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Eclipsed cinemas: colonial modernity and film cultures in Korea under Japanese colonial rule

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Eclipsed cinemas: colonial modernity and film cultures in Korea under Japanese colonial rule

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Content ECLIPSED CINEMAS:
COLONIAL MODERNITY AND FILM CULTURES IN KOREA
UNDER JAPANESE COLONIAL RULE
by
Dong Hoon Kim
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)
August 2008
Copyright 2008 Dong Hoon Kim
ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
While writing this dissertation, I have been blessed with the support
and encouragement of many people. At the end of one journey and threshold
of another long one, I would like to catch my breath briefly and express my
sincere thanks to these people whom I deeply respect, admire and love.
My committee members have sustained this project with their
consistent encouragement, support and guidance. Professor David James,
whose steady belief in my works began even long before this dissertation, has
always been there for me, guiding me through every step of my early
academic career. I owe a great deal to Professors Priya Jaikumar and Akira
Lippit for providing me their intellectual and personal support as well as the
professional example. The relationship I have developed with them for the
past few years was one of the best things that happened to me during my
graduate years. I would also like to thank other Critical Studies faculty
members. In particular, I appreciate Professors Anne Friedberg, Curtis Marez
and Tara McPherson for their intellectual guidance and personal
encouragement. I wish to thank Linda Overholt who has always greeted me
and answered my endless questions with her loving smiles. I owe special
thanks to Professor Todd Boyd who has taught me the most important lesson
iii
in the development of my career as a scholar: how to enjoy what we do. The
conversations I had with him on Thursdays for years were one of the most
entertaining, exciting, and intellectually stimulating occasions throughout my
graduate years. Thank you, Dr. B!
I have benefited immensely from the collegiality and friendship of my
colleagues and friends. Especially, I am deeply grateful to my dissertation
writing group: Nam Lee, Jaime Nasser, and HyeRyoung Ok. They have
taught me the true meaning of academic collaboration as well as the unfailing
friendship. I remain indebted to those who read all or parts of the manuscript
and offered me advice, comments, and feedback, which tremendously helped
me improve and augment my dissertation: Patricia Ahn, James Cahill,
Stephanie DeBoer, and Janani Subramanian. My colleagues at USC have
supported me in various ways. My thanks are extended to Karen Beavers,
Hyunjung Cho, Hyung Sook Lee, Ayana McNair, Younjung Oh, Paul Reinsch,
and Chunchi Wang. I particularly wish to acknowledge the friendship of
Yuko Itatsu. I have turned to her supportive and altruistic frienship so many
times.
I would like to extend my gratitude to my friends in Korea as well:
Choi Won-Yong, Hwang Woo-Hyung, Kim Ji-Young, Lee Kwan-Hoon, Lee
Sang-Ha, Park Jung-Ho, Shim Jung-Won, Sung Chang-Hyun, Yoo Hyun-Joo,
iv
and Yoo Shi-Jung. I thank them for their warm welcome during my visits to
Korea and caring friendship. I would also like to appreciate Kirsten O’Connor
for being an incredible hostess during my research trip to Japan. My deepest
thanks go to my parents, who, although dismayed by my career decision at
first, have never stopped believing in me.
This project has been supported by fellowships and research
institutions. The ACE/Nikaido Japan Studies Fellowship of the USC East
Asian Studies Center enabled me to conduct research in Japan. The
Dissertation Completion Fellowship of the USC Graduate School helped me
focus on completing this project throughout the last year at USC. I am grateful
to the Curator Itakura Fumiaki of the Japanese National Film Center for his
generous assistance and to the Professor Jennifer Peterson of the University of
Colorado for introducing me to the Netherlands Filmmuseum.
v
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ii
List of Figures vii
Abstract x
Introduction 1
Between Nationalism and Historical Amnesia: 8
Japanese Imperialism and East Asian Film History
Chapter 1
Blue Swallow (2005) and Nationalist Film Spectatorship in Korea 15
The Crash of Blue Swallow 15
Film Audiences without Movie Theaters: Film Culture in Korea 42
before the 1920s
Chapter 2
The Arirang Legend: Origins of National Cinema and Nationalist
Film Spectatorship 61
Arirang, Film History, and Film Spectators 70
Korean Film Spectatorship: Nationalist Enough? 84
Benshi/Byeonsa across “Borders” 109
Chapter 3
Gyeongseong or Keijo?: Dual Urban Modernities in Seoul 137
Who Owns Seoul?: “Great Migration” and Japanese 137
Film Cultures in Korea
“Intra-Imperial” Co-Productions 147
The Ethnically Segregated Film Audiences 161
Table 1 167
vi
Chapter 4
Film Audiences in the Margins of Film History 188
Colonial Flanerie: Modern Girl, Modern Boy and Movie Theaters 190
Gisaeng: Challenging the New Woman Discourse 218
Conclusion 244
Bibliography 251
vii
LIST OF FIGURES
FIGURE 1. A Korean newspaper article that reports Park’s 16
struggle to acquire her aviation permit due to her
financial problems
FIGURE 2. Park Gyeong-Won (played by Jang Jin-Young) and 23
her Blue Swallow from Blue Swallow (2005)
FIGURE 3. Danseongsa, the oldest movie theater in Korea, located 44
in Jongno, Seoul (circa 1918 and present)
FIGURE 4. Court gisaeng (female performing artists/entertainers) 56
on the stage of Hyeobryulsa, Korea’s first indoor
theater (1902)
FIGURE 5. Nah Un-Gyu and Shin Il-Seon from Arirang (1926) 64
FIGURE 6. The caricature of Collbran and his streetcar that reflects 90
Koreans’ enmity against him
FIGURE 7. L. Martin’s newspaper advertisement for his theater 93
which is only referred to as “a brick house on the east,
right outside of the Gate”
FIGURE 8. Betty Bronson in Peter Pan (1924) 99
FIGURE 9. A newspaper report on “Manse (Hurrah) Revolt” that 103
transpired at the welcoming ceremony for the American
Congressmen
FIGURE 10. A theater listing in a newspaper with the photos of 114
byeonsa, which evidences the significance of byeonsa
practice in early film culture and business in Korea
FIGURE 11. Wu Jeong-Sik, the first Korean byeonsa 124
FIGURE 12. The Moving Picture Film Censorship Regulation which 130
focuses on film exhibition and byeonsa/benshi performances
viii
FIGURE 13. The caricatures of Seo Sang-Ho, the first celebrity 135
byeonsa, as a heavy drinker and womanizer from a
magazine article chronicling the rise and demise of
byeonsa practices
FIGURE 14. “Joseon Drama by Joseon Kinema and Shochiku” 157
FIGURE 15. A postcard featuring Hon-machi in Seoul’s South 168
Village (Namchon), circa 1920
FIGURE 16. The crowd that gathered around the Emperor 170
Sunjong’s funeral hearse, 10 June 1926
FIGURE 17. A Korean newspaper review of Douglas Fairbanks’ 175
The Black Pirate for Korean audiences
FIGURE 18. A Japanese newspaper ad of The Black Pirate for 176
Japanese audiences
FIGURE 19. Theater ads listing film programs at Japanese theaters 177
FIGURE 20. ”Mimicry of Others” 193
FIGURE 21. Modern Boys and Modern Girls or “Things that crawl 195
out when the autumn leaves are falling”
FIGURE 22. Modern Girls, Fashion, and Consumerist Lifestyle: 197
“The Age of Fur”
