifice, but does
not compensate for it. Korean women, therefore, cannot but accept their sad destiny
of being deceived by love and crying for money.
43
In this way shinpa literature gave a voice to the colonized Korean women who
were denied any benefit that their virtuousness was expected to bring them. As
demonstrated in the character of Hong-to’s brother, a surrogate of the colonial
authority who delegates the persecution of his sister, shinpa literature offered a
vernacular form of criticism of enlightenment nationalism as well. It precisely
pointed to the fact that Korean male subjects, whose enlightenment discourse
claimed to become the frontier force to save their nation through education, were not
even capable of rescuing their sisters. Shinpa literature served as a significant venue
where the Korean public’s unendorsed material aspirations and despairs for the
nationalist promise were expressed from Korean women’s point of view. It was the
venue where their conflict-ridden desires, suspicions on the dominant discourse and
fantasies shaped out of the lower-class Korean women’s experience of harsh reality
of colonial modernity were all articulated and negotiated.

II. Figuration of nationalism in Ch’oe In-kyu’s Viva Freedom and The Night
before Independence
As soon as Korea was liberated from the Japanese colonial rule, the U.S. military
government was established. The government mobilized the governing policies to
effectively restore the order of the southern half of the Korean peninsular and to
efficiently control it. Many of the regulations passed down from the colonial period
were maintained and the political situations which resulted form it operated as
greatly dissatisfying for left-wing groups in South Korea, who demanded a complete
44

removal of the residue of Japanese colonial rule. The government regulations were
focused on the ideological control that prevented left-wing groups from spreading
socialism and communism. As in other fields left and right conflicts divided the
cultural field of South Korea of the period.
Left-wing cultural activists and filmmakers founded two major organizations in
the cultural field in 1945: the Choso^n Art Construction Headquarters (Choso^n
munhwa konso^l chungang hyo^pu^ihoi) and the Choso^n Proleta Art Federatio
(Choso^n proletariat yo^nghwa tongmaeng). The leaders of these two organizations
had participated in the Korea Artista Proleta Federation (KAPF), a left-wing, anti-
imperial cultural organization established in the colonial period.
38
These two groups
merged into the Korean Film Union (Hanguk yo^nghwa tongmaeng) in 1946.
39
The Korean Film Union became the primary film organization of South Korea in
the post-liberation period. It set the principles of getting rid of the Japanese colonial
legacy, feudalism, the rejection of chauvinistic nationalism, and the establishment of
a politically progressive national cinema and the collaboration of Korean and
international cinema. The principles also included its contribution to the building of a
democratic nation and the elimination of production of reactionary films.
40
While the Korean Film Union operated as a nationwide film organization in post-
liberation South Korea, concentrating on making newsreels. Right-wing groups and
nationalist writers and filmmakers who did not take part in the Korean Film Union

38
Hanguk yo^nghwau^i p’ungkyo^ng, 1945-1959 [Traces of Korean Cinema from 1945-1959],
Korean Film Archive, p.56.
39
Ibid., p.63.
40
Ibid., p.77
45

organized the Choso^n Film and Theater Association (Hanguk kujakka
hyo^puihoi) in 1946. The Choso^n Film and Theater Association, which pursued the
goal of advancing the artistic quality of film, established its sub-organization named
the Choso^n Film Directors Club (Hanguk yo^nghwa kamdok kurakbu). The
Director’s Club changed into the Korean Film Council (Taehan yo^nghwa hyo^p-
u^ihoi) and finally became the Motion Picture Association of Korea (Hanguk
yo^nghwain hyo^phoi), a current film organization on a national scale in South
Korea.
41
Ch’oe In-kyu, whose film I will discuss in detail in the rest of this chapter,
was one of the major members of the Choso^n Film Directors Club who had had
pro-Japanese film career along with Shin Kyo^ng-kyun, Kim Yo^ng-hwa, etc.
The U.S. military government set new film regulations named the “military
government ordinance 68,” which abolished most of the film laws promulgated by
the Japanese colonial government, yet kept the key censorship regulations including
the obtaining a pre-screening permission.
42
The censorship regulations were used
primarily to prevent filmmaking and activities of left-wing groups that belonged to
the Choso^n Film Union. “Most of film events hosted by the Korean Film Union
were hindered” and the organizers of events were often arrested with the charge of
breaking the regulations.
43
Thus, the censorship purported to ideologically restrict
film production and exhibition and to promulgate pro-American capitalist discourse.
Because of the censorship and the Choso^n Film Union’s documentary-oriented
filmmaking, commercial film productions were dominated by right-wing filmmakers

41
Ibid., p.64.
42
Ibid., p.70.
43
Ibid., p.80
46
and producers. The given political situations, narrative feature film productions
were oriented towards the promotion of pro-American nationalism. During the
period there were two major film production companies which made feature films:
Enlightenment Film Production Company and Koryo^ Film Company. The former,
which tried to stick to a politically neutral position, produced many films with the
thematics of anti-colonial nationalism such as March 1
st
Revolution (Samil
hyo^ngmyo^ggi, Yun Pong-ch’un, 1946), Hero, Yu Pong-kil (U^isa Yun Pong-kil,
Yun Pong-ch’un, 1947), Son of a Patriot (Aegukjau^i adu^l, Yun Pong-ch’un, 1948),
etc. While these films were inclined to deliver nationalist messages rather than to
offer entertainment, films produced by Koryo^ Film Company were oriented towards
a more popular film rendering of nationalism. Ch’oe In-kyu who made films for the
company succeeded in the manufacturing of such films and his Viva Freedom
became the master text of them.
Ch’oe’s films demonstrate the ways in which the ideological orientation of pro-
American nationalism was fabricated through the popular conventions of shinpa,
using and simultaneously sacrificing the conventions. As I will discuss in detail later,
his films exploited the conventions of shinpa in a two-fold way: the embodiment of
the shinpa conventions as a degraded legacy of Japanese colonialism, thus as the
objects to be removed. The legible marks of shinpa such as a character of Mr. Min
playing a greedy usurper in The Night before Independence or Mi-hyang playing the
lover of a pro-Japanese spy in Viva Freedom, for instance, were portrayed as those
who ought to die for the establishment of a new, independent nation. At the same
47

time, yet, the intense sentimentality brought forth from the characters and their
death were utilized to pump up patriotic emotion and to stress the image of the U.S.
as the savior of the nation. This particular fashion of constructing a political message
in an ambiguous combination with the conventions of shinpa was a product of the
ideological imposition and a demand on the creation of cinema appealing to the
masses.
Ch’oe In-kyu has been appreciated as the father
44
of Korean modern cinema and
the master of major filmmakers, who made the road for the golden age of Korean
cinema of the1950s and 60s. Until very recently he has occupied a much-admired
place in the pantheon of Korean National cinema along with Na Un-kyu and Yi Kyu-
hwan, whose “genealogy of realism” has represented the authentic history of Korean
cinema.
45
Ch’oi made the so-called “liberation trilogy”: Viva Freedom, The Night
Before Independence, and A Sinner Without Sin (Choe o^pnun choein, 1948).
46

These films, which have been appreciated as an embodiment of nationalist spirit,
were, in fact, made by his desperate attempt to expunge his past pro-Japanese
activities. In the late colonial period he directed films which conveyed the message
of cooperation with the Japanese pan-Asian invasion such as Tuition (Suo^plyo,
1940), Homeless Angel (Chip o^bnun ch’o^nsa, 1941) or films which obviously
advocated Japanese militarism like Sons of the Sun (Taeyangu^i adu^ldu^l, 1944),
Pledge of Love (Sarangu^i maengse, 1944), Sons of Kamikaje (Kamigajeu^i

44
See Yi Yong-il, History of Korean Cinema
45
Ho Hyon-ch’an, 100Years of Korean Cinema, in which he describes them as “pillars of Korean
cinema.”
46
Yi Yo^ng-il.
48
adu^ldu^l, 1945). A notorious pro-Japanese masterpiece, Death Band at a
Watchtower (Mangruu^i kyo^lsadae, 1943) and Young Face (Cho^lmu^n Mosu^p,
1943) were produced by him as well. When the liberation came he quickly made the
liberation trilogy, through which he was able to make his “overnight switch to a
nationalist”. His much revered position was overshadowed by the high suspicion that
nationalism manifested in his films were exploited as a camouflage to cover up his
pro-Japanese film career.
The problematic relation of nationalism and the colonial past is not merely
registered in Ch’oe’s film career, but in the Korean national cinema in general. The
relation adds another layer to the topology of discourses of nationalism, modernity,
and the sentiment of shinpa. Ch’oe’s post-liberation films play out a discursive move
of those three components in transition from the space of the colonized Korea to that
of the liberated Korea.

II-1 Gender and Construction of National Identity in Viva Freedom and The
Night before Independence
The Night before Independence ends with the scene of the our main characters
looking down a bridge over the Han River against the landscape of Seoul in the
morning when the South Korean government was established. Accompanying the
visual image, the voice-over narration tells us that “Now the darkness has gone. The
young people are taking a walk on a hill and, as if they’ve all forgotten what
happened so far, their wings are strongly fluttering for their new lives in the future.”
49
The scene displays a dramatic switch from the bleak narrative and dark tone which
informed the film prior to the scene. The story of a family trauma and a bloody plan
of vengeance were over the previous night and now high hope for the independent
country fills the screen along with the bright sunshine.
The narrative prior to the last scene is centered around a vengeance scheme
against Mr. Min, a pawnbroker, plotted by a woman named Ok-ran, whose father
was killed by Mr. Min 5 years ago. On a night when Mr. Min is about to sexually
assault a woman, So^l-hi, a man (the character’s name is not mentioned in the film,
but for it is played by the director Ch’oi himself, I will call the character Ch’oi
hereafter) who witnessed the scene throws a stone to break the window of the pawn
shop. It stops Mr. Min and brings in front of the pawnshop Ok-ran and her agent,
Song who were peeping at Mr. Min’s behavior. The man who threw the stone runs
away with So^l-hi, but both of them are soon caught and taken to a warehouse by
Song. Ok-ran tells Song a secret that So^l-hi is in fact Mr. Min’s daughter, who was
abandoned by him and came back from Shanghai and that Ch’oi, who came from
Manchuria, is her brother. While So^l-hi and Ch’oi remain in the warehouse, Ok-ran
and Song bring Mr. Min there and try to kill him. But, he is murdered by some other
bully who happens to be there. Ok-ran reveals the familial secret to everyone, and
the dying Mr. Min, who now knows the identity of So^l-hi, is reunited with her
bursting into tears. He finally dies after stating that he wants to donate his entire
fortune for the building-up of the new nation.
50

As the story speaks for itself, the narrative of the film consists of the
components of “money-rape-vengeance,” typical of the pattern of shinpa narrative.
47

The sharp contrast of the overall shinpaesque story and tone and the bright
hopefulness of the last scene are crucial in conveying the key message of the film:
the tragic night ought to be ended before the emergence of the independent
government. Here, the firm link made between shinpaesque components and the dark
past inscribes the message with the implication that the dark past of the nation has
passed along with the mode of shinpa; or, more accurately, that the mode of shinpa
should disappear when the dark past is gone.
The paralleling of the mode of shinpa with the father figure who is unqualified
and effeminized anticipates counter-shinpaesque masculinity which can be
legitimized by the new nation. The male protagonist of Viva Freedom, Han-chung, a
revolutionary fighting for national independence, embodies such masculinity. He is
portrayed as a hero who sacrifices his life for his nation, rejecting any romantic
involvement with two women, Mi-hyang and Hye-cha, who are attracted to him and
rescue him from the hands of Japanese army. At the beginning of the film Han-chung
is arrested because a pro-Japanese Korean informant, who is Mi-hyang’s lover,
reports his activity to the Japanese police. Chased by Japanese police officers, he
hides into Hye-cha’s house. Later when he and his comrade are discovered by the
Japanese police, delivering a dynamite, Mi-hyang hides him. Afterwards she visits
his headquarters in order to hand over an important piece of information on the
Japanese military as well her money for helping his activity. But her lover follows

47
Young-Il Lee, History of Korean Cinema, pp. 265-271.
51

her on her way to the headquarters and let the Japanese military attack it. During
her visit she is killed in the attack. He, who is injured by the attack, is hospitalized in
the clinic where Hye-cha works as a nurse. With her life-risking help he escapes the
clinic watched by Japanese soldiers. The last reel of the film which contains the rest
of the film is lost, yet, a newspaper review on the film describes the ending as
follows : after Han-chung escaped from the clinic, he hides in a mountain; the
Japanese military follows him and shots him to death. Mi-hyang’s lover also dies
during the shooting. When the next day breaks, it is the day of the Liberation, August
15
th
, 1946.
48
When Viva Freedom first came out, it was hailed as a film that embodied the
spirit of nationalism as well as the ethos of the liberation and became “the bible” of
anti-Japanese film produced afterwards. Besides the much celebrated thematics of
the film, its surprising box-office success received a lot of attention. As its narrative
suggests, it skillfully combines the subject matter of a nationalist resistance and the
generic components of the action-thriller and romance, and presents a popular
entertainment form of nationalist sentiment. For example, the film begins with the
scene of Han-chung and his comrade being chased by the Japanese police and the
scene is followed by that of a shooting rampage. The scene of Japanese troops
attacking the headquarters offers images of spectacular actions as well. These action
spectacles are combined with the story of the two women’s unrequited love for the
hero, blending the serious message of fighting for the nation and the clichés of an

48
Kyo^nghyang Sinmun (Newspaper), October 20, 1946. Recitation from, Sinmunu^ro pon hanguk
yo^nghwa 1945-1957 [Newspaper Coverage on Korean Cinema 1945-1957], Korean Film Archive
(2004), p. 56.
52
action-packed romance. Thus, the appreciation of the film as a nationalist
masterpiece that continued the legacy of Arirang’s national realism and passed it
down to The Stray Bullet was evidently unconvincing, apart from Ch’oe’s pro-
Japanese film career.
The Night before Independence also offers a mixture of a nationalist theme and
stylistic clichés. The film begins with an eye-catching scene of a young woman in
her underwear running out of a room, pushing an old man trying to sexually attack
her. Such a motif of the crime genre is combined with that of the thriller genre
employed by the plot of Ok-ran planning to kill the old man in order to get revenge
for her dead father. These generic motifs all come down to the quintessential
shinpaesque moment, when the relationship of the woman and the old man is
revealed as that of a daughter and a father with an explosion of emotion.
Intermingling a variety of generic components, the film was intended to offer a
cinematic pleasure along with a nationalist lesson. Both Viva Freedom and The Day
before Independence attempted to manufacture the popularization of nationalism,
patching together layers of hegemonic political discourse and cinematic
entertainment.

II-2 Narrative of the Construction of New Nation and Shinpa
Both of the films tell the story of nation-building with the emphatic vision of hope
and conviction pervasive in the post-liberation period. The story obviously engages
in the narrative of overcoming and leaving behind the colonial past as a prerequisite
53
for nation-building. It is noteworthy that the narrative is evidently tied to the
process of clearing up the legacy of shinpa in both of the films. The clearing-up of
the legacy of shinpa takes place in the form of the death of characters who visibly
index the code of shinpa. In The Night before Independence, for instance, the
emergence of the new nation is heralded with the death of Mr. Min, who brings to
the film the emotional quality quintessential of shinpa and carries troubles passed
down from the colonial past.
His regretful tears as well as pleasure mixed with pain shown in the scene where
he realizes that the woman he attempted to rape is none other but her daughter
abandoned by himself unmistakably indexes the convention of shinpa. The
coincidental identification of long-lost family members in the explosion of emotions
was repeatedly used as a key clichéd moment in the convention of shinpa. His
performance of the clichéd moment is loaded with negative implications linked to
colonial times. His portrayal as a greedy and irresponsible man, who causes the
familial trauma and invites vengeance, highlights his inappropriateness for the role
of patriarch of the new nation. He murdered a friend of his because of “a petty
financial transaction” and abandoned his wife and daughter, who now he does not
even recognize. That he is a loan shark running a pawnshop also suggests his
exploitive relationship with the people of the same race. He is linked to the
stereotypes of evil characters in shinpa texts, who are represented as bloodsucking
usurpers often affiliated with Japanese land owners or capitalists. The story of a life
troubled with money is in line with the tradition of the shinpa text analyzed earlier, A
54
Long, Sorrowful Dream, where Su-il, who is forsaken by his fiancée, Sun-ae
married to a man of wealth, Chung-pae, becomes a usurper in order to pay back his
resentment caused by his poverty. The narrative is also linked to the character of
Hong-to in the aforementioned shinpa text, Fooled by Love, Crying over Money, who
becomes a courtesan in order to fund her brother’s education. The character of Mr.
Min in The Night before Independence represents the side of a victimizer who ruins
the life of poor Koreans, allegorized in the characters like Su-il and Hong-to, by
using the power of money.
The portrayal of Mr. Min’s character as such serves as the trope of the colonized
Korean male who exploits the people of the same race, mimicking the colonizer, thus
lacking the legitimacy to be the Father of the new nation. The narrative process of
killing the unqualified Father is therefore required to establish a new national
identity. The invalidation of the patriarchal authority of the old, colonized Father
concurrently performs the de-legitimization of shinpa, which is located in the
identical position as he is. Loaded with colonial and anti-national significations, both
of the colonized father and mode of shinpa are simultaneously emasculated by the
new nation. Both of them are fingered as the residue of the colonial legacy, which
should be gotten rid of prior to Korean peoples greeting the new era of an
independent country.
In Viva Freedom the character of Mi-hyang carries the properties of the
convention of shinpa like the character of Mr. Min does in The Day before
Independence. Her performance is imbued with the shinpaesque acting style that
55
employs highly artificial facial expressions, unnatural bodily gestures and the
display of exaggerated emotion. Her involvement with her lover demonstrates
another indication of her embodiment of the tradition of shinpa. She describes her
involvement with her lover as a “rotten relationship,” which she can’t break due to
built-up emotion (cho^ng), even though she wants to. The relationship is similar to
the pattern of destined relationship central to the convention of shinpa, which is best
exemplified in a love triangle that traps the involved lovers with an uncontrollable
force, thus is perceived as unavoidable fate.
The film highlights the shinpaesque characteristics of Mi-hyang by contrasting
her with the other major female character, Hye-cha. Hye-cha is portrayed associated
with western modernity through a series of images: her profession as a nurse, the
church she goes to, her friends playing a ball game, a western sport enjoyed by “New
Women,” her religious dialogue with her mother, etc. Her expression of romantic
feeling takes a more sophisticated and “modernized” form as well such as keeping a
journal about her frustration of unrequited love towards Han-chung. These modern
images unmistakably indicate the influence of American culture, which started to
prevail during the period of the U.S. military government, and attach positive
significances to her character. She is rendered as an intelligent, trustworthy and
Americanized, modern woman contrary to Mi-hyang, who is stuck in supposedly
outdated shinpaesque sentimentalism.
Re-playing the discourse of New Woman (shinyo^so^ng)—educated,
enlightened, modern woman—in opposition to Old Woman (kuyo^so^ng), which
56

was prevalent in the colonial period, the film evidently delivers a message that a
woman assimilated into American culture benefits her country. In contrast to Hye-
cha’s contribution to Han-chung’s activity to save the country Mi-yang, despite her
good intentions, brings a critical threat to him by accidentally exposing his
headquarters to the Japanese military. The character of Hye-cha is allegoric of a pro-
American nationalist discourse dominant in Korea in this period, which defined the
U.S. as a blood alliance of Korean people and the savior of Korea.
49
The narrative of
the film surrounding these two women, then, clearly suggests that an independent
Korea needs support from the U.S. and that the cultural legacy of shinpa, associated
with colonial history, poses a fundamental peril to the nation, and should be cleared.
Along with the polarization of a good, pro-American, modern woman verses a
bad, colonialism-associated, outdated woman Viva Freedom mobilizes another
significant binary opposition which once again disqualifies shinpa. This binary
opposition structures the film into two extreme emotional paths: the absence and
presence of emotion. The absence of emotion, which is embodied through Han-
chung, signifies a patriotic, sacred, and masculine quality; on the other hand, the
presence of emotion, represented by Mi-hyang, represents a cheap and feminine
attribute that hinders patriotic activities. Han-chung’s lack of interest in the women
attracted to him, especially his indifference and impassivity towards Mi-yang, for
instance, serves as one of the primary characteristics that portrays him as a strong,

49
for pro-Americanism of the Rhee regime see Chungmoo Choi, “Kyo^ngyiro um singminjuu^i wa
maehokdoin kwangaek [Marvelous Colonialism and Enchanted Spectator],” in Muhwa Ilggi: Ppira
eso^ Saibo^ munhwa kkaji [Reading Culture], (Seoul: Hyo^nsil Muhwa Yo^ngu, 2000).
57

solid patriotic figure, which is foiled by Mi-yang’s character.
50
The conversation between the two at the headquarters reveals their telling
difference in terms of the expression of emotion and what the difference signifies in
the film. In the conversation she says that in her first encounter with him when she
helps him to escape the chase of Japanese police officers at the hospital she had a
life-changing experience. She continues to say that the experience made her not want
to live a life like “a loaf of rotten meat,” “only pursuing money” anymore. After she
hands her money over to him and gives him information on the Japanese military,
she cries and begs and states that she has the “right to live a new life,” and that she
wants to stay with him until his death. He responds to her in an apathetic tone as
follows:

Right, everyone has the right to live a new life. We jumped into the Japanese
military camp in order to give our nation a new life. But what you need to do so
is not sentimentalism but a will power of steel and passion of volcano.

He then calmly suggests that she go back to her hometown because “he will be dead
at any moment” and after death “he will be buried forgetting everything including his
memory of her.” His response clearly articulates that her intense feeling both toward
him and her own decision to live a new life, which perhaps implies her decision to be
devoted to independence movements, is absolutely misdirected. What she feels and
thinks, according to him, is a product of mere “sentimentalism,” whereas the “new
life” of the nation needs “a will power of steel and passion of volcano.” Mi-hyang’s

50
Her sexuality, her romantic feeling toward Han-tong, is repressed and sublimated into a religiously
charged patriotism to save him.
58
“mere sentimentalism” means the sentimentalism of shinpa which encodes her
characterization. Her shinpaesque sentimentalism, he claims, is not what we need to
serve and save the nation. The emotion, rather, it is further implied, is categorically
different and hierarchically distinctive from the nationalist zeal which he has, and
should be clearly demarcated from it. The narrative procedure that she is eventually
killed confirms the necessity of such a demarcation and the ultimate removal of the
shinpaesque emotion in order to realize the sacred zeal to save the nation. This
gendered demarcation set between nationalist pathos and shinpaesque sentiment
operates to configure the authenticity of the former embodied through his character.
The authenticity signifies the masculine, the nationalist, and the legitimate and, in
contrast, her shinpa-coded femininity implies the colonial, thus illegitimate. The
shinpa-coded femininity is exploited as the opposite to the authenticity, as its
defining negativity. The legitimacy of masculine nationalist pathos is enabled by its
constitutive outside, the feminine and shinpaesque sentiment.

II-3 Transactions between Nationalist Pathos and Shinpaesque Sentiment
Nationalist pathos and the construction of the authenticity of the pathos, as
discussed above, are constituted through the positioning of shinpaesque sentiment as
its inferior counter-term. The binary opposition between the two, however, is not
securely sustained. It is blurred by particular transactions made by the affective and
discursive operations of nationalism crossing the boundary set between the two. The
59

two characters, Mr. Min and Mi-hyang, who go through the similar filmic destiny
respectively in The Night before Independence and Viva Freedom— both of them
embody the code of shinpa and get killed—perform similar actions as well. The
scene of Mr. Min being reunited with his daughter is followed by that of his sudden
declaration of his financial devotion to the emergent government. In the middle of
his resentful and tearful confession of his past he says, “Tomorrow we will be
independent and establish our own government. Now I got no grudge over my
death.” He then states that he wants to donate his entire fortune to the new
government. Likewise in Viva Freedom, as discussed earlier, Mi-hyang hands over
her money along with information on the Japanese military to Han-chung at the
headquarters. Afterwards she is attacked by the Japanese army and killed.
The donation of money made right before their death suggests that there exists a
certain deal made between the legacy of shinpa and nationalist protocol. A deal, or to
be more exact, a one-way demand made by nationalist protocol, is that the subjects
who are tied to the legacy of shinpa, of shameful national history, should sacrifice
themselves for the nation. In the case of Mr. Min and Mi-hyang as in many other
cases of Korean films
51
the sacrifice is made through their monetary offers. It is
noteworthy that their monetary sacrifice does not lift up their status into the one
endorsed and embraced by their nation. As demonstrated in the sequences following

51
For example, in ‘Till the Last Moment (Shin Sang-ok, 1960) a female character, who used to be a
military prostitute after the Korean war, is ashamed of what she had done and commits suicide,
wishing that all of her money will be spent for the re-building of nation. A similar case is found in
Silver Stallion (Chang Kil-su ), where the female protagonist, Kil-lye, gives the money she earned
working as a military prostitute for the U.S. troops to the male leader of her village when he has to
leave the village because of the war.
60
that of the donation being made the characters no longer exist in the films after
offering money. In the morning scene of The Day before Independence, Similarly,
after Mi-yang is shot to death in Viva Freedom the film quickly shifts to what
happens to Han-chung and then to Hye-cha, who will play a dominant role in his
escape from the hand of Japanese soldiers. Mr. Min and Mi-yang, therefore, make an
unremembered, un-honored devotion to their nation.
Their forgotten devotion makes profoundly problematic the statement with which
Viva Freedom begins, “Let’s trace back to the memory of blood-ridden death of
those who died for our nation.” The characters Mr. Min and Mi-hyang, despite their
attempts to be part of independent movements and the construction of the new
nation, do not count as “those who have died for our nation” in the films. The two
characters and culture of shinpa which they embody are, rather, figured as culpable
for the lasting colonial legacy and indebted to the new nation. Thus they are
demanded to pay back the nation without being acknowledged. Such a request for an
unregistered contribution to the building-up of the new nation reveals that the
nationalist discourse of the period took something from culture of shinpa; that it
drew out of the culture of shinpa what was necessary for its configuration but didn’t
acknowledge shinpa.
The movement of money from the realm of the culture of shinpa to that of
nationalism serves as a material index that indicates the invisible transference of
emotion. In The Day before Independence, for instance, Mr. Min’s declaration of his
financial commitment for the new government signals a quick turn in the narrative
61
and emotive meaning of the scene as well as the entire film. Prior to his
declaration, as mentioned earlier, the scene displays quintessential characteristics of
shinpa: a most unlikely coincidental incident--the woman he tried to rape is none
other but his own daughter!--and the following emotional outburst. Yet, as soon as
his declaration is made, the drama takes an upward move to the terrain of nationalist
pathos. Most of all, his character, condemned for carrying the colonial legacy,
instantly turns into the one ready to devote himself to his nation. This turn brings a
new implication to his re-union with his daughter who came from Shanghai: the
recovery of national sovereignty enables the return of Korean migrants in Shanghai,
the location of the Korean provisional government during colonial times. His
apology to Ok-ran for murdering his father also gains an expanded significance of
reconciliation at the collective level that is expected prior to the greeting of the new
era of independence.
The shift of meaning of the scene simultaneously transforms the meaning of
emotion overflowing in the scene. The tears and gestures of pain expressed by Mr.
Min and his daughter do not merely present the cheap sentimentalism of shinpa any
more, but change into a sense of the heart-warming, sacred one-ness of the nation.
The excessive emotion deployed in the scene is utilized to fuel the vision of national
unity and restoration of unified national identity. Nationalist pathos is contradictorily
fed with and intensified by the womanly, mawkish feeling of shinpa, which is
constructed as the inferior opposite of the pathos.
62
Viva Freedom displays another case of the displacement of shinpaesque
sentiment onto nationalist pathos. Mi-yang’s weeping and begging at the
headquarters is, as discussed earlier, pejoratively labeled by Han-chung as
“sentimentalism” that hinders nationalist missions. The label is supported by the
visual arrangement of the scene, where the sequences of the conversation of the two
parallel with those of Japanese troops approaching the headquarters. This cross-
cutting accentuates the inappropriateness of her tearful personal confession made at
the moment of an impending attack, suggesting that her ignorant act puts the activists
in danger. But as the narrative gets to the point where the attack begins, her emotion
starts to take on a different meaning. At some point in the course of the narrative,
where she insists on staying with him to help his fight and is finally killed by a gun-
shot fired by a Japanese soldier, her emotion stops being rendered as foolish and
womanly. It rather delivers a solemn and sublime sense of a death-defying fight for
the nation. Her emotion, obviously unwelcome by the nationalist activist, is now
used to affectively strengthen the significance of the battle scene, a nationalists’ fight
against the colonial force. The affective strengthening then reaches its peak when he
is wounded by a gunshot and falls on the floor next to her presumably dead body. It
looks as if they, having fallen together in an anti-colonial struggle, are lifted up to the
status of consecrated national heroes.
Does the displacement of the meaning of shinpaesque sentiment onto patriotism
evidence that she is accepted as an anti-colonial fighter? Does it invalidate Han-
chung’s disparagement of Mi-yang’s claim on her devotion to the nation? I contend
63
that the because film proceeds after the battle scene, the answer to both questions
is no. The image of the two fallen together quickly cuts to that of a clock tower and
then to the room of a hospital where Hang-chung is lying unconscious. This
momentary change of scenes relegates her presence and the significance of her death
in the battle into invisibility and the film is no longer concerned with her. Even
without the confirmation of her death, the film shifts its focus onto Han-chung’s
escape and Hye-cha’s action to help the escape. Such a swift move of the narrative
and visual strongly implies Mi-yang’s participation in the battle is not seen as
integral part of the meaning of the battle. I argue that the intense emotion expressed
by her right before the battle is siphoned off to heighten the affective impact of the
battle. Without the acknowledgement she deserves for her sacrifice the emotional
outburst that comes along with her pledge of sacrifice for the nation is employed to
pump up the emotive force of patriotism displayed in the battle scene. In other words
she is used as an emotional prop for the patriotic action and then discarded.
Using her as an emotional prop is mobilized to foreground Han-chung’s
honorable actions. In order to take over the fight all alone he lets other activists
escape at the headquarters, showing a touching memo that says, “If my lover wants, I
will come even thousand times.” The memo powerfully demonstrates his
determined will to die a “thousand times” for his nation, which he calls “my lover,”
along with a strong sense of the male-bond that enables the prioritization of his
colleagues’ lives over his own. Through the unregistered draining off of Mi-yang’s
“cheap” tears into the scene of his admirable actions he can be imbued with the aura
64
of exalted nationalist passion. This process reveals how the construction of male-
centered national identity is enabled at the expense of femininity. In the process, the
shinpaesque is represented as the core of the feminine and is mobilized to strengthen
and highlight the masculine national identity.
The two donors, Mr. Min and Mi-yang identify themselves as members of the
national community. They use words such as “we” or “our” in their last words. His
dying wish is “Tomorrow we will be independent and have our own government.”
And she confesses that Han-chung trusted her only because she said that she is
Korean, and she decided to stop living a corrupted life. Their giving out money and
emotion for the community, however, does not make them accepted as rightful
members of the community. Their monetary and emotional contributions, strangely
enough, are taken for the benefit of the community without either the
acknowledgement or reward they deserve. Such unfair transactions made between
the two characters and nationalist demands, to say the least, speak to the larger
context where the culture of shinpa and nationalism were situated in the post-
liberation period. Nationalist discourse purloined the emotive effects of the mode of
shinpa in order to intensify nationalist pathos and promote the ideal of an all-
encompassing one-ness. More problematic is that the purloin proceeds in the absence
of the interpellation of the culture of shinpa as a legitimate part of national culture.
Nationalist discourse, to be profoundly contradictory, exploited the sentiment of
shinpa which it prescribed as its other without clearing its otherness.
The mobilization of the culture of shinpa to amplify nationalism fundamentally
65
undercuts the binary opposition set between the two. The contrast of Han-chung’s
subdued coldness and Mi-yang’s excessive emotion, then, is not as oppositional as it
seems. Rather, between his “will power of steel and passion of volcano” and her
sentimentalism there exists merely a thin line constantly blurred by the emotive
conversion made between the two.
The two-fold strategy operated by Korean nationalism during the post-liberation
period, devaluing and simultaneously draining the affective energy out of the mode
of shinpa, uncovers hidden aspects of nationalism. Korean nationalism fabricated the
authenticity of its agenda, that is, its presumable pursuit of collective interests for all
Koreans, vis-à-vis the rendering of the mode of shinpa a major hurdle to the
collective interests. It, at the same time, incongruous to its own rendering, took
advantage of the mode as an emotional resource in order to draw the Koreans’
empathy into the agenda. Therefore, the seemingly sacrilegious patriotic passion is
set up to be triggered by a formulaic cue of cheap sentimentalism.
The incongruity of the double face of nationalism is, I contend, a corollary of the
fictiveness of its own claim on the universality of interests it pursues. Nationalism
represented in the films is oriented toward a male-centered, pro-American nation,
and thus, is a political tool of the patriarchal ruling class. Bourgeois, masculine
nationalism of Korea concealed the class and gender specific interests it served,
bringing the people’s empathetic agreement on its agenda. Such an emotive
mobilization took their hearts to the interests and manufactured the fantasy of
“horizontal comradeship.” The sentiment of shinpa, mobilized as the affective
66
apparatus of hegemonic nationalist discourse, invisibly partook in the construction
of the “imagined community” of post-liberation Korea.