FIGURE 23. Modern Girls, Fashion, and Consumerist Lifestyle: 197
“Modern Girl’s Ornament Movement”
FIGURE 24. Ahn Seok-Yeong’s essay cartoons: “Modern Boy’s 201
Stroll” displays the association between Hollywood
movies, fashion, and modern boys
FIGURE 25. Ahn Seok-Yeong’s essay cartoons: Modern boys 201
watching modern girls, not films, in a movie theater
ix
FIGURE 26. “One Hundred People in the Entertainment World” 222
featuring gisaeng Ju San-Wol
FIGURE 27. The newspaper ad for the opening of the Gyeongseong 235
High Entertainment Movie Theater, Korea’s first movie
theater, featuring gisaeng performance and Japanese
female dancers’ Electricity Dance as pre-screening shows
FIGURE 28. The photos of Meijiza Theater 245
x
ABSTRACT
“Eclipsed Cinemas: Colonial Modernity and Film Cultures in Korea
under Japanese Colonial Rule” examines how histories and legacies
surrounding Japanese imperialism have been inscribed upon the film
histories and film cultures of the East Asian region, focusing particularly on
the interactions and reciprocal influences between Japanese and Korean film
cultures under Japanese colonial rule. More specifically, it investigates how
Japanese imperialism influenced and directed the development and formation
of the film cultures in Korea from around 1900 through the early 1930s, with
an emphasis on the film culture of the 1920s when film became the major
modern culture and thereby fully integrated into the everyday cultural life of
the Koreans. While focusing on film exhibition and spectatorship which have
been often marginalized in discussions of national and colonial cinemas, this
dissertation looks at various aspects of colonial film cultures such as film
production, exhibition, reception, policies, and censorship. It additionally
considers the various ways in which the unique nature of Japanese
imperialism as the sole Asian imperial force—its geographical and cultural
proximity to its colonies and its ultimate endeavor to turn its colonies into
Japan—shaped the early development of cinema in Korea and East Asia.
xi
As it uncovers a variety of historical issues and questions that have
long been ignored or marginalized, “Eclipsed Cinemas” is also concerned
with the issue of historiography in relation to the ways in which the legacies
of imperialism and nationalism have modified, concealed, exaggerated or
“eclipsed” film histories and historical materials. By investigating the
cinema’s convoluted relation to Korea’s colonial modernity and Japanese
imperialism and the discursive formations of national and regional film
histories and historiographies, this dissertation ultimatley explores the
mutually constitutive relationship between early Japanese and Korean film
histories.
1
INTRODUCTION
After buying tickets, we headed directly toward the main exhibit. When we
passed by four or five people coming out from the exhibition, we heard
them telling a joke aloud, “those two Korean animals at the main hall were
surely funny,” and then they walked on. When we reached a certain spot
where a dim daylight was falling, we saw a Korean male who wore a
traditional hairdo and outfit, sitting on a chair in one corner. In the other
corner, a lady was sitting on a chair, and she wore a long Korean skirt with
which she covered her head and through which she only exposed her eyes.
A friend of mine immediately turned pale, sighed and deplored, “they are
the two Korean animals those Japanese talked about.” Oh…alas!
1
This bizarre meeting between Koreans on opposite sides of the gaze at
an exposition held in Tokyo that showcased an “ethnic village” epitomizes
the politics of the expositions organized by Japan during its imperial
expansion around the early twentieth century. Since The Great Exhibition
(1851), the first international-scale exposition held in London, the world’s fairs
and expositions were one of the most popular cultural features in the later
half of the nineteenth century and throughout the early twentieth century in
the west and they served to celebrate the victorious accomplishments of
western modernization and of western imperialism by way of exhibiting its
technological and scientific achievements as well as the actual bodies of
“Others” from the “uncharted” territories it had conquered. During its
imperial reign, Japan not only participated in the world fairs of the west in
1
Daehan Maeil Sinbo, 6 June 1907.
2
order to “demonstrate its place among the powers of the world”
2
but
borrowed the imperialist politics of the world’s fair and exposition from the
west and held its own versions of expositions all over its imperial territories.
Japan’s expositions functioned similar to its western counterparts, aiming to
commemorate Japan’s imperial expansions and also display its difference
from other “backward” Asian countries by casting its imperial gaze upon its
“uncivilized,” “underdeveloped,” and “not-yet-westernized” neighbors in
order to validate its imperial project and consolidate its role as a regional
leader which aspired to modernize the region and protect its neighboring
countries against the threats from the western imperial forces.
I open this dissertation with this particular anecdote not just because
it displays the visual politics of Japanese imperialism. Rather, I am more
interested in the unusual encounter between two different kinds of Koreans,
which, I argue, emblematically exhibits the essentially conflicting nature of
Korea’s overall experience of modernity. This uncomfortable encounter
certainly demonstrates the ways in which modernity in Korea was influenced
and directed by Japanese colonialism as well as the Japanese origin of Korea’s
modernity. In Korea, as in many Asian countries, including Japan, modernity
has been by and large equated with western civilization. However, as Carter J.
2
Carol Ann Christ, “The Sole Guardians of the Art Inheritance of Asia: Japan at the 1904 St.
Louis World’s Fair,” Positions 8, no.3 (winter 2000), 683.
3
Eckert points out, much of what the Koreans came to consider as “modern”
during and even prior to Japanese occupation was actually to a large extent
Japanese in origin; western civilization was largely “filtered through a Meiji
or Taisho prism.”
3
Indeed, the world exposition, an invention of western
modernity and product of western imperialism, came with the very different
kinds of meanings to a group of Korean college students in Tokyo who went
to enjoy the up-to-date urban culture only to find themselves vexed and
shocked when confronting “their own people” on display as “filtered”
through Japan’s own version of Orientalism and reproduced according to
Japanese imperialist needs and logics.
Creating a “distance” between Japan and its colonies was particularly
important for Japanese imperialism, as its “distance” from its colonies in
geographical, economic, cultural, and ethnic senses was often not far enough.
Besides, for centuries Japan’s position in East Asia had been traditionally
considered “behind” those of China and Korea in the regional order—
especially in a cultural sense. In this regard, the exposition was one of many
cultural institutions Japanese imperialism turned to as a way to reshuffle the
regional hierarchies and publicly put on a show signifying that Japan had
become the new leader in a new order premised upon the modernization of
3
Carter J. Eckert, Offspring of Empire: The Koch’Ang Kims and the Colonial Origins of Korean
Capitalism, 1876-1945 (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1996), 34.
4
the region. In addition to the Japanese Empire’s crafted sense of distance, I
also would like to pay attention to another sense of “distance” at the Tokyo
exposition illustrated here. In most cases, the distance between the observers
and observed in terms of geography, race, and culture at the world’s fairs and
expositions was the primary precondition for the former to fetishize and
otherize the latter. There is however, a striking lack of “distance” between the
subject and object in the case of Koreans at the exposition held by the
Japanese, their soon-to-be-colonizer. At first glance, one could only see this
complete lack of distance between two different groups of Koreans here—the
lack of ethnic difference— but suggestions of proximity between them give
way to the rift of immense economic, social, and cultural differences. On the
one end of the “looks,” there are couples who are so poor that they sell
themselves to be part of a public display, which visually functions to mark the
clear “distance” between Korea and Japan. On the other end of the “looks,”
we have Korean college students who have the privilege of enjoying modern
education, life, culture, and experience, and their distance from Japan is
virtually non-existent, as they are physically present in Japan, studying
abroad in this most advanced, modern, and westernized country in the region.
What makes this very discomforting exchange of looks in this particular
exhibit of Koreans both fascinating and poignant is the mixed sense of
5
distance. Korea’s modernity is nothing but this mixed sense of distance; while
being modern connotes the excitement, transformation, development, and the
“new,” modernization and modernity also signify the colonial occupation and
exploitation for the Koreans. Thus modern Korea could not have and should
not have looked away from its colonial reality despite its relative proximity to
its colonizers. Like looking at the displayed Korean bodies at an exposition,
modern Korea was constantly reminded that its modernization was grounded
primarily on colonialism. The Koreans on both sides of this “look”—all stand
for the colonial modernity of Korea. Colonialism and modernization are not
mutual antithetical; colonial experience is an integral part of Korea’s version
of modernity. And it is this colonial modernity that creates the mixed sense of
distance between the two groups of Koreans at an exposition, and also the
incongruous nature of Korea’s modern experience.
This dissertation explores how these multiple senses of “distance”
constructed modern urban culture and experience in Korea under the colonial
rule of Japan (1910-1945), focusing on the film culture. More specifically,
“Eclipsed Cinemas” investigates how Japanese imperialism influenced and
directed the development and formation of the film cultures in Korea from
around 1900 through the early 1930s, with an emphasis on the film culture of
the 1920s when film became the major modern culture and thereby fully
6
integrated into the everyday cultural life of the Koreans. Essentially, I am
concerned with the issue of historiography in relation to the ways in which
the legacies of imperialism and nationalism have modified, concealed,
exaggerated, or “eclipsed” film histories and historical materials, shedding
light on a variety of historical issues and questions that have long been
ignored or marginalized.
The primary agenda of this dissertation is to make a contribution to
recent attempts to de-colonize early cinema and modern visual cultural
studies. These fields have been very productive in film studies and cultural
studies since the late 1970s, producing many groundbreaking works that
introduce innovative historiographical methods and theoretical approaches.
Yet their main discourses have rarely deviated from Euro-American contexts.
In the same vein, the cinema’s role and function in projects of imperialist
expansions remains seriously understudied. European modernity cannot be
divorced from its histories of imperial aggression and expansion in its
political, economic, and cultural dimensions, and the role of the cinematic
medium as one of the overriding engines propelling European modernity and
imperial mechanisms cannot be overlooked. Considering that since its
inception the development of cinema has been indebted to the
commodification of “Others,” the commercial advantages of various imperial
7
wars, and the uses of penetrative powers of imperial networks for developing
film distribution and exhibition systems, the marginalized status of this issue
effectively eclipses one of the formative aspects of the medium’s early history.
In this dissertation, I address this historiographical void by
interrogating the mutually constitutive relationship between imperial
Japanese cinema and colonial Korean cinema. In fact, Japanese imperialism
has been even more neglacted in not only film studies but also in other
disciplines such as cultural studies and colonial studies. About the noticeable
scarcity of the studies on Japanese imperialism in academic fields, Leo T.S.
Ching writes:
What is symptomatic in the study of Japanese colonial discourse is its
persisting ghettoization in Euro-American academia. Whereas studies
of colonial India or colonial policy in Algeria are collected under the
rubric of Cultural Studies, works on Japanese colonialism and colonial
Korea or Taiwan are more often than not allocated to the
specialization of Area Studies or the History department, notably
Asian or East Asian studies.
4
According to Ching, the contained condition of the studies of Japanese
imperialism within East Asian studies ultimately essentializes imperialism as
solely a “western” problem in Euro-American academia and underscores the
4
Leo T.S. Ching, Becoming Japanese: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation
(Berkeley and Los Angenes: University of California Press, 2001), 30.
8
west’s obsession with its own authority to constitute itself as a body of
knowledge and the sole author of its criticism.
5
This ironic regression to
Eurocentrism in the academic fields of colonial and post-colonial studies also
takes place in the film and cultural studies. Early Japanese cinema—and
Japanese cinema in general—is one of the most prolifically studied non-
western national cinemas in the west and it is often considered as an
alternative form of national cinema, compared to western film practices,
aesthetics, and styles. Yet it is problematic to employ Japanese cinema as the
prime example of the non-western cinemas or “alternative” cinema. Certainly,
Japanese cinema displays quite unique and different features than American
and European film in terms of film aesthetics. But on a historical level, early
Japanese film history is more aligned to the western film histories than it is to
other non-western or colonial cinemas as the early development of Japanese
cinema was intertwined with Japan’s imperial project. I argue that differences
on the aesthetic level, but similarities in terms of politics and film history
make it easy to fetishize and exoticize aesthetic differences, while
disregarding the political economy of cinema.
5
Ibid.
9
Between Nationalism and Historical Amnesia:
Japanese Imperialism and East Asian Film History
A lot of people died as a result of a war. That could not have been
avoided. You have to properly understand the stance of each country.
And therefore you need to teach why the countries were sent to war.
We shouldn’t keep repeating that Japan was bad. That destroys pride
in the country. (Tojo Yuko)
6
Today many East Asian countries consider themselves as having
entered into a post-post colonial era and as being regional leaders and global
economic powerhouses, and thus the issues of modernization, colonialism,
and imperialism seem to become things from the past that they might as well
get over. Yet the colonial and imperial pasts frequently re-surface, stirring up
old and recent memories of conflicts and abhorrence, and creating new
tensions and challenges. Japan, the former colonizer, occupies the center of
these never-ending disputes. For the Westerners, Japan is seen as a
“feminine” country that is generally associated with varied cultural
expressions ranging from samurai, sumo, anime, manga to playstation.
However for its East Asian neighbors, Japan is an “ultra-masculine”
militaristic force always ready to flex its muscles and easily bring back
century-old memories of imperialist aggression. As exemplified through the
6
David McNeill, “My Grandfather Died to Protect Japan: Interview with Tojo
Yuko,“ Ohmynews, 22 August 2005. Emphasis added.