II-4 Self-contradiction of Modern National Identity of Korea
The Night before Independence and Viva Freedom illustrate that Korean masculine
nationalism of the post-liberation period was constructed through an emotional
transaction with the culture of shinpa, which nationalism devalued and criticized. By
making the transaction concealed and unregistered, the two films attempt to deliver
the nationalist message that the culture of shinpa, the embodiment of the pre-
modern, feminine, anti-national and colonial past, should be dead before the nation
greets the new era of independence. Such a self-contradiction of nationalist
discourse, which is deeply repressed behind the message, however, surfaces as a
symptom, quietly disclosing that self-contradiction.
The symptom appears in the last scene of The Night before Independence,
which was briefly discussed in the beginning of this chapter. The last scene, where
the four young people who survived the previous night are looking down a bridge on
the hill, is obviously there for the purpose of heralding an independent, modern
nation after the death of shinpa. The image of the bridge, in particular, is placed in
the scene to envisage the future modernity that the nation will move forwards to
build up. This bridge is an historic architecture that adds multiple layers of meanings
to the scene. It was originally named the Han River Footbridge and the name
changed to the First Han River Bridge, which is now called the Grand Han River
67
Bridge (Hangang Taekyo). It is the first pedestrian bridge over the Han River,
which was built as part of the urban planning of the colonial government with
modern civil engineering technology in 1916-17. Before the liberation it symbolized
the power and pride of the colonial government.
A profound irony underlying the image of the bridge is that the vision of the new
country, be it conscious or unconscious, unfolds through the emblem of colonial
ruling, and that the shackle of colonialism is imagined as a signpost of the path the
liberated country should take. Contrary to the celebratory message of the country’s
break from the colonial past that appears on the surface, the film, then, undoes the
break. The nationalist gesture to wipe out the colonial legacy represented in the film
is itself embedded with the legacy.
The gaze of the four survivors as well as the camera directed to the bridge in the
last scene of the film is the gaze of fetishism, which a postcolonial critic, Chungmoo
Choi, points out in her essay, “Marvelous Colonialism and Enchanted Spectator”
(“Kyo^ngyiro um singminjuu^i wa Maehokdoin Kwangaek”).” She argues that a
core mediator between the modernity of colonized and colonizer is a fetishistic force
of commodity, which is produced by the colonizer and enchants the gaze of the
colonized. She writes:

…[It] exposes the problem of (post)colonial modernity, which is based on
fetishism that produces enchantment and phantasmagoria which the
enchantment gives rise to. Colonial ruling operates in the similar way as the
fetishism of commodity in the Marxist term does. Fetishism is activated in such
a way that even though a commodity generates the mystery and attraction which
68

creates desire for the commodity, the relation of production underlying the
commodity is thoroughly covered up. The relation between modernity of the
colonized and the colonizer follows the similar path. The visual and material
commodities as the products of western modernity exercise power in the
production of knowledge or administrative systems over the colonized Koreans,
who are excluded from the modern structure of ruling. The commodities also
draw desire for the enormous force which produces such material entities behind
them. From this perspective what mediates the modernity of colonized with that
of colonizer is the “thing-ness,” the surface of modernity, which played an
important factor in the formation of the subjectivity of colonized Koreans.
52

The gaze directed at the bridge in the scene is, to follow Choi’s argument, the one
enchanted by the power of colonialism, which is capable of modern western
engineering technology and the capital necessary for building the bridge. The gaze is
filled with the desire and awe for the capability, which the Koreans were not allowed
to access during colonial period. This desire and awe-ridden gaze reveals that those
who greet the independence day are still under the fetishistic spell cast by the symbol
of colonial capital. Underlying the irony of envisioning the independent nation’s
future vis-à-vis the symbol of colonial capital there is a deep-seated consciousness
which still dwells in the past under the colonial domination
This deep-seated consciousness is what Choi designated “continued colonized
consciousness” elsewhere. The “continued colonized consciousness” means “the
imposition by the dominant power of its own world view, its own cultural norms and
values, on the colonized people so that they are compelled to adopt this alien system
of thought as their own and therefore disregard or disparage indigenous culture and

52
Chungmoo Choi, “Marvelous Colonialism and Enchanted Spectator,” p. 61. Translation is mine.
69

identity.”
53
Korean nationalism had been subject to the colonized consciousness
during colonial times and continued to be caught in it after the Japanese imperial
power officially left the country. The post-Liberation South Korean nationalist dream
of establishing an independent modern nation was still embedded with colonized
spirit, as was suggested by the four characters of the film envisioning the national
future by admiringly looking at the bridge built by colonial modern capital and
technology. The nationalist dream imbued with colonized spirit only anticipated
continued subjugation
The Post-Liberation South Korean nationalism, therefore, conveniently
accommodated another hegemonic power that succeeded Japanese colonialism, the
U.S. After the Liberation, the South Korean nationalist ruling class welcomed with
intense enthusiasm the U.S. neocolonial domination. They hailed the occupation by
the U.S. neo-colonial military government, calling the military and administrative
agents “the blood ally” or “friends of liberty.”
54

This pro-American nationalist discourse was deployed in order to effectively
sustain the Korean military and economic dependence on the U.S., establishing the
power of the Korean ruling class. The liberation was, then, an empty signifier which
covered up the nation’s subjugation. The Grand Han River Bridge, which symbolizes
this empty signifier in The Day before Independence, demonstrated the actual

53
Choi, “Decolonization and Popular Memory,” in Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia,
Tani Barlow ed., p. 350
54
Friends of Liberty was also a name of a propaganda material that the U.S. distributed in Korea in
this period.
70

emptiness of meaning of the sign sadly by being destroyed in the Korean War.
55

The delusional daydream of building an independent country was broken by the war
caused by the power struggle of South Korean “friends of liberty” with their enemy,
which brought the permanent division of Korea.
As the liberation is an empty signifier, the nationalist envisioning presented in
The Day before Independence and Viva Freedom is a blank gesture. Behind the
blank gesture there exists the continued colonized consciousness, which engineers
the perpetuation of colonial subjugation. The nationalist critique that the culture of
shinpa is the detrimental remnant of colonialism which puts sacred nationalist
missions in danger, then, describes the problematic embedded in nationalist
discourse itself. The configuration of the culture of shinpa as such is a way of casting
upon it the colonized-consciousness behind the façade of nationalist discourse. The
nationalist critique that the inheritance of shinpa should be cleared up for it carries
the colonial legacy, therefore, should be turned to nationalist discourse itself.

III Conclusion
Since the colonial period, Korean modernity was inscribed with the problematics
occasioned by the coercively imposed transnational matrix of colonialism and
neocolonialism, from which modernity was shaped. The nation, subject to colonial
and neocolonial subjugation, was not sufficiently coherent, not sufficiently free of

55
The bridge was reconstructed in 1934-37 and then, partially destroyed in Korean War. It was once
again reconstructed in 1957-58. In 1979-82 the same-shaped bridge was built next to the original one
and became the twin bridges as they are now.

71
foreign bodies to constitute the independent, uniform nationhood. The
configuration of the imaginary of the homogeneous national identity of Korea was
made possible only by the gendered projection of the transnational embeddedness
onto the culture of shinpa. Figured as a feminine, mindless and popular cultural form
that never measured up to the national authenticity, shinpa was the abject onto which
the transnationally mediated stigmas ingrained in the national identity were ejected
onto. As the abject of its nation the culture of shinpa served national modernity at its
periphery.

72
Chapter 2 Melodrama of the 1950s: Transition from the Mode of Shinpa to
Modern Melodrama
The agenda of the construction of a homogeneous nation served as a master
discursive frame, which made sense of and legitimized other discursive practices
performed in every realm of colonial Korea. While the master frame was still
effective in the post-liberation period with the changed task of the establishment of
one nation-state, after the Korean War when the permanent partition of the nation
occurred and the U.S. neocolonial domination of South Korea was firmly instituted,
the master discursive frame did not operate as such any more.
During the postwar period, nationalism had been eclipsed to a great extent and the
discourse of democracy and freedom became a new dominant frame of politics, at
least on the surface. The Syng Man Rhee regime did not succeed in the creation of a
hegemonic discourse which would displace the role that nationalism had played in
the construction of national identity and gender formation in the previous era. While
prior to the war nationalism had functioned as a primary vehicle to configure the
imaginary of the pure national identity by projecting upon the culture of shinpa
transnationally inflected stigmas embedded in the colonized nationhood, the
discursive force that sustained nationhood as such significantly waned in the postwar
period. The waning of nationalist discourse consequently loosened the burden of the
imaginary of untainted nationhood imposed on the identity of Korean women.
With nationalism that had curbed gender order relatively slacked representations
of female identities in South Korean popular culture and cinema rapidly adopted
73
American consumerism and Hollywood films. Images of women who practiced
the concept of individual freedom and sought the fetishistic pleasure of American
commodities entered the film screen, threatening the patriarchal order of postwar
South Korea. A body of films which displayed the new, modern images of women
emerged and was labeled as modern melodrama.
In this chapter I first provide an overview of political changes in postwar South
Korea and explain the social and cultural matrix from which modern melodrama
emerged. Then, I explicate the meaning of female identity in flux, one of the key
motives employed in modern film melodrama, in relation to the social cultural
context. Prior to its presence in modern film melodrama the motif was showcased in
South Korean all-female opera, yo^so^ng kukku^k. Modern film melodrama
presented variations of the motif through the re-appropriation of the convention of
shinpa. I demonstrate that, in contrast to dominant film discourse, which set a binary
opposition between modern melodrama and shinpa and exclusively highlighted
newer and more advanced styles of the former, the two interacted with each other in
order to create images of female identity in flux. Through the analysis of Madam
Freedom (Chayu puin, Han Hyo^ng-mo, 1956) and Confession of a College Girl
(O^nu^ yo^daesaengu^i kobaek, Shin Snag-ok, 1959) I argue that South Korean
postwar modern melodrama articulated patriarchal order-challenging femininity by
re-engaging in the convention of shinpa

74
I Changes in Political Discourse of the 1950s
After the liberation, the political and economic circumstances of the Korean
peninsular were re-organized in fundamentally different ways than prior to the
liberation. Half of the peninsular was placed under the control of the U.S., and the
fashion in which the state hegemony was operated, as well as the subject of
hegemony, radically changed. The collective rubric of nationalist resistance against
Japanese imperialism had lost its validity. Instead, a new political direction was
explored, which would adjust the southern half of Korea to its role of defending the
capitalist bloc at the tip of the far east in the era of the cold war. The new global
order of the cold war split and remapped Korea into capitalist and communist
territory and South Korea, territorialized as a capitalist country placed under the U.S.
superpower, had to gear its identity as an anticommunist country.
Anti-communism, thereby, displaced anti-colonialism and rapidly gained absolute
dominance in every realm of South Korea’s life in the post-liberation period. The
process of displacement was first materialized in the split occupation of Korea by the
U.S. and the Soviet Union and then was furthered in the South by the unjust policies
implanted by the U.S. military government (1945-48) on Korean collaborators with
the Japanese colonial force. The U.S. military government, for example, vetoed the
special bill for the execution of Korean collaborators and assigned the majority of
them to its administration. A thorough renovation of colonial legacies demanded by
the South Koreans was confused by the collaborator-favorable policies and resulted
in tremendous resistance from the masses of South Korean.
75

When the South Korean independent government was launched in 1948, it
based the principles of the state on freedom and democracy (chayuminjujuu^i) as
showcased in the name of the ruling party, “Liberal Party (chayudang).” Here,
freedom meant freedom from communists and democracy signified American
political systems, thus the terms freedom and democracy were exploited to signify
anti-communism. These principles clearly articulate the national identity of South
Korea as an anti-communist front regulated by U.S. hegemony. The re-ordering of
South Korea into an anti-communist country profoundly influenced South Koreans’
understanding of the nation-state and the civil war (the Korean war). The speech for
the presidential campaign in 1956 made by Ik-hi Shin, the candidate of the
oppositional party, for instance, defined the Korean War as a war “not about killing
the people of the same nation, but a test of the strength competed by democracy and
communism . . .”
56
Freedom and democracy were empty signifiers mobilized by the
ruling class so as to draw South Koreans’ support and agreement on the re-ordered
identity as the anti-communist nation dictated by the changed global political system.
Discourse of freedom and democracy was an apparatus to build the hegemony of
the indigenous ruling class who were associated with the power of the U.S. The
building of hegemony, however, was not successful enough to fully assimilate the
South Korean into the legitimacy of discourse. Discourse of freedom and democracy
was not capable of bringing forth their unquestionable intellectual and affective

56
So^k-yo^ng Kim, “Nanu^n taetongryo^ng so^ngo^lu^l iro^k’e ponda[ I See the Presidential
Election This Way],”(Seoul: Namkwangmunhwasa, 1956), recitation from Un-so^n Paek,
“Minjudanggwa chayudangu^i cho^ngch’i inyo^m nonjaenag [Debates on the Political Philosophy of
Democratic Party and Liberal Party],” in 1950-yo^ndaeu^i insik [An Understanding of the 1950s ],
(Seoul: Hangilsa, 1990), p.110.
76
agreement as nationalist discourse of the colonial period had been. The Syngman
Rhee [Su^ng-man Yi] regime did not properly establish an over-arching and
cohesive discursive domination which could possibly parallel the domination of
nationalism in colonial times. The major reason for the absence of such discursive
domination, I suggest, was that there was too large a gap between the discourse of
freedom and democracy and its realization in the political practice of the regime.
Another important cause of the lack of dominant discourse was that nationalism was
not successfully renovated enough to justify the agenda underlying the new political
system and cultural change.
The gap between the surface and reality of politics prevalent in the entire period
of the Rhee regime was brought about by the anti-democratic and despotic fashion of
ruling. The regime was not prepared for the reception of the idea that “the state
power comes from its people,” which defines democracy. It, conversely, took
advantage of the façade of democracy in order to found and accumulate the power
and wealth of the ruler both as an individual and the agent of the ruling class.
Corruption and violence enacted by the regime in the name of democracy made an
easy way for dictatorship until the regime was crushed in the April 19
th
Revolution
led by the masses, who had outsmarted the ruling class by apprehending democracy
in a surprisingly short period of time 12 years after the democratic political system
was introduced.
The Rhee administration did not turn to the construction of hegemony as its
primary political tool. The administration, which lacked the base of a political party,
77

rather, mainly relied on the military and political forces
57
as well as on the
mobilization of the masses for political events.
58
. The political practice of the
administration was perceived as no better than pulling strings to create the dictatorial
charisma of Rhee. Transgression of the boundary set by the laws generated severe
criticism in the nascent alternative political domains. Sasanggye, a major political
magazine of the time, critiqued the administration, for instance, as follows: “[South
Korea] is not a state ruled by law, but a deformed political entity controlled by
absolute power transcending law”
59
“Despotism at the mercy of an individual,”
60

“and “Laws are not strictly applied, but, leniently adjusted according to political
situations and individuals’ interests.”
61

It grew evident by the late ‘50s that democracy claimed by the administration
was, in actuality, mere an vehicle for dictatorship; and freedom meant freedom only
for one person, the dictator. These negative political factors were entangled with the
economic environment that promoted corruption in the regime. The predominant
financial resource of the regime and the state was U.S. aid, the amount of which was
7-14 times larger than that offered to other Asian and African countries after World
War II. The U.S. aid received by South Korea was different from the aid granted

57
See Sang-ton Kim, “Chugu^l chikyo^ngida [It’s Almost Killing Us],” Sasanggye, No.53, 1957, p.
50. and To-hyo^n Kim, “1950-yo^ndaeu^i Rhee Syngman ron [View on Syngman Rhee of the
1950s],” in An Understandingof the 1950s, pp.73-74.
58
See “Rhee tadtongryo^ngu^i chaech’ulma tamnhwaru^l ilkko [On the Statement for President
Rhee’s Running Again for the Election],” Choson Ilbo [Choson Daily], March 16
th
, 1956, and Su^ng-
chu Han, “Che il konghwagugu^i yusan [Legacy of the First Republic],” in An Understanding of the
1950s, p.44.
59
Su-So^n Kim, “A Path to Democracy,),” Sasangge, No. 32 (March), 1956, p.148.
60
Chong-ku^k Yi, “Minjujuu^iro kanu^n kil [ A Path to Democracy],”Sasangge, No. 43, 1957, p.
271.
61
Sasangge, No. 65, 1958, p.162.
78

through the Marshal Plan to postwar South Korea and European countries. While
the European aid was for the purpose of economic reconstruction of the countries,
South Korea was primarily intended to strengthen the military force of South Korea
so that the U.S. could consolidate its control in East Asia. In order to satisfy the
military and political demands made by the U.S. associated with western modernity.
The Rhee administration even preceded the campaigns of “unifying the nation by the
invasion of the North (“pukjin t’ongil”).” Since the administration did not have
legitimate and systematic methods of distributing the aid, funds as well as other
financial resources such as the land and capital owned by the colonial government,
personal connections and violence were publicly and privately used to access those
resources. Dominated by the unlawful allocation of financial resources accompanied
by violence, the Rhee era was labeled as “the state of police,” or the state of
gangsters. Such an apparent discrepancy between the surface and reality of politics
clearly shows that, in contrast to what was claimed, the Rhee regime was
fundamentally anti-democratic, and failed to bring the Korean public in agreement
with the dominant politics.
In his book, Korean Modernity (Hangugu^i kundaewa kundaeso^ng) Kyo^ng-il
Kim, South Korean social critic, contends that the discourse of democracy overrode
nationalism in this period,
62
and that, in terms of politics, it was more of a non-
nationalistic period than any other historical moment in Korea. Even though
nationalism was mobilized as part of the discursive apparatus of the Rhee regime, the

62
According to Kim the core zeitgeist of the ‘50s South Korea can be summarized as democracy. See
his Korean Modernity (Hangugu^i kundaewa kundaeso^ng) (Paeksanso^dang, 2003), pp. 160-62.
79

regime did not consistently and coherently maintain nationalism as the core of its
discursive practices. On the one hand there were attempts to create the nationalistic
façade of the nation and its leader. Rhee’s political career as an anti-colonial activist
and his hard core antagonism towards Japan, for instance, were foregrounded
throughout his term. Historical discourse of the period stressed the historical
narratives drawn according to the myth of Tangun, a mythic founder of Korea, and
his founding spirit called hongik ingan, meaning that a nation should contribute to
the overall benefit of every human being, or hwarangdo,
63
the aristocratic military
organization of kingdom of Shilla.
On the other hand, modern cultural items imported from American culture were
arbitrarily picked up and incorporated into Korean tradition. For instance, the
celebration of Thanksgiving, holding Christmas parties, and events that imitated a
May queen pageant in the west became popular at the time. Extreme cases of hasty
cross-cultural adaptations often generated farce-like scenes such as the presence of
an impersonation of an Indian tribe leader in a local parade in Korea. In his book,
The Invention of Tradition, Eric Hobsbawm argues that traditions are “invented” to
construct a continuity with the past, yet the constructed continuity is a response to
“novel situations which take the form of reference to old situations,” thus is “largely
fictitious.”
64
In the case of the Korea of the ‘50s the hybridization of what was
figured as traditional and the modern had not grown enough to conceal the
“fictitiousness” of its continuity with the past. The chaotic mix of the traditional and

63
Tangun is a mythic figure constructed as the origin of Korean nation and hongik ingan is known as
the central idea with which Tangun established Korea.
64
Eric Hobsbawm, The Invention of Tradition, (Cambridge, 1992), p. 3.
80
modern displayed in the political and cultural scene of the period reveals that
South Korea did not construct a coherent and homogenous imaginary of the nation.
The heterogeneity and discontinuity embedded in the formation of the nation,
thereby were laid bare. The Rhee regime, then, did not succeed in manufacturing a
hegemonic discourse capable of amalgamating the heterogeneity and discontinuity.
The regime was not able to either effectively re-configure nationalism or invent a
dominant discourse through which the public could be controlled under the new
political circumstances and the influx of American modernity.
The lack of a discursive master frame, which would enable a cover up of the
discrepancies between the surface and reality of politics and configure the uniform
cultural identity of the nation, led to a relatively loosened control over the reception
of transnational popular culture. The slackened control especially benefited the
incursion of American popular culture, which was mainly disseminated through
imported Hollywood films and the U.S. military bases in Korea. The transnational
adaptation of American popular culture in ‘50s Korea received significantly different
responses from the adaptation of Japanese shinpa during the colonial period. The
reception of American popular culture was relatively free from the criticism of the
anti-national and anti-modern form of culture applied to the reception of shinpa.
South Koreans’ awareness of colonial domination was much diluted when the form
of domination switched to U.S. neocolonialism. American popular culture was
conceived as the prestigious symbol of modernity and freedom rather than the
81

imposition of the colonizer’s culture, which brought even further openness and
readiness to American culture both in terms of critical and popular reception.

II Fantasy of Modernity and Female Identity in Flux
The appropriation of American popular culture in ‘50s South Korea, however,
was hardly reflective of the everyday life of common South Koreans. The
appropriation rather was intended to feed unrealistic desires and longings for
glamorous American capital and culture, which could not be owned and enjoyed by
most South Korean people of the period. South Korea was not equipped with the
economic resources needed to materialize in real life the alluring images represented
in Hollywood films. Images of modernity circulated in South Korean popular
culture, thus, were fabricated out of the collective fantasy of American modernity.
The fantasy, however, served as a significant vehicle for configuring the modern
identity of South Korea, modern female identity of South Korean women in
particular.
Marshall Berman said, “In countries whose process of modernization is not
independent and underdeveloped modernity grows through fantasies, dreams, and
mirages.”
65
United State Foreign Policy—Asia: Study Prepared at the Request of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee written in 1959 said, “In many ways South
Korea is existing in loaned time . . . .Without the U.S. aid its’ economy will

65
Marshal Berman, All That Is Solid Melt into Air: The Experience of Modernity, (New York, 1982),
p. 287.
82

collapse.”
66
These two quoted passages accurately describe what South Koreas
were going through in their war-devastated every day life and how it was represented
in popular culture as well. Socio-economic circumstances of South Korea did not
provide the material base to realize a modern life which they learned from
“developed” countries and heard from their government.
From 1954-60, South Korea received aid in the amount of $ 1,889,000,000 from
the U.S., which translated into $ 13-4 per person, 7-14 times more than that Taiwan
or Philippines received ($1-2 per person). But the GNP growth was only 4.4%, a
remarkably smaller figure than 7-10% growth achieved in the 60s through state
industrialization projects.
67
More than 80% of the population engaged in agriculture
and the unemployment rate exceeded 50% of the entire population.
68
While these
statistics demonstrate that the ‘50s was a significantly stagnant period, the growth of
population and its concentration in urban areas show contrasting changes. The
growth rate of the population between 1955-60 was 2.98% per year, the highest rate
in Korean history. The post war baby boom, which set the world record of the
average number of children per family in the 20
th
century, 6.3 in 1957,
69
and the
population that moved from the North to the South as well as soldiers who came
back from the war front all contributed to such a massive growth. The most
problematic aspect of this growth was the rapid concentration of the population in

66
Colon Associates Ltd., United State Foreign Policy—Asia: Study Prepared at the Request of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 1959, pp.122-3.
67
Ho-ch’o^l Son, p.169.
68
Kwan-mo So^, Hanguk hyo^ndae sahoeu^i kyegu^p kujowa kyegu^p puhwa [Class Structure and
Ramifications of Modern Korean Society], (Seoul: Hanu^l, 1984), pp. 76-7.
69
T’ae-hwan Kwon, “Components of Population Growth,” in Kwon T’ae-hwan et al., The Population
of Korea (Seoul National University Press, 1975). Recitation from Kyo^ng-il Kim, p. 132.
83

urban areas, which brought the urbanizing rate of 24.5% from 1955 to 1960.
70

Urban areas under these sweeping changes as well as extreme poverty created an
environment where life was mere survival.
71
The modernization without
industrialization characteristic of postwar South Korea inevitably created the
unfortunate circumstances for the modern as “fantasies, dreams, and mirages.”
Instead of the miseries-ridden, poverty-stricken everyday life in war-devastated
reality, the South Korean public wanted to be fed with the alluring images of the
glamorous western life style and to daydream about fetishistic American
commodities that they could not own. The fantasy of modern culture, yet, played a
more important role than just feeding the desire for enchanting western goods and
images. Fantasies, especially those configured through the medium of film, served as
major vehicles in the construction of modern female identities against the
phantasmagoric vista of western modernity. The frame of fantasy enabled modern
female identities to be imagined in a way reassuring to the South Korean patriarchal
order in conflict with those identities. Provocative images of women challenging the
established code of patriarchy could be displayed under the assumption that they
were not real, and, thus, not seriously threatening to the conventional gender order;
simultaneously satisfying and fulfilling the desires of South Korean women who
sought pleasure in them. The fantasy frame was a device through which female

70
U^i-yo^ng Yu, “Ingu idonggw tosihwa [Change of Population and Urbanization],”in Hanguk sahoe
I: inguwas paljo^n [Korean Society I: Population and Develpoment] (Seoul National University,
1978), pp. 93-5. Recitation from Kyo^ng-il Kim, p. 132.
71
Kyo^ng-il Kim, p. 133.
84

audiences were able to enjoy what they were not allowed to be and have, and to
keep both of what they were and what they wanted to be at the same time.

II-1 Fantasy of New Female Identity and All-Female Opera
The fantasy of new female identities appeared in the arena of popular culture
through the medium of theater prior to its emergence in cinema. Images of woman
out of place in terms of gender hierarchy were embodied in the most spectacular
form in the all-female opera, yo^so^ng kukku^k, in postwar Korea. The all-female
opera was launched in 1948 by the establishment of yo^so^ng kugak tonghohoi, the
Women’s National Music Association, and reached the peak of its popularity during
the war and immediate postwar period and quickly waned from the late 1950s.
72
The
phrase, yo^so^ng kukku^k is translated into “female” (yo^so^ng) “national” (kuk)
“theater” (ku^k). Before the liberation a dramatic form employing multiple actors
who sang in the p’ansory style”
73
was called “ch’anggu^k,” a term which dates back
to the 1930s and then it switched to kukku^k, which, precipitated by the achievement
of national independence, stresses the meaning of the national.
74
While yo^so^ng

72
For the history of yo^so^ng kukku^k see Min-yo^ng Yu, Hanguk yo^ngu^k undongsa [History of
Korean Theater Movement], (Seoul: Taehaksa, 2001), Hyo^n-mi Paek, Hanguk Changgu^ksa yo^ngu
[A Study of History of Korean Opera], (Seoul: Taekhaksa, 1997) and Pyo^ng-ch’o^l Kim, Hanguk
Yo^so^ng Kukku^ksa yo^ngu [A Study of the History of Korean All-Female Theater], Ph.D. Diss.
Dongguk Univ., 1997.
73
Andrew P. Killick, “Ch’anggu^k Opera and the Category of the Traditionesque,” Korean Studies
Vol.25, No. 1, p. 58. For the different definitions of ch’anggu^k see Hyo^n-mi Paek, p. 25. She argues
that the concept of ch’anggu^k is not necessarily limited to the presence of p’ansori in the
performance. Although the idea that ch’anggu^k is a version of p’ansori adapted into a multiple-
singer performance is still prevalent, in the early years of ch’anggu^k, it combined various kinds of
other traditional music and performances. Although it has the tradition of one century , the concept of
ch’anggu^k, is still being formed
74
During the immediate liberation period the use of a prefix ‘’kuk,’’ signifying the
national, became prevalent in Korean culture. The diverse traditional music of pre-
85

kukku^k came into play as a variation of ch’anggu^k, it has particularities that are
not completely subsumed into ch’anggu^k. In yo^so^ng kukku^k, the all-female
opera, literally all characters are played by female performers and male roles are
played by cross-dressed female performers. Although there are a few instances of
cross-dressed female performers on stage in the history of Korean theater, such as in
the performance of yo^sadangpae, female song and dance troupes or that of
courtesans during the colonial period, the presence of cross-dressed female
performers was perceived as quite unique in the male-dominated Korean theater. For
a short period, while Korean men were gone to the war front, yo^so^ng kukku^k
enjoyed an enormous popularity.
Repertoires of yo^so^ng kukku^k primarily consist of historical dramas based
on folktales or pseudo-historical narratives originated from the era of Three
Kingdoms.
75
Most dramas are set in a war and their narratives center around the
motif of “an obstacle to a marriage and its removal.” The male and female
protagonists, who are all princes and princesses or at least aristocrats, happen to meet
during a war and fall in love with each other. Their love is, however, always faced
with a hurdle such that they turn out to be each other’s enemy; or that one of them
does not know or cannot reveal his or her royal identity. The situation is often more
complicated by the intervention of a third person, usually a male who is jealous of

colonial origin, for example, was termed “kuggak” (national music). Kukkuk is one of the
terms coined in that fashion. See Paek pp. 336-7 and also Killick, p57.
75
The repertoires include p’ansory ch’angguk such as Tale of Ch’ung-hyang and Tale of Shim
Ch’o^ng as well as adaptations of foreign literature and plays such as Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and
Monte Christos.

86

the lovers and schemes to keep them apart. But the male protagonists get rid of all
the problems using their heroic power; his or her hidden identity is uncovered, and
the lovers live happily ever after.
Composed of conventional narrative components like a heterosexual romance,
the glorification of the male hero, the extreme polarization of good and evil, poetic
justice, a happy end, etc,
76
yo^so^ng kukku^k has been perceived as cheap escapism.
According to a Korean drama historian, yo^so^ng kukku^k is perfect for those who
“like something sweet and sentimental and wish to escape from reality,” because
through the combination of “a sad melody of ch’ang, traditional singing, filled with
han, pent-up grief, beautiful dance, fantastic and sentimental love stories, flamboyant
costume, and spectacular stage settings,” yo^so^ng kukku^k “ was no more than a
comfort pill for the South Koreans tired from the war.”
77
Such a view of yo^so^ng
kukku^k, which is dominant in the scanty research on the subject, significantly
misses the subversive potential of gender politics underlying its banal surface.
With a few exceptions, dramas of yo^so^ng kukku^k revolve around the
confusion about identities of characters, primarily of male or female protagonists.
For instance, in Bead and Princess (Kusu^lgwa kongju) when a lowly man named
So-tong first meets princess So^n-hwa, he does not know that he used to be the
prince of the Kingdom of Paekje. In Shepherd and Princess (Mokdonggwa kongju) a

76
According to Pyo^ng-ch’o^l Kim, the only exception for the happy end is One Star (Pyo^l hana).
See his A Study on the History of Korean All Female Opera, P. 86.
76
Min-yo^ng Yu, p.89. Or it is criticized that “yo^so^ng kukku^k’s repertoires are all the same as
they dub fictive tales of the far past with crude romanticism.” Seoul Simun (Seoul Newspaper), June
11, 1959.

87
shepherd proposes to a princess, not knowing that she is disguised as a commoner
to protect herself during a war. Later the shepherd himself comes to know that he is
the son of a royal minister of the kingdom. Identity confusion sometimes bring forth
homoerotic or incestuous incidents. In Times of Absent Love (Mujo^ng seyuo^l), for
example, the princess is attracted to Ka-sil, who, disguised in male attire, fights in a
war in order to take revenge for her husband’s death. Or in Even Though the Sun Is
Setting (Haenu^n cho^do) the prince falls in love with the princess of his enemy,
who turns out to be his sister.
The recurrent motif of identity confusion set against a political crisis suggests
the weakened power of the nation and its patriarchal system. Fictive wars
represented in dramas obviously allegorize the Korean War that was going on and
mirror the national power put in danger. Identity confusions that precipitate narrative
events, then, represent changes in gender hierarchy caused by the Korean War and
the loosened patriarchal authority. South Korean women’s mobilization as a labor
force during the war while Korean men were gone to the war front caused significant
changes in the status of South Korean women. By collectively entering the public
space as a labor force, the South Korean women encroached upon the place of
Korean men assigned by patriarchy. Rather than just a cheap amusement, yo^so^ng
kukku^k served as a vehicle for the re-enactment of such a social crisis and the
ensuing transformations in gender relationships.
Yo^so^ng kukku^k re-enacts the social crisis and changed gender relationships
in two different ways. On the one hand it resolves the crisis by the celebration of
88
male heroism and the union of heterosexual couples. Such a resolution seemingly
relocates in the “right” position characters in camouflaged or mistaken identities and
re-confirms the patriarchal order. The resolution, on the other, simultaneously
betrays the premise which it is to carry out. Due to its gender ambivalence brought
forth by cross-dressed female performers, the male-dominance and heterosexual
bond which are supposedly carried out by the resolution cannot be completed. In her
essay, “Gender Politics of Yo^so^ng Kukku^k of the 1950s,” Hyo^n-mi Paek points
out the transgressive dimension of gender performance underlying yo^so^ng
kukku^k as follows:

…[T]he male protagonists [of yo^so^ng kukku^k] are mostly omnipotent and
have an absolute will power and self-confidence. As a result they achieve both
power and love at the same time overcoming any obstacles. . . . In this way
characters are constructed in terms of “male gaze,” however, all the drama is
“displayed” by female performers. . . . For this reason yo^so^ng kukku^k offers
a form of gendered inner split. Yo^so^ng kukku^k stresses women’s masculinity
through female performers’ enactment of male-ness…. That the female
performers play male roles and show their masculinity is a violation of social
convention that prescribes gender identity and is the reversal of the gender role
expected by social convention.

Paek contends that the “inner split” between masculine representation and feminine
performer presented in yo^so^ng kukku^k is the site of transgression of social norms
of gender. While male protagonists of yo^so^ng kukku^k embody the typical male
desire that sets up the female as an object of his desire, the embodiment of his desire
through a transvestite woman enables her to take his masculinity on a woman’s
terms. The masculinity expressed vis-à-vis the body of a transvestite woman
89

transposes the glory invested in the male hero onto the female body. The female
body takes the position of the male subject, and makes a claim to, only at the
imaginary level though, the right to desire, the right bestowed only to the male in
patriarchal society. Female transvestism also deconstructs the implications of the
union of a heterosexual couple as a narrative closure. The heterosexual union, which
is built upon the same sex relationship at the level of performance, ultimately negates
the recuperation of established gender order it is supposed to signify.
The female audience’s fanaticism about cross-dressed female performers, one of
the major characteristics of the reception of yo^so^ng kukku^k, provides an
important clue to how to read its female spectatorship. In an interview Kim Chin-
chin, one of the major yo^so^ng kukku^k stars of the 1950s recollected that “some
frantic fans sent letters written in their blood….girl students were crazy about
Kyo^ng-su, who played the role of a prince.”
78
Or a female audience reminisced
about her viewing experience as follows:

…[I]n kukku^k there were things more shocking than in a movie . . . In it
women were disguised as men; women as they were, they were capable of
playing the male roles and did it so well; they did it so well and . . .it’s
surprising to see that. I mean, women got what was supposed to be men’s
capability; it depended on how to develop it, I mean, like only the brave achieve
something. I came out of theater amazed by how come she chose to play the
male role and did it so well.”
79

78
“Yo^so^ng Kukku^k u^i hu^ru^m [The Vein of, Yo^so^ng Kukku^k],” Kyo^nghyang Sinmun
(Kyo^nghyang Newspaper) Nov. 21, 1984
79
Jai-ran Byun, Hanguk yo^nghwasaeso^ yo^so^ng kwangaegu^i yo^nghwa kwallam yo^ngu: 1950-
yo^ndae chungbaneso^ 1960-yo^ndae ch’obanu^l chungshimu^ro [A Study on Women’s Movie
Viewing Experience in Korean Film History: Focusing on the mid-‘50s to early ‘60s]. Ph.D. Diss.
Chungang University, 2000, pp. 117-118.
90
Along with the homoerotic nature of the fandom, the description above shows that
the female audience found an intense pleasure in looking at the masculinity
manifested in the female performers. The reminiscence of the female audience
member demonstrates that her amazement about kukku^k mainly comes from the
fact that women performers were so well capable of playing male roles; that the
brave women developed their capability and achieved something. To see the female
performer appropriate what is described as belonging to the male, thus, is one of the
major pleasures of yo^so^ng kukku^k. The female audience of the period could
participate in the appropriation while viewing it, and enjoy a phantasmatic
masculinization of herself.
The female spectatorship of this kind, which can be called “temporary
transvestism,” is quite similar to Laura Mulvey’s contention about the female
viewing position in her essay “Afterthoughts Inspired by Duel in the Sun.” While
“the conventions surrounding the look” in cinema excludes the female gaze, she
claims, the narrative which cinema inherited from the tradition of story-telling makes
female spectators adopt the position of the male lead in order to follow the narrative.
Therefore, female spectators in cinema enact trans-sex identification, oscillating
between the feminine position of the object of male desire and the masculine position
of the desiring subject. Cross-dressed female performers in yo^so^ng kukku^k, who
practice the trans-sex identification themselves, fully spur the female spectatorship as
such. Female spectators of kukku^k, therefore, are able to fantasize about themselves
not just as a princess waiting for a prince but as a prince who rescues and marries the
91

princess. In this manner the female spectatorship enables female viewers to get out
of the mold of femininity that locks them in passive objecthood. Gender order
constructed on the basis of binary opposition of male verses female and masculinity
verses femininity is subverted and the boundary of masculinity is crossed.
The relation between yo^so^ng kukku^k and melodrama of the period has been
perceived as discontinuous or even opposed. The former has been classified as an
“old” form of spectacle categorically distinguished from “new” cinematic spectacles
offered by film melodrama. The relation of these two forms of spectacle is described
mainly in terms of distinction. For example, Dictionary of Women in Film Industry
states that Korean films produced in the period “foregrounded modern styles in order
to distinguish itself from yo^so^ng kukku^k and a major way to do so was to adapt
novels serialized in newspapers into films or radio dramas.”
80
It also contends that
“through the film adaptation of radio dramas [South Korean] women came out of the
past of kukku^k and historical drama to the real world . . .”
81
In other words, it is
argued, while the cinema was the medium which enabled the Korean women of the
period to live modern lives, yo^so^ng kukku^k is an outdated medium that held the
Korean women back in the fantastic romance of a feudal world no longer related to
reality. This argument seems quite well-grounded by the fact that yo^so^ng kukku^k
started to flourish during the Korean War when only five or six feature films were
annually produced. When the Korean cinema was rapidly growing as a public
entertainment medium, supported by the domestic film promotion policy in 1954,

80
Yo^so^ng yo^nghwain sajo^n [Encyclopedia of Women in Film Industry] (Seoul: Sodo, 2001), p.22
81
Ibid., p.38.

92
yo^so^ng kukku^k was brought to a quick and almost complete demise. However,
I argue that there are also similarities between the two forms of spectacle pertaining
to female sexuality in particular. The difference between the outer and inner identity
of women, which a great deal of South Korean films, especially melodrama,
generated in the period were concerned with, is a pivotal issue of yo^so^ng kukku^k
as well. These two forms share the way of perceiving changing female identity to a
great extent, and should be arguably understood in light of continuity of representing
femininity in a particular way.

II-2 Continued Figuration of Female Identity in Flux
Although not as spectacular and flamboyant as in yo^so^ng kukku^k, postwar
South Korean melodrama repeatedly employed the motif of female identity in flux.
While in yo^so^ng kukku^k the motif was configured in the form of female
performers’ appropriation of masculinity through transvestitism, postwar film
melodrama rendered the motif through images of women out of familial order. These
images were soon integrated into the restored familial relationship in melodrama,
thus distinguished from the representation of female identity in a body of films
categorized as modern melodrama. Melodrama, which used the motif in order to
construct the theme of reuniting lost family members, relied more on the
conventional representation of femininity than did modern melodrama, which was
focused on the image of female sexuality changing and challenging patriarchal order.
In more conventional melodrama, however, the presence of women out of place in
93
terms of patriarchal order still offered a glimpse of transforming female identity
and gender order.
In melodramas such as Passing Over the Hill (Kogaelu^l no^mu^myo^, Yi Yong-
min, 1959) and Gold Rush (Nodaji, Cho^ng Ch’ang-hwa, 1961), for instance,
members of a family, parents and children in particular, who are most often
separated or lost and when they meet first, they don’t recognize each other, end up
identifying their familial relationships and restoring the familial order. In Passing
Over the Hill, So^l-hi, the female protagonist, is attracted to Ch’o^l-kyu without
knowing that he is her half-brother. Before marriage her father had an affair with a
woman and she had a baby girl from him, who is So^l-hi now. But when So^l-hi was
born and her mother died after the delivery, he let Kum-ji, who is another woman he
had an affair with, adopt So^l-hi. As the story unfolds, the complex relationship
entangling her identity is uncovered and, notwithstanding the exorbitant behavior of
her father, the reconciliation between him and So^l-hi is implied.
In Gold Rush U^ng-ch’il, who has looked for gold for two decades, has
abandoned his wife and little daughter, Yo^ng-ok, and does not recognize her when
he meets grown-up Yong-ok. The process of uncovering Yong-ok’s identity and also
Tong-il’s, a son of U^ng-ch’il’s dead friend, proceeds simultaneously with the main
plot of his getting back his gold taken by gangsters. At the end, the father and
daughter identify and reunite with each other in tears. Or in Going over the
Mountain, Sailing across the Sea (san no^mgo pada Ko^no^, Hong Song-ki, 1958) a
girl who grew up as an orphan turns out to be a daughter of a wealthy man who owns
94

a big company The motif of this kind—someone I know turns out to be my lost
child—is found more often than not in melodrama of the period and deployed as a
major tear-jerking factor.
The narrative structure that poses the problem of the mis/un-identified parent-
child relationship and its resolution by the restoration of the familial positioning
arguably reflects the Korean people’s psyche traumatized by the war, who were
forcibly separated from and inevitably lost their family during the war. Such a family
called “yisangajok,” “separated and dispersed family,” the extreme form of which is
the family torn in South and North Korea, has been perceived as an emblem of the
collective han—pent-up sorrow and resentment—of Korean people racked by the
tragic modern history of Korea.
82
The narrative surrounding the mis/ un-
identification of a subject mirrors the anxiety and resentment precipitated by the
broken familial tie in reality and the final resolution possibly serves to reassure the
audience about reestablishing the family.
A lot of the representations of the identification problem on screen highlight the
father and daughter relationship in particular. The father, as in Passing Over the Hill
or Gold Rush, does not recognize his daughter until certain evidence or testimony
comes up. These figuratively blind fathers reveal the incompetence of patriarchy,
which fails to identify a female subject and assign her with the proper positionality

82
Im Kwon-taek’s Kilsottum (1986) well represents the issues of separated family. The film is set in
the background of the 1980s, when the campaign of finding family members lost during the Korean
War was sweeping the nation. The female protagonist of the film, Hwa-yo^ng refuses to accept his
long-lost son, whom she found through the campaign. Her refusal shows a quite different approach to
the issue of family from a woman’s point of view, which challenges the maternal code of South Korea
that puts an absolute value on the blood tie between mother and her child.

95

within the family system. The seriously undermined “Law of the Father” is, then,
unable to render the subjectivity of the daughters according to the dominant gender
formation. The daughters, displaced from the position attributed by the dominant
gender formation, often threaten the boundary established by the gender formation.
For example, So^l-hi unknowingly risks the incestuous taboo by being attracted to
her brother in Passing over the Hill and Yong-ok in Gold Rush, taken advantage of
by the gangster, traps her father before she comes to know her identity.

III Emergence of Modern Melodrama
While female identities were momentarily off track only to be re-integrated into
the established gender and familial order in the more conventional type of
melodrama, a body of films which foregrounded the pleasure and novelty provided
by deviant femininity, emerged in the mid-‘50s. These films mobilized a particular
strategy in the use of the motif of female identity in flux so that even after a female
subject seemingly returned to her position assigned by the patriarchal order, her
desire still remained obscure and ambivalent.
83
In modern melodrama female
subjects were able to keep male subjects from ultimately acknowledging who female
subjects truly were and what they desired under the façade of the recuperated gender
order.
One of the primary factors in the figuration of such a female identity in postwar
South Korean cinema was the massive import of Hollywood films which had begun

83
The identity in flux offers a sharp contrast to the convention of shinpa, where women resentfully
carry the wrong identity of a bad women like an unfaithful lover, a betrayer of her nation, or a woman
of sexual degradation.
96

immediately after the liberation. During the period of the Korean War a “total of
170 foreign films were imported to” South Korea
84
and American films accounted
for over 50% of them.
85
The number of domestic films produced during the period
was only 17 (5 films in 1950, 5 films in 1951, 6 films in 1952 and 6 films in 1953)
86

and a majority of them were propaganda documentaries. Import of films from the
UK, France, Italy, Spain, Sweden, West Germany etc. occurred via Japanese
distribution companies because Korean film companies did not have distribution
contracts with those countries. Although Korean film companies had a direct
distribution contract with the U.S. Central Motion Picture Exchange,
87
after the war
broke out, the branch of the Central Motion Picture Exchange moved to Japan, and
South Korean business deals with American films were all made in Japan. In
addition to this environment surrounding film import, the lack of a domestic facility
to put Korean subtitles in foreign films caused an inevitable involvement of the
Japanese film industry in importing foreign films to South Korea.
88

With all the extra labor and money-costing factors, the demand on the screening
of foreign films, American films in particular, continually grew from the war time
and later on. Hollywood melodramas such as Waterloo Bridge (1940), Homecoming
(1948), Back Street (1941), September Affair (1950) and Random Harvest (1942) as
well as western film like Drums Along the Mohawk, Rio Grande (1939), High Noon

84
Traces of Korean Cinema from 1945 to 1959, p. 179.
85
Ibid., p. 185.
86
Ibid., p. 207.
87
The Central Motion Picture Exchange (CMPE) was established in Japan by the U.S. government
during the occupational era in order to monopolize the distribution of American films in Japan.
88
Ibid., p.184.
97

(1952)
89
were all screened in South Korea in the middle of the war. The high
import cost, which was $2,000-$3,000 on average,
90
consistently raised protests in
the domestic film industry and the field of film criticism and eventually caused the
government to institute the domestic film protection acts such as the exemption of
admission tax on domestic films (1954) and import quota. These acts lay the ground
for the rapid recovery of the domestic film industry, which produced 18 films in
1954, 30 in 1956, 37 in 1957, 74 in 1958 and 111 in 1959.
91
The rapid growth of
domestic film production well paved the way for the golden age of South Korean
cinema which began in the late ‘50s, yet the presence of American cinema was
overlaid with the blossoming scene of South Korean cinema and its growing
awareness of cinematic modernity.
After the tax exemption on admission fee of domestic films was enacted and Tale
of Ch’un-hyang brought a phenomenal success, the number of film production
companies fast increased and 71 production companies existed in 1958. But, many
of them shut down after making one film because of financial difficulty.
92
A majority of them were small companies without a stable financial base and that
they were heavily dependent upon the financing of local distributors who wanted to
screen shinpa style films. These two were the primary modules in the shaping of the
mode of film production which continued to generate shinpa films. Although the

89
For the list of American films imported this period see Traces of Korean Cinema, p.185.
90
Ibid., p.185.
91
Ibid., p.207.
92
Young-Il Lee, History of Korean Cinema, p. 212
98

heyday of film production began in the late 50s, an industrialized structure of film
production was not launched until the First Motion Picture Act established in 1962.
Hyo^n-ch’an Ho, a film producer of the period describes the mode of film
production of the 50s as follows:

Since the early (colonial) period there existed no film production company
based on large capital. A majority of them were small or mid-scale companies. It
was not possible to form stable capital for film production under the colonial
rule. Before the liberation film capital and movie theaters were all dominated by
Japanese capitalists. After the liberation even this type of capital was harder to
get. In other words, like independent film productions the production capital of
Korean cinema was poor and unstable.
93

Under such circumstances, according to Ho, local distributors played a significant
factor in the process of film production. Local distributors were those who financed
films even prior to filmmaking began. They attended events called “script reading”
(dokhoe) held by production companies. If local distributors who attended a script
reading liked it, they provided money to make it into a film. If a film made from the
script which they chose gained a commercial success, they invested in the next film
which would be made by the same production company.
94
The role of local distributors was, therefore, crucial in the making of a film, and
scripts were written and films were made in the way they liked. Of interest was that
they liked the types of scripts which generated a flood of tears.
95
A South Korean

93
Hyo^n-ch’an Ho, p. 113
94
Ibid., p. 113
95
Ibid., p. 113
99

film critic, who was active in the period, remembers the process of which local
distributors participated in the film production as follows:

A producer let a screenwriter lodge in a hotel room and made him adapt a
Japanese script into a Korean version and took it to local distributors. . . . After
distributors asked for a couple of changes, they signed a contract. They usually
asked a few crying scenes, suspense scenes, or those of coincidentally missed
encounters to be incorporated into the script. They often even designated a
director and actors for the film.
96

This passage evidently tells that the local distributors enacted an absolute control
over film production and that they were those who made continue to remain in film
the clichéd elements of shinpa such as “crying scenes, suspense scenes, or those of
coincidentally missed encounters.” It is also indicated that, unlike large cities such as
Seoul, in local areas a majority of film audiences still kept a strong taste for shinpa
style film.
The small-scale company-based mode of film production and the pattern of
individual-based financing who were rooted in local film consumption were,
therefore, major two factors of the on-going presence of shinpa style film. These
factors were interrelated with the drive for modern style cinema targeting the city
audience and brought forth the interface of the shinpaesque and modern in postwar
South Korean cinema. Although the shinpaesque and modern were constructed as
opposed in cultural and cinematic discourse of the period, they were combined and
intersected in the molding of postwar South Korean cinematic modernity.

96
Il-su Ch’oe, “Hanguk yo^nghwa kihoeku^i munjejo^m [Problems of Korean Film Production],”
Kihoek Ch’angjak Hyo^phoe ed, Hanguk Yo^nghwa kihoek 70nyonsa (1919-1964) [70 years of
Korean Film Production (1919-1964)], p. 234.
100

The emergence of South Korean modern melodramas and the designation of
them as such in the ‘50s illuminatingly lay out the meaning of “modern” particularly
in the realm of cinema of the period. The term, melodrama itself, was, in fact, not
familiar to South Korean people by the late 1940s. This unfamiliarity of the term is
demonstrated by a newspaper article published in 1949 titled with “Questions on
Culture”:

Question: What does melodrama mean?
Answer: “Melo” is “melos,” meaning music in Greek and “melodrama”
originally indicated the form of opera in which drama was combined with
music in order to attract the audience. But presently it means so called shinpa
drama [theater], which is made simply for entertainment and exclusively stresses
the story, putting its dramatic nature [characters], the core of theater, as
secondary. Dramas made to trigger audience’s tears like Fooled by Love, Crying
over Money and Don’t Cry Hong-to are all melodramas. Melodrama means the
same in movies.
97

This short question and answer shows that the term, melodrama, had gained its
meaning among South Korean film and drama viewers through using shinpa as the
point of reference. The appropriation of a western genre/ cultural mode of
melodrama in South Korean culture occurred by identifying the particular
similarities of the genre/ mode with the established conventions of shinpa.
The quoted passage, however, does not give an accurate explanation of the ways
in which the term, melodrama, was appropriated and signified in South Korean
culture of the period. First, the passage is missing a reference to Hollywood

97
Kyo^nghyang Sinmun, December 28, 1948. Recitation from Korean Film Archive (KOFA),
Newspaper Coverage on Korean Cinema 1945-1957 (Sinmunu^ro pon hanguk yo^nghwa 1945-1957),
(2004), p.232.

101

melodrama, even though widespread use of the term was certainly precipitated
by the South Korean film viewers’ exposure to Hollywood films, which were
bombarding domestic screens since the period of the war. A South Korean film
reviewer, for instance, used the term, melodrama, to designate “foreign melodrama,
Hollywood melodrama” in particular in his comment on the South Korean film
industry written in the mid ‘50s: “To be honest our filmmaking to this day has been
no more than the imitation of foreign melodrama (mainly American), which only
shows a desperate strife to put more glamour on the silver screen . . . .”
98
Past the
mid‘50s, melodrama started to designate domestic films that were visibly inflected
with the style and narrative structure of Hollywood melodrama as well as foreign
melodrama.
Second, although it is correct that the reception of both the term and generic
properties of Hollywood melodrama were enabled through using shinpa as the point
of reference, the equation between melodrama and shinpa does not precisely describe
the manner in which the term was practically used in South Korean film criticism of
the period. Melodrama clearly carried the implication that it was a style more
advanced, modern, thus superior to shinpa, therefore the relation of melodrama and
shinpa was not defined by equation but by a hierarchy. A generic category for
shinpa-coded films was gradually ramified from the category of melodrama and
became one of its sub-categories, which was termed “shinpaesque melodrama.”

98
Choson Daily, July 1 , 1957. Recitation from
ST
Newspaper Coverage on Korean Cinema, p.689.

102

The following newspaper articles illustrate the trajectory of the dynamics set
between melodramatic and shinpaesque and the significance of such dynamics in the
Korean cinematic culture of the ‘50s:

New Movie Review-- Sad Story of a Woman (Yo^in Aesa)” (Dong-Ah Daily,
Feb.24, 1950):

When a domestic movie is produced with all the obstacles of the lack of
necessary machinery, it should be able to contribute to the growth of film
industry….[In that sense] the efforts of the director, Shin Kyo^ng-gyun deserve
to be appreciated, who has overcome the obstacles and achieved this much.
Although his film shows a little bit of problems caused by the shooting
environment, it still satisfies the formal quality of melodrama.
99

New Movies—Lovers (Aein) (Kyo^nghyang Sinmun (newspaper), Oct. 10,
1956):
It seems that the movie made quite an effort to meet the requirements to be a
melodrama.
100

There Is Hope for Domestic Melodrama, Too—Lovers Proved it” (Hanguk
Daily April, 4, 1956):

[The movie] shows the typical style of modern melodrama with diverse and
complex stories. It revolves around an ill-fated couple, but the stories of minor
characters, who come and go around the couple, are more interesting. . . .
.Although a quite complex movie, it proved that domestic melodrama can be not
quite impossible.
101

“Weekly Movie Review (Hanguk Daily Oct. 7, 1956)”:

….[A] melodrama that has the quality of Lovers could be viewed in color
without much embarrassment.
102

99
Newspaper Coverage on Korean Cinema, p.278
100
Ibid., p,578.
101
Ibid., p, 577.
102
Ibid., p.577.
103

It Made the Cut as an Entertainment Movie with Its Style —Lovers (Hanguk
Daily Oct. 7, 1956):

Cruel fate separates a young man and a woman feeling for each other, even
before they do not even know each other’s name. Then, after many twists and
turns, they meet again at a place, which happens to be a wedding hall where the
woman is marrying another man. This re-encounter sparks the flame of their
love again. This is an exciting story in many different ways. Although the movie
is shinpa-toned in a sense, it is well rendered cinematically by the solid method
of Hong Song-ki [the photographer] and shows harmoniously collaborated
acting. It is a two hour-long, enjoyable, wholesome entertainment movie.
….[Whether] it is Italian Neo-Realism [or something else], it is not easy to
establish a style. It deserves to be welcome that, whether by Madam Freedom…
or Lovers, Korean cinema began to build up a certain style.
103

In the first quoted review, published in 1950, director Shin’s “efforts” were
appreciated in that he made a film which “satisfied the formal quality of melodrama”
despite the hard challenge of the absence of industrial resources. It suggests that
melodrama was perceived as a form that should meet a particular level of expectation
in terms of quality, thus as a form which could be “achieved,” not given. The next
quoted review written on Lovers (1956) similarly suggests that melodrama was a
genre which was much desired and gained with quite an effort. The third one
specifically defines the film’s genre, melodrama, with an adjective, “modern,” and
expects that the capability of creating a modern melodrama will advance the quality
of domestic melodrama. Underlying the review is a comparison of domestic
filmmaking to foreign, particularly Hollywood filmmaking. It suggests that it is
greatly encouraging for the domestic film industry to produce modern melodrama,
which only seemed possible in the foreign film industry, especially in Hollywood.
Such potential of the domestic film industry, it is insinuated, brings “hope” that

103
Ibid., p.577.
104
domestic melodrama will be modernized and developed to the level of foreign or
Hollywood melodrama. These implications are also relevant to the last quoted
review. It alludes that the film, which rises up to the level of modern melodrama,
deserves to be made in color and rendered glamorous, which only advanced and
modernized foreign films can afford.
The comparison between domestic and international/ Hollywood filmmaking is
played out and drawn to an unaddressed point of reference, the convention of shinpa.
The convention of shinpa connotes the opposite of modern melodrama and the
positive meanings carried by it: not modernized, underdeveloped, far falling short of
international/ Hollywood standard, etc. The convention of shinpa signified that
which was reverse to what the domestic film industry aspired to. The description of
Lovers as “wholesome entertainment” found in the last quoted review thus indicates
that the film offers the entertainment of high quality in contrast to the cheap
entertainment provided by a body of shinpa-coded films. In a similar way the
discursive value of the much welcomed achievement of South Korean modern
melodrama, the building-up of a “certain style,” is gained through its opposition to
the lack of style of a body of shinpa-coded films. In this way the positive generic
meaning of modern melodrama was configured vis-à-vis the binary opposition of the
convention of shinpa.

Movie Review—a Decent Piece, Yerim Film’s Redeeming Affection (Kuwo^nu^i
aejo^ng) (Hanguk Daily May 15, 1955):

105

…[T]here Kyo^ng-ae runs into Yi-ch’o^l whose crippled body is supported
with a cane. He is cold to her, who is about to burst her long-unanswered
affection to him, because he doesn’t know the baby held by her is his. He just
says that he wishes her happiness. Shocked and perplexed, she gets her baby
into his arms. “This is your dad, baby! Your dad!” Tears flood her eyes. . . .This
is melodrama directed by Min Kyo^ng-sik and produced by Yerim Film. This
movie has a quick tempo, yet, still shows a nice rhythm.
104

New Movie: a Fast- Paced Melodrama--Stars in Lost Paradise (Sillagwo^nu^i
pyo^ldu^l) Based on Late Kim Rae-so^ng’s Novel (Hanguk Daily, Oct. 4, 1957):

The character of Kim Tong-wo^n, a popular writer, is involved in a romantic
relationship with the après-girl
105
type of literature-studying, college girl (played
by No Kyo^ng-hi). . . .This is a modern melodrama, the main plot of which is
combined with the stories of various minor characters’ comic everyday life.
Despite its conventional portrayal of the romantic relationship and the lack of
verisimilitude in the proceeding of events its fresh tempo and nice transitions of
scenes, which are rarely found in Korean movies, draw the audience’s attention
without boredom.
106

The narrative of Redeeming Affection discussed in the first quoted review tells the
clichéd story of a love triangle. The male and the female protagonist who feel for
each other cannot realize their love because of the interference of the third person,
her boss. The passage above describes how the coincidental re-union of the old
lovers and their child, whom the father does not know is his, is portrayed. Although
the clichéd narrative and the emotional rendering of the reunion scene tellingly
display the code of shinpa, the film is labeled as “melodrama.” What makes this
shinpa-coded film melodrama is arguably its “quick tempo” and “nice rhythm.” The

104
Ibid., p.370.
105
The word, “après-girl (aprego^l)” was coined by the combination of a French word, après and an
English word, girl. It designates an image of an amoral and liberal type of woman, which appeared in
popular cultural texts in postwar South Korea. The image was greatly influenced by the
existentialism-inflected postwar French cultural icon such as Brigitte Bardot
106
Ibid., p.735.
106

second review uses a similar frame of criticism that despite the “conventional”
story of the film, Stars in Lost Paradise’s formal aspects like tempo and the
transition of scenes contribute to the qualification of the film as melodrama.
These reviews disclose that films labeled as melodrama in critical discourse of the
mid and late ‘50s combined the emotional and narrative components of shinpa with
the stylistic features of relatively fast tempo and smooth transition, indicative of
continuity editing, quintessential of the stylistics of Hollywood films. The reviews,
however, exclusively stress the presence of newly learned Hollywood formal
vocabularies in domestic films as a clear sign of cinematic modernity. Film’s tempo
was particularly highlighted as a key criterion for qualifying domestic films as
modern melodrama. One of the major reasons Madam Freedom was acknowledged
as the master text of modern melodrama of the period was the “proper sense of pace
of the film,” which successfully conveyed a modern life style, according to a South
Korean film critic, “for the first time in Korean cinema.”
107
Such a focus on filmic
pace served to differentiate modern melodrama from shinpa-coded films, which had
been greatly downgraded for their slow pace, and also to overshadow properties of
shinpa still strongly presented in modern melodrama.
Another frequently addressed formal feature of modern melodrama was its
narrative structure that intertwined a main plot with subplots or a variety of episodes
only loosely related to the main plot. The review of Stars in Lost Paradise quoted
above pointed out that the combination of the film’s main plot with “various minor
characters’ comic everyday life” was what made the film deserve to be labeled as

107
Hanguk Daily, June 7
th
, 1956. Recitation from Newspaper Coverage of Korean Cinema, p. 509
107
modern melodrama. The review on Lovers mentioned earlier also noted that the
use of various minor characters such as an “après type of man, a playboy, and a
college professor who teaches how to date well created a “panoramic” vista. The
complexity of the narrative structure of the film was perceived as one of the indexes
of cinematic modernity, which was regarded as severing the narrative tradition of
shinpa that repeatedly used worn-out repertoires. The categorization of certain
films as modern melodrama in film discourse of the ‘50s was based on the ways in
which Hollywood stylistic features were amalgamated with the convention of shinpa
and the degree to which such amalgamation was achieved and generated a modern
look of a film.
A number of films which still displayed the strong narrative and emotional
characteristics of shinpa were produced in the late ‘50s and were designated as
“shinpa-toned,” “shinpa style,” or “shinpaesque melodrama.” These designations
signified that, although the films were incorporated into the genre of melodrama,
they were figured as an inferior type of melodrama, thus, a subgenre of melodrama
lesser than modern melodrama. Film reviews written in this period demonstrate that
the downgrading of a particular film as shinpaesque melodrama occurred not because
of the presence of shinpa-coded narrative or the rendering of sentiment itself. The
downgrading was rather related to the absence of stylistic features, which would
cover up or obscure the components of shinpa as in films classified as modern
melodrama. The following newspaper film reviews

108

New Movie: Clichéd Melodrama--Chu Chung-nyo^ u^i Blue Thread, Red
Thread (Ch’o^ngsil hongsil) (Hanguk Daily Oct. 18, 1957):

The movie looks like folk melodrama with the title of Blue Thread, Red Thread,
but the story is a contemporary version of Don’t Cry, Hong-to. A woman named
Aeja (played by Chu Chu^ng-nyo^), whose past is unknown [to the audience],
meets her former boy friend, Mr. Na (played by Yi Min) and re-kindles their
romance. Their romance, which is interfered with the emergence of a bourgeois
girl, Tong-suk (played by O^m Aeng-ran), who is interested in Mr. Na, but,
finally finds a happy end. It seems a simple story, but, since it is melodrama, it is
not just simple as it looks. . . .[M]inor characters create ups and downs of the
story.

The major shortcomings of the movie are (A) the too conventional proceeding of
the story through coincidences, which take place out of nowhere with no causal
relation….(B)…[L]ousy and visually ineffective parallel cutting . . .and heavy-
handed transitions of scenes. The movie shows a rare case of the all-at-once
recovery of the cheap sentimentality and lack of sophistication, typical of
Korean movies. In the scene of Aeja’s attempting to kill herself on the railroad
Mascagni’s prelude to Leon Caballo is played; it is almost a comedy.
108

New Movie: Purely Shinpaesque Melodrama, Yi Ye-ch’un’s A Wanderer’s
Resentment (Pangrangjau^i han) (Hanguk Daily Dec. 2, 1957):

A melodrama straightforwardly implanted with every shinpaesque element. A
man from the countryside robs his family’s wealth and spends it all on his
courtesan in Seoul named Kim Kun-cha. By the time the money is all gone, she
leaves him, abandoning two children with him. He secretly leaves his children at
the gate of his parents’ house and begins to wander. The musical fashion of
shinpa which have been much played by traveling troupes are directly used….
The scene of his coming back home like a monster and crying out, “It’s me; It’s
your son,” is especially wonderful.
109

The first passage quoted from a review on Blue Thread, Red Thread explicitly
stated that the film was a version of Don’t Cry, Hong-to, a prototypical shinpa text,
suggesting the film’s strong association with the tradition of shinpa. The review
described the film as not fully qualifying as modern melodrama, and thus classified it

108
Ibid., p.743.
109
Ibid., p.762.
109
as “clichéd,” “shinpa-toned” melodrama. Although it harshly criticized the film
for its “recover[ing]” the negative patterns inscribed in Korean cinema “all at once,”
it was not merely because of the film’s affinity to the story and emotional rendering
presented in Don’t Cry, Hong-to. It was rather because the film was not equipped
with Hollywood film vocabularies such as the organization of narrative with proper
causal relation or continuity editing, which would enable smooth parallel cutting and
the transitions of scenes.
At stake was, then, “the lack of sophistication” which would be otherwise
achieved through the utilization of those formal techniques. In the case that the use
of a western filmic component did not bring forth the expected sophistication of a
film, it was not acknowledged as modern melodrama. The scene of a female
protagonist’s attempt to commit suicide described in the quoted passage, for
instance, uses the prelude to opera, Leon Caballo, yet the effects of the tragically
grandiose western music presumably does not contribute to rendering the scene in an
urban refined style. It, on the contrary, plays a major factor in the maximization of
sentimentalism conveyed by the event, and thus amplifies shinpaesque mawkishness.
What the scene lacks is a sense of proper using a western, modern cultural element to
alter the mode of shinpa into a trendy, stylish one. Such a sense would keep the
scene from being “degraded” to “comedy.” A film which lacked the use of those
elements like A Wanderer’s Resentment, was downgraded to the bottom of the
hierarchy of domestic melodrama, and dishonorably designated as “purely
110

shinpaesque melodrama,” or even excluded from the category of melodrama and
called “shinpa comedy not a movie.
South Korean film criticism of the mid and late ‘50s was drawn to the
assumption that modern melodrama was a newly emerged genre opposed to the
convention of shinpa. There did exist differences between modern melodrama and
shinpa film. Modern melodrama showed visible technical and formal distinctiveness
from shinpa film. As pointed out in the film reviews quoted above, modern
melodrama was faster paced and presented a more complete continuity editing than
shinpa film made at the time. One of the reasons that Madam Freedom was
recognized as the prime text of postwar South Korean melodrama was a sense of
speed generated by camera movement. It was the first film in Korean film history to
use “properly made dollies and cranes.”
110
For example, at the beginning of the film
the camera quickly pulls in to show the gate of So^n-yo^ng’s house, which
captivates the audience with a quick moving image. This sense of movement carries
the energy of a modern city, anticipating glamorous and spectacular images of
women enjoying new western culture.
The dance hall scene, where So^ng-yo^ng first visits a public dance club with her
neighbor, Ch’un-ho who gave her private dance lessons, is another key scene which
is marked with a visible sense of modernity. The scene shows the image of a female
dancer passionately dancing mambo on the stage for a duration of time which is
longer than required for the progression of the narrative. It, then, cross-cuts between
her image and the audience sitting at tables watching her, especially So^n-yo^ng

110
The DVD supplement of Madam Freedom, Korean Film Archive, 2005
111
admiraingly gazing at her. The scene foregrounds both the spectacle of the
dancer’s wild bodily movements which bear the sign of the modern and the
audience’s act of looking at the movements. Their act of looking is reflexive of the
film audience’s watching of the film that offers the modern spectacles. By cutting
between the spectacle and the spectators the scene makes a statement on what the
film does–the film identifies itself as a modern one, interpellating the viewers as the
recipients of modernized film style. Such a self-awareness of being modern, different
from the kinds of films still stuck with old conventions like shinpa, was an important
element inscribed in postwar South Korean modern melodrama.
Another key modular required to be a modern film was a lesser degree of
sentimentality, which was the epitome of the mode of shinpa. Films which were
labeled as falling short of modern melodrama shared the feature of excessive
sentimentality as in the case of Resentment of a Wanderer, mentioned in the review,
which was pejoratively designated as a mere “comedy,” not a movie—not because it
was a comic film, but because the exaggerated emotion presented in the film was too
artificial and too undue; simply because it was too obviously shinpaesque. Thus, a
more subdued and sophisticated rendering of emotion, compared to shinpa, counted
as a significant index of the modern in the South Korean cinema.
Besides these formal issues, even though not often addressed as a sign of modern
film in the film criticism of the period, a body of film designated as modern
melodrama had the commonality of the overt presentation of female desires. The
female desires were primarily sexual ones: for example, So^n-yo^ng in Madam
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Freedom who seeks extra-marital romance, or Sonya in Hell Flower who
daringly and shamelessly seduces the brother of her present lover. Or as in the case
of Confession of a College Girl the desire for social mobility pursued by the female
protagonist, So-yo^ng was employed as a major driving force of the narrative.
Modern melodrama’s highlighting of the expression and negotiation of female
desires with the established gender order as its center of narrative and emotional
rendering made it noticeably different from films with shinpa conventions, where
female desire was so deeply repressed that it worked only as an underlying, hidden
factor of a text.
With the stylistic and thematic differences, yet, a close analysis of the film
reviews written in that period demonstrates that the style of modern melodrama and
the convention of shinpa co-existed in films. The different extents to which either the
former or the latter was foregrounded in a film determined the film’s generic labeling
and value. The criteria which divided the two were not absolute either but rather
subject to the negotiable consideration of how much modern or shinpaesque
elements weighed in a film. Therefore, a body of films designated as modern
melodrama did not emerge as a completely new genre, but existed in a spectrum,
which was shaped by the concurrence and coalescence of the style of modern
melodrama and the convention of shinpa.
In the ‘50s, South Korean film discourse, shinpa was figured in a similar way as it
was in nationalist discourse of the colonial and immediate liberation period. Shinpa
was constructed as the inferior other to nationalist discourse of the period, likewise it
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was positioned as the opposite of South Korean modern melodrama. The
function of binary opposition framing the relation between modern melodrama and
shinpa was akin to that of nationalist discourse and shinpa. The former positioned
shinpa at the exterior of South Korean cultural and cinematic modernity, and served
to build the boundary of the meaning of modernity. In the relation to ‘50s’ South
Korean film discourse shinpa was once again that which South Korean cultural
discourse of the modern constantly relied on, reflected itself upon, and then, denied.
Shinpa was employed as a twisted mirror, on which the discourse of modernity
found what it was not, what it ought to reject and repulse.
The mode of shinpa was not fixated on the “pre-modern” as was suggested by the
film discourse of the period. The mode of shinpa was an integral part in an array of
parameters that molded the cultural modernity of postwar South Korea. The mode
did not remain unchanged either. It was altered and modified in the process of the
construction of modern South Korean cinema particularly in the configuration of
modern identity of South Korean women in the period.
.
IV New Female Icons and Re-enactment of Shinpa in Modern Melodrama
As I demonstrated, the relation of modern melodrama and shinpa was not
oppositional as was assumed and claimed by film discourse of the ‘50s. Styles of
modern melodrama and the convention of shinpa rather overlapped and intersected in
many of films produced in this period. In major texts of modern melodrama that
114
initiated the emergence of new female icons are found the cases of the use of
shinpaesque convention for the figuration of modern female identity.
Major texts of modern melodrama which brought modern female identities onto
the screen and popular cultural arena include: Madam Freedom, Hell Flower
(Chiokhwa, Shin Sang-ok, 1959), Beautiful Lira (Aru^mdau^n Lira, Kang Tae-
chin,1959), She Is Not a Sinner (Ku^ yo^jau^i cho^ega anida, Shin Sang-ok, 1959),
Confession of a College Girl, etc. These films gave rise to the new female icons of
“madam freedom,” who, as a married woman, enjoys secretly visiting dance halls
and engages in extra-marital affairs; an après--girl (Beautiful Lira), an unashamed,
dangerously seductive military prostitute (Hell Flower)’ and manipulative women
who faked their identities in order to secure their positions in society (She Is Not a
Sinner and Confession of a College).
These female icons are linked to the motif of female identities in flux displayed in
repertoires of the all-female opera and also to that of the misidentification presented
in more conventional melodrama of the period. As in the cases of the use of those
motives in the all-female opera and the more conventional melodrama,, the
representation of the female icons offered the fantasy of modern female identities yet
to be accepted and endorsed by the gender order of postwar South Korea. It is
noteworthy that the representation of the fantasy of modern female sexuality in
melodrama reveals a particular relation to the convention of shinpa.
Modern melodrama used the code of shinpa to camouflage modern female desires
and to make them less threatening and less challenging to the patriarchal order of
115
postwar South Korea. Modern melodrama borrows traditional patriarchal code-
bound images of women from shinpa repertoires and strategically mobilizes them in
order to negotiate with the patriarchal order. Rather than exploiting the convention of
shinpa as its inferior counterpart modern melodrama engaged in and translated it into
modern terms of gender and cinema. In this sense the code of shinpa did not merely
serve to shape a traditional or anti-modern form of culture, it was rather re-
appropriated in the formation of ‘50’s cultural modernity, and was a significant part
of modernity of the period. I will discuss the specific ways in which the code of
shinpa is re-contextualized and re-used in terms of the configuration of new gender
dynamics through the analyses of Madam Freedom and Confession of a College
Girl.