10
political leaders’ persistent visits to the Yasukuni shrine, debates about
Japanese history textbooks, and on-going quarrels with Korea and China over
the border issues, Japan seems not too seriously concerned with grunts and
threats from its former colonies; Japan wishes its former colonies and the rest
of the world to understand that the Japanese are victims too. There was
violence, war, exploitation, and massacre, but there is no aggressor—only
victims exist. The above quoted interview with Tojo Yuko—a granddaughter
of Tojo Hideki, the wartime prime minister who was convicted as a war
criminal and executed in 1948—is typical of Japan’s general perspective on its
imperial past and also indicates that the modern history of East Asia remains
a field of fierce contests even today. Throughout the interview, Tojo Yuki
constantly calls for “a proper understanding of history” to fully comprehend
what really happened (see above) during the war, but that is exactly what
Japan’s former colonies continue to ask Japan to do. As Leo Ching argues, the
abrupt dissolution of the Japanese Empire by an external force instead of
through prolonged struggle and negotiation with its colonies has enabled
Japan to circumvent and disavow its colonial question.
7
Therefore, Japan and
its former colonies are still dealing with their unfinished business of de-
colonization. As a result, histories (and pseudo-histories) of imperialism and
7
Leo Ching, Ibid., 20.
11
colonialism still dictate the present of East Asia, and thus epochal
demarcation between the colonial and postcolonial is not really applicable in
this region. In East Asia, colonial modernity, postcoloniality, and post-
postcoloniality are inextricably intertwined.
Another historiographical void this dissertation attempts to take on is
the eclipse of early East Asian cinema. An adequate history of East Asian
cinemas during Japanese imperial rule has yet to be written, largely due to the
prolonged decolonization processes which have generated the contested
historical views on the region’s colonial/imperial pasts. It should be noted
that the nationalist investments—the counteractive responses to Japanese
imperialism—which have haunted such countries as Korea, Taiwan, and
China as well as many other Southeast Asian countries, have actively
participated in blurring rather than illuminating the film history of the region.
As Nick Deocampo eloquently argues in his study on the history of early
Filipino cinema under the influences of multiple imperial forces, “film
historians who trace the beginning of a national cinema to a time of fierce
nationalism may only be too tempted to investigate history through the rose-
colored glasses of a nationalist, but this may be achieved at the expense of
history.”
8
Hence, owing to the nationalist historiography which is inclined to
8
Nick Diocampo, Cine: Spanish Influences on Early Cinema in the Philippines (Manila: National
12
only underline nationalist efforts, “any interpretation that lies outside the
nationalist framework, let alone one that dares to challenge the relevance or
validity of the framework itself, is often ignored as unimportant or castigated
as morally deficient, regardless of the evidence.”
9
In Korea and other former
colonies of Japan, the ideals of a nationalist perspective have been
overemphasized, but privileging the nationalist paradigm has tended to stifle
other possible stories and withhold material historical accounts. Yet
nationalist historiography tells only half of the story. The “silence” in
Japanese film historiography over Japan’s decisive role in its former colonies’
film cultures is equally important. This conspicuous elision is hardly
coincidental and is instead the result of a larger historiographical paradigm of
post-war Japan, which tends to downplay its imperial past and instead depict
Japan as an equal victim of the wars, militarism, and imperialism of the epoch.
“Eclipsed Cinemas” begins to address the multiple complexities of the
aforementioned problematic of film historiographies by exploring the film
cultures in Korean under colonial rule. The phrase “film culture” here
includes film production, distribution, exhibition, spectatorship, policy,
censorship, and the social reception of cinema and film texts. Nonetheless, I
Commission for Culture and Arts, 2003), 12.
9
Carter Eckert, “Excorcizing Hegel’s Ghosts,“ Colonial Modernity in Korea, eds. Gi-Wook Shin
and Michael Robinson (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2001), 366.
13
focus particularly on film exhibition and spectatorship which have been even
more marginalized in discussions of national and colonial cinemas, especially
in Korea. For decades the history of Korean colonial cinema has been written
exclusively about the films by Korean filmmakers and Korean spectators’
responses to them. However, in order to draw a complete picture of the
formation of Korean colonial cinema, it is imperative to look beyond the films
produced by Koreans and Korean spectators’ loyal devotion to them, since the
number of films locally produced in Korea throughout the colonial period
was quite small; until the later years of Japanese imperial rule when the
screening quota systems began to limit the number of foreign films screened,
more than ninety-five percent of the films released in Korea were foreign
imports. This means that Korean film-goers’ interactions with locally
produced films were rare occasions at best and quite special events as they
account for only a small portion of the film culture in colonial Korea. It is
therefore intrinsically limiting to discuss Korean colonial cinema only by
relying on a highly limited numbers of texts and by thinking through film
spectatorship under Japanese imperial rule based solely on locally produced
films. The most pressing issue is to inquire into the ways in which Korean
film-goers dealt with the absence of the images with which they could
immediately identify. This “absence of the images” has been an agonizing
14
issue also for Korean film historians as no single film produced in Korea prior
to 1934 has survived.
10
To tackle these dual “absences,” I pursue a
historiographical approach that Giuliana Bruno calls “the economics of
discourse,”
11
rather than considering film history merely as the mode of
production. Therefore, in interrogating the ways in which the film-viewer
relations inform the intricate interrelations among cinema, modernity,
colonialism, and identity construction and finding a way to develop a picture
of what film cultures in colonial Korea were like in the absence of Korean film
texts, I consider how these issues were popularly expressed, and thus
examine films, literary works, newspapers, magazines, and industrial
accounts.
* * *
Throughout this dissertation, including the notes and bibliography,
all Chinese, Japanese and Korean names (except those who have published in
English) appear in the East Asian order of family name first. All translations
from Japanese and Korean materials are mine unless otherwise noted.
10
In March 2008, Korean Film Archive (KFA) announced its discovery of the 1934 silent film
The Crossroad of the Youth (Cheongchunui Sipjaro), and the film became the “new“ oldest film in
Korea that has remained. Prior to the finding of The Crossroad of the Youth, Delusion (Mimong,
1936) was considered the oldest and sole silent film that had survived.
11
Giuliana Bruno, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira
Notari (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993), 83.
15
CHAPTER 1
BLUE SWALLOW (2005) AND
NATIONALIST FILM SPECTATORSHIP IN KOREA
The Crash of Blue Swallow
On August 7, 1933, light rain sprinkled over the airstrips of Haneda
aerodrome, the largest civilian airport that had opened just two years
previously on the outskirt of Tokyo, Japan. At 10:35 am, a plane took off from
the airport and quickly disappeared into the mist of cloudy sky. The plane
named “Blue Swallow” was scheduled to fly from Japan to Yeouido, the inner
city island of Seoul, Korea, and then continue to Manchuria in order to
commemorate Japan’s acquisition of Manchuria under the mission name of
“Imperial Army’s Comfort Communication Flight for Japan-Manchuria
Friendship.” This flight also carried a personal meaning for the aviator, as it
was a belated homecoming flight for the pilot of Blue Swallow, who received
an aviation license in 1927 but struggled for several years to acquire her own
plane. At the time it was a custom for pilots to fly back to their hometown
with their own planes and have a big parade and party after they passed the
aviation test. About fifty minutes after departure, however, Blue Swallow
16
crashed into Hakone Mountain, located 80 km northwest from Tokyo, due to
mechanical failure triggered by a typhoon. Later that afternoon, a rescue party
discovered the fallen Blue Swallow and the pilot’s body inside.
FIGURE 1. A Korean newspaper article that reports Park’s struggle to acquire her aviation
permit due to her financial problems. Donga Ilbo, 4 September 1925.
The tragic death of Park Gyeong-Won (1901-1933), one of the first
Korean pilots and one of only three female pilots of the entire Japanese
Empire at the moment of her death, immediately shook up both Japan and
Korea. Her funeral, hosted by Tachikawa Aviation School where she trained,
was held at the Imperial Aviation Society of Japan. Top government officials
and cabinet members attended her funeral, and Japanese and Korean media
17
covered the event competitively. Given the rarity of female pilots, Park’s
death was understandably treated like that of a popular movie star. More
importantly, it was also a distinguished media promotional event for the
Japanese Empire, since Park, an imperial subject from colonial Korea, died
while carrying out her imperial mission. A stone monument that records her
heroic deed was erected in the Hakone area in the following year, and Japan
even immortalized Park fifty years after her death by enshrining her in a
Buddhist temple in 1983 along with Japanese wartime officials and soldiers,
some of whom had been accused of war criminals after the war. In 1994, a
biography on Park by Kano Mikiyo was published in Japan.
1
Japan’s
continuous interests in and veneration of Park show how much this tragic
event meant for the empire. Due to her unfortunate and “untimely” death,
therefore, Park remains in suspended animation at the very moment when
she flew the Blue Swallow for the empire, and thus is enchained to the
colonial past even though Japanese imperialism is long gone. She may
eternally remain as a conspicuous imperial signifier, playing her role as a-
colonized-turned-into-a-model-imperial-subject, and once again no rescue
crew could come save her from this dire peril.
1
Kano Mikiyo, Etsuerarenagatta Gaiky ō (Tokyo: Jijit ōshin, 1994).
18
Contrary to Japan’s efforts to commemorate her, in Korea Park
Gyeong-Won had been virtually forgotten until a feature bio-pic on her came
out in the winter of 2005. Directed by Yun Jong-Chan, who is known for his
keen interest in women’s issues, the film Blue Swallow with its high
production cost of 10 billion won and big stars was one of highly anticipated
spectacles of the year. Yet Blue Swallow had suddenly found itself in the chaos
of fierce debates and controversies even before it took off, and when it was
released, it crashed into the bottom of box office. The controversies
surrounding the film started with an online newspaper article, “The Cheer
Girl of the Empire, Who Beautifies Her?”
2
This article from Ohmynews, the
influential liberal newspaper in Korea which solely publishes on-line,
disparages not only the film but also the film’s subject, Park Gyeong-Won
herself. In fact the entire article centers on Park’s suspicious life as a willing
collaborator of Japanese Empire and betrayer of her country rather than on
the film itself. The article traces Park’s life from her birth to her last moment
and raises a series of questions concerning Park’s problematic relationship
with Japanese government. Let alone her last flight, the article suspects that
her life-long cooperation with Japanese imperialism benefited her in various
ways and thus helped secure her career. The article specifically questions
2
Jeong Hye-Ju, “Jegukjuuiui Cheergirl, Nuga Mihwahaneunga,” Ohmynews, 19 December
2005 (www.ohmynews.com).
19
Park’s relationship with Koizumi Matajiro, then Minister of the Posts and
Telecommunications and the grandfather of the former Japanese Prime
Minister Koizumi Jun’ichir ō (2001-2006), by pointing out that he was the one
who gave Blue Swallow to Park and supported her till the very last moment
of her life and that there were rumors that he had an affair with Park because
of his sponsorship. The article, uploaded only ten days before the film’s
release, quickly generated debates over the film and Park Gyeong-Won and
eventually led protests and attacks against the film, the production company,
and the filmmakers alike.
Shortly after the article’s publication, it was revealed that the reporter
had not even seen the film when she wrote the article, and that she was a
biographer herself working on a biography of Kwon Gi-Ok, the very first
Korean female pilot (1901-1988), which spiced up the controversies even
more.
3
The credibility of the reporter’s writing was never inquired into,
3
The nature of Ohmynews, the on-line newspaper, has a lot to do with the disputes
surrounding the film Blue Swallow and Park Gyeong-Won. Actually the writer who wrote the
article is not a professional journalist; she is what Ohmynews calls a citizen-reporter. Yet like
many other Ohmynews’ citizen-reporters, she is an expert on what she is writing on, and thus
the historical research and information her article contains grasped the attention of
Netizens— a term merging two words, Net and Citizens, to describe active on-line users in
Korea. Ohmynews, which relies mainly on the citizen-reporter system, with its over forty
thousand citizen-reporters, might be seen as an exemplary use of new media for an
alternative democratic forum, but in fact it has its historical roots in the 1980s when grass-
roots media movements flourished in response to strong media regulation and surveillance of
the military regime in Korea. Thus its motto, “every citizen is a reporter,” does not simply
reflect a rosy expectation for new media’s potential as more democratic media. In other
words, Ohmynews cannot be tied to technological determinism which often maintains that
20
instead, Kwon received more attention. Kwon took an entirely different path
from Park, and the contrast between two female pilots pushed the
controversy further. After being imprisoned a couple of times for her
involvement in anti-Japanese activities, in 1920 Kwon Gi-Ok fled colonized
Korea for Shanghai, China, where the Korean Interim Government founded
by Korean exiles was located. Kwon went to Yunnan, a southwestern region
of China, to enroll in Yunnan Army Air Force School in 1923 and graduated in
1925. After joining Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang (KMT) Army in 1927, she
flew 7,000 hours, participating in various missions against Japan as well as
Chiang’s renowned North Expedition. From 1937 to 1949 when she finally
returned to Korea, Kwon had been a key member of several anti-Japanese
organizations based in ChungKing, hoping to liberate occupied Korea. In 1968
South Korean government garnered Kwon a Medal of Independence to pay a
tribute to her life-long dedication to the nation’s independence.
4
In this sense,
there is little doubt that Park would receive much public sympathy because
new media have created a whole new venue for a better democratic use of communicative
media; rather it is another realization of Korea’s strong alternative media tradition by way of
internet. Therefore, although Ohmynews distances itself from traditional journalism and
media, it does not mean that it is on the margin. Ohmynews exported its format to Japan and
started Ohmynews Japan (www.ohmynews.co.jp) with major investment from Son Jeong-Ui
(Son Masayoshi), a Korean Japanese IT and media mogul and the CEO of a leading Japanese
telecommunication and media corporation Softbank Corporation, in 2006. It evidently shows
that Ohmynews is competing with mainstream media on the center stage.