IV-1 Madam Freedom and Strategic Use of the Code of Shinpa
Madam Freedom, internationally and domestically one of the most famed South
Korean films of the ‘50s, tells a story about a woman named So^n-yo^ng, who
changes her life style from a demure wife to a sexual and cultural adventure seeker.
The change is initiated by her starting to work at a boutique, where she sells mostly
smuggled western accessories and cosmetics. As she gains her own income and is
exposed to life outside the home, she becomes bold enough to take private dance
lessons from a college student named Ch’un-ho living next door, with whom she is
later involved in a romantic relationship. She begins another romantic affair with the
husband of the owner of the boutique she works for. The affair is finally exposed to
116

the owner and brings a mortifying ending to So^n-yo^ng. In the meanwhile her
husband, a college professor, uncovers her secret pleasure and decides to drive her
out of their home. At the end she regrets what she did and desperately begs for her
husband’s forgiveness and acceptance of her as his wife and the mother of their
child.
While criticism of the novel was focused on moral issues raised by a married
woman’s deviant behavior and her “defiled” sexuality, criticism on the film version
of Madam Freedom tended to stress the new film language pioneered by the film,
and was predominantly favorable to the film. One of the newspaper reviewers of the
film wrote:

A Recent Great Piece—Madam Freedom:
….[A]fter watching Madam Freedom I felt pleasant in that I watched a domestic
movie that is like a real movie….[E]very one interested in movies has been
subject to the custom that he should give a favorable treatment to domestic
movies and that he should blind himself to problems of domestic movies and
give them pretty good reviews. But Madam Freedom is the one which deserves
to receive applauds without such a special treatment. Conditions required for the
expression of modern sensibility are not only that there should be no loose and
unrelated events in a movie and that the connections of scenes should be
smoothly made. But the conditions also include that a movie should have proper
tempo that delivers a sense of movement….Han Hyo^ng-mo is the first [South
Korean] director who succeeded in expressing a new and fresh style in our
cinema.
111

The review tells us that the film version of Madam Freedom achieved a remarkable
progress in film language such as the coherent organization of narrative, continuity
editing, and the adjustment of pace. Thus the film, the review suggests, satisfied to a

111
Hanguk Daily, June 7, 1956. Recitation from Newspaper Coverage of Korean Cinema, p. 509
117
great extent the formal requirements to express “modern sensibility,” and that it
was an epochal piece which brought forth “a new and fresh style,” meaning modern
style, of film in South Korean cinema.
The film, successful both critically and at the box-office, in fact, was perceived as
signaling the emergence of South Korean modern cinema, creating an interesting
contrast to the success of Tale of Ch’un-hyang (Ch’un-hyangjo^n, Yi Kyu-hwan,
1955), released one year prior to it. The success of Tale of Ch’un-hyang, based on
the well-known folk novel, generated the surprisingly rapid revival of the postwar
South Korean film industry and confirmed the still strong popularity of a traditional
subject matter long-familiar to South Koreans. Madam Freedom, on the other hand,
brought to the scene of South Korean popular culture the presence of the public’s
desire for a completely different taste, a taste for that which was attempted “for the
first time in Korean cinema.” In the cultural arena where the traditional and modern
as well as a broad spectrum traversing these two axes confusingly coexisted, Madam
Freedom was marked as an epochal breakthrough that fully brought a sense of
modernity to the arena.
Yet, what has rarely been noted is that the modern woman’s dilemma portrayed in
the film, which was split between individual pleasure and traditionally imposed
obligations as a wife and mother, does not neatly fit into what is simply prescribed as
modern. Rather, into the signs of the modern that the film inscribed were
incorporated the layers of the convention of shinpa, defined as a “pre-modern,” or
even an “anti-modern” mode of cinema and culture. More importantly, the
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mobilization of the convention of shinpa in modern melodrama transformed the
convention itself into a form better suited for a modern taste desired by the South
Korean film viewers of the ‘50s. The code of shinpa, too, was modernized and
changed, serving as part of the vehicle to construct modern identities of South
Korean women.
The incorporation of the style of modern melodrama and the transformed code of
shinpa are effectively mobilized at the end of Madam Freedom in particular, where
So^n-yo^ng seemingly tries to return to the place traditionally assigned and
previously occupied by herself. The transformed code of shinpa is employed as a
device to dissemble the meaning of her return so that the meaning may not be fully
determined and settled. The dissembling effect is gained through a two-fold process
through which the code of shinpa is engaged in the signification of the ending of the
film: first, a strategic use of the code for the purpose of covering up her desire not to
return to the traditional position and secondly, a transnational alteration of the code
into a signifier indicating a cultural pleasure with western modernity lingering after
her gesture of return.
At one level as a moment of truth and punishment the ending infallibly delivers
the message of how a deviant woman ends up after all. Her husband, who has been
completely ignorant of her life outside home, comes to know “everything” about her
and uses his authority to judge her deviant behavior. To So^n-yo^ng, who ran home
after being slapped by the boutique owner who found out about So^n-yo^ng’s affair
with her husband in a hotel, he firmly declares, “I know why you are so late tonight.
119
If you still have a modicum of conscience, you should not get back to your role
as a wife and mother. We’re through. ” He, then gets in the house and locks the gate.
Their little son fiercely knocks the door, shouting, “Mom, mom! Dad, please, let her
in.” Trying to stop the son in vain, he reluctantly opens the gate. The son runs to her
and they embrace each other crying. Her tearful statement, “I’m sorry, I did wrong,”
expresses her regretful and repenting mind, delivering the familiar, yet hard lesson
which she has learned.
Then the scene slowly moves to visually render a rather equivocal response to the
fallen woman’s repentance. Her husband, who was standing at the threshold of the
gate of the house, walks outside and gazes at his son and wife. The framing of the
scene at first shows in a close-up the mother and son embracing each other crying
and then pulls back to include him in the frame at the end. This framing suggests
that she, who has atoned for her wrongdoing and learned the true value of traditional
femininity, is perhaps accepted by her husband, and that the family possibly reunites.
The message of the possibility of a family reunion, enabled by the mother and
wife’s re-affirmation of the worth of a patriarchal family is, yet, interfered with by
the code of shinpa dwelling in the scene. On the surface the code of shinpa operates
to affectively strengthen the message. The code of shinpa, first and foremost, is
exhibited through all types of intense emotions and dramatic performance, in
contrast to glamorous, urban images displayed in the film prior to the ending of the
film: the husband’s shock, anger and the ultimatum that she is no longer accepted as
his wife and his child’s mother; So^n-yo^ng’s shameful confessions; regretful tears
120

and begging for forgiveness; a little child’s desperate attempt not to let go of his
mother; and the tear-jerking image of the mother-son bonding.
The setting of a snowy night for the cataclysmic ending of the film adds to the
drama loaded meanings inherited from the tradition of shinpa. The setting of a
snowy night often appeared in shinpa repertoires as a visual sign to connote the
intense sufferings of women. A poor woman who is separated from her family or
abandoned from her lover, wandering on a street holding her baby on a snowy night
was one of the clichéd images rendered in shinpa-coded texts. A film titled A Snow
Falling Night (Nunnarinu^n pam, Ha Han-su, 1958, 1969), well in line with this
convention, for instance, portrays the story of a poverty-stricken mother, who,
unable to afford to rear her new-born baby boy, abandons him at the gate of
someone’s house on a snowy night.
112
The image of the snowy night in the scene
serves to transition the character of So^n-yo^ng from a pleasure-seeking madam
with freedom to a helpless shinpaesque heroin torn apart by fate.
This transition seemingly confirms that she, once an unruly woman, regrets her
unvirtuous deeds and begs for forgiveness, and that she has fully turned around to
return to the place safely kept under patriarchal authority. This clichéd resolution
effectuated by the utilization of the code of shinpa, however, is greatly undermined
by the auditory rendering of the ending. The use of a mind-blowing chanson,

112
The entire narrative of the film is as follows: her abandonment of the baby is witnessed by a police
officer and he sends her to jail. He takes care of her baby, who grows up to be a prosecutor. Years
later when her husband, a drug addict, shows up and tries to take advantage of her son, she murders
her husband. The prosecutor who convicts her happens to be her son, who does not know that she is
his mother, but the lawyer-turned-police officer helps her to be set free.

121

Fallen Leaves, as the background music of the ending generates a strong
ambivalence in the resolution articulated in the narrative and at the same time
questions if the shinpa-coded resolution authentically means what it narrates on the
surface.
Fallen Leaves functions as a force sweeping the denouement, heightening the
overflowing shinpaesque sentiment and simultaneously giving rise to different
implications than the shinpaesque sentiment appears to covey in the ending of the
film. The music begins when So^n-yo^ng runs out of a hotel room after being
slapped by the boutique owner. The piano rhythm of the music punctuates her
downward steps on the staircase of the hotel and her running to her house. After a
brief stop in the scene of her husband waiting for her in his room at the house, the
music starts to play again with its dramatic effect accelerating. It continues to be
played until it ends with melody and beats fraught with tension and conflicts in the
last frame capturing the three family members together.
Fallen Leaves is, here, not merely used to supplement the narrative of the film,
but re-articulates the meaning stated by the narrative. The powerful music score,
resounding with the visual image of her crying with her face on the brick wall of her
house, subtly put into the visual image a sense of sentimental self-pity flavored with
postwar French cultural atmosphere.
113
With the sentimental self-pity is also imbued

113
Western existentialism, imported to the field of high literature and intellectual discourse of South
Korea via Japanese literary discourse, formed the representational tendency of an elusive anxiety
towards the modern age. In melodramas it translates into vernacular cultural icons such as a self-
destructive military prostitute or an anarchistic “après-girl. For a detailed explanation of the influence
of existentialism on postwar Korean intellectuals and the formation of anti-communist humanism see
Ko^n-u Kim, 1950-yo^ndae huban munhakgwa Sasanggye chisigin tamron kwallyo^n yangsang
122

the gratification that comes from the enjoyment of a modern and western cultural
sign.
114
The music score of Fallen leaves pumps up the sensibility and sense of the
shinpa-coded resolution of the film’s ending and concurrently articulates the identity
of the So^n-yo^ng as well as the female audience of the film as consumer and desirer
of transnational culture. The use of Fallen Leaves in the film, thus, illustrates that the
mode of shinpa was altered into a westernized and modernized form and was
engaged in the configuration of modern femininity in melodrama.
Of interest is that prior to the transitional moment cued by Fallen Leaves, any hint
of the conventions of shinpa is strangely absent in the film. The film, rather, attempts
to take to different directions parts of the narrative which could be potentially
deployed by shinpaesque patterns. In the scene of the sour breaking-up of So^n-
yo^ng and Ch’un-ho, for instance, shinpa convention would have he end up with her
in bitter tears for being walked out on by a man. In the scene he, who has double
booked farewell gatherings for his departure for the U.S. with two different women,
So^n-yo^ng and her young cousin who he also dates, chooses her cousin in So^n-
yo^ng’s face. So^n-yo^ng, instead of helplessly crying as shinpa heroines would do,
blames him for fooling her, aggressively asking, “Didn’t you say you loved me? Is
this what you call love? You just took advantage of me, didn’t you? And then she
leaves. Rather than a miserable victim of an untrustworthy man, she is rendered a

yo^nggu [Korean Literature of the late 1950s and Its Relation to Intellectual Discourse of Sasangge],
Ph.D. diss. Seoul National University, 2001.
114
The similar use of western music in film is found in The Houseguest and My Mother (Sarangbang
sonnimgwa o^mo^ni, Shin Sang-ok, 1960). The widowed mother plays Chopin’s Impromptu
whenever she feels sad because she cannot express her affection for the male guest of her house.

123
woman capable of accepting the bitterness of the end of an extra-marital romance
and moving on.
The relationship between So^n-yo^ng’s husband and Miss Pak, his nighttime
Korean grammar class student, doesn’t follow the patterns of shinpa, either. From the
beginning, their relationship does not carry the burden of fate, which makes ending a
relationship a matter of life and death in shinpa texts. She decides to stop dating him
for herself and sadly, but gracefully, leaves him after giving him a token of love, a
hand-made necktie. In this manner, the film lacks, or rather, avoids, shinpaesque
moments until it reaches the denouement. The absence of the shinpa code throughout
the film and its sudden rise as a dominant dramatic force at the end presents a clash
between the modern, or to be more precise, what was defined the modern, and the
shinpaesque. The clash functions to expunge the “corrupting” pleasures which So^n-
yo^ng has enjoyed. It perhaps does so, yet, only on the surface for, as I have
demonstrated, the pleasures still find their place in her remorse and distressing lesson
learned.
As a sign of the transnationally mediated code of shinpa, Fallen Leaves
acoustically indicates that she is not only a punished fallen woman but a secretly
satisfied recipient of western modernity. Beneath her tears as a helpless heroine is
harbored a sweet delight of savoring the sorrowful tune of the French chanson. In the
scene of her chastisement the pain from the miserable catastrophe of her deviance
and her satisfaction with the enjoyment of modern cultural product are welded. Such
a double significance presented in the denouement of the film suggests that with all
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the signs of her contrition, she may not give up her pleasure and clandestinely
keep it. So, the more crucial question that the last scene brings up is not whether the
husband will let her in his house or not, but whether she will truly get back to the
role of a good mother and wife or just fake it.
In this sense, the motif of the revelation of female identity, which is shared with
repertoires of the all-female opera and more conventional melodrama of the ‘50s, is
employed in a manipulated way in Madam Freedom. Her identity, after all, remains
unidentifiable and unknown to her husband. The code of shinpa, supposedly played
out to affectively reinforce the meaning of her return to the traditional feminine
position, then, serves as a façade, behind which her identity is kept unidentifiable.
The code of shinpa is mobilized as a tactical gesture to exhibit a scene of the restored
familial order to the anxious eye of South Korean patriarchy so that the possibility of
her desire not to return to the traditional position is concealed and uncensored.
Through the mobilization of the code of shinpa for two different purposes—the
creation of a surface reassuring to patriarchal order and the display of a
transnationally modified signifier of modern culture--the film produces room for the
ambivalence of female identity caught between the seduction of the modern and
imposition of the traditional. The ambivalence exactly represents the dilemma of
South Korean female subjects of the ‘50s as well as the ways in which the dilemma
was culturally negotiated. The code of shinpa was employed in such a way that the
changing identities of South Korean women, fluctuating between modern and
traditional, could be articulated in terms which reassured traditional gender order and
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at the same time fulfilled the female subjects’ wish for modern pleasure and
freedom. The mode of South Korean modern melodrama and shinpa were played out
not in a way exclusive to each other, but in a mutually constructive way in the
shaping of the identity of South Korean women in flux.

IV-2 A Dialogical Translation of the Shinpaesque in Confession of a College Girl
After her grandmother dies, who has been her only guardian since her parents
died in the Korean War and funded her college education at a law school, So-yo^ng,
the female protagonist of the film, is helplessly exposed to various vices of
patriarchal capitalism like poverty, sexual harassment at a job interview, and a
danger of prostitution. Regretfully witnessing much of her desperate struggle for
survival, her crafty friend named Chi-suk comes up with a scheme, which would
completely change So-yo^ng’s life. Chi-suk makes up a story out of a journal she
happened to discover. Finding that the woman who wrote the journal was abandoned
by her lover, a man named Rim Ch’oe, and that after he left her to marry a girl from
a wealthy family, her baby daughter died of illness and she committed suicide, Chi-
suk suggests that So-yo^ng could pretend to be Ch’oe’s dead daughter. Chi-suk
claims that, since the daughter’s mother is dead and he doesn’t know anything about
the presence of his daughter, it will be a perfect plan for So-yo^ng. Although not
entirely by her own decision, So-yo^ng finally visits Ch’oe with the portion of the
journal and tells him that she is his daughter.
126
Thanks to his wealth and social status as an assembly man she is able to
continue her education and becomes a promising lawyer. In her first trial she argues
on behalf of a woman named Sun-yi, who is charged with the murder of her husband.
At first Sun-yi is silent about what happened, but, So-yo^ng persuades her to talk
about what she did. Through So-yo^ng’s narration and the flashbacks of Sun-yi’s
past in the courtroom it is revealed that Sun-yi was abandoned by her husband and
went through extreme financial and emotional hardships. While desperately
wandering on a street to get money for her sick child, she ran into her friend and later
visited the friend’s to borrow money. While waiting for her friend to get back home,
she found her husband, the father of her child, at the house and came to know that he
abandoned her and married the wealthy friend of hers. Out of rage she kills him with
a knife.
After successfully arguing Sun-yi’s case So-yo^ng gets back home and starts to
blame herself crying: “I am an unforgivable sinner. I have not been a human. . .
.Until a moment ago wearing a mask of hypocrisy, I was arguing on behalf of the
accused . . .” When she is about to leave the house, her step-mother, Ch’oi’s wife,
who knows that she is not Ch’oi’s real daughter, but moved by So-yo^ng’s speech at
the court, persuades her to stay. So-yo^ng decides to be a “true” daughter to Ch’oi
and his wife and joins them for the party for the celebration of her success as a
lawyer hosted by Ch’oi, who is still blind to the truth.
So-yo^ng as an interlocutor of Sun-yi’s case is made possible by her social status
as a lawyer achieved through her education, which is interestingly enabled by her
127
manipulation and disguise of her identity. Her family background and financial
situation prior to her new life as the daughter of Ch’oi are not unlike those of Sun-
hi’s. The landlord of her boarding house attempts to sexually harass her, taking
advantage of her inability to pay the rent; and at a job interview she is harassed by
the male interviewer who just looks for a girl he could easily exploit. Suffering from
these humiliating incidents and hunger, she wanders on a street at night and is
approached by a man, who mistakes her for a prostitute. Trying to avoid him, she is
run over by a car. These incidents show that she could end up in a similar situation
as Sun-yi’s without her trick on her familial identity. The narrative of the film adds
another woman’s story that resembles that of Sun-hi and So-yo^ng. The life of the
mother of the real daughter of Ch’oi, which is recorded in her journal and used by
Chi-suk and So-yo^ng for their scheme, repeats the victimhood of women exploited
and abandoned by men and the patriarchal social order. What the three women, the
mother of the real daughter of Ch’oi, Sun-hi, and So-yo^ng go through offer
recurring variations on the identical thematics of women’s tragic life under
patriarchy until the vicious cycle is broken by the So-yo^ng’s manipulative action.
So-yo^ng’s maneuver to change her familial and social status contributes to
turning the cycle of female victimhood into the case of inquiry on injustices caused
by unequal gender positions. The turn of the cycle also enables the justification of
women’s sufferings as the consequences of gender positions as well as the tactics
employed by women in order to avoid the consequences. The narrative of the film,
which promotes women’s use of such tactics in a way, is linked to the thematics of
128
female identity in flux prevalent in popular cultural texts of the ‘50s. Female
subjects represented in popular cultural texts of this period hide, as in the case of
So^n-yo^ng in Madam Freedom, or fabricate their identity like So-yo^ng in
Confession of a College Girl. Female subjects turn out to be someone other than
what men think they are and by assuming different identities than those perceived in
the established gender order they provide access to pleasure and power, which they
desire, yet are not allowed to have in reality.
The scene of So-yo^ng’s oral proceeding at the court brings into full view how the
thematics of female identity in flux is configured through interactions between the
mode of modern melodrama and the conventions of shinpa. By her voice-over
narration on what happened to Sun-yi and her argument for her she represents Sun-yi
in both senses of the word. Through So-yo^ng’s articulation the once silenced story
of a victimized woman is transmuted into an eloquent speech that criticizes brutal
patriarchy. Sun-yi’s life and tragedy presented and narrated by So-yo^ng illustrates
the epitome of the convention of shinpa: the audience, the female audience in
particular, all weep together for the heart-wrenching story of a woman’s life torn
apart by abusive male power and unequal gender positioning. Women at the public
gallery of the courtroom quietly and collectively sob with sympathy for Sun-yi’s ill-
fated life. Their over identification with Sun-yi with their speech swallowed by their
overflowing tears epitomizes the essential feature of the female spectatorship of
shinpa. Such an asymbolia of female spectatorship sharply contrasts with the
portrayal of So-yo^ng as a female lawyer, providing an effective foil of her presence.
129
However, the contrast between the female audience and So-yo^ng is not just
to display the opposition of shinpa and modern melodrama, rather the two are put
into a process in which each mediates the other. The mediation translates the shinpa-
coded, muted drama of a female victim into terms that can be heard by and
understandable to the audiences of the ‘50s. The forms of modern melodrama and
shinpa are intertwined through the process of translation of the latter by the former.
The process, which can be termed as the interlocution of modern melodrama and
shinpa, makes possible the two different cultural forms communicative to each other.
The interlocution takes place through So-yo^ng’s argument for Sun-yi, who
translates Sun-yi’s silence into a language that can be heard by and understandable to
the judges and audiences. Whereas Sun-yi’s pain and affliction that are pent up and
buried in her silence illustrate the ways in which women’s tragedy is rendered in the
convention of shinpa, So-yo^ng’s articulation of Sun-yi’s pain and affliction shifts
them into the realm of speech, a communicable form of women’s tragedy. Instead of
being absorbed in muted resentments and sadness, which can only be released
through tears, the women’s tragedy is re-coded and voiced in the language of modern
melodrama. Accompanied by her own tears and intermittent silence, the argument
that she makes in order to “appeal to the sympathetic mind of the judges so that they
may not too strictly apply the law to Sun-yi’s case” shows the affective language
shared by modern melodrama and shinpa. The code of modern melodrama was
achieved through the interaction with the mode of shinpa, not the exclusion of it.

130
V Conclusion
South Korean postwar melodrama made a path to the emergence of modern
female identities at the time of fading nationalism and the absence of hegemonic
political discourse. South Korean postwar modern melodrama was much welcome as
the core index of the nation’s modern culture and as a more advanced cinematic
style, which had overcome the convention of shinpa. The convention of shinpa,
however, was renewed and re-appropriated in modern melodrama, and interwoven
into the figuration of modern femininity. The convention of shinpa, therefore, served
as a significant layer of the scene of modern cinema and culture of postwar South
Korea, although it was obscured and repressed in the scene.
Ground-breaking female images touted in modern melodrama quickly declined
when totalitarian nationalist discourse was revived with the establishment of the
military Park Chung Hee [Pak Cho^ng-hi] regime and were displaced by the more
submissive and compliant images of mothers, wives and sisters of family
melodrama, a dominant genre of the early ‘60s.

131
Chapter 3 Nationalism and Melodramatic Excess in Historical Drama of the
1960s
South Korea underwent significant political, socio-economic and cultural
transitions from the early 1960s on. After the fall of the Rhee regime by the April 19
Revolution (1960) and the brief period of the second republic (1960-1961) the power
of the state was taken over by a military regime established through the May 16 coup
in 1961 led by Park Chung Hee. The military regime pursued modernization and
industrialization of the nation at full force and mobilized nationalism as a
predominant hegemonic discourse. The curb on national and gender identity which
had been loosened during the ‘50s was tightened to an unprecedented extent and
South Koreans became subject to the totalitarian identity formation dictated by the
state. South Korean male and female subjects were respectively interpellated as
industrial warriors (sanso^p yo^kkun) and at the same time mothers who bore those
warriors. They were required to fully sacrifice themselves for the achievement of the
industrialized modern nation.
The rise of the state and nationalism that had absolute authority consequently
pushed out of the cultural scene the glamorous, provocative female images offered
by modern melodrama of the ‘50s which questioned patriarchal and national order. In
the early ‘60s, melodrama transformed into family melodrama called “home drama”
and demonstrated the shift of cultural focus from the exuberance of transnational
modern culture and women’s pleasure of the consumption of culture to the every day
life of the lower and middle-class family. In many cases images of family life in
132
family melodrama were framed by the narrative of generational transition of
male authority, allegorical of the emergence of the new military regime with the
catch phrase of modernization, as showed in films like Romance Papa (Romansu^
ppappa, Shin sang-ok, 1960), Mr. Pak (Pak so^bang, Kang Tae-chin,1960),
Coachman (Mabu, Kang Tae-chin, 1961), Under the Roof of Seoul (So^ulu^i
Chibung mit, Yi Hyo^ng-p’yo, 1961), Sunflower Family (Haebaragi kajok, Pak
So^ng-bok, 1961), Salaried man (Wuo^lgup chaengi, Yo Pong-rae, 1962) etc. When
the authority of the Park regime was consolidated through the establishment of the
third republic in 1963 after the period of military junta, films which further
foregrounded the thematics of modernization emerged. In films such as Rice (Ssal,
1963) and Ttosuni (Ttosuni, Pak Sang-ho, 1963) women particularly were
represented as participants in the industrialization project. Women were re-positioned
as the subjects who proudly offered their devotion to the state project as opposed to
those who decadently enjoyed sexual, cultural pleasure and freedom in modern
melodrama of the ‘50s.
Historical drama, which became the prime genre of the period, bears more
evident correlation with hegemonic discourse of the state than any of the other film
genres prevalent in the period. Historical drama was a cultural vehicle best-suited to
the function of disseminating hegemonic discourse of the period in many ways. The
grandiose scale and high production value of historical drama, further promoted by
the newly established film laws geared towards the industrialization of film
production, well corresponded to the growth-oriented state politics of the period.
133
Historical drama’s narrative pattern that portrayed the trajectory of the fall and
rise of political power was also capable of conveying the significance of historical
change caused by the emergence of the new military regime. Yet, the most significant
correlation between the genre and political discourse is found in a melodramatic
mode shared by the two.
As I demonstrate later, the rhetoric and narrative of nationalist discourse, the core
of hegemonic discourse of the period, was itself melodramatic to a great extent.
Historical drama, which the employed melodramatic mode as its central pattern as
well, presents profound correspondence to the melodramatic rhetoric displayed in
nationalist discourse. More importantly, however, I argue that the melodramatic
mode of historical drama does not only mediate its relation to nationalist discourse
through affinity. I demonstrate that historical drama, which reproduced melodramatic
sentiment and narrative of nationalist discourse, simultaneously exceeds the frame of
nationalist discourse vis-à-vis the melodramatic mode.
First, I analyze the rhetoric, narrative and gender politics mobilized in nationalist
discourse constructed by the state in the ‘60s and demonstrate that they were
primarily drawn to melodramatic rhetoric. Second, I explore the ways in which
melodramatic rhetoric of nationalist discourse was reproduced in historical drama of
the period. Finally, I demonstrate that emotional excesses presented in historical
drama provides sites of ruptures subversive to nationalist discourse.
In order to show the presence of ruptures I analyze the narrative structure of
historical drama that enables the maximum display of melodramatic sentiments. The
134

maximum display of melodramatic sentiments performs the mourning of loss,
which was oppressed by hegemonic discourse. Two different types of mourning,
mourning of the maternal and mourning of the romantic, respectively serve to
reclaim the South Korean public’s demand for lamentation over historical traumas
and to acknowledge the gendered desire for female sexuality not regulated by
hegemonic discourse.

I Industrialization and Changes in the Environment of Film Production
South Koreans, who experienced modernization without industrialization in the
1950s, were thrust into a historical transition which geared the nation toward
economic modernization in the ‘60s. The Park Chung Hee regime (1960-1979
initiated the state-driven industrialization under the rubric of the “revolution of 5000-
year national history.”
115
This transition brought a full revival of nationalism, which
had been placed at the periphery of the realm of state hegemony during the postwar
era except for its use in the promotion of anti-communism. South Korea, as a late
industrializer, was faced with the national mission of catching up with advanced
capitalism. The urgency of the mission was further stressed because the South was
obsessed with winning a race with North Korea which had already achieved
industrialization to a significant degree during the 10 year postwar period.
116
South
Korean industrialization, thus, required a total mobilization of its people and

115
Chung Hee Park, Nation, Revolution and I (Seoul: Hallym Corporation, 1970). First edition 1963,
p. 22
116
Myo^ng-rim Pak, “Ku^ndaehwa p’rojektwa hanguk minjokjuu^i (Modernization Project and
Korean Nationalism),” in Han’guk ui kundae wa kundaeso^ng pip‘an [Criticism on Korean
Modernity], Yo^ksa Munje Yo^n’guso yo^kkum ed., (Seoul : Yo^ksa Pip‘yo^ngsa, 1996), p. 330.
135

nationalism was the core ideological apparatus for the mobilization.
117
Nation
consequently overruled democracy, freedom and rights of an individual and
nationalism was employed as hegemonic discourse that enabled the absolute power
of the dictatorial government and state.
The national modernization projects brought the state-initiated re-structuring of
the system of film production. The politics on film were oriented toward “the
industrialization with an emphasis on film export and film production scale.”
118
The
government reduced the number of film production companies from 71 to 16 in 1961
and the established Motion Picture Act (yo^nghwa po^p) in 1962. The revised
Motion Picture Act (1963) imposed the requirements of officially permitted film
production companies as follows: 1) a particular size of film studio and the sound
recording facility and film development, 2) lighting facility capable of more than
60kw, 3) more than three 35mm cameras, 4) more than 2 contracted directors and
more than 2 contracted actors, 5) annual production of more than 15 films, etc.
119

These regulations resulted in the survival of only 4 film production companies in
1964.
120
The regulations, thus, were clearly intended to re-direct the structure of film
production towards large scale industry-basis system. This industry-basis system
consequently promoted the production of big-budget entertainment film.
121

The production of large scale entertainment film promoted by the new film
policy brought the boom of spectacular historical drama with high production values

117
Ibid., p. 331.
118
Encyclopedia of Women in Film Industry, p. 108.
119
Ibid p.108
120
Ibid., p. 108
121
Young-Il Lee, History of Korean Cinema, p. 262.
136

in the period. Two historical dramas, Tale of Ch’un-hyang (Ch’un-hyangjo^n,
Hong So^ng-ki) and Virtuous Ch’un-hyang (So^ng Ch’un-hyang, Shin Sang-ok),
which were released around the same time in 1961, paved the way for the flourishing
of historical drama afterwards. Both of the films used color cinemascope for the first
time in Korean cinema history
122
and the female protagonist of each film was
respectively played by Chi-mi Kim and Eun-hu^i Ch’oe, the two most prominent
female film stars of the time.
123

The re-structuring of the mode of film production spared no space for small-scale
or individual-based productions
124
As Lee explained, Korean film production prior
to the establishment of the Motion Picture Act “had been primarily organized on the
basis of individualized systems.” But, after the Act was enforced, “in order to make a
film, a film company should be founded first . . . .or a contract with an existing film
company should be made….[therefore] the owner of a film company decided subject
matters, content and styles of films.”
125
This shift in the mode of film production,
however, did not bring the disappearance of the production of lower-budget, “lower-
quality” films including shinpa style films. Because, in order to meet the requirement
that one film company should produce at least 15 films per year, film companies
needed to expand the quantity of film regardless of quality. This was one of the
major determinants of the continued generation of lower-budget, “lower-quality”
films. As I will discuss in detail in the next chapter, the item on foreign film

122
Young-Il Lee, History of Korean Cinema, p. 271.
123
While the success of Shin’s Virtuous Ch’un-hyang enabled him to found a major film studio, Shin
Film, Hong went downhill after the box-office failure of his Tale of Ch’un-hyang.
124
Ibid., p. 259, p. 253.
125
Ibid., p. 262
137
importation quota, added to the Act in 1963, resulted in carrying on the
generation of lower-budget, “lower-quality” films, counter to its intention. Besides,
the possibility of the generation of lower-budget, “lower-quality” films was spared
through certain strategies invented for small-scale and individual producers who did
not qualify to register as a film company to survive in association with local
distributors. In sum, the number of domestic films produced after the establishment
and revisions of the Act increased: 144 (1963), 147 (1964), 189 (1965), 136 (1966),
172 (1967), 212 (1968), and 229 (1969). This increase came about along with the
increase of lower-budget, “lower-quality” films.
While the number of films with lower production values increased, there emerged
the production of big-budget entertainment films which only large production
companies leading the industry-based system were capable of. Historical drama
became a dominant genre in the early phase of the shift in the mode of film
production. Spectacular historical drama with high production values was the genre
best compatible to the new film policy.
The rise of Shin Film founded by Shin Sang-ok in the period was the
paradigmatic success case born out of the re-structured film industry. With the huge
success of Virtuous Ch’un-hyang he was able to expand his former film company,
Shin Sang-ok production, into an up-scale production company. Even before the re-
structuring occurred, he owned a film studio in Wo^nhyoro in Seoul (1959) and
garnered continued success from big-budget historical dramas such as Prince
Yo^nsan (Yo^nsangun, 1961) and Yo^nsan, the Tyranny ( P’okgun Yo^nsan, 1962).
138
Shin Film towered after the Motion Picture Act was enacted and dominated the
film industry until it collapsed due to a financial crisis cause by an over-expansion as
well as its conflict with the government in the early ‘70s.
Shin Film built a new film studio in Anyang in 1966, partially funded by the
government. The success of large-scale historical drama made a significant
contribution to the establishment of Shin Film as the major studio of the period
despite criticism for benefiting from its association with the government. Shin Film
created primary spectacular historical dramas of the period: for instance, Virtuous
Chung-hyang which, as aforementioned, used color cinemascope, Tale of Shim
Ch’o^ng (Shim Ch’o^ngjo^n, Yi Hyo^ng-pyo, 1962) which presented the scene of a
sea palace shot under water for the first time in Korean cinema, and Sino-Japanese
War and Queen Min (Ch’o^ng-il cho^njaenggwa yo^go^l minbi, Yim Wo^n-shik,
1965) that was “a blockbuster War Film on the largest scale ever.”
As was suggested by the case of Shin Film, blockbuster type historical drama was
the genre that was best suited to as well as instigated by the new government policy.
The generic and conceptual characteristics of historical drama of the 60s that
corresponded to the demands of the state generated another correlation between
political discourse and patterns of the genre. The genre did not only incorporate the
government protocol of the industrialization of the mode of film production but
reproduced the rhetoric of hegemonic political discourse as well as the narrative of
historiography woven by the discourse. The rhetoric and narrative were heavily
drawn to melodramatic style. For example, speeches and writings made and written
139
by Park Chung Hee primarily employed a sentimental appeal to the people,
which was intended to bring their consent to the fact that we, poor South Koreans
should move forward to state modernization and get out of the collective misery.
This political message was reflected in his view on history and historiography
constructed under his regime, where the past history was portrayed as evil and
Koreans as helpless victims of the history who desperately waited for a savoir to
rescue them from wretched circumstances.
The melodramatic rhetoric and narrative of hegemonic political and historical
discourse were repeated in historical drama of the period. Historical drama had the
patterned narrative frame that incapable, vicious kings and politicians victimized
innocent, mostly female, members of royal families and a new masculine, military
power emerged and saved the innocent. The frame is, then, filled with tear-jerking
scenes of the suffering innocent, presenting hyper-sentimental imageries of history.
The melodramatic style of historical drama, thus, offered an objective correlation of
the political rhetoric and historical narrative constituted by the state. Historical
drama as such an objective correlative of hegemonic discourse was apparently
caused by its mode of production imposed by the state. Of great interest, yet, is that
historical drama offered layers of meaning counter to its operation as such an
apparatus of the hegemonic discourse. The layers come into play through the very
melodramatic style that was employed for the reproduction of hegemonic discourse.
The melodramatic style, thereby, was mobilized in historical drama of the period as a
140

multi-faceted modular which imitated and contradicted the hegemonic discourse,
negotiating and altering it.