4
8wolui Dongnib Undongga Kwon Gi-Ok (Seoul: Minjok Seonyang Center, 2003).
21
her choice to be a pilot was very personal, and even worse, her last flight was
nothing but a propaganda show for the Japanese Empire, which significantly
distinguishes her from Kwon who was an ardent nationalist.
A cacophony of voices over Park Gyeong-Won and the film Blue
Swallow was amplified by more rumors and accusations floating around on-
line, as South Korea is one of the better-wired countries, and major media
almost immediately picked up the issue. Rumor had it that the film was
partially financed by Japanese investors, which was totally false. Some
accused the production company’s initial promotion method during the early
production phase, which advertised Park as the first Korean female pilot,
although the company corrected its mistake by changing Park as the first
Korean female civilian pilot when Kwon Gi-Ok’s family publicly censured the
company right after the film promotion initiated. Soon various portal
websites and media homepages became filled with disdains for Park and the
film and many Netizens even said producing this kind of film is a national
shame.
The debates culminated with the opening of anti-Blue Swallow website
on an internet portal site, Daum (cafe.daum.net/antichungyeon), which
blamed the film’s attempt to wrongfully embellish Park, the collaborator of
Japanese empire, and misinform film audiences of the colonial history. The
22
website was an interesting blend of nationalism and the ‘80s leftist culture,
employing as background music From the Vast Field, one of the most famous
underground songs sung by college students and activists in the 1980s and
the early 1990s, and encouraging visitors to leave their signatures and words
of supports on its message board in order to officially protest the film’s
release. The website gained even more attention when the film’s production
and promotion companies sued a couple of Netizens who, according to the
companies, spread false rumors on the anti-Blue Swallow sites that negatively
impacted the film’s box office performance. Indeed, the film drew far below
the standards for a moderate success, with only three hundred fifty thousand
attendants even though the company managed to book 307 screens—close to
twenty percent of the entire film screens in Korea—when it was released.
After the DVD came out several months later, and more people actually
watched the film, sympathetic opinions that regretted and even critiqued the
hasty judgments prompted by emotional nationalism began to appear in
newspapers defending Park by arguing that she is not officially branded as
Chinilpa (collaborators of Japan) by the government. Yet these defenses came a
little too late, and major damage had already been done. The production
company had good reason to believe that the controversy hurt the business
23
and effectively buried the film before it was given a proper opportunity to be
a subject of “fair” public discussion.
FIGURE 2. Park Gyeong-Won (played by Jang Jin-Young) and her Blue Swallow from Blue
Swallow (2005)
The crash of the film Blue Swallow evokes key issues pertinent to this
dissertation, even though it is a contemporary film. Sixty years after the end
of colonialism, the social discourses concerning Blue Swallow make it obvious
that nationalism and colonial experience still play vital roles in shaping film
culture and spectatorship in contemporary Korean society. Calling out
collaborators and erasing imprints of almost four decades of Japanese
imperialism have been poignant and challenging questions for Korea since
1945 when Korea was liberated from Japanese Empire, as modernization in
Korea is virtually equated to imperial aggression. For this very reason there
24
are blurry lines between colonial exploitation and imperialism’s role in
nation’s modernization. The internal decolonization process is far from over,
not just because it has been only some sixty years since the end of colonialism,
but its process has been significantly entangled with and influenced by other
political and ideological premises which were mobilized in attempts to build
and re-build nation-hood after thirty six years of colonial occupation.
The decolonizing process is further complicated in the Korean context
by the division of nation. Since the Korean War (1950-1953), which not only
stripped the nation of sufficient time to pull itself together and deal with
urgent colonial and postcolonial issues but also forcefully pushed the
peninsula into the forefront of the Cold War, North and South Korea have
created and fostered mutually contesting and often contradicting nation-
building narratives, which deeply affect their perspectives on the colonial past.
In both sides of the Korean peninsula, strong nationalisms have emerged as
attempts to redeem their colonial past. For North Koreans eliminating any
remnants of Japanese intervention in Korea’s modernization processes has
been exceptionally serious business because North Korea traces the origin of
the nation back to the anti-Japanese movements of the 1930s in which North
Korea’s first leader Kim Il-Sung got personally involved as an anti-Japanese
Empire guerilla leader. Bruce Cummings offers an insightful assessment of
25
North Korea’s seriousness concerning the colonial past and how the writing
of its colonial history is employed to build its nation-ness:
Of course, they talk about resisting the Yankees as well, but
throughout the country one finds monument after monument to the
anti-Japanese struggle, thirty-five years after the Japanese quit Korea.
Kim Il-Sung, it is said, commanded this movement; all military and
political life is patterned after the resistance. Clearly, this is the North
Korean version of a myth of national foundation.
5
As this quote illustrates, the history of resistance against the Japanese
Empire for Korean independence has been the centripetal force in North
Korea’s modernization and nation building project. Naturally in all cultural
products of North Korea, the colonial and postcolonial imaginary has been
structured around the anti-Japanese histories and spirits, a phenomenon
exemplified by the flourishing of the so-called Anti-Japanese Revolutionary
Literature genre (Hangil Munye). Anti-Japanese Revolutionary Literature
refers to the body of works that revise and develop artworks originally
created by Kim Il-Sung whom North Korea considers as the ultimate savior
of Korean people for his acts of enlightening an aimless nation and leading
the national resistance against Japanese imperial rule. Numerous Anti-
5
Bruce Cummings, “The Legacy of Japanese Colonialism in Korea,“The Japanese Colonial
Empire 1895-1945, eds. Ramon H. Myers and Mark R. Peattie (Princeton: Princeton University,
1987), 478.
26
Japanese Revolutionary works, including films, have been written and
produced, and they continue to be produced to this day. To historically
justify the existence of the nation and Kim Il-Sung’s and his son Kim Jong-Il’s
leadership, North Korea constructs the colonial past in the exactly same way
over and over again, and thus Japan and its imperial past become permanent
structuring “others” in North Korea. As the nation’s history itself proves,
according to North Korea’s nationalist narrative, the Kims were saviors
during the colonial era, and they will remain as the nation’s saviors forever.
Meanwhile in South Korea, as Bruce Cummings precisely points out,
“the virtues that the Japanese shared were hard to justify philosophically, but
easy to adopt practically—military success, the use of a strong state, rapid
economic development, modern industrial structure— and thus Koreans have
never been able to rid themselves of its Janus-faced influence.”
6
For instance,
as the family history of the Gochang Kims (also known as the Koch’Ang
Kims) told by Carter J. Eckert strikingly illustrates
7
, South Korea’s capitalist
system has its roots in the colonial period, and thus industrialists, government
officials, policemen, journalists, and others who had accumulated political,
economic and cultural power under Japanese colonialism became the core
6
Bruce Commings, Ibid., 482.