II Use of the Melodramatic in Nationalist Discourse of the 1960’s
Nationalist discourse dominant in the ‘60s was informed with particular emotional
impulses. The narrative of nationalist discourse, according to Benedict Anderson’s
seminal book, The Imagined Community, mobilizes the logic of unified comradeship
of members of the nation in order to produce an identical consciousness of their
belonging to the nation.
126
Apart from the narrative of nationalist discourse, which is
assumed to be shared by nationalisms of any nations, Korean nationalism of the
1960s displayed strong sentimentalism as its predominant rhetorical mode.
The rhetorical mode was manifested through the writings and speeches of Park
Chung Hee, who was not only a political icon of the period but also a predominant
vehicle of political, historical, and economic discourses generated by the state. Major
texts written and spoken by the author heavily and consistently relied on the oratory
style charged with sentimentalism. In Our Nation’s Path (Uri minjoku^i naagalgil,
1963), one of his major books, for example, he asserted the need to remake the
collective identity of the Korean people was a “national task.” He wrote:

Now is the time for each individual to place his hand on his heart, reflect upon
our shameful past, and resolve to regenerate himself as a loyal and patriotic
member of our national community. All anti-national, unpatriotic poisons
lurking in our hearts must be rooted out and burned away by our passionate love

126
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Community: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
(London: Verso, 1983), pp. 1-7.
141

of our country. When the dried-up spring of patriotism regains the vigor
previously had, then there will be light in this land, the first torch of a national
revolution, a people’s revolution.
127

In this passage, the main argument that the Korean people should “regenerate”
themselves as patriotic national subjects is made using the metaphor of “heart.” With
their heart, the passage says, they should look back at the past, its humiliation and
darkness, and find the “all anti-nationalistic and unpatriotic poisons lurking in their
heart.” Phrases like “our passionate love of our country” or the “spring of patriotism”
imply that what the nation presently demands is a devotion gushing forth from the
“spring” of their heart, an absolute passion of patriotism. By using a strong
emotional appeal generated by the metaphor of heart and the accompanied
sensational language his writing effectively functions to push the citizens toward the
mission dictated by the state, the building-up of a “new” nation.
The emotional appeal is not just applied to the description of the Korean people,
the objects called for the “revolutionary” task by the state. Many occasions in Park’s
writings, rather, demonstrate that he portrayed in an excessively sentimental manner
himself as the subject and agent of the state as well as the other members who
participated in the May 16 coup. In the preface of another book of his, The Country,
the Revolution, and I (Kukkawa, hyo^ngmyo^nggwa, na), he described himself as a
national leader unified with the suffering people in tears of pain:
Late at night July,1963. It was midnight and heavy rains were falling outside at a
steady rate. I was sitting at the corner of my study and stopped writing to look
out into the dark and the rain-drenched streets. Suddenly, I felt an urge to run

127
Park Chung Hee, Our Nation’s Path: Ideology of Social Reconstruction (Seoul: Hollym
Corporation, 1970), first edition 1962, pp. 21-22.
142

outside and to stop the rains with my sheer will power, or, knowing that it
would be a futile gesture, to cry with my people suffering from the rains.
128

Or elsewhere in the book, he wrote:

Stepping on the revolutionary road to Kimpo [on the morning of the coup], I
pictured the morning of a brightening day and the rising sun ‘till they
overflowed in my heart. I shall never forget the expressions on the faces of my
revolutionary comrades—those who stood up and followed me. They risked
their thirty-year-old youth and sought the right destiny of the nation, leaving
behind them their beloved wives, sons and daughters, their old mothers and
fathers. They were young. They had not yet fully reaped the fruits of their lives.
It was a noble human image, an image that made me tearful. I looked down
the Han River and realized that the waves were new. The flowing water was
fresh; nothing was the same as it had been yesterday. There can be nothing old.
History flows like that, always inviting the new.
129

Here, Park represents himself as a leader, who sincerely feels his overflowing
sympathy with his people’s trouble or a sense of loyalty with his “revolutionary
comrades.” This emotionally charged rendering of his personality and the coup he
led constructs a mind-absorbing narrative of his leadership and the history of the
nation, so that the narrative pulls the public’s affective agreement and identification
with them. Park’s melodramatic rhetoric served as a primary tool to turn the story of
his power struggle into hegemonic discourse, which the South Korean public could
empathize with and agree to justify.
The emotional effects of nationalist discourse exemplified in the passages quoted
above are not merely generated by using particular words or phrases. Another critical
device utilized for the effects is the manner in which the historical past, the

128
Park Chung Hee, The Country, the Revolution, and I (Seoul: Hollym Corporation, 1970), First
edition 1963, p. vii.
129
Ibid., p59.
143

historical circumstances of the time and the coup, are dramatized. Through the
arrangement of these components in absolutely oppositional terms, South Koreans
were presented as facing nonnegotiable conflicts and tensions. The historical past of
the nation, it was claimed, was oriented towards “anti-national” and “unpatriotic”
directions and the legacy of that past should be “rooted out” and “burned away. If
South Koreans resolve to clear such a collective evil and move forward, nationalist
discourse contended, there would be a new torch lit for the future of the land.
Nationalist discourse imposed on the people a Manichean vision of past and future,
the shameful history and bright prospect of time to come, and darkness and light.
These binary oppositions placed them at the locus where an utter resentment and
humiliation and an overflowing hopeful expectation traversed. The emotional
intensity brought forth by the oppositions is furthered by the weight of the phrase,
“destiny of nation,” which dramatized the South Korean public as a protagonist
living an unavoidable vicissitude of fate.
The polarized view of history leads the public to another task given by “the
destiny of nation”: making a choice between life and death. Park’s texts repeatedly
claimed that now it’s time of choice of destiny, for example, he wrote:

We must realize that today we have come face to face with the greatest national
crisis in our history. We have arrived at a solemn moment when the very fate of
our people would be determined— the fate of whether we live or die, rise or fall
. . . . We face today multiple disadvantages, difficulties and tragic situations.
There is only one [choice] we can make: either to be afflicted by being led by
the crisis to the pit of perdition, or to aggressively combat and overcome it. On
our choice at this moment depends the life or death of our people and nation.
130

130
Our nation’s Path, p.17.
144

Or elsewhere he said, “We are standing at an important crossroad, where we must
decide whether we shall be victorious over our ordeal or fall into so deep an abyss
that we can never rise again.”
131
Or, “a difficult choice awaits us”.
132
Or, “to make
the right choice at this point is the most crucial test of our national destiny.”
133
The
recurrent demand on choice inextricably linked to the national destiny gives rise to a
sense of an impending and inescapable nature of the choice and creates a cataclysmic
scene of history. The significance of the choice is expanded through the use of
oppositional words for the description of possible outcomes of the choice: “rise” or
“fall,” “live” or “die,” “overcoming” of “tragic situations,” or, “falling into the “pit
of perdition,” etc. Standing at a crossroad leading to either to heaven or hell and
burdened with a mission of rescuing the nation from the “greatest crisis” of history,
South Koreans were configured as performers of the most conflicted-ridden drama of
the national history.
The conflict-ridden drama of history was effectively portrayed through a
bifurcated perspective on the past and future and negative description of the past. As
serious as the present crisis was, as high as the hope for the glory of the future was,
the past should be necessarily remembered as miserable and dark as possible. During
the Park regime, the Choso^n Dynasty in particular was rendered a period when most
weaknesses and drawbacks of the nation were formed, thus caused the national
tragedy like colonization. Park described, for instance, the character of the Choso^n

131
The Country, the Revolution, and I, p.19.
132
Our Nation’s Path, p. x.
133
Ibid, p. x.
145

Danasty in Pathway of Our Nation in terms of absolute negativity. The Choso^n
Dynasty, to him, was the embodiment of feudalism, oppression, divisiveness,
passivity, and corruption. As a collage of regressive and irredeemable characters, the
Choso^n Dynasty was the weakest and the most shameful time of Korean history.
Park pointed out that fractional strife (tangjaeng tangpa ssaum) was the prime factor
in the loss of national strength and sovereignty. According to him, all administrative
groups of the Choso^n Dynasty had done nothing but taking sides in the politics of
fractional strife, and “it barred the ruler from making sound judgment during critical
junctures of history.” The negative national characteristics caused by the political
strife such as dependency, laziness, lack of initiative and industriousness, lack of
pride, and absence of critical faculty, according to Park, should be eliminated for the
construction of the new nation:”
Such a negative historical view was applied to the first and second republic prior
to the Park regime as well. According to Park, the two administrations respectively
led by Rhee and Chang were not very different from the Choso^n Dynasty in terms
of pre-modern mentality and impotence. He claimed, “We have never broken out of
the vicious circle of feudalistic poverty, degradation, complacency, laziness and
fratricidal warfare….”
134
therefore, “We have never, throughout our long history,
managed to create a nation worthy of its name.”
135
The history of Korea prior to his
leadership was constructed as an absolute backwardness and vice.

134
The Country, the Revolution, and I, p.19.
135
Ibid, p.19.
146

The repetitive use of an emotion-driven tone, the absolute binarism of
historical past and future, and the obsessive emphasis on the choice of destiny in
Park’s writings create a particular mode of dramatization of nation, history and
people. The mode of dramatization employs melodramatic components such as
hyperbolic emotions, the moral polarity of good and evil and a narrative structure
which organizes a catastrophic past and high hope for the future. The mode of
dramatization also constructs the members of the nation in a similar manner to the
way that heroines of melodrama are rendered. Just as heroines are portrayed as
helpless innocent victims in melodrama, in political discourse of the period members
of the nation are figured as suffering and crying victims of tragic history.
Melodramatic narrative structure and emotions were prime vehicles in the
construction of the imaginary of the nation in political discourse of the period. South
Korean nationalism, initiated and imposed by the state through the dissemination of
political discourse of the period, thus seized upon the rhetoric of the
melodramatization of its nation, history and people.
The melodramatic portrayal of members of the nation as feminine subjects in
nationalist discourse, who were fed up with weariness, anguish, tears and shame
caused by national traumas and the incapability of the state,”
136
effectively served to
envision new leadership. The effemination of the people was mobilized to justify a
need for a masculine hero, who could rescue them from collective misery. The
justification of such a need was called for in order to legitimize the presence of the

136
Ibid, p.20
147

regime enabled by a coup. The feminization functioned to figure the powerful
masculine identity of the regime.
Such a positioning enables the regime to manifest itself as a savior of the
devastated nation. The major participants of the coup, according to Park, “raised the
torch of revolution…for the people and in their fervent wish to rescue the Fatherland
from the imminent crisis” and to bring about “national prosperity.”
137
As illustrated
in the quoted passages earlier, the Park regime represented itself as a “torch” of the
nation that would bring the light of glory and prosperity by modernizing the nation.
The helpless Korean people afflicted with the wrong leadership of the past, it was
claimed, could regain their right direction in life by following the new leader. This
claim made by the state is justified and reinscribed by the gendering and
sentimentalizing of the nation and people.
The melodramatic rhetoric of the dominant discourse has another significant
function. As a quintessential emotional response of the melodramatic, the
sentimental rhetoric of nationalism invites a full absorption into the scene of the
nation and history. The nature of the invitation may be best described as a loss of
self; A complete immersion into the rhetoric with no distance secured, which is the
mode of reception of melodramatic cultural texts, thus, an over-identification is
induced as an effect of reception.
The over-identification without distance, I argue, is the most effective
reaction for the state that mobilizes people for the construction of the modern nation.
By being made to lose their selves, people are dissolved into the logic of the

137
Our Nation’s Path, p. ix.
148

modernization and the labor required by it. They are asked to be solely occupied
with the goal of modernizing the nation and to be fully charged with the spirit of
marching toward the modernity. The demand for such a total mobilization was often
expressed through images of bodily fluids. Park’s political statements, for instance,
repeatedly used expressions like, “Let’s work with blood, sweat, and tears. . . . Only
the light coming form blood, sweat, and tears can illuminate our nation’s prospective
right.”
138
This rhetoric aiming at inducing physical reactions through over-
identification is similar to that of melodrama designed to cause bodily responses,
primarily tears.
139
The hegemonic discourse of state mobilization interpellated the
members of the state as spectators of a sentimentalized scene of their history.
The metaphor of bodily liquids was articulated within a particular temporal frame.
The metaphor was mobilized to emphasize what the people should do in the present
moment. The metaphor delivered the message that they must put their energy and
labor into the state project to the point where their bodies would generate blood,
sweat and tears now. Now is the time they should do this more than any thing else.
The idea of now comes from the figuration of the past as a time of suffering and the
future as a time of glory. Thus, the now is when they must overcome the suffering
inherited from the past and achieve the glory in the future. The present is prescribed
as the time to depart from the dark and shameful past and move towards an ideal
future. If they did not make enough efforts to achieve the future, nationalist discourse

138
The Country, the Revolution and I, p 23.
139
In that sense the discourse of state nationalism produced in Korea at the time is similar in terms of
its discursive style to What Linda Williams calls a “body genre.” See her article, “Film Bodies:
Gender, Gene, and Excess” in Barry Keith Grant ed. Film Genre Reader II (University Texas Press,
1995).
149
stated, they were to “fall into a pit of perdition.” The present was the very
moment when the Korean people ought to make a decision about life and death and
push themselves in maximum for the construction of the future.
The repetitive use of an emotion-driven tone, the absolute dichotomy of historical
past and future, an obsessive emphasis on the choice of destiny, the rendering of the
people as victim heroines, and a demand on the full immersion into narratives woven
by the state—all these components evince that nationalist discourse produced in this
period was heavily drawn to melodramatic rhetoric and effects. If nationalism had
revived as a prime hegemonic apparatus of the state, the core mode of the hegemonic
apparatus was melodramatic.

III Reproduction of Nationalist Discourse in Historical Drama
The logic and sentiment of nationalist discourse created by the Park regime was
reproduced in historical drama of the period. The narrative structure of historical
drama is centered around the pattern of the prevalence of disorder and chaos caused
by evil characters and the removal of disorder and chaos by the emergence of a new
power. This narrative pattern corresponds to the claim of the Park regime that the
regime was a savior who would rescue the helpless people from historical tragedy.
The narrative pattern also reproduces the gender pattern constructed in political
discourse. Good royal characters who go through deposition are, in most cases,
females or effeminized males and the newly established power that appears at the
end of film is always embodied through male military figures. Helpless feminine
150
characters are allegorical of South Koreans, who are constructed as in need of
and waiting for new masculine power which will save the nation. The narrative
composed of a kingdom in crisis, feminine noble figures victimized by the crisis, and
the coming up of a male hero forms a correspondence to political discourse and the
gender politics constructed to legitimize the emergence of the regime.
The correspondence is effectuated through the same tear-jerking dramatization of
suffering used in politics. As I will discuss in detail later in this chapter, the
sentimental rhetoric of political discourse, which portrayed the people as suffering
and crying subjects, was reproduced by the melodramatic representation of deposed
noble figures in historical drama. For instance, the tear-provoking images of innocent
queens driven out of the palace deprived of their royal positions or separated from
their sons are the most often displayed stereotypes in historical drama. The patterned
hyperbolic expression of emotion induces an effect of identification with those in
pain both in film and political discourse. The melodramatic mode is, therefore,
mobilized as a major ideological apparatus of politics and culture of the period.
Another similarity to political discourse is found in the representation of the
Choso^n Dynasty in the historical drama. The Choso^n Dynasty, as previously
discussed, was portrayed as the worst and weakest historical period of Korea, and
blamed for causing national traumas in the historiography written by the state of the
period. The historiography exclusively stressed negative aspects of the politics of the
dynasty and described it as irredeemable. Historical drama, court drama of the
Choso^n Dynasty, in particular, adopted the historiography and turned history of the
151
Choso^n Dynasty into stories fraught with struggles for personal interests, the
pursuit of greed, jealousy, political manipulations and retaliations. The
narrativization of Choso^n history in that manner shaped the pattern of a
personalization of history, which described personal desire and competition for
power as the primary factors that changed history. One of the most clichéd narratives
of the court drama of Choso^n, for instance, is that concubines favored by kings like
Lady Chang and Lady Nok-su Chang pull strings behind the scene of politics
through their abuse of power motivated by jealousy. Another frequently presented
element from the repertoire of Choso^n court drama concerns the spectacular cruelty
and violence and indulgences of despotic kings like prince Yo^n-san (1495 – 1506)
and prince Kwang-hae (1608-1623), both of whom ascended the throne, but were
deposed afterwards.
The personalization of history brings forth the characteristic of the lack of the
public realm in historical drama. The public realms such as politics and historical
events are intermingled with private matters and re-configured into personal
tragedies. For instance, in Queen Mother In-mok (In-mok taebi, An Hyo^n-ch’o^l,
1962), which I will discuss in detail later in this chapter, the entire narrative is
focused on the personal sadness and suffering of the ill-fated queen mother and
prince Kwang-hae’s violence and cruelty enacted against her. Prince Kwang-hae and
his mother Lady Kim, a royal concubine of king So^njo, continue to scheme to be
favored by the king in order to succeed the king after his death. Their most
threatening enemy is a new-born prince, Yo^ng-ch’ang, prince Kwang-hae’s half-
152
brother born to Queen In-mok. Lady Kim and Prince Kwang-hae collaborate to
poison the king and to depose innocent Queen Mother In-mok and kill Yo^ng-ch’ang
after he ascends the throne. Yet, due to his continued tyranny and incapabileness, he,
after all, is deposed himself and the queen mother regains her royal position. In the
film there exists virtually no public realm. Royal characters and politicians are
portrayed as only interested in political games in pursuit of self-interest. In the film,
political issues all involve the conflict between prince Kwang-hae and the newborn
prince and between two groups of people supportive of either of the two. Lady Kim,
a major contributor to Kwang-hae’s taking of the throne, for instance, assigns major
administrative positions to people on her side using her personal power. She even
offers a position to someone only because he offered ginseng to the king.
Lady Chang [Concubine Chang] (Chang hibin, Cho^ng Ch’ang-hwa, 1961), a
historical drama about royal concubine Chang favored by king Sukjong (1674 –
1720), shows a similar case of the predominance of private story in historical drama.
Lady Chang, a former court maid who becomes a royal concubine of King Sukjong,
schemes to take the title of queen after giving birth to a son. The success of her
scheme has innocent Queen Min deposed and brings her the position she wished.
But, as her abuse of power and cruelty are revealed to the king, the king restores the
position of Queen Min and finally executes Lady Chang. In the film Lady Chang is
the main character that holds the king in the private realm and disables his
performance of sound political judgment and fair enactment of power. The king
himself is portrayed as desiring not to be repressed and restricted by the behavioral
153
code of court. He, for instance, often says that it is pointless to stick to the royal
courtesy and behavioral codes and that he, rather, wants to enjoy freedom and self-
indulgence with Chang. Macro issues of society and nation which the king is
supposed to be concerned with are predominantly overshadowed by a series of
conspiracies to gain the title of queen initiated by Chang and her family.
The personalization of history is linked to the embodiment of women as evil
characters. The conniving and manipulative women in historical drama, such as Lady
Kim in Queen Mother In-mok or Lady Chang, are the major vehicles to bring down
history to personal matters. They are figured as primary obstacles to the
“appropriate” use of power, legitimate politics, and proper history. The
representation of the Choso^n Dynasty vis-a vis the link between the feminine, the
private and the evil in historical drama is in rapport with the historical narrative
written by the state of the time, further promoting the gendered historical view
constructed by the narrative. As aforementioned, the Choso^n Dynasty was
described as the core factor in bringing vice and impotence to national history in the
historical narrative and such description was exploited to fabricate the image of the
regime as a masculine hero. The embodiment of the Choso^n Dynasty as evil,
feminine characters lacking a sense of public political domain in historical drama of
the period served to justify the gendering of history intended to masculinize the
regime. The personalization and effeminization of history in historical drama of the
‘60s mirrors the official historiography produced by the state of the period.

154
IV Melodramatic Mode and Excess in Historical Drama
The generic convention of melodrama employed in historical drama, as discussed
above, reflects the rhetoric and agenda of nationalist discourse and historical
narratives configured as part of nationalist discourse. The melodramatic mode of
historical drama was employed to deliver and disseminate the message the state
attempted to impose on the people. The operation of the melodramatic mode of
historical drama, however, is not limited to the reproduction of dominant discourse. I
argue that the reproduction is significantly undermined by the different ways of
using melodramatic effects in historical drama, which conflict with and disrupt the
workings of dominant discourse. The different ways of using melodramatic effects
interfere with the people’s empathy with the rhetoric of dominant discourse,
rupturing their identification with the rhetoric. The melodramatic mode, thus, was
mobilized to result in a two-fold outcome.
Disruptive effects generated by the melodramatic mode are presented through the
interrelation between intense emotions and a particular temporal arrangement of the
narrative of film. In historical drama the representation of events of film which cause
melodramatic emotional hyperbolism feature two key patterns. Those events are
intended to create extreme and abrupt changes within a far shorter narrative time
than expected and without much verisimilitude. That is, events happen so quickly
and abruptly that much of details of the events, or sometimes even the clear
presentation of causality of events, are missing. On the other hand, the portrayal of
sadness and pain caused by events is given an unnecessarily long time and repetition.
155
Melodramatic rendering in historical drama of the period is shaped vis-à-vis the
two codes: contracted narrative and expanded presentation of emotion to the
extreme.
. One of the primary intense emotion-inducing events in historical drama is the fall
of royal characters, noble and innocent ones in particular. The fall of royal
characters, a conventional element around which narrative of the genre evolves,
provides momentums for the explosion of intense sadness and suffering. In Queen
mother In-mok, for example, emotional intensity occurs when the queen mother is
deprived of her royal position and has her young son, Prince Yo^ng-ch’ang, killed by
his half-brother, Prince Kwang-hae, after he has ascended the throne. These events
come with added scenes which heighten melodramatic sentiment like the scene of
the queen mother’s ordeal after deposition or that of her enforced separation from her
son. A series of tragic events caused by her fall are arranged so as to provide
instances for the eruption of emotion. Likewise in Lady Chang the events of
deposition of Queen Min and then Lady Chang as well as Lady Chang’s execution at
the end offer major tear-jerking scenes.
The narrative progress, which precipitates and advances a series of the falls of
these characters, and accompanied emotional outbursts share the characteristic of
leaving out proper connections or details of the events. For example, in Queen
Mother In-mok the change of the queen mother’s status is caused by the sudden
death of king So^njo enacted by lady Kim. Thus, although the king’s death is
virtually the cause of all ensuing tragedy, the rendering of his death lacks a proper
156
process to unfold the event as well as likelihood of the event. Before his death,
the king reveals that he wants to change his successor from Prince Kwang-hae to his
newborn son because he cannot trust Prince Kwang-hae, who was born to a
concubine, as his legitimate successor. The king makes such a significant decision
merely because he gets upset by the fact that the Prince, who he thought was crying
while begging for the King to change his mind, was in fact only pretending to cry.
The decision hurriedly made by his slight disappointment, in turn, brings Lady
Kim’s scheme of his assassination. On knowing that the king made up his mind,
Lady Kim approaches him and serves him a poisoned beverage. The assassination is
described as spontaneously committed by Lady Kim without the process of planning
it. Further, it happens too easily and conveniently to be believed in that the king is
naïve enough to drink the beverage served by the mother of Prince Kwang-hae.
Crucial decisions and events which cause a death or changes of the fate of royal
characters are made by abruptly triggered feelings. The realization of death or
changes of fate, further, take place too easily and too simply as if everything happens
as it is supposed to. The organization of narrative as such delivers a sense of
absurdness or unlikelihood as well as the feeling of the mysterious absence of the
true cause of the events.
Another significant aspect of the narrative of changes of noble characters’ status
is that they are told and shown too quickly or hurriedly. Events are narrated, but not
described with much information or detail. The narrative progress does not provide
enough time for the viewers to precisely perceive the causality and process of events.
157
The rushed proceeding of events has their specificities skipped and omitted and
the narrative unfolds without much logical connection. For instance, in Lady Chang
Queen Min is deprived of her position of queen merely by King Sukjong’s whimsical
change of temper. Later, Lady Chang is, in turn, deposed and then, executed by the
King, who now acknowledges her evil personality thanks to a series of coincidences.
In this way, historical drama of the period presents a patterned ellipsis of narrative as
its major characteristic.
Another factor in the shaping of the pattern of narrative of historical drama is the
repetition of episodes which hardly function to advance narrative, and, in fact,
exceeds the demand of narrative. The second half of Queen Mother In-mok, for
instance, presents a series of episodes showing the ordeals of the queen mother and
her family, which does not serve more than just to display how much she and her
family suffer. The second half of the film shows the following sequences:

The queen mother’s father, falsely accused of treason, drinks poison
while his wife and sons cry and scream around him.

Prince Kwang-hae drags Prince Yong-ch’ang from the queen mother.

The mother of queen mother is enslaved to a local governor.

Prince Yo^ng-ch’ang is sent to Kanghwa island, shouting “mother” with
the old court maid Yim and his nanny standing and crying behind.

The queen mother cries for her son in her room.

The queen mother is driven out of the palace crying, with a number
of court Maids.

Her mother is humiliated and beaten because of she spills wine over the
158
local governor she serves.

The deposed queen mother and court maid Yim eat rice cake, Prince
Yo^ng-ch’ang’s favorite food, crying for him.

An officer who receives the order to kill Prince Yo^ng-ch’ang arrives at
The island; the prince, who was standing on the beach shouting
“mother,” is murdered.

Even though a series of episodes of the persecution of the queen mother and her
family is needed to justify a coup planned by the opponents of Prince Kwang-hae by
showing unfair sufferings caused by his tyranny, the number of episodes and the
amount of time devoted to them go beyond what is needed. The episodes related to
the queen mother and her son, in particular, recur five times: Prince Yo^ng-ch’ang
being dragged from his mother, the court maid Yim and his nanny seeing him forced
to be sent to the island, the queen mother left in the room crying, the queen mother
and her court maid crying at the memory of his being fond of rice cake, and, finally,
the Prince separated in the island, crying for his mother before his death. The
recurrence of episodes sharing the identical significance makes them superfluous in
terms of narrative progress.
The redundant presence of recurrent, emotionally charged episodes fills the
second half of the film with tears and screams, except for the coup-related portion of
the film. Such redundancy at the level of narrative brings the gratuitously prolonged
and unnecessarily reiterative representation of emotions. I argue that the episodes
related to the suffering of the queen mother and her family serve as pretexts for
bringing up emotional outbursts as often as possible and also for dwelling in them as
159
long as possible. The narrative is organized in such a way that it can pull out the
maximum amount of time and intensity devoted to melodramatic emotions. Ellipses
of narrative, which I mentioned earlier, join the pattern of recurrent episodes in the
production of the maximum display of emotion and feelings. Incomplete causality,
the rushed proceeding of the story, and missed details generated by ellipses of
narrative, as recurrent episodes do, create an exclusive focus on the eruption of
overwhelming pathos, which is redundant in terms of narrative procedure. Recurrent
episodes and ellipses of narrative render scenes of the film the juxtaposition or
montages of intense feelings. Historical drama of the period in general presents this
particular structure of narrative and pathos as a generic code. The structure of
narrative and pathos is the form of the popular perception of history during the ‘60s.

IV-1 Exclusive Highlight on Emotion As a Register of Compressed Modernity
I suggest that the particular melodramatic rendering presented in historical drama
of the period, which brings an exclusive concentration on the representation of
emotion through redundancy and ellipses of narrative, reflects the collective modern
historical experience of South Koreans. Historical traumas to which Korean people
have been subject during modern times possibly had them unable to intellectually
conceive and process events that cause traumas. Not properly equipped with
knowledge of what happened, they registered shocks caused by traumatic events
only at the level of feeling and preserved them in sensory memory. That is, when the
public felt out of control with historical situations, historical reality could be
160
remembered as the bombardment of stimuli and the fragments of sensation of
those stimuli flashed up in the form of intense sentiment. The melodramatic
rendering of historical drama registers those fragments of sensation of historical
memory surfacing in the public mind-set. The melodramatic rendering, therefore,
serves as the form of vernacular perception of modern history of the nation.
Such a perception of history is given rise to by particular political, and socio-
economic determinants which have shaped the modern history of Korea. Since the
modern period began, Korean people had been exposed to a series of traumatic
transformations. After the enforced opening to foreign powers in 1879, for instance,
they experienced the aggressions of a variety of foreign imperial powers and then
their nation was finally annexed by Japan. After the 35-year colonization, the
liberation quickly took place as a byproduct of the allies’ victory in World War II.
The civil war and the permanent division of the nation soon followed the liberation.
After the two different states were established in the North and the South of the
Korean peninsular, South Koreans were subject to radical political changes of the
April revolution and the Military coup. The Park Chung Hee regime, then, launched
the modernization project, pushing South Koreans towards industrialization with an
unprecedented speed and intensity.
Korean early modern history was fraught with a series of tragic experiences
and the industrialization launched in the early ‘60s initiated the 30-year condensed
transformation of national economy and culture, which brought up a social issue of
161

“living three hundred-year of change for thirty years”
140
—meaning
modernization which took three hundred years in the west happened for thirty years.
Such an experience of modernity is aptly termed “compressed modernity.”
141
During
the compressed time, the popular historical memory was embedded with sensory
registers of pain and sadness caused by overwhelmingly traumatic events.
The perception of history as such brought forth a particular style of
representation of history in Korean cinema of the ‘50s and ‘60s. History could be
viewed as changing scenes of one historical event followed by another; rapid
appearance and disappearance of historical events as if space and time are shrunken;
as if people are torn out of the traditional continuum of time and space and keep
being thrust unto a new world. History, thus, became temporally shrunk and
perceptually disorienting, yet intense sentiment-exuding images.
The abrupt and extreme fall of noble characters narrativized in historical drama is
analogous to the lives of Korean people who were thrown into the new world which
appeared and soon disappeared. The missing details and incomplete causality of
narrative of the fall are symptomatic of the loss of a conceptual processing caused by
the sudden up-rooting of a traditional way of life. Maximized exhibition of emotion
in historical drama corresponds to their emotional response to the traumatic nature of
the uprooting which was epitomized as a loss: the loss of the nation by the

140
Chin-kyo^ng Yi, O^ttoke sambaegnyo^nu^l samshimnyo^ne san sarami chagigasin ilsu issu^lkka?
[How Could Man Be Himself Who Has Lived Three Hundred Years for Thrity Years?] (Seoul:
Tangdae, 1996).
141
For the discussion of compressed modernity see Kyong-sup Chang, “Compressed Modernity and
Its Discontent: South Korean Society in Transition,” Economy and Society 1999, 28 (1), pp. 30-35,
and Hae-joang Cho, “You Are Entrapped in an Imaginary Well”: the Formation of Subjectivity within
Compressed Development—A Feminist Critique of Modernity and Korean Culture” Inter-Asia
Cultural Studies 2000, I (I). pp. 46-49.
162
occupation by the Japanese and the loss of national unity by the Korean war in
particular. Through the exhibition of emotions, the historical drama re-presents the
historical trauma of Korean modernity experienced in the shrunken and broken
continuum of time.

IV-2 Re-Compression of Historical Experience and Need for Decompression
The representation of compressed modernity in historical drama speaks to
nationalist discourse and rhetoric imposed by the state as well as to the popular
historical experience. Nationalist discourse employed melodramatic rhetoric in order
to configure members of the nation as helplessly suffering subjects and to justify the
claim that they needed a strong and masculine leadership to rescue them from the
ruins of the tragedy of past history. Because melodramatic affects exploited in
nationalist discourse were solely intended to impose the overruling logic of a
complete departure from the dark and failed past and march forward toward the
future, people were not allowed to revisit and grieve over the past in different ways
than permitted by the state for its agendas. For its agendas the regime made a
selective use of sentiment; sentiment was permitted to be manifested only in order to
arouses the sense of a victimhood of the people, thus to acknowledge the need for a
new regime. Except for this purpose, sentiment should be forbidden so as to
subjugate people to the absolute supremacy of the proposition of modernization.
163

The historical past was, therefore, required to be eliminated from the public
mind-set and the sensory memory of lived history to be thrown away.
142
The
historical past is abstracted into pure negativity; and the present has the single raison
d’etre of making a decision to move to the future. The temporality constructed by
such a logic presses the lived experience of history into a linear structure. The linear
structuring of time is based on a particular conceptualization of time: the past
crystallized into one-dimensional, negative speculation; the empty present existing
only for the future, and the dreamt, but never reached future. Thus, time is once
again, abstracted and contracted into a void and consequently compressed modernity
is once again compressed—it is re-compressed.
The double contracting of time—the first time by the experience of historical
events itself and the second time by the historiography imposed by the state--then,
shows that not only is historical reality compressed but the historicization of reality
is compressed. Since the second compression represses the way the Korean people
lived and remember history by the logic of modernization, the overindulgence in
emotion represented in the historical drama serves as a vehicle to resist that
compression. The recurrent and maximized presence of emotion in historical drama,
then, is the form mobilized to dissolve the emotion repressed by the state. That is, the

142
The image of the Park regime which enforced the termination of the past seems to be similar to
that of kings in historical drama, who without much support of causality and narrative justification all
of sudden appear and announce the deposition and re-position of noble characters. In Lady Chang, for
instance, Queen Chang King Sukjong, triggered by his temperature and blinded by his gullibility,
proclaims the deposition of Queen Min and then the deposition of Queen Chang, in turn, and finally
Queen Chang’s execution. The scene of proclamation repeated in the film compensates for the lack of
plausibility of the events by showing the authority of the status of king. The place of a square where
major decisions for the kingdom are pronounced and royal events like a royal wedding, coronation
ceremony, etc. take place creates the aura of his power.
164
presence of emotion in such a way is a cinematic language that represents the
return of the repressed. Vis-à-vis the presence affective reactions to historical
traumas preserved and suppressed in popular memory can be rendered visible and
the time emptied and pressed into the linear structure is redeemed. In this way the
pattern of display of emotion in historical drama de-compresses the compressed
historiography and temporality of Korean modernity imposed by the dominant
discourse.