7
Carter J. Eckert, Offspring of Empire: The Koch’Ang Kims and the Colonial Origins of Korean
Capitalism, 1876-1945 (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1996).
27
founders of the postcolonial South Korea. As a result, besides its continuous
disputes over modern historical writing with Japan, South Korea still faces
serious internal conflicts concerning the nation’s colonial modernity and its
legacies. Consequently, defining the borders between pro-nation and pro-
empire have been hazy and arbitrary in many cases. In the same vein
determining who the Chinilpa were has been a difficult task for South Korea,
since unlike North Korea where Chinilpa were immediately expunged after
Korea’s liberation, even though it in fact had a lot to do with political rivalries,
South Korea was rather generous toward this issue. Special Investigation
Committee for Anti-National Activities (Banmin Teukui) founded in 1948
under a U.S. trusteeship (1945-48), right before the establishment of Republic
of Korea (1948), dealt with 682 cases but it was only able to sentence seven
people to corporal punishment and imprisonment. Even those seven were
released during the Korean War, and the committee itself was dissolved in
1951. The shameful failure of the committee stemmed from political reasons at
a time of national and international turmoil. The United States, which was in
charge of the south part of Korean peninsula and occupied Japan—the Soviet
Union oversaw the north part of Korea in conjunction with Korean Labor
Party’s governance—was reluctant to advance the committee, since this newly
emerging world power believed that many Chinilpa, considering their upper-
28
class background and social influence, could be a central force in establishing
a new South Korean government capable of dealing with immediate threats
from communist countries such as North Korea, the Soviet Union, and China.
Rhee Syng-Man, the first president of South Korea, a fervent anti-communist
who studied and organized exiles for Korea’s independence from the States,
found out that many of his supporters and followers were involved in
Japanese imperialism in one way or the other. Hence both the Korean and
American governments did not want to endorse the committee’s activity,
which resulted in its premature demise. Since the nation stepped into a wrong
path from the outset, therefore, at the various historical moments, the Chinilpa
issue has continually surfaced and re-surfaced in South Korea. Once again the
recent administration (2003-2008) has initiated a policy they call “Correctly
Upholding History,” based upon an idea that the previous histories of the
colonial past have been falsely written. Hence the government has
endeavored to amend various laws, revise the colonial history, and change
school curricula in order to “correctly uphold” the story of the nation’s
colonial past. As part of those efforts, the government established The
Presidential Committee for the Inspection of Collaborations for Japanese
Imperialism (PCIC) in 2004 with the sole focus of searching for and publicly
proclaiming Chinlipa. The PCIC announced the first list of Chinilpa in
29
November of 2006 that included the “most notorious” collaborators and
issued more lists afterwards. Unfortunately, the policy created more
questions than answers because some felt uncomfortable with the abrupt
changes in relation to historical writing and arbitrary standards in deciding
who should or should not be included in the lists, and there were others who
questioned the ultimate motivation of this leftist government, which,
according to these people, might use the committee’s activity for other
political purposes.
In this context the film Blue Swallow’s case is not an anomaly that
caused a sudden social discordance, but just another familiar example that
verifies how much the colonial experience still haunts contemporary Korea,
whether it be north or south. Blue Swallow’s fall not only typifies the
unsettling concerns in regards to an as-of-yet fully decolonized colonial
history but reveals some of the major problems that the colonial discourse of
contemporary Korea—at least on one side of the peninsula—contains. To
delve into questions present in the discursive reception of the film Blue
Swallow, I will go back to the Ohmynews article and then move on to the actual
film text, as the newspaper article nicely summarizes the nationalist
historiography in writing the colonial history as well as the grave problems
entailed in it.
30
A reader can be easily drawn to the article’s provocative title, “The
Cheer Girl of the Empire, Who Beautifies Her?” which employs a highly
sexualized cheerleader metaphor to describe the depravity of imperialism and
highlight Park’s immoral act of betrayal. Suspiciously mulling over collusion
between women of the colonized and imperial aggressors by way of a sexual
trade as shown in this article is not something uncommon in the Korean
national imaginary. Taking on postcolonial nationalism of South Korea,
Chungmoo Choi argues that South Korea’s nationalism is essentially
gendered and that the masculine nature of nationalism is built upon constant
suffocation of women’s sexuality and demonization of it at the same time. In
particular, Chungmoo Choi points out that prostitution has been a sustained
theme in the process of making nationalism masculine:
The dominant discourse of nationalism in postcolonial Korea
strategically chooses to suppress women’s equivocality to privilege
the masculine subject of the nation. Gendered nationalism thus
antagonizes women’s self-contradiction and suspects women’s desire
for the recognition of multiple female subjectivities as a kind of
whoring, while valorizing multiple male subjectivities as nationalistic
and therefore heroic.
8
8
Chungmoo Choi, “Nationalism and Construction of Gender in Korea,” Dangerous Women:
Gender & Korean Nationalism, eds. Elaine H. Kim and Chungmoo Choi (New York: Routledge,
1998), 28.
31
As Choi shows through various cultural and social evidences, during
the colonial period a partner of “prostitute” in the dangerous liaison was
imagined as Japanese imperialists and during the post-colonial period it was
the G.I. stationed in South Korea, which was a material figuration of the U.S.’
militaristic hegemony. Thus, on the one hand, women’s actual and symbolic
prostitution with imperial aggressors represents the scarred and thus
damaged masculinity of colonized males, while on the other hand it is
deemed as the grave threat to the nationalist efforts. “The Cheer Girl of
Empire,” as the Ohmynews article describes Park Gyeong-Won’s potential
relation with Japanese Empire, is an indication of masculine nationalism of
South Korea, and accordingly preys on the national imaginary that assumes
how a woman’s gender and sexuality are distrustfully connected to anti-
national activity and its decadence. The article’s way of tying Park Gyeong-
Won’s gender and sexuality to the imperialism is more apparent when it
insinuates Park’s sexual misdemeanor by bringing up a rumor of her affair
with Koizumi Matajiro, and by doing so the article implies that Park’s
immoral sexual behavior could not be divorced from her being Chinilpa. It
subtly suggests that giving her soul away to the empire is reflected directly in
her “selling” her body to the high government official of the empire: an act of
“whoring.” By labeling Park as a cheerleader—or “prostitute”— the article
32
makes Park a traitor to her country, one who primarily used her body and
sexuality for her own personal gratification.
Besides its problematic gender politics, the article reveals another
question in relation to nationalism and nationalist historiography, which
simplifies the complexity of histories in order to effectively sort out Park as
Chinilipa. It is no doubt that the achievements of Park Gyeong-Won’s lifetime
leave many people under a lot of speculation in view of her undisputable
connection to Japanese Empire as discussed so far, but it is problematic to
entirely dismiss her and her career and manipulate them in order to fit them
handsomely to the nationalist historiography just because of this connection.