IV-3 Emotion and Mourning
The display of emotion in a particular pattern in historical drama is, as explained
above, a form of de-compressing the repressed pathos brought forth by a series of
historical traumas: the loss of the national sovereignty by colonization, the loss of
national unity by the Korean War, and the division of the nation, and the loss of the
traditional way of life by “compressed modernity.” The modern history of Korea has
been imbued with fundamental losses. The fundamental losses are linked to a
corporeal and metaphoric loss of the mother. The war brought forth the actual
separation of mothers and children and the colonization and the war are signified as
tragedies that happened to the “motherland.” The maternal trope of the loss of the
most significant and cherished object is theorized by psychoanalysis. The most
critical part of the constitution of a subject, according to psychoanalytic theory, is the
displacement of the dyadic relationship of the child and the mother to the triangular
one including the presence of the father. This displacement accompanies an
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inevitable loss of the child’s union with his/her mother and, as a substitution of
the loss, his/her acquisition of language, an embodiment of the Law of the Father.
The fact that the predominant issues surrounding the fall of noble characters in
historical drama concern the maternal demonstrates such a link between national
historical trauma and mother at the representational level. The significant dimension
of the link lies in the fact that the emotional moments of the drama are devoted to
crying over traumas related to the maternal, that is, to the process of bereavement of
the maternal loss. The metaphoric tie of national and maternal trauma presented in
historical drama is, then, extended to the metaphor of the mourning of loss. The
mourners prevalent in historical drama well exemplify such a tie. Prime victims of
historical drama, as demonstrated in the analysis of Queen Mother In-mok, are
primarily represented as mothers and children crying for the enforced breaking of
their union. Stories of unfortunate kings, one of the most popular subject matters of
the genre, involve their troubled relationships with their mothers as well. The
tyrannical Prince Yo^n-san, for example, suffers from the secret surrounding his
biological mother, deposed Queen Yun. He finds that she was executed after he was
born and he grew up taking the new queen as his natural mother. His tyranny begins
with his discovery of the secret and is initiated by his wish of retaliation of those
involved in his mother’s death. He is portrayed in an ambiguous way both as a
despotic king and poor son who cannot stop mourning for his mother. Sad Story of
King Tanjong (Tanjong aesa, Yi Kyu-ung, 1962), which is about the well-known
historical event of the de-throning of King Tanjong by his uncle, Prince Su-yang,
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tells that his dethronement is caused by his inability as a boy king who cannot
cope with his uncle’s vicious manipulation. His innocent but impotent childlikeness,
however, the film suggests, has another cause: the absence of his mother. The scene
where he calls an old court maid with tears before his execution supports the idea
that he is characterized as a child mourner who misses the mother figure.
Kings as male mourners who miss the maternal have in common the inappropriate
quality for the position of King. They are either pampered with their abuse of power
and sexual pleasure like Prince Yo^n-san and Prince Kwang-hae, or haven’t become
mature and strong enough for the position as shown by King Tanjong. Their
inappropriateness, whether their characters are portrayed as evil or good, shows that
theses male mourners have an inherent conflict with the social code attributed to
their positions. They are unable to fit into the social code structured by the
patriarchal order that defines and prescribes “right” places for each individual. Male
mourners, who conflict with the social code imposed by the Law of the Father, then,
indicate images of men who are not able to live up to the Law of the Father,
therefore, those who fail to be constructed as male subjects capable of performing
the Law by the identification with the Father.
Freud’s theory of mourning offers a view on the primordial form of
mourning as an intrinsic part of the constitution of a male subject. In “Mourning and
Melancholia,” he writes that the primordial mourning originates from a child’s
breaking with his pre-oedipal union with his mother through the intervention of the
father. A subject’s separating from the person or thing which was an essential part of
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their being causes him to mourn. However, the crucial process of mourning,
Freud argues, is not merely comprised of the subject’s absorption in the lost object.
It, rather, consists of the procedure of working over a traumatic experience so that he
can gradually overcome it. The process of mourning, thus, has two facets: the
subject’s hypercathecting the lost object and simultaneously detaching himself from
the object. These two facets are repeated during mourning, through which he can
withdraw his libido bit by bit from the object. The final withdrawal is enabled by the
displacement of the lost object by a set of signs. In other words, instead of having the
lost object the subject comes to have signs of it. By doing so he accepts the loss and
at the same time refuses to accept it: He says, “Yes, I know I have lost the object”
and “No, I have not lost it because I have found it in signs”—what Freud terms
negation. Such a symbolic displacement that emerges vis-à-vis the negation
completes mourning, and the subject gains the mastery of the overwhelming
experience of loss.
The completion of mourning is, therefore, perceived as inherently linked to the
constitution of a male subject who renounces the pre-Oedipal maternal union and
speaks the paternal language.
143
The male mourners of the historical drama, then,
haven’t yet resolved the Oedipal crisis, and remain under the shadow of the maternal

143
Julia Kristeva also explains that the process of mourning and the negation is crucial in the
emergence of language during the Oedipal period. Through accepting the maternal loss and
substituting it by language, the paternal symbolic, a male child acquires language and resolves the
Oedipal crisis. The infantile mourning for the maternal loss, the negation, and the acquisition of
language are critical and interrelated process of the Oedipal stage. See “Life and Death of Speech” in
Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1989). The completion of mourning by the symbolic displacement is also discussed in detail in
Julia Reinhard Lupton and Kenneth Reinhard’s After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis
(Cornell University Press, 1993).
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realm instead of entering the paternal symbolic. The “feminine” features shared
by the images of male mourners such as crying, whining, sudden changes of mood—
tyrannical male mourners, in particular, laugh or get angry and all of sudden burst
into tears—demonstrate their not-yet-overcome maternal influence.
144
Their conflict
with social code, it can be explained, comes from their failure to accept the paternal
symbolic, and the constant thematic of the historical drama, the negative male
characters unable to abide by royal behavioral code, is the manifestation of the failed
male subject.
Such a perspective on male mourners, however, brings up more questions instead
of solving the issues raised by the representational pattern of mourning in the
historical drama. Although the image of violent mournful kings is one of the most
visible components of the genre, the images which dominate the genre are not those
of tear-shedding men but those of victimized women who invoke the flood of tears.
Another issue at stake is that there exists a gendered moral judgment underlying
crying men and women: crying men are portrayed as falling short of maleness, but
crying women are represented as good and innocent. This pattern, it seems, suggests

144
So-yong Kim relevantly points out that Prince Yo^n-san is a maternal melodrama (samou^i
melodrama). She also argues that the film is the story of a male child who fails to reproduce the order
of the Father and prince Yo^n-san’s hysterical madness is caused by the failure, which is in line with
my point of view. Different form her claim, yet, that his hysteria is characteristic of pre-modern
masculinity represented from the perspective of modernity, his characterization shadowed by the
dominance of his mother, as I discuss later in the chapter, takes the form of mourning and is a way of
re-appropriation of the pre-modern by the Korean male subject. Therefore, it is not represented from
the perspective of modernity but from the perspective of him who re-claims the pre-modern taken by
the logic of modernization. See her Kundaeso^ngui yuryo^ngdu^l: pantastic hanguk yo^nghwa
(Phantoms of Modernity: Korean Fantastic Films, (Seoul: Ssiatsu^l Ppurinu^n Sarandu^l, 2000), pp.
129-137. For another reading of his character as a male child unable to reproduce the order of the
Father, see Jai-ran Byun’s “1950-yo^ndae hanguk yo^nghwau^i chunghungkirul ilgu^onaen
yo^nghwa angwa paku^i pyo^nhwa [Changes on the Inside and Outside of Cinema that Created the
Golden Age of Korean Cinema of 1950’s],” in Encyclopedia of Women in Film Industry, p. 25.
169

that there is a certain determinant promoting the predominant cinematic
production of crying female victims. The issue concerns the ideological demand of
the Park regime that in order to foreground the masculine power of the regime it
needed to construct the image of people helplessly suffering from the historical
fallacy, and enthusiastically welcoming a male hero to rescue them. The plethora of
images of crying women is required to some degree by such an ideological demand
of the state.
However, since the South Korean male was to be constructed as a “industrial
warrior” (sano^p yo^kkun) who marches forward toward modernization, or forward
to the future, the Korean female is assigned a split subjectivity: an industrial warrior
participating in the national modernization and at the same time a mourner who
laments the traumatic loss of the past. In this way, the mission of mourning is
displaced onto the Korean female, and the image of mourning women that floods the
historical drama, in part, is the effect of the gender politics subject to the dominant
discourse of the state at the period.
145

V Mourning and Excess
So far I have discussed conflicted layers of meanings registered in the image of
mourning women in historical drama. On the one hand, the image reproduces the

145
The generic component of evil female characters functions as another displacement of the genre.
Tyrannical male mourners are without exception presented along with evil female characters. As
shown in the case of Nok-su Chang, a royal concubine of Prince Yo^n-san the male mourner, Prince
Yo^n-san, is blinded and manipulated by the female evil character, Chang. It suggests that the blame
for wrongdoings enacted by the male mourner is displaced onto the female. On the one hand, the
presence of female evil lessens the weight of guilt supposed to be attributed to the tyrant kings; on the
other, it embodies the historical view of the regime that represents the Choso^n Dynasty as the
feminine diabolic.
170
gender configuration intended by the state in order to enact the contradictory
request of effeminization of people and limited masculinization of male subjects for
the purpose of mobilization. On the other it represents the return of the repressed, the
mourning of historical trauma oppressed by the state. Therefore, even though the
images of mourning women mirror the gender politics of the state, they do not
merely reinforce the message of the state. Rather the melodramatic instances
embodied through mourning women offer moments of excess not contained by the
nationalist discursive and affective frame dictated by the state.

V-1 Mourning for the Maternal and Excess
The most intensive imaging of mourning women takes place at the moment of
mother-child separation. Queen Mother In-mok provides three different variations of
the mother-son relationship: the queen mother and her son, Yo^ng-ch’ang, the queen
mother’s maid and her son and a concubine of Prince Kwang-hae and her son. All
three relationships are tragic and mothers and their sons are all victimized by Prince
Kwang-hae’s abusive use of power. As mentioned earlier, Yong-ch’ang is killed by
Prince Kwang-hae; the son of the maid, who secretly takes care of the son of a
member of the queen mother’s family, is murdered by mistake by assassins sent by
Prince Kwang-hae. The concubine is forced to separate from her son because Prince
Kwang-hae wants to take her as his concubine. When her son sneaks into the palace
and happens to meet his mother taking a walk with the prince, she denies her being
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the child’s mother, afraid of the prince’s anger,. The child ends up being taken
away by soldiers, crying and shouting, “Mom, mom!!”
The three different instances all offer the typically melodramatic rendering of
emotion. The separation of Prince Yo^ng-ch’ang from his mother, as previously
analyzed, are repeated in the many separates sequences which all consist of long
shots of crying, screaming, and collapses: being dragged by soldiers from his mother
at the palace, being forced to get on a boat with his nanny and old court maid Yim
and, as a result, standing and bursting into tears, shouting “mother, mother” on the
beach of the island he exiled to, etc. The episode of the maid’s son being killed
includes another typically sentimental instance that the maid and her husband set up
their son to be killed instead of the son of the queen mother’s family because of their
loyalty to the family. Lastly, the concubine and her son also have the moment of
exploding emotions such as the sequence of the crying child trying to hold her
mother’s clothes or the sequence of the mother crying alone after her son is dragged
away.
The repetitive presentation of events identical in meaning, as illustrated by
the above scenes, does not serve the development of narrative. The single scene
necessary for the unfolding of the narrative is that of Queen Mother In-mok being
separated from her son. The rest of the two episodes, which are similar to the proto-
scene of the separation of the queen mother and her son, but not directly related to it,
are placed, not for the sake of narrative causality but for the heightening of the sense
of pain afflicted by the two. The son of a member of the queen mother’s family, for
172
whom the maid sacrifices her own son, is hardly even identified. He is just
another son of the family and his danger merely retells disastrous outcomes of the
queen mother’s fall. The episode with the concubine and her son is redundant at the
level of narrative as well. This episode, inserted before the scene of the queen mother
and her royal maid eating rice cake and reminisce about the exiled child prince, is
not directly connected to the queen mother’s story either. It is placed there to add
more tears to the tragedy of the queen mother. The two episodes play out emotional
and thematic copies of the proto-scene, reiterating and expanding the proto-scene not
in light of its narrative but its emotional effect. Therefore, they are put together to
serve the goal of maximum sentimentalization.
Maximum sentimentalization, unbound by the narrative causality, operates
against the narrative economy of the film. The effect of maximum
sentimentalization, which erodes the narrative economy of the film, more
importantly, creates ruptures in the narrative of nationalism as well. Discourse of
modernization as the core of nationalism disseminated by the state during the ‘60s,
as previously argued, mobilizes the temporal construction which configures the past
as the origin of national tragedy, thus as that which ought to be absolutely negated.
The past is, except for the selective use by the regime for the articulation of the very
negativity, the time which South Koreans should never revisit. That is, the past is the
time to be purged out of the consciousness of South Koreans.
While the past is the time, according to the logic of nationalist discourse,
when South Koreans should depart as soon as possible and as completely as possible,
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in historical drama the past is invoked as long as possible through repeated
mourning of the female characters of drama. Mourning women in historical drama
brings back traumatic experiences of the historical past and allows drama to dwell in
the grievance over it for the maximum amount of time. They are the delegates for the
forbidden ritual of remembering and re-living the collective loss of the past,
mourning the past. The past, which was constructed as the object to be depreciated
and forgotten, thus, is revisited for a prolonged time by the delegates. The delegates,
then, are mobilized in order to overturn the historical lesson imposed by the state and
to reclaim the collective desire to re-appropriate the past.
The recurring moments of maternal mourning not only expand the time of
dwelling in the past but also disrupt the linear temporal move to the future dictated
by nationalism. Strong sentiments coming from the event of In-mok’s separation
from her son, for instance, are scattered here and there in the film, dissecting with
irregularity the narrative progress towards the film’s ending. The span of cinematic
time assigned to the film’s ending, where the chaos is resolved by the rise of new
masculine leadership, is minimized. The minimization also cuts down the allegorical
meaning of the ending-- the Park regime’s self-justification and promise for the
future. In this way the offshoots of the time of the past, ramified from the pathos of
mourning, interrupt the move of narrative toward the future. The maximization of the
past along with the minimization of future bits of the mournful pathos break down
the temporal structure of discourse of modernization project. The past compressed by
174

the temporal structure is reclaimed and the force of compression imposed by the
temporal structure is significantly undercut.
146

V-2 The Mourning of the Romantic and Excess
Melodramatic sentiment that collides with nationalist discourse manifests in
historical drama in another form than the mourning of the maternal. The form of a
forbidden romance
147
provides as much momentum for an intense absorption into
feeling as the mourning of the maternal does. While the mourning of the maternal
offers loci that takes back the historical past so that it can be reminisced and
recollected, disrupting the nationalist narrative of modernization, the mourning of the
romantic brings to the surface female sexuality repressed by nationalism and the
gender order imposed by it. Romantic relationships in the Choso^n court drama of
the 1960s are portrayed predominantly as the embodiment of an evil woman’s
manipulation who dreams of the upward mobility of her status by giving birth to a
son of the king as shown in Lady Chang. A few instances of romantic relationships
found in the Choso^n court drama of the 60s also share the of representation of
romantic relationships as lacking legitimacy, that is, as opposed to endorsed social

146
Another significant reversal of the logic is presented by the sado-masochistic exhibition of
violence and sexual play performed by evil characters of historical drama. Spectacularized “perverse”
pleasure, which dominant historiography presents as the index of the failure of the past by, implies a
subversion of dominant historiography. The index of failure is altered into pleasure, thus it inverts and
exceeds the official historiography.
147
That the romantic relationship is rarely found in historical drama is, in fact, characteristic of
historical drama of the 1960s. In his article “1950-yo^ndae sagu^kgwa kuago^ chaehyo^nu^i u^imi
(Historical Drama of the 1950s and Meaning of Representation of the Past) Yi Ho-gol states that
historical drama of the 1950s was predominantly concerned with the destined romantic relationship,
which is a major difference from historical drama of the 1960’s. See Kim So-yon et al., 50nyo^ndaeui
hanguk yo^nghwa: maehokgwa hondonu^i sidae (Korean Cinema of the 1950’s: the Age of Attraction
and Confusion ), (Seoul: Sodo, 2003).
175
code. In a similar pattern as the conflict represented in the Choso^n court drama
between an evil concubine’s personal ambition and the royal behavioral code,
romantic feeling is placed in opposition to the public realm. Sino-Japanese War and
Heroin, Queen Min (Ch’o^ng-il cho^njaenggwa yo^go^l minbi, Im Wo^n-sik, 1965,
Queen Min hereafter), Queen Min is set in the tumultuous period of the late Choso^n
Dynasty. Queen Min, betrothed to a noble man named Chung-ku Cho, is forced to
marry child emperor, Kojong. During her marriage, she emerges as a leading
political figure, eclipsing the power of Regent Hu^ngso^n, the father of the emperor
who has dominated his son. The film plays out the conflict between Regent
Hu^ngso^n and Queen Min set in complex international politics at the time. Queen
Min, who believes that westernization is the only way to save the nation, calls for
support at first from Japan against Regent Hun^gso^n, who is backed by the Chinese
Qing Dynasty, Queen Min realizes the Japanese’ imperial ambition, turns to other
international powers like Russia. She is finally murdered by Japanese soldiers.
That which adds another, more significant layer of tension to the narrative of
the film is an inner conflict of the Queen herself torn between personal desire and
public agenda. Her personal desire tied to romantic feelings is rendered a major
obstacle to the public agenda she is supposed to enact. After her marriage, she still
harbors secret passion toward her former fiancé, Chung-ku Cho and then, after his
death develops feelings for Sun-ku Cho, the brother of Chung-ku Cho. The narrative
draws a trajectory of her turning from a lonely queen to a powerful political figure
and in the process the passion she harbors is repressed. The sequence of her dream,
176

where she tries in vain to cross the river between her and Sun-ku, saying “If I
take off this royal gown and swim across the river, would you take me?” epitomizes
the polarity of two realms.
148

The polarity of “personal feeling” (“sasarou^n cho^ngli”) and duty as the
“mother of nation” (“kukmou^i tori”) and the demand to sacrifice the former for the
latter is allegorical of the gender politics of the state. The Park regime, which
constructed the subjectivity of South Korean women as industrial warriors and at the
same time mothers who bear industrial warriors for the nation, represented female
sexuality not bound by such gender order as dangerous and degenerating. The female
sexuality of South Korean women was to be repressed and disciplined in order to
produce the identity that fit the nationalist agenda of the state.
Queen Min’s romantic feeling toward the brothers manifests how her female
sexuality conflicts with nationalist discourse. Her romance, as mentioned earlier, is
the component in binary opposition to nationalism and the gender order imposed by
nationalism of the period. Her feeling is a hurdle she has to get over in order to
become a powerful political figure. The deaths of the two brothers provide
momentum that pushes her into higher public position. For instance, the first death is
related to her marriage to the emperor, and confirms the fact that she irreversibly
enters the public realm, the position of the mother of the nation. The second death

148
Kil-so^ng Yi also argues in his analysis of costume and mise-en-scene of the film that queen Min’s
failure to take off her clothes in the dream sequence suggests that she has taken the path to the
political realm irreversibly and that her transfiguration into a political leader is made possible at the
expense of her femininity. See his article “Ch’o^il cho^njaenggwa yo^go^l minbi [Sino-Japanese War
and Heroin Queen Min],” in Su-ha Ch’a et al., Kundaeui Pungkyong (Landscape of Modernity:
History of Korean Cinema ) (Seoul: Sodo, 2001)
177
also contributes to the confirmation of her character as a charismatic political
leader in that the death eliminates the possibility of their romantic union and enables
her to die a death caused by the national enemy. Such a death elevates the
significance of her death into a national tragedy since she is not simply a heroine of
romance who is rescued by her lover and then sacrifices herself for her lover’s life.
She, thus, becomes a woman who deserves the name of the mother of the nation. The
last scene of the film where her dead body is burned heightens the heroic sense of
her death. The spectacle of burning fire visualizes the significance of her death as a
passionate political leader who struggled to save her nation. The second death is
employed in order to reaffirm that the Queen’s identity is suited to the demand on
female sexuality securely restricted to code of the public realm.
However, she is not neatly integrated into the female image constructed
and idealized by nationalism. The quintessentially melodramatic sentiments
delivered by her romantic feeling and its termination through her lovers’ death offer
the possibility to exceed the gender construction by nationalism. The older brother
Chung-wo^n Cho is executed in the early stage of the film, which is quite
unexpected since the character is played by one of the biggest South Korean male
stars of the time, Chin-kyu Kim . The way in which he is executed is also surprising
due to the exaggerated cruelty and melodramatic pathos produced by the event.
Similar to the ellipsis of narrative in the representation of the fall of royal characters
in historical drama, the event of his execution is made hurriedly and abruptly. The
scene of Cho being killed by soldiers who have been sent by regent Hu^ngso^n,
178
parallels the parade of Queen Min entering the palace for wedding. The
dramatization of the sadness and anger brought forth by the enforced separation of
two lovers and tragic death offers the most explicit instance of the melodramatic
sentiment in the film.
Another case of the similar melodramatic moments in turn happens in the scene
of death of Cho’s younger brother. His death takes place in as unlikely a manner as
his older brother’s death, which makes it too perfectly melodramatic as in the case of
the latter. The brother, who was released from the death penalty and sent to Japan by
Queen Min, comes back to the palace in order to rescue her from the Japanese
troop’s attack. But he is shot by a bullet misfired by her. After accidentally shooting
him, she escapes from the palace with injured Cho, but he finally dies and then she is
murdered by Japanese swordsmen as well. This too precisely melodramatic action
done by “none other than the one who is the most unlikely to do that” expands the
pathos produced by the incident.
The residual of her romance, forbidden and interrupted by her lovers death, is
intensified and magnified through the pattern of repetition which organizes the
narrative of romance and death: a forbidden romance, the unlikely death of her
lovers, and the most stereotypical melodramatic effects. This pattern takes the
narrative of romance and death onto the apogee of melodramatic sentiment. This
melodramatic sentiment on apogee for the dead translates into the maximum
intensity of mourning for the dead as well as for her ceased romance. Melodramatic
sentiment, thus serves to present and preserve her romance, resistant to the
179
prohibition of female sexuality and unbound by the gender order dictated by
nationalism. The remnant of her repressed sexuality is returned through the
lamentation over her unrealized romance. Therefore, melodramatic sentiment carried
by the lamentation brings sites of excess where nationalism cannot totally contain
female sexuality. Melodramatic sentiment, then, enacts the subversion of the
nationalist gender order and makes visible the presence of female sexuality not
endorsed by nationalism.

VI Conclusion
South Korean historical drama of the ‘60s was engaged in a double operation in
relation to nationalist discourse generated by the state. On the one hand, historical
drama reproduced the hegemonic discourse of modernization-driven nationalism and
the gender formation constituted by nationalism primarily through the utilization of
melodramatic mode. Melodramatic mode used in historical drama corresponded to
nationalism and the gender formation through the gendered portrayal of the past
history as evil femininity, which disseminated the effeminized and victimized images
of South Koreans. The functions of the melodramatic mode employed in historical
drama, however, were not limited to the reproduction of hegemonic discourse. They,
rather, served create sites which exceeded hegemonic discourse. The narrative
structure of historical drama that enabled the maximization of melodramatic
sentiments performs the symbolic revisiting of the past history. The revisiting of past
history is enacted by the mourning of the maternal, which is the trope of the
180
mourning of the loss caused by traumatic historical experiences. The repetitive
display of melodramatic sentiment caused by mourning serves to break down the
narrative of nationalist discourse and its temporal frame and to reassert the collective
desire to lament over the loss in the past. Through another form of mourning, the
mourning of the romantic, melodramatic sentiment also operates to bring the
presence of female sexuality suppressed by the gender order imposed by nationalist
discourse. The melodramatic mode of South Korean historical drama of the ‘60s,
thereby, registers the reproduction of state-produced hegemonic discourse and at the
same time the subversion of hegemonic discourse. Vis-à-vis such a double
functioning the melodramatic mode carried out negotiations with hegemonic
discourse of ‘60s South Korea, giving rise to the loci where identities outside the
terrain of the national and gender identity constructed by hegemonic discourse were
represented.

181

Chapter 4 Realism, Modernism, and Melodrama
Realism has been the criterion by which Korean films have been classified and
designated as the authentic cinema of the nation. Different types and different
connotations of realism have been put into use in South Korean film discourse, yet
realism has always been the signifier which indexes the authenticity of South Korean
national cinema. From the late ‘50s to early ‘60s the concept of “Korean realism”
was explored and defined as the “true” representation of the reality of the nation with
a “spirit of resistance.”
149
During the period, the canonization of particular films on
the basis of the concept of Korean realism began as well.
150
The concept became the
core foundation on which the genealogy of South Korean national cinema was
constructed, where Arirang, Ferry without a Ferry Man (Imja o^mnu^n narutbae, Yi
Kyu-Hwan, 1932), Viva Freedom, Pia Valley, The Stray Bullet, etc. have been listed
as primary texts
From the mid ‘60s, modernism emerged as a new film style in South Korea. In
western film history cinematic modernism has been related to the “shock of the new”
through the “experimentation” and “innovation” of film language.
151
In Film History
: An Introduction, Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell explain that cinematic
modernism in the west formed the historical lineage from the ‘20’s European avant-
garde movements like French Impressionism, German Expressionism, and Soviet

149
Tu-yon Yu, “Korean rio^lisu^m tansang (A Thought on Korean Realism), Cinema World
(Yo^nghwa segye), February 1957, p. 40.
150
For the historical process of filmic discourse which established a particular meaning of realism as
an index of Korean national cinema see Kim So-yon, “Cho^nhu hanguk yonghwa tanronesoui
liolisumui umie kwanhayo [ On the meaning of Realism in filmic discourse of postwar Korea], “ in
Korean Cinema of the 50s: Age of Attraction and Chaos.
151
Kristin Thompson, David Bordwell, Film History : AnIintroduction, 2
nd
edition, (McGraw-Hill,
2003), p. 357
182

montage to postwar European film movements.
152
In the historical lineage,
modernism is not a negator or the opposite of realism as it is in Jameson’s
theorization. According to Jameson’s periodization modernism emerges negating
realism, responding to a different stage of capitalism, imperialist capitalism that
displaced the classic, industrial capitalism from which realism was born out of.
153

Postwar modernist filmmakers, according to Thompson and Bordwell, shared a drive
for two different kinds of realism, “objective” and “subjective.”
154
Whether they
were driven to the representation of external reality (objective) or of an internal
world (subjective), they had the commonality of [seeking] to be truer to life than they
considered most classical filmmakers had been….”
155
In Thompson and Bordwell’s
terms, postwar European cinematic modernism was the aesthetics which attempted to
see “truer” reality through the creation of film styles distinguished from those of
“most classical filmmakers,” thus through an awareness of film language. Italian
Neo-realism was the most apparent example of objective realism
156
with a particular
awareness of film language and was, therefore, one of the key modernist film
movements in the postwar period.
In South Korean film discourse the relation between realism and modernism
has not been clearly defined in such a way that the former is the predecessor of, or
the opposite to the latter. As a film term, realism tended to loosely refer to films that

152
Thompson and Bordwell, p. 357
153
Fredric Jameson, “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism Verso, 1991.
154
Ibid., pp. 357-358
155
Ibid., p. 357
156
Ibid., p. 357
183

represented the harsh reality of the nation, without a stylistic association. The
emergence of Arirang was, for example, designated as the genesis of realism in
Korean cinema even though its style seemed an emotion-provoking one as
aforementioned reviews on the film and its labeling as “national romanticism”
suggest.
157
Or another much acclaimed Korean national realist film, Viva Freedom,
has the combined properties of an action thriller and a shinpa style, yet, because of it
narrative on anti-colonial resistance, it has been named as a successor of realism in
Korean cinema achieved by Arirang. Pia Valley and The Stray Bullet, which will be
discussed in detail later, were the first South Korean films that were defined as realist
films with a specific stylistic association with Italian Neo-realism. Yet, in South
Korean film discourse realism has been used to indicate films with strong social
criticism rather than films with a particular style. Films of Korean New Wave
directors, Park Kwang-su and Chang Sun-woo in particular that appeared in the late
80s, for instance, were categorized as realist films mainly because of their socially
engaging thematics rather than their stylistics.
A body of South Korean modernist films that appeared in the mid-‘60s drew
attention primarily for their foregrounded visual styles. Compared to South Korean
realist films made up to that time, modernist films rendered the reality of the nation
in more abstract terms and instead, focused more on an individual’s anguish and
distress. In Mist, for instance, a narcissistic male bourgeois’ ambivalence towards
integration into modernized society forms the central narrative. Or Way Back Home
(Ku^iro, Yi Man-hu^i, 1967) revolves around a female subject who is alienated in

157
See the first chapter of the dissertation, pp.21-22.
184

modernized Seoul, afflicted with her dilemma between marriage and desire for
love South Korean modernist filmmakers, named “visualists,” consciously used
particular film language such as montage, long takes, wide angles, and especially
Michelangelo Antonioni’s style using an external image as an objective correlative
of an internal landscape. This awareness of film language was perceived as the index
of modernist film style in the South Korean film discourse of the period.
158

Modernism in South Korean cinema of the ‘60s lasted only a few years, and the
integration of modernist film styles into the body of national cinema has been
incomplete and inconsistent. Yet, film discourse of the period demonstrates the
presence of attempts to position those films as authentic cinema.
Both realism and modernism in South Korean cinema of the ‘50s and ‘60s were
shaped through hybridization with transnational cinematic modes, Italian Neo-
realism in particular. South Korean film discourse of the periods consistently
promoted Italian neo-realism as a cinematic model to follow. Vittorio DeSica’s The
Bicycle Thief and Roberto Rosellini’s Open City in particular were continually
referenced as examples of the embodiment of a “spirit to confront reality,” which
South Korean realism needed to aim for.
159
Films established as masterpieces of
Korean cinema at the time such as Pia Valley and The Stray Bullet were appreciated

158
The relation between realism and modernism in the South Korean cinema of the period was, yet,
still obscure and the boundary of the two was often blurred. The Stray Bullet, for instance, has been
established as the prime text of national realism, but, due to the visible awareness of film language
presented in the film, it is also categorized as a modernist film. See Hyo-in Yi, M.A. dissertation,
Hanguk yo^nghwau^i kundaeso^ng yo^ngu so^so^l [A Study on Modernity of Korean Cinema],
Kyongsong University, 1996.
159
Yo^nghwa segye [Cinema World], February 1957, “Korian dae Italianisum [Korean VS.
Italianism],” which includes Tu-yon Yu, “Korian lialisum tansang [A Thought on Korean Realism],”
Paek-nyon Ho^’, “Hanguk Yonghwawa Itaeri yonghwa [Korean Cinema and Italian Cinema],”and
Yong-pin Hwang, “Italiansiame kwanhayo [On Italianism].”
185
for their successful creation of Korean realism inspired by Italian Neo-realism.
Modernist films, in turn, began to adapt the late stage of Italian Neo-realism
represented by Michelangelo Antonioni’s films. Filmmakers like Kim Su-yong and
Yi Man-hui for instance, were acclaimed as the creators of image-centered cinema
which delivered the Antonianian modern atmosphere.
Whereas Italian Neo-realism was a clearly visible transnational component that
shaped South Korean cinematic realism and modernism, there existed another
significant, yet invisible layer underlying the formation of them. The convention of
shinpa was played out as the inferior opposite to the realism and modernism of South
Korean cinema. The binary oppositions that structured the relation between national
culture and shinpa during the colonial period and modern melodrama and shinpa in
the postwar period were replayed with different modalities of national realism and
modernism in cinema.
In this chapter I explore how realism and modernism were discussed in South
Korean film discourse of the ‘50s and ‘60s and how the convention of shinpa was
positioned in the discourse. I address the ways in which film discourse posited the
convention of shinpa in order to legitimize realist and modernist modes of film and
the role which the privileged signifier of Italian neo-realism played in the
legitimization. Pia Valley, The Stray Bullet and Mist will be analyzed to exemplify
the relationships among South Korean cinematic realism/ modernism, shinpa, and
Italian neo-realism of the period. I especially provide a detailed analysis of Mist and
demonstrate that the identity of a South Korean male modernist of the ‘60s was
186

constructed through male narcissism, which was enabled through the repression
and displacement of shinpaesque femininity of South Korean women onto an ideal
male image.

I Italian Neo-Realism and South Korean Cinema (from the mid-‘50s to early
‘60s)
South Korean film critic, Kim So-yo^n claims that realism is an “obsessive
returning point in the history of (South) Korean film discourse.
160
Realism in South
Korean cinema, prior to the burgeoning of blockbusters from the late 90s was, in
fact, employed as an absolute criterion to define film of high quality, or art film
opposed to entertainment film, thus, it was tied to the concept of national cinema in
the sense of cinema representative of the nation. Realism, thus, signified an
indisputable index that secured the “authenticity” of national cinema.
The Korean film magazine, Cinema World (Yo^ nghwa segye) heralded the
position of realism as such in South Korean cinema through the introduction of
Italian neo-realism in the late ‘50s. Cinema World featured various articles under the
theme of “Korean VS. Italianism ( Korian tae Italianisu^m)” in the February issue of
1957.
161
The articles included in the issue, such as Tu-yo^n Yu’s “A Thought on
Korean Realism (K’orian lialisum tansang),” Paek-nyo^n Ho^’s “Korean Cinema
and Italian Cinema (Hanguk yo^nghwawa Itaeri yo^nghwa),” and Yo^ng-pin

160
Kim So-yo^n, 2003, p. 18.
161
Before the feature in Cinema World February, 1957 issue, there were intermittent discussions on
realism and Italian Neo-realism. For example, “New Tendency in Film Style: On Neo-realism
(“Yonghwa Kibopui Singyonghyang: Neo Liolisume Kwanhayo”) was in Choso^n Daily, May 10the,
1954.
187

Hwang’s “On Italianism (Italiansiame kwanhayo^)” all contended that Italian
Neo-Realism would be the right path for South Korean cinema to follow.
Italian neo-realism was adapted and altered in a way that it could speak to the
political, socio-economic, and cultural registers of postwar South Korea. Kim
exemplifies discourses around Pia Valley that the process of the transformation of
Italian neo-realism into anti-communist humanism by film criticism in postwar
South Korea. The film portrays communist guerillas who were still active in South
Korea after the Korean War and combines their battles with a love story of two
guerilla members, Ae-ran and Ch’o^l-su. , Ae-ran and Ch’o^l-su eventually decide to
defect from the North because of their skepticism towards the communists’. But
when the two escape from the guerilla camp, Ch’o^l-su is shot to death. The film
took a unique position among films produced during the postwar period. As
discussed in the previous chapter the prevalent genre of this period was modern
melodrama, which followed the Hollywood style and did not register much of the
nationalist agenda or sentiment. The film makes a case for the relationship among
nationalism, realism and the melodramatic underlying the relationships, which is not
visible in the more popular genre of modern melodrama.
The film was initially censored by the government for the reasons that “the film
was not a particularly anti-communist film” and that “it could not be seen as an anti-
communist film, and could affect national security.”
162
After heated debates over the
anti-communist nature of the film and a few removals and additions of scenes it
finally gained the permit for public screening. The addition of a scene to the end of

162
Dong-Ah Daily, August 26th, 1955
188

the film particularly made a critical contribution to obtaining the permit. The
scene where Ae-ran’s walking on the sand after her lover died overlaps the image of
the South Korean national flag covering the entire scene, which affirms that she
would surrender herself to the South, lifted the ban on the film.
A few years later, around 1957, when neo-realism was being established as the
master code of Korean cinema, Kim argues, South Korean film discourse started to
highlight the film as an exemplary case of the embodiment of (neo) realism. South
Korean film critics promoted the value of the film by emphasizing that it presented
elevated humanism.
163
Humanism in this context signified human nature and desire
which could not fit into communist ideology. According to the critics, “because the
film represented (anti-communist) humanism, it was realistic; and because it was
realistic (it well represented humanism through realistic rendering), it was an (great)
anti-communist film.”
164
In other words, realism was placed at the link between
humanism and anti-communism.
Underlying the censorship of Pia Valley and debates over realism, I argue, there
exists an invisible factor. This invisible factor is a melodramatic component rendered
in the added last scene. The added image of the national flag illuminatingly tells
what was actually at stake in the censorship of the film. The effect of the added last
scene is not limited to the generation of the anti-communist message. Another key
effect of the scene is brought forth by the transference of romantic feeling produced
by the relationship of Ae-ran and Ch’o^l-su onto the feeling of triumphant anti-

163
So-Yo^n Kim p.47
164
Ibid., pp.47-48
189

communist nationalism. Romantic feelings, which are caused by her attraction to
him, their touching decision to surrender together at the risk of death, and the sense
of loss and sadness caused by his death, are all translated into mind-absorbing
nationalist sentiment. What is strengthened by the addition of the national flag is a
transference of a heart-breaking romance onto heart-lifting nationalism. This
transference is another exemplary case of my earlier argument that nationalism,
contradictory to its own claim, derives its emotive energy from the melodramatic.
What satisfied the government was the very presence of the transference as well as
the anti-communist message delivered by the added scene.
165

What is noteworthy is that critical discourses of the mid to late ‘50s attempted to
take the melodramatic representation of anti-communism in the film into the
different context of humanism and realism. In critical discourse, the melodramatic
components were taken as evidence of a humanist touch and then, as a mark of
(neo)realistic achievement.
166
The reviews of the film written at that time
demonstrate a discursive tendency to associate the film with humanism and realism.
For example, film critic, O Yo^ng-chin wrote in his review “A Study on Director, Yi
Kang-ch’o^n: His Works and Humanism (“Kamdok Yi Kan-ch’o^n yo^ngu:
chankpumgwa humaniju^m”)” as follows:

165
The character of Ae-ran is presented as more than a mere stereotype of a melodramatic heroin.
Rather than just sacrificing herself for her beloved man, she herself is portrayed as the subject who
reflects upon the reality of communism and throws skepticism on it. Yet, the transference of romantic
feeling into patriotic sentiment in the film became a prototypical pattern of anti-communist films
made afterwards such as I want to be human, too (Yu Hyo^ng-mok, 1969).
166
Ibid., pp.47-48.
190

…[W]hen a fact is found far away from reality, modern realism just begins
then. . . .Yi Kang-ch’o^n’s Pia Valley and Defeat show morality born out of the
war and humanism….In Pia Valley Ch’o^l-su, an intellectual in charge of the
division of culture of the guerilla troop, forgets his ideological identity due to
the withdrawal of communist military force and Ae-ran, secretary of the guerilla
troop, loves him with a true desire of life [.] [The film] anatomizes their
personalities with an intense touch and gives them a warm hand of elevated
humanity, through which the director also attempts to establish his own morality
….
167

In a similar way a critic named T’ae-chu Song wrote the following:

Rather than the unfolding of events [Pia Valley] attempts to elevate humanity by
the representation of personality of individuals . . . [and] successfully portrays
the mind and behavior of those who are forsaken by communist guerillas in a
documentary style. It portrays the communist guerillas not in an abstract and
superficial way, but in a specific and substantial. . .way, and discloses without
compromise the reality and absurdity of communists [.] [By doing so it] creates
the new types of human beings with a warm touch of humanity. The skeptical
intellectual and the female secretary who feels for him are all rendered that way.
I see that the director produced a new content and form of the bare mind of
human beings revealed under the life and death situation, that is, their last
struggle for life, by the meticulous representation and pursuit of reality.
168

The main point shared by the passages quoted above is that the skeptical intellectual
Ch’o^l-su and Ae-ran, who is in love with him, are the primary indexes of the
“humanist” rendering of the film. This point interestingly re-codes the romantic
relationship of the two as a sign of humanism and by doing so painstakingly labels
the film as a realistic one. The purpose of the re-coding and labeling is without a
doubt to prove to the government that the film is an anti-communist one. That proof
is, here, drawn by the erasure of the presence of melodramatic sentiment in the

167
Yo^nghwa segye [Cinema World], October, 1957, pp. 50.
168
“Kamdok, Yi Kang-ch’on yo^ngu: ingangwa yesul [A Study of Director, Yi Kang-ch’on: Man and
Art],” Ibid., pp. 52-3.
191
romantic relationship, by leaving out a visible link of the film to that particular
generic attribute.
Such a discursive process implies that postwar film discourse attempted to found
the basis of South Korean cinema in a different direction than the state demanded.
Humanism was the term that could possibly justify the difference. Realism, here, was
mobilized as a buttress to legitimize the difference. While nationalism was geared
towards the idea of a totalitarian, anti-communist nation, the postwar film critics
desired to secure the independent and legitimate space of cinema. Even though
nationalist discourse and the discourse of national cinema took different paths
towards the identity of the national, they shared a significant commonality—that
both of them took recourse to the melodramatic. Nationalist discourse interpellated a
female subject in melodramatic terms and constructed her identity as the one who
collectively represented the nation. (Ae-ran as an individual woman in love is
transformed into a remorseful defector wrapped with the national flag of South
Korea.) The discourse of national cinema, on the other, displaced her romance onto
the non-melodramatic signifier of humanism.

II The Stray Bullet, National Realism and Melodrama
Postwar critical discourse on Pia Valley and the ways in which it engaged in
discourse of realism shaped the path for the construction of national cinema in the
‘60s. Just as the key underlying factor in the formation of Pia Valley as part of a
realist canon had been the exclusion of the melodramatic, the construction of
192
national cinema in the ‘60s was continually drawn to the othering of melodrama.
The Stray Bullet has been lauded as the all-time masterpiece of Korean cinema. The
film has been celebrated as the pinnacle of the genealogy of Korean national cinema,
which was rooted from Airang. As the words “masterpiece,” “pinnacle,” “epitome”
of “national cinema ”and “national realism” used in the description of the film
indicate, The Stray Bullet, and discourse on it, became a critical step to consolidate
the link between national cinema and realism, and to establish Yu himself as an
auteur representative of South Korea.
I approach the film in terms of its significance in the construction of critical
discourse about South Korean national cinema and the concept of national realism. I
especially focus on how the process of the construction of national cinema and
realism parallels the process of the exclusion of the mode of melodrama. I
demonstrate that there exists an anxiety over melodrama underlying the “realistic”
style of the film and that the anxiety is reflexive of the anxiety of the South Korean
male on South Korean female body inscribed with historical traumas. In the film the
encounter with the male anxiety of the female body that is inscribed with historical
trauma is avoided by the visual rejection of the body, that is, by not looking at the
body, so that damaged masculinity mirrored in the female body can be is avowed. I
argue that the visual rejection performs the rejection of the melodramatic, which the
body carries and is associated with as well. The rejection of the melodramatic, then,
serves to recuperate the damaged masculinity for the rejection enabled the film to be
193

elevated onto a prestigious neo-realist film as opposed to second rate melodrama
and to be positioned as the master film that represented the nation.

II-1 How Realistic Is the Film That Represent the Pinnacle of Korean Realism?
The Stray Bullet tells the story of a family that has fled from North Korea and now
lives in a shantytown for war refugees. The name of the village -- “Liberation
Village” (Haebangch’on)-- signifies that the people living there have been liberated
from oppressive communist North Korea.
169
Literally afflicted with the division of
nation and also to South Korean’s cold war system-- as is indicated in the names that
call these exiles, sirhyangmin or wo^llammin, the quintessential victims of
communism -- they lead a hopeless life. The eldest son, Ch’o^r-ho, who works in an
accounting office, cannot afford to have his rotten teeth pulled. The younger son,
Yo^ng-ho, a war veteran, is still unemployed two years after the War; he dreams of
“making it big” and ends up a bank robber. Ch’o^r-ho’s wife dies during the
delivery of their second child, and his sister, Myo^ng-suk, becomes a military
prostitute. Against the grim reality of the family’s lives, the bed-ridden, mad
mother’s voice echoes like a curse.
In The Stray Bullet there is a scene in which Ch’o^r-ho discovers Myo^ng-suk
with an American GI. Ch’o^r-ho is riding a bus that stops at a traffic signal. Looking
out the window of the bus, he spots his sister sitting next to an American soldier in a
jeep. Wearing western attire and sunglasses, a sharp and noticeable contrast to the

169
The film’s ironic depiction of this “liberation” suggests that the family’s history and plight mirror
the complexity and ambiguity of post-war South Korean life as a whole.
194

traditional Korean garb she was wearing when she begged Kyo^ng-sik to marry
her, she is ostentatiously flirting with the soldier. Two other men on the bus, also
observing the scene, converse sarcastically about her.
170
Overhearing their dialogue,
Ch’o^r-ho turns around and walks away
The scene is symptomatically marked with historical tragedies and national
troubles, which are manifested through the problematic gender relationship.
171
The
story of Ch’o^r-ho’s family, wo^llammin who fled to the South and are living in the
Liberation Village, lucidly allegorizes Koreans’ collective traumas of the civil war
and the division of the nation. Along with them the image of his sister Myo^ng-suk,
flirting with an American G.I. in the scene above demonstrates another pressing
issue Koreans faced: the condition of a nation neo-colonized by U.S. hegemony
which makes Korean women serve as military prostitutes for the American troops.
Ch’o^r-ho’s encounter with his sister sitting next to the G.I. epitomizes the
masculinity of Korean men compromised and threatened by the distressing historical
situation. It is noteworthy that the troubled masculinity is revealed through a
particular scopic arrangement reflexive of the gender problem. The move of his gaze
at his sister should be especially placed on focus, here. After looking at her on the
bus, he walks away turning his back on her so that he cannot see. In so doing, he also
obstructs the view of other people on the bus and then, he moves down the aisle with

170
“A good business, huh? It doesn’t even need capital.”
“But, can she get married?”
“If she has a problem getting married, she will pass herself off as a college girl
or an office girl. Who knows?”
“I bet she will turn into a virgin, ha ha ha!”
171
For the issue of Korean male’s crisis represented in The Stray Bullet, see my article, “The Stray
Bullet and Masculinity in Crisis,” included in Kathleen McHugh and Nancy Abelmann ed., South
Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre, and Nation (Wayne State University, 2005).
195

the camera following him, depriving the film’s audience of their view of her. In
this way, Ch’o^r-ho blocks the entire traffic of looking in this scene that mediates the
female body. By interfering with the circulation of gazes, he manages not to see and
not to let his sister be seen. Here, he is not the subject who exerts the privilege
of looking. Rather, he strives to avoid the gaze.
172
Denied the enactment of scopic power, his act of turning away negates the
presence of her scandalous body. By pretending not to see her, the object to be
looked at, he forsakes himself as the “bearer of the look,” profoundly different from
Laura Mulvey’s canonical theory of the gaze
173
He forsakes himself as the subject
of the look because the look brings with it the painful encounter with the reality that
he is a helpless colonized man who can do nothing about his sister’s prostitution to
the colonizer due to his family’s poverty. The shame and disgrace that Myo^ng-suk’s
body carries, therefore, are his own as well. Ch’o^r-ho, who perceives the female
body as an object of uneasiness and fear, is unable to enjoy the pleasure of looking as

172
In fact, there are two other gazes than Ch’o^r-ho’s in the scene, which I didn’t address here: the
erotic gaze of the American soldier and the derisive gaze of the two men on the bus; The first,
perhaps, exemplifies the scopic organization between the male subject and female body delineated by
Laura Mulvey in her canonical essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975); that is, the
male gaze orients the female body as object of his desire. The second gaze, which is from the
voyeuristic position of her countrymen (Myo^ng-suk is not aware of being looked at), is judgmental:
the two onlookers condemn the woman for selling her body to American soldiers and also derisively
speculate that she will later pass herself off as a “good” girl and get married. See my essay “The Stray
Bullet and Masculinity in Crisis.”
173
There are similar instances of such a troubled male gaze found elsewhere in the film. When
Ch’o^r-ho picks up Myo^ng-suk in police detention (she gets caught while flirting with American GIs
at night on the street), he never looks at her. Afterwards, walking along the street as if they don’t
know each other, they keep a certain distance between them. By not seeing her he avoids perception
of her “degraded” sexuality and his disempowered position as a male subject. The film revisits
another version of this scenario in the coincidental encounter between Kyo^ng-sik and Myo^ng-suk as
she is hustling an American soldier on the street. This perturbing encounter shocks and shames the
war veteran, a shame visually generalized and exacerbated by the fact that it takes place in front of
Choso^n Hotel which was occupied and exclusively used by U.S. military personnel at the time.
Tellingly, after this incident, Kyo^ng-sik completely disappears from the narrative and the screen as
well – he is excised from the scopic regime.
196

the male subject is supposed to. Instead of visual pleasure, he suffers from an
anxiety of looking at the female body. His scopic relation to the female body
illuminatingly discloses a symptom of visual phobia. He becomes a “scopophobic”
subject rather than a scopophilic one.
174

Ch’o^r-ho deals with his scopophobia, as aforementioned, by avoiding looking at
the troubled female body. To him this avoidance functions as a way of disavowing
the anxiety-provoking vision of the female body. His manner of disavowal is,
however, significantly different from the ones discussed in Western film theory such
as voyeurism and fetishism. While a male subject, as argued in Western film theory,
disavows the castration anxiety provoked by a female body via the mobilization of
voyeuristic and fetishistic modes of vision, the male subject presented in The Stray
Bullet does not have recourse to such devices. Instead of controlling the female body
through voyeuristic punishment or fetishistic idealization, Ch’o^r-ho can only turn
away from the sight evocative of his anxiety, an act which erases sexual difference

174
I am using Mulvey’s hypothesis on the scopic regime in order to reveal its theoretical limitation in
the consideration of the historical specificity and cultural difference of postwar South Korea. There
are a number of debates and counterarguments that critique the limitation of the hypothesis in
explaining diverse positioning of the subject and object of gaze that traverse the gender division.
Among many, for instance, Paul Willeman, claims, based on Freudian theory, that the scopophilic
drive which generates the gendered scopic structure argued by Mulvey is auto-erotic at the beginning.
The scopophilic drive, therefore, does not exclude the possibility of observation of the body of one’s
sexual like, which can place a male body as an object to be looked at. See Willeman’s article
“Voyeurism, the Look and Dwoskin,” in Afterimage, no.6 (1976), p.43. Peter Lehman also criticizes
Mulvey’s argument writing that by exclusively assigning the position of being looked to women she
replicates the patriarchal ideology which she criticizes. For Lehman’s criticism and exploration of
male body as the object of gaze, see his book Running Scared: Masculinity and the Representation of
the Male Body (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993). Feminist critics Gaylyn Studlar
challenges masculine subjectivity as the powerful, active agent of gaze in her book In the Realm of
Pleasure: Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetics (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1988). Linda Williams and Marsha Kinder also assert the presence of a visually pleasurable
female subject of gaze in Hard-Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (Berkley:
University of California Press, 1989) and “Individual Responses,” in Camera Obscura, nos. 20-21
(1989) respectively.
197
from a specific visual field – that determined by a familial or national
perspective. Eroticism and sexual difference, the film suggests, can only be imaged
and narratively configured within a transnational scopic field.
That the bus stops for the traffic signal at the moment he catches sight of
Myo^ng-suk, and that the window/ frame/ screen is arrested when he turns away
suggests the fact that the scopic anxiety portrayed is not just that of the male
characters alone. This frozen frame registers the refusal to see Myo^ng-suk enacted
by the medium of the film itself. The medium of film, we might say, tries to evade
capturing her. The scophopobic symptom that troubles the male subject is inscribed
in the cinematic apparatus at this historical moment as well. The Stray Bullet, in this
sense, might not be as “realistic” as has been believed. The “realistic aesthetics” of
the film, I argue, are permeated by this scopophobic vision. This film, placed at the
pinnacle of cinematic realism in Korea, is, to be profoundly ironic, driven by the will
not to see “reality.”
The seemingly realistic style of The Stray Bullet, which is, in actuality, imbued
with the anxiety of and the will not to see reality, casts a significant doubt not only
on the claimed realism of the film, but on the authenticity of national realism,
believed to be excellently embodied by the film. The meaning of realism that
betrays its own premise, then should be re-read and questioned. At stake, here, is the
gender relation inflected with national historical experience as allegorized through
the male gaze and female body in the aforementioned bus scene. The assumed
achievement of realism is made possible by the erasure of the “shameful” body of
198

the South Korean female from the sight of the South Korean male. If realism is
enabled only by an escape from the vision of the female body embedded with the
stigma and shame of the male subject himself, the validity of realism must be
fundamentally compromised.
The ways in which the “shameful” female body is represented in the film displays
a significant difference from the representations of the female body registered with
the identical stigmas in ‘50s films. In Hand of Destiny (Unmyo^ng u^i son, Han
Hyo^ng-mo) made in 1954 or Hell Flower, for instance, military prostitutes are
portrayed in a far more glamorous and spectacular way, serving as the center of
visual pleasure in the films. Hand of Destiny’s Margaret (Magaret) , a North Korean
spy disguised as a military prostitute and Hell Flower’s Sonya (Ssonya) , a military
prostitute involved in a Korean male groups’ activity of smuggling commodities
from the U.S. military base, are represented as beauties with fatal attraction. Clothed
in seductive western style dresses, they are portrayed as femme fatales who exhibit
an alluring fetishistic power.
175
The fetishistic power exercised by the military
prostitutes in the films offers the major reason for their punishment as well. Margaret
and Sonya are eventually subject to the severe punishment of death: Margaret is shot
to death by a South Korean male agent who loved her
176
and Sonya is stabbed by her

175
For the fetishistic representation of Sonya in Hell Flower and its significance in the context of
post-war Korea under the neo-colonial hegemony of the U.S. see Yu Shin-chu’s article
176
The narrative and characterization of Hand of Destiny is similar to those of Shiri (Kang Che-kyu,
1999) to a surprising degree. In both films, male and female characters are disguised in different
identities than what they actually are and are involved in heterosexual romantic relationships, which
end in the deaths of female characters executed by the male ones. Although there are two different
aspects: unlike Margaret, the female spy in Shiri is not disguised as a prostitute and she knows the
true identity of her lover. The agent, the cold war ideology and gender stereotypes are, amazingly,
repeated in the two films with more than a half-century time gap.
199

lover and sinks down to a swamp. The lack of fetishistic representation of the
military prostitute and her punishment in the narrative in The Stray Bullet evidently
distinguishes it from the two films.
The severe punishment of military prostitutes has been consistently presented in
South Korean cinema because their sexual deviancy implied not only the
transgression of patriarchal familial code but a national betrayal. Military prostitutes
as the women of the worst kind imaginable in South Korean’s psyche are killed or
commit suicide at best.
177
Exceptions are made in the case that they are mothers and
have an alibi that their “dirty” sexual trades are an inevitable sacrifice for raising
their children. Confession of Flesh (Yukch’eu^i kobaek, Cho Kung-ha, 1964?), for
example, offers a rare representation of an admirable military prostitute/ mother. The
female protagonist is a mother of three daughters and, hiding her job of prostitution,
financially supports their college educations. She is described as the figure of
authority and dignity, called “the president mom” by her co-workers and neighbors.
Later her identity is revealed to her daughters before her death, yet, she is still
remembered and honored by them. It promotes the idea that “corrupted” female
sexuality transgressive of familial and national order only can be forgiven for her
sacrificial motherhood. The lack of punishment of Myo^ng-suk’s “degraded”
sexuality in The Stray Bullet is, perhaps, partially justified by her connection to
motherhood in the scene of her holding Ch’o^r-ho’s baby at the hospital after the

177
The case of a military prostitute’s suicide is found in ‘Till the Last Moment” (Isaengmyong
Tahadorok, Shin Sang-ok, 1960). The sister of a man. who the female protagonist, wife of a crippled
war veteran, has a romantic relationship with, becomes a military prostitute and at the end of the film
kills herself, stating in her will that she donates for country all the money she earned through
prostitution.
200
death of his wife during delivery. However, there is another, more significant
factor which brings about the lack of her punishment. I argue that the absence of her
punishment is the consequence of the film’s stylistic orientation of realism and that
the absence serves to avert a melodramatic moment which would be otherwise
presented; to sustain the realist style of the film.

II-2 Realism and Fear of the Melodramatic Body
In order to demonstrate that the absence of Myo^ng-suk’s punishment functions to
avoid a melodramatic moment I will compare The Stray Bullet to another film that
deals with the issue of military prostitution, made in the similar period, ‘Till the Last
Moment (I saengmyo^ng tahadorok, Shin Sang-ok). ‘Till the Last Moment tells the
story of a military prostitute as a small part of the main narrative and the rendering of
this part shows a sharp contrast to The Stray Bullet. The main narrative is centered
around a married couple, a crippled, war-veteran husband and his wife, who goes
through much pain, including the loss of their daughter to a car accident in the
aftermath of the Korean War, but finally overcome it and build a nursing home cum
factory for war widows. In the beginning of the film, the wife is involved in a
romantic relationship with a man called Cho. The story of the military prostitute
begins with Cho’s encounter with his long lost sister, who turns out to be a military
prostitute. The scene of Cho and his sister’s encounter dramatizes their re-union and
the revelation of her identity in the quintessentially melodramatic fashion.
201
Cho, who was walking on a street, runs into his sister and they embrace each
other, expressing their excitement. A few minutes later, when the G.I., standing away
from them starts to ask her what is going on, Cho realizes that she is a military
prostitute. He takes her to the house of the war veteran’s wife and burst into tears,
telling her what happened. Contrary to the scene of the brother’s shunning his
recognition of his sister’s identity in The Stray Bullet, Cho’s recognition is rendered
in a highly dramatic way with the use of intense music and a close-up of his shocked
face which is held for a moment. The encounter scene is followed by his heated
reproach for her and her self-justification drenched in tears which occur in the wife’s
house. He yells at her, “Have you ever thought about your parents? They raised you
and even sent you to college and now you are what? Look at your self straight. Look
at yourself in the mirror.” She, then justifies her decision to become a military
prostitute. She says she did it because she “just wanted to live and “If he had been in
her shoes, he would have done the same thing.” He replies, “Don’t make such
nonsense! Then, every woman in the world should be a Yankee princess like you?”
After this argument she realizes that her “rotten body” is “not allowed to be exposed
to the bright sunlight,” and decides to leave her body to “become a good sister in the
other world.” She commits suicide after writing a note that she wants to leave her
entire fortune to the wife and wishes that the fortune will be used for “those
victimized by the war like her so that she can atone for her sin.” With the money, the
wife finances her husband’s construction of a facility for war-widows.
202
Compared to the representation of the military prostitute in ‘Till the Last
Moment, The Stray Bullet is different in two ways: the absence of the brother’s tear-
jerking reproach at his sister and her punishment in the narrative. These two major
melodramatic components are erased in the latter and this erasure makes a significant
contribution to the subdued and sublimated style of realism of the film. The subdued
stylization is employed in order to avoid the representation of military prostitutes in
the melodramatic mode shown in Till the Last Moment. That is, a typically
melodramatic mode that uses an emotional outburst and the punishment of military
prostitutes is shunned. The fact that this avoidance enabled the positioning of The
Stray Bullet at the pinnacle of Korean national cinema significantly indicates what
qualified a film as national cinema in the ‘60s. I argue that the exclusion of generic
features of melodrama, especially the component of excessive affection, was
constructive of the core definition of the national in the meaning of national cinema.
Such a consistent attempt to keep the melodramatic out of the terrain of national
cinema obviously was caused by stigmas loaded on the genre—those long held and
commonly accepted stigma that it is an anti-national, anti-modern, cheap, and
feminine genre. The generic aversion to melodrama is most visibly expressed
through the male protagonist Ch’o^r-ho’s refusal to see his sister Myo^ng-suk’s
shameful body. His refusal does not only reveal the male anxiety of looking at a
female body inscribed with his impotence and historical trauma. It also uncovers the
uneasiness caused by the female body represented in the melodramatic way. His
turning away from the sight of her body, therefore, simultaneously signifies a
203
stylistic distanciation from melodrama. Therefore, the formal choice of realism,
combined with the event of Ch’or-ho’s decision not to see his sister, serves as the
vehicle to repress of the melodramatic mode. Underlying the male subject’s visual
phobia exists the phobia of melodrama embedded in (South) Korean cinema.
In the film, Ch’or-ho finally passes out in a taxi, shouting, “Let’s get out of here”
and his younger brother, who robbed a bank, dreaming of making it big, is arrested.
Their masculinity, which is barely sustained through visual disavowal and mimicry
of the Hollywood gangster/ film noir genre-coded action, faces its collapse at the
end. The Stray Bullet is, thus, a film about the failed masculinity of South Korean
men, allegorical of the failed “imagined community.” The film, still, offers a
detoured way out of the failed masculinity—the aesthetics of realism. Through the
successful embodiment of cinematic realism by which the national cinema reached
the height that had never been reached, the film found a rescue from the failure and
re-affirmed the male-centered-ness of the national cinema. And this was made
possible once again at the expense of melodrama.

III Modernism in South Korean Cinema
From the mid-‘60s, a substantial body of films designated literary films (munye
yo^nghwa) was generated. Literary films loosely referred to films based on works of
high literature and were classified as films of high artistic quality. Modernism as a
film style appeared in South Korean cinema through these literary films, although
204

modernist style films were not dominant enough to form a film movement, in
contrast to European postwar art cinemas.
The primary factor in the creation of literary film was that the second revised
Motion Picture Act (1966) included literary film in the category of quality film. The
first revised Motion Picture Act (1963) legally restricted the importation of foreign
films and only permitted producers who made domestic films to be entitled to
foreign film importation licenses. The tradition of quality film award dates back to
the Rhee regime of the 50s, when the government began to reward producers of
domestic films by granting them foreign film importation quota licenses. The 1963
revision continued the tradition and defined the eligibility for the obtainment of the
license as follows: in the case that certain producers’ films were designated as
quality film and received prizes at the Golden Bell Award (taejongsang), the South
Korean equivalent for the Academy Award,
178
or invited to international film
festivals, or exported overseas, the producers were granted the licenses.
179
By being
added to the quality film list, which had been dominated by anti-communist films,
war films, and propaganda films, literary film emerged as one of the kinds of film
that possibly brought the chance of importing foreign films, whose box-office gross
was incomparably higher than that of domestic films.

178
Ibid., p.260.
179
Chi-yo^n Pak, “Park Chung Hee ku^ndaehwa ch’ejeu^i yo^nghwa cho^ngch’ak: yo^nghwabo^p
kaejo^nggwa kio^phwa cho^ngchagu^l chungsimu^iro [Film Policy under the Park Chung Hee’s
Modernization System: Revisions of Motion Picture Acts and Industrialization Policy],” Yu-shin Chu
et al., Korean Cinema and Modernity (Hanguk yo^nghwawa ku^ndaeso^ng), (Sodo, 2001), p. 186
205

Since the primary goal of making a literary film was to receive the license,
producers did not consider the commercial possibility of literary films.
180
Such an
industrial environment provided artistic freedom, not quite intended though, which
enabled filmmakers to make films without taking into account its box-office gross
and allowed them to seek new styles. Because literary films hardly had a commercial
value, producers needed domestic films that could easily gross a certain amount of
money without a risk of failure. The demand for easily money-grossing films
brought forth the generation of various genre films such as shinpa, action-thriller,
sword fight, and horror films. These lower-budget, “lower-quality” films, thus,
continued to be made and sold to local distributors, who bought them along with
foreign film distribution rights through block booking.
181
Another significant factor
in the mode of production of the period was that small-scale production companies,
which did not qualify to register as film companies, borrowed a name of a registered
one and produced films under the name.
182
This producing under a borrowed name
(taemyo^ng chejak) found its financial source in local distributors and became a
pervasive mode of production that made lower-budget, “lower-quality” films in the
period.
Literary film was, in terms of the mode of production and position in film
discourse, counter to genre films. Even though literary film was a byproduct of the
competition of foreign film importation and its production lasted for only a short
period of time (four to five years) before it was removed from the category of the

180
Encyclopedia of Women in Film Industry, p.95
181
70years of Production of Korean Cinema, p. 236
182
Encyclopedia of Women in Film Industry, p.120-121
206
quality film. In 1969, it was placed at the center of South Korean national
cinema. Literary film was labeled as classical, high-brow film which was made
through a legitimate production process. It opened up a space where filmmakers
explored stylistic experimentations and attempted to create an art cinema
distinguished from the other explicitly propagandistic quality films. In that sense,
literary film was a locus where filmmakers’ individual styles were visibly presented
in negotiation with the ideological imposition of the state as well as in opposition to
the unlawful production of genre films.
The privileged positioning of literary film as an elite cinema and legitimate
national cinema, therefore, was made possible by the presence of its inferior others
determined by the given industrial system. The presence of cheap genre films as
“bastards” of the flawed structure of the film industry was an underlying constituent
of literary film. Shinpa film in particular, which was held to be the lowest of the low
among low-quality films, was posited in overt opposition to literary film. Literary
film’s artistic achievements, it could be inferred, were celebrated in part because the
achievements differentiated it from poor quality shinpa film, a quickie genre
manufactured by a shameful collaboration of local distributors and name-borrowing
producers. It would not be far-fetched to say, thus, that literary film, consciously or
unconsciously, functioned to create a pleasing façade for South Korean cinema,
where the dishonorable reality of the film industry and its obvious sign, shinpa film,
were seemingly wiped out. Underlying the production of literary film there was a
tension between the desire for achieving proud national cinema and the presence of
207

cheap shinpa films flooding the film market. The flawed structure of film
industry enabled the presence of both.
The stress on the role of literature in art cinema, as the designation of literature
film manifests, was caused by the conditions of the Korean film industry and critical
discourse in the colonial period. Moon-im Peak, a South Korean film scholar,
discusses the industrial context of literature-oriented filmmaking of Korea,
incorporating the argument of Haw Imp, renowned literary and film critic of the
colonial period. In his article titled “On Chosen Cinema,” Imp argues that the heavy
dependency of Korean films on literature was caused by the specificity of Korean
cinema culture that “had had only exhibition without production for quite a long
time”
183
because the medium of cinema was implanted from the west. In addition,
unlike Japan, Korea didn’t have strong a tradition of theater which could be easily
translated into cinema.
184
These factors brought the conditions of the lack of cultural
resources for the film industry and the use of literature as a main resource of film. Im
particularly addressed the frequent utilization of folk novels in early Korean cinema,
which, Paek claims, explains why Tale of Ch’un-hyang has been such a crucial text
for Korean cinema throughout different periods.
185

183
Hwa Yim, “On Chos^on Cinema,” in Ch’unch’u Novemeber 1941, p. Recitation from Moonim
Paek, “1950nyo^ndae huban munyeroso^u^i sinariou^I u^imi (Meaning of Screenplay as Literature in
1950s)” in So-Yon Kim et.al., p.212.
184
Ibid., p.212
185
Ibid., p.213. The first fiction feature film was the adaptation of Tale of Ch’un-hyang made by a
Japanese director, Hayakawa Kisi in 1923. Another folk novel made into film many times is Tale of
Changhwa and Honglyo^n (Kim Yo^ng-hwan, 1924), which was proudly advertised all the crew
members involved in the making of the film were Koreans. The first Korean sound film, the film
which revitalized postwar national film industry in 1955, the first color cinemascope film (1963), the
first Korean film which competed in the Cannes film festival in 2002 were all Tale of Chunhyang.
Thus, Chunghyang has been a muse for Korean cinema from the beginning to the present.
208

Yim argued that film should be the form of culture or art rather than that of
mere entertainment and that the perception of film as an artistic tool of self-
expression has been the root of Korean cinema as showcased in Na Un-kyu.
186
Paek
claims that the term, “spirit of authorship (“spirit of art),” which Im repeatedly used
in order to emphasize the idea of artistic self-expression in film, was passed down to
the ‘50s. Thereby, the idea that “literature is a supportive force to provide the artistic
spirit” for film led to “the movement of the elevation of the screenplay into (high)
literature” of the ‘50s.
The movement was also embedded with other factors specific to the ‘50s’ film
industry. Since the nationwide box-office success of Tale of Ch’un-hyang made by
Yi Kyu-hwan in 1955, a quick influx of money and labor into a film industry lacking
an organized infrastructure pushed the industry into commercial filmmaking. In
order to draw audiences, films were made out of radio dramas or novels serialized in
newspapers, which offered stories familiar to popular audiences and could be easily
made into entertainment films. Yet, on the other hand, a group of intellectual writers
and screenwriters along with film critics took over the mission of the embodiment of
artistic spirit in film. These “serious” writers and critics pursued the artistic spirit and
soul of the author, which were believed to be directly reflected in the quality and
value of films.
187
Through the movement, thus, they sought to elevate screenwriters
onto the level of high literature as a major step for the creation of art film.

186
Hwa Yim, “On Chos^on Cinema,” in Ch’unch’u November 1941. Recitation from Moonim Paek,
p. 213
187
Moonim Paek, p.206
209

In the middle of the ‘60s, the legacy of literature-oriented filmmaking started to
be visibly altered. With the continued link between literature and film, yet, a much
stronger emphasis on visual style began to be foregrounded in both of the realms of
filmmaking and criticism. A new group of directors designated “visualists” like Yi
Man-hu^i, Kim Su-yong, Cho^ng Chin-u and Yi So^ng-gu emerged, representing the
younger generation of filmmakers. Their films were labeled either as “literary film”
(Yi Man-hu^i and Kim Su-yong) or as “youth film” (Cho^ng-Chin-u and Yi So^ng-
gu), both of which flourished for a short period of time from 1965 to 1968.
Most of the renowned films of Yi Man-Hu^i and Kim Su-yong, such as Yi’s Way
Back Home and Kim’s Mist are imprinted with the influences of the second group of
neo-realist filmmakers. The inner psychology of characters captured in long takes
demonstrates the visible traces of Michelangelo Antonioni in particualr and his
consistent theme of “lost modern man.” Films of Cho^ng Chin-u and Yi So^ng-gu
display the influences of French cinema. Cho^ng’s First Rain (Ch’ou, 1966), for
example, blends images from Jacque Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)
with a quite typical sinpaesque plot. Yi So^ng-gu, who made Young Face
(Cho^lmun p’yojo^ng, 1960), General’s Beard (Changgunu^i suyo^m, 1968) etc.,
was called a “pioneer of Korean Nouvelle Vague.”
188

From the middle of the ‘60s, thus, Korean cinema witnessed the new trend that
highlighted formal styles as a major attraction of cinema. The emergence of this new
trend, I argue, came into play with a continued interaction with the legacy of shinpa.
Critical discourse which celebrated the new transnational hybridity in South Korean

188
Yong-Il Lee, History of Korean Cinema, p. 187
210

cinema constantly referred back to the negative legacy of shinpa and talked about
the achievement of new visual style in younger generation South Korean filmmakers
in terms of overcoming the legacy.

III-1 Discourse of Modernist Film and Shinpa
During the short period from 1965-1969, the production of literary film showed
a drastic expansion. Major literary films that were released in the period and
critically well-received are as follows: Kim Su-yong’s Seashore Village
(Kaenmau^l, 1965), Sound of a Magpie (Kkach’i sori, 1967), Children at a Rifle
Ground (Sagyo^kjangu^iAidu^l, 1967) and Mist,Yi Man-hu^i’s Market Place
(Sijang, 1965), Late Autumn (Manch’u, 1966), Water Mill (Mu^llebanga, 1966), Way
Back Home (1967), Steam Whistle (Kijo^k, 1967) and Myth of Ssari Valley
(Ssarigolu^i shinhwa, Yi Man-hee), Yu Hyo^n-mok’s Grudge (Han, 1967), Guests
on the Last Train, (Makch’aro on sonnimdu^l, 1967), Decedants of Cain (Kainu^i
huyedu^l, 1968), I Want to Be Human, Too (Nado inganyi toeryo^da, 1969), Yi
So^ng-gu’s When Buckwheat Blossoms (Memilkkok Pilmuryo^p, 1967) and
General’s Mustache(1968), Seoul Is Full (So^u^lu^n Manwo^nida , Ch’oe Mu-
ryong, 1967), Trees on the Slope (Namudu^l pitale so^da, Kim Seung-ok, 1968), An
Old Man Making Ceramic Jars (Tokjinu^n, nu^lgu^yi, Ch’oe Ha-wo^n, 1969), and
etc.
189
Many of these films, more than films of any other categories generated in the
period, have been added to the genealogy of Korean cinema. For Instance, Seashore

189
Ibid., p, 335-336.
211
Village, Late Autumn, Fog, Guests on the Last Train, General’s Mustache,
Market Place When Buckwheat Blossoms, and An Old Man Making Ceramic Jars,
Children at a Rifle Ground, Myth of Ssari Valley, I Want to Be Human, Too were
placed in the pantheon of national cinema.
Theses films were praised as films that “brought Korean cinema to a higher artistic
stage,” or were “categorically different from shinpa,” or “differentiated from
melodrama in nature.” For instance, in his article, “Green Light for the Visual Age--
Achievements of Late Autumn and First Love” (“Yo^ngsang sidaerou^i
ch’o^ngsinho--Manch’uwa Ch’onyo^nu^i munjeso^ng”), published in 1967, Chong-
wo^n Kim, one of the leading film critics throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s, appreciated
the emergence of younger generation filmmakers with a new sense of visual styles
like Yi Man-hui and Cho^ng Chin-u as follows:

It is completely the story that got Korean cinema sick. Korean cinema has been
stuck with this hackneyed hurdle [of story]. The predominance of story in film
brought the dishonorable label of “slow-paced Korean cinema.” It is a mistake
to expect the new for the camera that only follows events. A film that wastes 1
hour and 40 minutes to explain what happens—how could the spirit of the
author possibly be in there? If the image of a film is set as the backdrop for
dialogues, not used for visual configuration, it cannot be a filmic expression.

In a word Korean films have many digressions. Our melodrama is like the
caprice of a nagging mother-in-law. So-called well-selling shinpa (films) are
packed with characters suffering tumultuous tragedies as if they compete for
who makes the audience cry more— this hasn’t been the basis of Korean
cinema?

But, an incident happened to our cinema . . . .[This is] not less than a coup
d’etat. And its leaders are Yi Man-hu^i and Cho^ng Chin-u. They all proclaimed
the dominance of “visual aesthetics.” . . .Late Autumn weaves the aesthetics of
waiting with philosophical reflection and photogenie; and First Love embodies a
212

visual poem with a passionate obsession with love. . . .Both are the films of
mood (atmosphere) which is centered on expression. This would inevitably
cause not a little resistance to the audience, who has enjoyed films that evolved
around plots. It would not be surprising if they, not trained in films of mood, feel
that way. Because with the taste for the type of films which fill the screen with
stories like the “resentment of a daughter-in-law” a film like Late Autumn that
highlights image cannot be understood.

But, fortunately this film received an enthusiastic response from the audience.
Although they were split between celebration and doubt, it was not rejected. Not
fully ripen though, the film has something new in it.
190

He also wrote that the emergence of new styles showed a “transition from the
underdeveloped pattern of telling a story” to the elevated representation that used
film language.” In this transition he saw “an enthusiasm to stick to the essence of
cinema.”
191

What his criticism clearly demonstrates is that the visual-oriented trend is
undoubtedly a progress the Korean cinema is making and that his judgment seizes
upon the idea of shinpa as a “hackneyed hurdle” to the progression. The centrality of
story in shinpa, according to him, is what has made Korean cinema “sick” and
“underdeveloped,” and its formulaic tear-jerking pattern is where the “spirit of the
author” is wasted. Opposed to the “dishonorable” legacy of shinpa, younger
generation directors’ efforts to highlight the visual style in their films elevated South
Korean cinema to the realm of higher film aesthetics. Their films, which he

190
Housewife’s Life February, 1967, Number 3, pp. 372-373.
191
“Saerou^n Sojae, Yo^ngsangu^I Ch’ugo—Sangbangi Munjejaku^l Ch’ajas^o [New Subject
Matters, Pursuit of Visual—Problem Films in the First Half of 1967],” Housewife’s Life, September,
1967, Number 3, p. 370
213

designated as “cinema of mood,” used “film language” as the central element of
cinema, thus, came to embody the “essence of cinema.”
The idea underlying such a binary opposition of visual aesthetics and shinpa
formed the constellation of meanings split into the two poles. On the one hand, there
is a chain of meanings attributed to shinpa: formulaic, banal, story-centered, tear-
jerking, outdated, anti-modern and vernacular. On the other hand, a group of
meanings such as visual-centered, mood, art, and the spirit of the author were
assigned to modernist films. The connotation underlying the meanings assigned to
modernist films was the sense of the new, which carried much obscurity and
uncertainty. In describing Yi’s Late Autumn and Ch’ong’s First Love Kim wrote,
that “they ha[d] something new in [them]. Kim defined “something new” as follows:

What is that something? Isn’t it is similar to the impression like foam with a
strange power, which felt after watching Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Eclipse?
–an image like mirage, not clearly grasped. It is a sense that something is there,
yet, it cannot be pinpointed and dug out: this is what Late Autumn and First
Love wanted to convey. For sure, these films have the strength to dissolve the
audience’s discontent. [The nature of the strength] is supported by descriptions
and situations [given in the films], [which are enabled by] not delivering the
films through stories. And the energy [of the strength] is, above all, the atom of
visual.
192

In the above passage he lucidly explicated the “something new” shared by the
modernist filmmakers, which was the impression like “foam with a strange power”
or a “mirage that was “not clearly grasped.” This impression was, according to Kim,
similar to feelings delivered by Antonioni’s films, such as The Eclipse. The Eclipse

192
Housewife’s Life, February, 1967, Number 3, p.373.
214

was released in South Korea in 1964 with a somewhat sentimental Korean title,
The Sun Is Lonely (T’aeyangu^n oirouo) and was advertised as a film which raised
the question of whether “humans can truly understand each other?” and illuminated
disconnected love and loneliness.”
193
Another film of Antonioni’s which was paid
much attention in South Korea was The Adventure. It was released in Korea in1963
entitled An Affair (Cho^ngsa) and described as a film that “surprised the world with a
bold description of the mood of love.”
194
As the advertisements of the films suggest,
Antonioni’s body of work was received by South Korean film discourse as the
portrayal of human isolation in the modern world presented through “description”
and “mood.” Such Antonionian theme and style that stress the rendering of the inner
psyche of alienated modern man through its corresponding external image delivered
the sense of obscurity and uncertainty to South Korean film viewers and critics and
was perceived as an ideal model for South Korean modernist film to pursue.
The Antonionian imagery of the inner psyche of man lost in the modern world,
thus, became the index of cinematic modernism in South Korean film discourse of
the mid-and late ‘60s, yet the meaning of the imagery imitated in South Korean
modernist films was significantly altered. On the one hand, the imitation served as a
vehicle to secure cinematic and cultural space not completely subsumed under the
hegemonic discourse of the state. In other words, modernism in South Korean
cinema of the period was mobilized for the representation of identities which were
not totally contained by the state-imposed identities: male subjectivity as an

193
Yowo^n, July 1964, Number 10, p. 222
194
Yo^won, August 1964, Number 10, p.247
215
industrial warrior and the female subjectivity as split between an industrial
warrior and wife/mother. The gap between the subjectivity portrayed in modernist
films and state-imposed subjectivity is uncovered through the comparison of major
modernist films and other films awarded as quality film, especially the ones
classified as enlightenment film.
The Evergreen (Sangroksu, Shin Sang-ok, 1960), based on the novel with the
same title written by Shim Hun, for instance, portrays the life of a female educator,
whose passion for the enlightenment of the people of a poor fishing village leads to
her physical exhaustion and eventual death. Another film of the rural-area-
enlightenment type, Rice (Ssal, Shin Sang-ok, 1963), tells the story of a man
discharged from military service injured, who returns to his hometown and tries to
dig a mountain in order to facilitate the water supply for the rice field in his
hometown. In both films the overcoming of poverty is presented as a prime mission
to be pursued and the female teacher and the discharged soldier are portrayed as a
triumphant heroine and hero who lead the modernization project to success.
While the subjects represented in these films of the enlightenment type
seamlessly perform the subjectivity constructed by modernization-driven nationalist
discourse, the female protagonist in Way Back Home, a critically acclaimed
modernist film, embodies her conflict-ridden self split between the position of a
virtuous wife of a wheelchair-bound war veteran-turned writer and her sexual desire
for a man working at the newspaper company. The film frames her conflict through
the self-reflexive structure of the film. His novel is serialized in a newspaper and she
216

delivers what he writes to a newspaper company every week. Once the chief
editors of the newspaper comments to her that her husband’s novel doesn’t seem to
keep up with modern romance and sexual relationship anymore because it does not
portray a fallen woman or an extra-marital affair. Hearing this, her husband changes
the direction of the story into such a modern trend. This change in the novel
corresponds to a change that happens to her. She soon starts to be attracted to a
young man at the newspaper company. Through the self-reflexivity, the film
foregrounds her and her husband’s interior mindscape, as in which each reflect upon
their conflicts.
Whereas Way Back Home opens up a space for the gap between the subjectivity
constructed by dominant social order and the individual desire in terms of feminine
sexuality in particular, many cases of the construction of male subjectivity in South
Korean modernist film present a dubious negotiation with dominant social order. The
male subject of Mist presents such a negotiation in the form of obscure male
narcissism. His male narcissism, as the face of his elusive self, divided and fraught
with conflict, is what was called the Antonianian impression like “foam” or
“mirage.”

III-2 Mist
When the film was released in 1967, it received enthusiastic reviews that said it
“demonstrated the high artistic level Korean cinema has reached,”
195
or even was an

195
Young-Il Lee, History of Korean Cinema, p. 338.
217

“avant-garde art film.”
196
The fact that the film is based on Kim Su^ng-ok’s
prestigious Tong-in Literature Award-winning short story, A Trip to Mujin (1964),
acclaimed as a breakthrough in the sensibility of Korean literature, and that the
adaptation into the film script was done by the novelist himself further heightened
the film’s artistic quality. The categorization of the film as an art film was made
possible by the hierarchical differentiation from melodrama. Reviews of the film
stressed that “the nature of the film itself is different from outdated and hackneyed
melodrama,”
197
or “[the film] broke the clichéd convention.”
198

The male protagonist of Mist, Ki-jun, takes a short trip to Mujin, his hometown,
while his wife in Seoul is working things out to make him an executive officer of her
father’s drug company. During his trip he recollects a past moment when he was
hiding in the closet of his house to avoid military draft for the Korean War and
another moment later when he was suffering from pneumonia in a small rented room
on the beach. He also has an affair with a female elementary school teacher named
In-suk, who desperately longs to move to Seoul. Yet on receiving a telegraph from
his wife informing him that he needs to attend a general meeting of stockholders,
where he will be officially appointed as an executive officer, he hurriedly leaves for
Seoul and also leaves behind his empty promise to take In-suk to Seoul.
The film proceeds, making spatial transitions from Seoul to Mujin and then to
Seoul again and this spatial move is played out with a temporal move from Ki-jun’s
present to past and then, back to the present. His trip of re-visiting his past is

196
Housewife’s Life, November 1967, Number 3 pp. 322
197
Housewife’s Life, November 1967, Number 3 p. 323
198
Yo^won, October 1967, Number 13, p. 264.
218
punctuated with his speculation on his past life in Mujin and entry into a social
success awaiting him in Seoul. Flashbacks, which frequently interrupt present events
and are accompanied by a reflective tone of his own voice-over narration, are all
carefully employed to create the contemplative atmosphere of the film. The use of
montage and long-takes also contributes to the effective rendering of his split self
divided between past and present as well as the stream of his consciousness.
Of interest is that his recollections are primarily triggered by the presence of
women in his past and present life. A mad woman he encounters at the train station,
for instance, brings him the memory of his hiding at the closet during the war. His
gaze at In-suk singing a popular song named Tears in Mokpo in a gathering with a
few men from the town, turns into a gaze looking at himself of the past. Or his visit
to his mother’s tomb takes him to the time he was following her funeral parade,
which, in turn, leads to the image of a bar girl who committed suicide nearby the
tomb early in that morning. The images of the women, in this way, are intertwined
with his contemplating process, stirring up memories deposited in the temporal lapse
of past and present.
What is also noteworthy is that the memories awakened by the women are related
to that which was greatly important, yet, he should leave behind: those days when he
had to be confined to the small, dark closet driven to the verge of madness and when
he had a certain desperate urge and pain of extreme loneliness which is now vexing
In-suk. The difference between by-gone days and the present is more clearly
revealed through the presence of his past self haunting him since his arrival at Mujin.
219
His past self, for instance, unlike the one remembered in flashbacks, appears and
walks next to him on a date with her, reproaching him for taking advantage of her on
a false promise. His past self criticizes what he is now and his lack of integrity and
innocence caused by his compromise for social mobility learned from his life in the
modern city of Seoul. His past self, thus, is a shadow cast over his present, reminding
him of what he has lost.
There is also another crucial loss—the death of his mother. She was the one who
insisted on his avoiding the military draft and choosing seclusion in the house,
saying, “You’re my life. If I lose you, I would lose everything.” Her strong
motherhood, that overrides the order of nation, suggests that her maternal desire
conflicts with the law of the nation. By transgressing the patriarchal authority of
nation she holds her son in her realm. Such dominant motherhood, which is
associated with that of the phallic mother and is also reflected in the absence of his
father, alludes to the crisis of the patriarchal nation undergoing the civil war. Kept in
her womb, metaphorized in the dark small closet he was hiding in, Ki-jun prolonged
his uninterfered nexus with his mother, delaying his entry into the paternal terrain,
which he has belatedly reached as a participant in building the modern nation. The
images of the mad woman, In-suk, and his mother, thereby, index the loss of his
innocence that existed prior to that entry and the essential part of his being, which he
owned in the maternal territory.
The snapshot of the image of his idling and struggling with loneliness and
boredom in his room in the past is inserted in the middle of the scene of In-suk
220
singing, revealingly making a connection between his past and her vocal
performance. His past, as aforementioned, signifies that which is painful, but
innocent; that which he desires to hold on to, yet, must give up for a successful entry
into the modern, industrial world. Her singing resonating with his memory of the
past, thereby, overlaps her with the female characters whom he encounters in Mujin:
the insane woman at the train station, his dead mother, and the prostitute who killed
herself. The maternal, the mad, and the sexually corrupted—these femininities are
interwoven into In-suk and her vocal imagery. The original short story describes her
singing by saying that “when she was singing the song, she looked like a mad
woman, a rotten dead body, a frog stuck in the swamp.” This description suggests a
strong link between In-suk and other female characters as well as their association
with Ki-chun’s past. The song she sings, then, is a core acoustic imagery of her
femininity, which signifies the illegitimate residues that he should leave behind in
Mujin before he is accepted as the authentic male member of the nation.
His trip to Mujin, then, looks like a trip for mourning, a trip for returning to the
place of his past and grieving over things he had to give up. A closer look, yet,
reveals a different procedure his trip operates than that of mourning. Mourning in the
Freudian sense signifies a transition from the hypercathection of a subject’s libido in
the loss of an endeared object, thus an absorption in the sadness over the loss at the
beginning to the eventual withdrawal of libido from the object. His trip includes the
process of grieving over his lost object, but does not lead to the final step of
mourning. Instead of getting to the step of leaving behind the object, it is followed by
221

the process of idealization of the object and by doing so enables a permanent
attachment to that object. He, in turn, internalizes the lost object and identifies with
it, investing an intense aura of idealization in himself. He, therefore, turns to the
idealization of his own self.
199
In sum his trip presents the process of the creation of
his narcissistic self, who preserves his loss through its idealization.
His narcissism, thus, ought to engage in the idealization of In-suk’s femininity
presented in the song she sings. Her character is linked to other sound imageries than
the song she sings at the gathering. For instance, before she sings at the gathering she
proudly says that she sang in her college graduation recital in Seoul One Fine Day,
an aria of Puccini’s opera Madam Butterfly. Or, during his visit to her school Ki-
chun, he peeps in her classroom, where she is teaching to her students, Swanee River,
an American folk song written by Stephen Foster. These acoustic layers of her
character tell that part of her is linked to western modernity, yet the part is repressed
in her relationship with him and her femininity, associated with the popular song and
the sound of frogs, is highlighted as the object to be idealized.
A particular scene in the film reveals how the idealization takes place. In a scene
where Ki-chun and In-suk take a walk at night in romantic mood, passing a swamp
where frogs are loudly croaking, he says, “Walking with you, it feels like the croaky
sound is going up to the sky and turning into stars.” In his displacement of the sound

199
His narcissistic symptom, in fact, surfaces, as he gets near Mujin. His split half, who he first comes
across, waiting outside the bus stopping out of order on the way to Mujin, personifies his inwardly
turned feeling of loss. The initial criticism that he would have supposedly had on the object for its
being lost is introverted with displacement of the criticism onto himself. These introjections of the
loss and lost object revealingly tell that he has begun operating his narcissistic mechanism,
anticipating the counterpart of the self-blaming critic, the self-admiring narcissist. This counter-part is
embodied through his fanciful romantic feeling for In-suk, balancing out his self-hatred with self-
worshipping and completing the two different faces of narcissism as formulated by Freud.
222
of frogs by stars in the sky two different changes of meanings are played out:
first, it changes the acoustic image to a visual one and secondly, the earthly into the
heavenly. The silencing of the acoustic and the elevation onto the aerial, thereby,
simultaneously proceeds.
I argue that this simultaneous proceeding uncovers the necessity of the death of
the acoustic in femininity for it to rise to the heavenly, that is, soaring into an ideal in
the masculine imagination. Along with that soaring, the maternal, the mad, the
rotten, and the dead—all these feminine residuals excluded from the legitimate are
killed and purified into the celestial light. This process reveals that the feminine
residuals embodied in her are purified and lifted onto the celestial light. However, at
the same time, since she is the embodiment of Ki-chun’s past in his mind, it is, after
all, his past self that truly shines in the heaven. His past self that was too near the
mother, insanity and death, thus is raised to the celestial place.
Of importance is that, yet, his past self is not totally taken away, but rather has
turned into an unattainable sacred object which can be adored and cherished forever.
Ki-chun, whose past self is now idealized into the lofty and unattainable celestial
object, is able to move forward into the position of the legitimate masculine
subjectivity. It is not because he succeeds in a complete separation from his past self,
but rather because he preserves the past self—the internalized lost object—in an
ideal form and keeps it. Along with the preservation he also holds the feeling of
being sorry for himself. He, then, is capable of accepting the state-endorsed male
223
identity and at the same time comforting himself with the fact that he did not give
up on his dearest object forbidden by the state.
His narcissistic self sustains ambivalence between his submission to the demand
of nation and desire not to completely do that. This ambivalence enables him to
compromise with the demand and simultaneously secures a special place for him,
which is superior to other “snobs” in Seoul and Mujin such as his wife, father-in-law
and his friend and accountant, Han-su Cho and his employers at the accountant
office. Different from such “snobs”, he can look at himself as the one capable of
being aware of the dark side of social mobility. Different from those ignorant,
success-driven people, he tells himself that he knows that social success means the
loss of innocence and that he only reluctantly agrees to achieve the social mobility.
In sum, through the construction of his narcissistic self he can remain as a modernist
with a seemingly deeper reflection of reality. The construction of his narcissism is
made possible by taking advantage of, and at the expense of, the femininity of In-suk
as the vehicle of self-idealization. Contrary to Ki-chun who returns to Seoul, a
central place of modernity, via Mujin, In-suk is left behind in Mujin and fails to
enter the realm of legitimate subjectivity.

III-3 Why Tears of Mokpo?
The crucial part of the process of lifting the frog sound onto twinkling stars, as
aforementioned, is the silencing and transformation of the sound imagery into the
visual. The silencing of the frog sound metaphorically parallels the silencing of the
224

song, Tears of Mokpo, which In-suk sings. The song, then, is a key acoustic
object that should be muffled in order to successfully achieve the metaphoric
elevation. The successful achievement of the elevation is of great significance for the
configuration of Ki-chun’s narcissistic self is at the mercy of that achievement. I will
delve into the connotation of the song underlying the metaphoric elevation and by
doing so shed light on historical, cultural and cinematic determinants interwoven into
the meaning of the elevation. A close look at those determinants will, then, uncover
the hierarchical dynamics involving the relation of the national and melodramatic,
and the meaning of the modern that has been growing out of those dynamics in
Korean culture and cinema.
Tears of Mokpo, first sung by Yi Nan-yo^ng in the colonial period in1935
(composed by Mu Il-so^k, lyrics by Yun Chae-hi) is a song about a woman who bids
farewell to her husband who taking leave at Mokpo, a port city located in Southern
part of South Korea (the province of Cho^lla)
200
. The song begins with the following
lyrics:

A ferryman’s song is shimmering
And soaking deep under the waves of Samhak island
A newly wed girl gets her sleeves wet at the port
Are these the tears of farewell? Mokpo is sorrowful

It became one of the dearest songs to Koreans, and was called “Mokpo Arirang,” or
“the national anthem of Mokpo (“Mokpou^i aegukka”).” The girl who is separated

200
Mokpo is the hometown of the former president Kim Dae Chung.
225
from her husband allegorically indicates the loss of national sovereignty. In the
lyrics of the second clause that “under the peak of Nojo^k which harbors the
resentment of three hundred years, my lover’s trace is visible,” for instance, the peak
of “Nojo^k” is where general Yi Sun-shin and his troops defeated Japanese three
hundred years ago. It, thus, configures the audience as a woman who misses her
lover, reminding them of the glorious past of their country contrasting the present
under the colonial rule.
Even though Tears of Mokpo has expressed the pent-up sorrow (han) of those
who lost their hometown (manghyangga) or of suffering people Cho^lla (southern
province of South Korea) (siru^mga), or of the dead who died political protests
during the period of the Minjung movement (chinhonga), it has never been embraced
as legitimate national culture. It is quite obviously because of the hierarchical
categorization of popular culture as cheap and valueless. Such devaluation has been
furthered by the association of popular culture with the Japanese origin that was
formed in the colonial period. Like the mode of shinpa, Korean popular music was
fundamentally transformed by Japanese influences.
The center of popular music, for example, shifted from folksong (minyo) and
p’ansori to a new mode called “trendy ch’angga.” “Ch’angga” was originally made
and sung for the delivery of the messages of enlightenment and national
independence. Song of Kyo^ngbuTrain (Kyo^ngbu ch’o^ldoga) written by Ch’oe
226

Nam-son, Song of Hope (Huimangga), Song of Students (Hakdoga),
201
but
gradually turned into more popular format without the messages. This popularized
version was later termed “trottu^,” or more pejoratively, “ppongjjak.” Its rhythm and
beat are similar to the mode of Japanese popular music called “enka”
202
and, in
actuality, the majority of early trendy ch’naggas were adapted from the melody of
Japanese popular songs with Korean lyrics. Trendy Ch’angga includes the
background music or theme songs of Japanese shinpa dramas. The theme song of
one of the master texts of Japanese Shinpa drama, Golden Demon, for example, was
translated into Korean and used for the Korean adaptation of the drama, Long,
Resentful Dream. The popularity of Trendy Ch’angga as mainstream popular music
was gained through the flourishing of shinpa drama in colonial Korea.
203

Tears of Mokpo carries the historical and cultural burden of Japan-originated
popular culture, its association with shinpa, thus, has been perceived not only as
inferior to high-quality music but as anti-national in nature. That burden, then, is
embedded in the voice of In-suk singing the song. When she sings it, thus, she
vocalizes that which can be designated as shinpaesque femininity born out of the
matrix that has historically and culturally molded the cultural meaning of shinpa.
Since she is represented as a woman in whom Ki-chun sees his past, her singing
Tears in Mokpo resonates with the signifiers of the maternal, the mad, the sexual,
and the dead.

201
originally titled “Ch’o^ngnyo^n Kyo^nggyega” a Japanese popular song which combined Japanese
lyrics with a western song and displaced by Korean lyrics, Yo^ng-mi Yi, Taejung kayosa [History
of Korean Popular Song], Seoul: Sigongsa, 1998, p. 44
202
For debates over Japanese enka and Korean trottu^ see Yo^ng-me Yi, pp. 62-65
203
Ibid., pp. 41
227

Another crucial aspect of the aforementioned idealization that metaphorically
lifts the frog sound onto stars is that its process of transforming the acoustic to the
visual imagery accompanies the erasure of the song attached to In-suk. The erasure
of the song needs to be enacted for the creation of the ideal image of Ki-chun. This
tie between erasure of Tears in Mokpo and creation of the ideal male image should
be expanded into the relation of the mode of shinpa and narcissistic male identity in
South Korean modernist cinema of the mid-1960s. I argue that the tie between Tears
in Mokpo and the ideal male self mirrors a generic tendency of Korean art film of the
mid ‘60s.
Of interest is that the outdated and story-centered shinpa-coded melodrama, which
was constructed as binarily opposed to visual-oriented modernist films, was often
signified by sound imageries. As mentioned earlier, South Korean films which
“ha[d] so many digressions” were figured as “the caprices of nagging mother-in-
laws,”
204
or another review on South Korean cinema in 1967 said that South Korean
cinema [told] a “formulaic story like [a sound from] an old gramophone.”
205
The
voice issue was addressed as a problem with voice actors as well. For example, a
film review pointed out one of the problems of South Korean cinema that disrupted
modernist film styles as follows:

204
Chong-wo^n, Kim “Green light for the Visual Age: Significance of Late Autumn and First Love,
(“Yo^ngsang Sidaeu^i Ch’o^ngsinho: Mach’u, Ch’oyo^u^I Mujeso^ng”), “ Life of Housewife, March,
Number 2, 1967, p. 257.
205
Chong-wo^n, Kim, “Audiences’s Psychology: Formation of a Pattern That Looks for Good
Movies, (Kwangeaku^I Simlihak: Yanghwalu^l Ch’annun P’ungjou^I Hyo^ngso^ng”),” Life of
Housewife, March, Number 6, 1967, p. 322
228

Not only do we see the same faces on every screen but we hear the same
voices come out of the screen. Not the voices of actors but those of voice actors
dominate films. It is even needless to say that the voices break the mood of
films. The voices make films undistinguishable from TV soap operas.
206

“Nagging mother-in-laws,” sound from “an old gramophone” and the same voices
of voice actors that interrupt visual styles were used to effectively discredit the
legacy of shinpa and shinpa-coded melodrama still prevalent in the ‘60s. The
acoustic association with the mode of shinpa is perhaps related to the presence of
bensi (pyo^nsa), who narrated the story of silent films which were predominantly
shinpa films. Thereby, voice in (South) Korean cinema was associated with the
legacy of shinpa and constructed as the opposite to the new visual-oriented cinematic
trend of modernism.
The meaning of voice in (South) Korean cinema as such adds an important layer
of cultural significance to the removal of the acoustic image in the process of the
metaphoric elevation in Ki-chun’s narcissism. The deadening of sound as an
indispensable pre-requisite for the creation of the celestial vision suggests that the
birth of visual-centered South Korean modernist cinema needed the silencing of
shinpesque convention.
The femininity associated with shinpa is taken into the process of idealization and
relegated into inaudibility/ invisibility and displaced by the male narcissist’s vision
of himself. In a similar way, the mode of shinpa, which has never been integrated
into a legitimate place in South Korean cinema, is repressed and pushed behind

206
Life of Housewife, March, Number 2, 1967, p. 257
229
modernist cinema. The narcissistic self-image of South Korean modernist
cinema, therefore, is enabled by the suppression of shinpa, and, at the same time,
only with the trace of shinpa. Shinpa is not properly entombed, thus, persistently
present behind the authenticity of modernist cinema. Shinpa is a shadow indelibly
cast upon the narcissistic face of South Korean cinematic modernism.

IV Conclusion
From the mid 1950s to the late 1960s, legitimate modes of South Korean national
cinema were constructed through the transnational adaptation of European cinemas,
Italian neo-realism in particular. From the mid ‘50s to early ‘60s realism was
established as the essence of South Korean national cinema and films such as Pia
Valley and The Stray Bullet were positioned as prime texts of realism. From the mid
‘60s, cinematic modernism influenced by Michelangelo Antonioni’s films emerged
as another legitimate mode and Mist was one of the films representative of South
Korean modernist cinema. Underlying the process of legitimization of realist and
modernist films as the authentic South Korean cinema, there was a consistent
exclusion of the mode of shinpa and melodrama. The shinpaesque/melodramatic is
either repressed in order to construct a male subject as the embodiment of realist
stylistics as in The Stray Bullet or is displaced by the narcissistic ideal male self as in
Mist. Italian neo-realism as a privileged signifier was mobilized as a transnational
cultural and cinematic vehicle to justify the repression and displacement.

230

Epilogue
From the late ‘60s the production of literary film began to drastically decrease
and shinpa-coded films called “retro style shinpa-melodrama” started thriving again.
Major shinpa-coded films released in the period include: the trilogy of Bitter, But
Once Again, A Snow Falling Evening (Han Han-su, 1969), Winter Lady (Kyo^ul
puin, Kang Tae-jin, 1969), Angel’s Tears (Ch’o^nsau^i nummul, Ch’oe Hun, 1970),
A Maid’s Abortion (Shingmou^i yusan, Pak Ku, 1969), Forget-Me-Not
(Mulmangch’o, Ch’oe Hun, 1969), etc. These films tell the stories of mothers who
were not allowed to be integrated into the institution of patriarchy, similar to
Hollywood maternal melodrama, Stella Dallas.
Images of mothers suffering from their childbirth outside of wedlock contrast
with male military heroism in the films produced in the same period such as Kim
who Has Returned from Vietnam (Wuo^lnameso^ toraon Kim sangsa, Yi So^ng-ku,
1971), Secret Code (Milmyo^ng, Yim Wuo^n-sik, 1968), The Third Zone (Che sam
chidae, Ch’oe Mu-ryong, 1968). In Kim who Has Returned from Vietnam. Kim after
coming back from the Vietnam War, finds his nation modernized to a surprising
degree and further resolves to commit himself to development of his nation. In
Secret Code and The Third Zone, South Korean troops triumphantly defeat secret
agents and spies from the North. While hegemonic discourse of anti-communism and
231
modernization were reinforced in a further oppressive way, shinpaesque
oversentiment and hyperdrama offered the space where women, allegoric of those
who were alienated and excluded from the benefit of modernization, could cry.
During the Yushin period (1972-79) a sub-genre of melodrama called “hostess
film,” centered around the stories of bar girls and prostitutes, was prevalent and in
the ‘80s erotic, pseudo-historical drama set in obscure past times called “tosok
eromul” and
soft-pornography flooded the screen. Madam Aema (Aema puin, Cho^ng In-yo^p,
1982) and a number of its sequels showed an interesting continuation with Madam
Freedom. It offered images of the sexually charged pleasure of fallen housewives,
yet in a far more eroticized way than in Madam Freedom, which could be read as a
trope of sexually dissatisfied South Korean housewives who had husbands who were
too busy modernizing the nation. .
South Korean melodrama that carried the legacy of shinpa has been a mode of
somatic enunciation, which expresses that the hegemonic identity formation does not
speak to modern identities of South Korean women, their desires and pleasures. The
somatic language of melodrama has signaled the claim that the grand narrative of
patriarchal nationalism and modernization discourse does not represent their
identities; does not address their sexuality. Against hegemonic discourse that
marginalizes their desires and represses speaking their desires, the somatic language
232

of melodrama cries or groans in the case of an erotic text like Madam Aema.
When the subaltern cannot speak, they weep; they moan.
207

While Korean shinpa and melodrama have been vehicles to communicate Korean
modernity in a proto-language outside the realm of “legitimate” language, in the ‘80s
there also began a collective move to the articulation of alternative languages that
spoke to modernity experienced at the periphery of the nation. As part of the
Minjung Movement, “People’s Cinema Movement (minjok yo^nghwa undong)”
outside mainstream film industry (ch’ungmuro) emerged in the early ‘80s. An
alternative cinema organization, Seoul Image Group (So^ul yo^ngsang chipdan) and
college film clubs initiated the movement, making “small films” (jagu^n yo^nghwa,
short films) with super 8 and 16 mm cameras. The film movement was joined by
other cultural organizations in the field of the Minjung movement such as
Changsangokmae, People’s Cinema Institute (Minjok yo^nghwa yo^nguso), and
Laborers’ Newsreel Group (Nodongja nyus jejakdan). Small independent films made
by these groups include P’arangsae (Blue Bird,1986), Oh Dream Land (O,
kkumu^nara), The Day before Strike (P’o^p cho^nya), An Olympic at Sangye Town
(Sangyedong ollimp’ik, Kim Dong-won, 1988) and labor newsreels.
One of the significant changes which the Minjung movement and People’s
Cinema Movement brought to South Korean political and cultural domains was that
they appropriated the hegemonic signification of nation and nationalism and attached

207
Sumita S. Chakravarty, "Can the Subaltern Weep? Mourning as Metaphor in Rudaali (The Crier),”
Diana Robin and Ira Jaffe eds., Redirecting the Gaze Gender, Theory, and Cinema in the Third World
(SUNY Press, 1998).
233
new meaning of the marginal and under-represented to them. This change
suggests that the public conception of modernity and modern identity transformed,
and that the people started to position themselves as the subjects of modernity and
modernization, not as the passive objects to be mobilized for the state-led
modernization project. People’s Cinema Movement enabled the use of the medium
of film for the representation of such an altered perspective on modernity and
modern identities. This is a profound achievement in the South Korean film history
enabled through a transnational reception of Latin American Third World Cinema
movements.
In the mid to late ‘90s the presence of women became visible in the mise en scene
of South Korean cinema. Pyon Yong-ju [Pyo^n Yo^ng-chu]’s documentary trilogy
on South Korean comfort women, Murmuring (Naju^n moksori, 1995) Habitual
Sadness (Naju^n moksori II, 1997), and My Own Breathing (Naju^n moksori III,
1999) made a major contribution to the visibility in many different ways. Her
documentaries brought the long taboo issues of military sexual slaves into the arena
of public discourse along with the questions of nation and the female subject. The
documentaries also inscribed the distinctiveness of feminine filmmaking in the field
of South Korean cinema. Other female filmmakers who emerged in the period such
as Yim Sun-rye and Yi Cho^ng-hyang also expanded the gendered boundary of
South Korean cinema. The launch of the Seoul Women’s Film Festival in 1999
demonstrated the substantial increase of interest in the issues of women and cinema
and a more active engagement in the discourse of cine-femininsm. Such changes in
234
South Korean cinema have caused and mirrored the alteration in the notion of the
people both in the sense of the nation (minjok) and marginalized people (minjung).
The changes, still very limited though, have been performing a productive
questioning of the nation, the people, modernity, and cinema.
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Asset Metadata

Creator Cho, Eunsun (author)

Core Title Transnational modernity, national identity, and South Korean melodrama (1945-1960s)

School School of Cinema-Television

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television (Critical Studies)

Publication Date 11/14/2006

Defense Date 08/24/2006

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag modernity,nationalism,OAI-PMH Harvest,South Korean melodrama,transnational culture

Language English

Advisor James, David E. (committee chair), Kinder, Marsha (committee member), Rosen, Stanley (committee member)

Creator Email eunsuncho@hotmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m132

Unique identifier UC1122330

Identifier etd-Cho-20061114 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-22752 (legacy record id),usctheses-m132 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Cho-20061114.pdf

Dmrecord 22752

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Cho, Eunsun

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email uscdl@usc.edu

Abstract (if available)

Abstract The Korean proto-melodramatic form, shinpa, derived from Japanese theatrical mode, developed into a major mode of popular theater, literature, and cinema duringthe colonial period. Since the colonial period shinpa or the shinpaesque has always been in (South) Korean modern popular culture, it has never been accepted as a legitimate cultural form and thus, was figured as a mere shadow of (South) Korean modernity.