Regardless of their positions on the film and/or Park, what is most noticeable
in the months’ long controversy nurtured by the newspaper article is that the
disputes have been formed chiefly around whether or not Park was Chinilpa.
In other words, the film text or the film’s take on Park were at best accessories
to debates over Park’s identity. Whatever the logics, intentions or ideologies
behind the Ohmynews article are, its ultimate purpose to turn spectators away
from the film Blue Swallow proved to be quite successful. As mentioned above,
the article was written before the author watched the film. The questionable
ethics of the article should have been properly called into question, but given
that so many readers were mainly preoccupied with the historical figure of
33
Park Gyeong-Won more than anything else, to take such a minuscule detail
into appropriate consideration seemed improbable. The public perception of
Park echoes Carter J. Eckert’s statement that “there was little room for a
spectrum of shades and colors, for the differences, singularities, exceptions,
contradictions, ambiguities, subtleties, and ironies of colonial life, most of
which were relegated to the background or actively disremembered”
9
in the
nationalist historiography of Korea. Overshadowed by the circumstances of
Park’s last flight and her suspicious relation to the Japanese government,
many of the wrinkles of her complex personal life have been smoothed out.
Indeed Park Gyeong-Won’s life does stand out as a rare female pilot
and self-made woman, coming from a society where Confucianism posed
strict social roles on women for about five hundred years. Born in 1901, she
was the youngest of five daughters from an impoverished carpenter’s family
in the city of Daegoo. Park’s parents, disappointed by having four daughters
without a son, decided to try one more time in a hope to give a birth to a male
heir. Despite their desperation, they ended up with another daughter, and
angered by the result, they named their last daughter “Won-Tong” which
literally means “Chagrin.” It is said that Park Won-Tong, who later changed
9
Carter J. Eckert, “Exorcising Hegel’s Ghosts: Toward a Postnationalist Historiography of
Korea,” Colonial Modernity in Korea, eds. Gi-Wook Shin and Michael Robinson (Boston:
Harvard University Press, 2001), 369.
34
her name to Park Gyeong-Won, determined to be a pilot after visiting an
aerial show by American pilot Art Smith in Busan, and to do so, she worked
incredibly hard to attend an aviation school in Japan, since no pilot training
institutions existed in Korea. Park went back and forth between Japan and
Korea to get jobs and make money, and finally in 1925 she attended the
Department of Automobiles at the Tachikawa Aviation School. To pay her
tuition, she continuously had part time jobs over the course of her education,
such as auto-mechanic and taxi driver. A year later, she passed the
Department of Aviation test and received a pilot permit in 1927. Since then
she participated in various aerial shows and competitions. The second Sino-
Japanese war broke out in 1931 and the war put strict restriction on private
flights, severely limiting flight opportunities for pilots, with the exception of
aviators willing to cooperate with the army. The restriction eventually led to
Park’s ill-fated flight for the “Imperial Army’s Comfort Communication Flight
for Japan-Manchuria Friendship.” In many ways Park is an atypical Korean
woman for her time. Even her physical figure itself made her quite distinctive:
at 5’4’’ tall Park was large for a Korean woman at the early twentieth century.
One of her Tachikawa school colleagues reminiscences that Park Gyeong-
Won drank and smoked a lot, made kimchi to give them to her Korean
35
colleagues, and loved to go to movies.
10
Park pursued her personal dream
during a dark period in her country’s history, and for this very reason her
aspirations to be a pilot and go on a long distance voyage were nearly
impossible to reach without riding the waves of the political and historical
situation, which she did by performing her adequate role as an imperial
subject. Park might be seen as “new woman” for her pioneering career, but
unlike the majority of new women of the period, she was not from a
privileged or rich family nor was she among the elite with higher education,
artistic gift, or stable job. Park was a working class woman who achieved
what she wanted—being a pilot, which was in itself quite unusual—by
breaching social norms and stereotypes and hurdling considerable obstacles
generated by the historical situations of her time.
Every contour of her life suggests that Park was an unorthodox
woman. The film Blue Swallow attempts to capitalize on Park’s unique life,
shedding light primarily on Park Gyeong-Won as an individual and more
precisely as a woman who followed her own desire of being a pilot while
fighting against dual oppressions of the patriarchal system of her country and
imperialism of Japan. When asked in an interview about his response to the
10
Han Seung-Hee, Film 2.0 (5 March 2004, www.film2.co.kr).
36
controversy greeting the release of his film and his views on how to approach
the colonial subject, the director Yun Jong-Chan remarked:
Yes, I did [expect the controversy]. It is a historical truth that Park
carried out the Japan-Manchuria Communication Flight, holding a
Japanese flag in her hand. For dramatic verisimilitude the film
portrays that Park held the flag out of the shock and sadness over her
lover’s death, but it does not mean that the film bestows an
indulgence on the fact that she raised the imperial Japanese flag…
The initial script handed on to me was a typical text that specifically
singled out the discrimination against Korean people in Japan. I did
not feel a need to make that type of film. I wanted to approach the
subject matter with a new perspective. Furthermore the original
script excluded the moment when Park waived a Japanese flag right
before her last flight. This is unacceptable. The misrepresentation of
history for dramatization’s sake would fuel controversy and also
does not help characterize Park in three-dimensions at all. Her act
cannot but be branded as a betrayer of the country, and she herself
must have known this fact very well. Over the course of pursuing her
dream, she could not avoid being struck by lightning. It is beyond a
human being’s control.
11
As the director’s comment demonstrates, the film does not shy from
dealing with a controversial figure like Park Gyeong-Won and describing her
multi-layered life without merely reducing her to another victim of Japanese
imperial rule nor a brazen Chilipa. In this sense the film certainly deviates
from an archetypal narrative of the colonial history. Nonetheless the film’s
way of picturing Park’s life is not as unique as her life; the ways in which the
11
Interview with Yun Jong-Chan, Film 2.0 (27 December 2005, www.film2.co.kr).
37
film recounts the story of its protagonist and tackles the colonial past are
hardly as radical as the claims made by those who despised the film and
questioned its portrayal of Park. In fact the film tries to circumvent these key
issues through a very cautious approach to Park’s life even though, as the
director points out, it includes Park’s waving the Japanese flag upon the
departure for her last flight, the most notorious moment in Park’s life. In
particular, the insertions of fictional characters in the film for “dramatic
verisimilitude” function as a double-edged sword; while the film uses certain
fictional characters as means of distancing its historical approach from a
nationalist one, other characters are employed to tone down Park Gyeong-
Won’s contentious image, in other words, to effectively maneuver through
potentially confrontational questions in relation to the colonial history as well
as Park’s relation to Japanese Empire. Indeed, the film includes a lot of
fictional characters, although almost all the main characters are loosely based
on actual figures. Two of the most distinct fictional characters in the film are
Kibe, a Japanese female pilot, and Han Ji-Hyeok, Park’s lover. In the film Kibe,
modeled on a Japanese pilot who had no historical connection to Park
whatsoever, starts her relation with Park as a rival, but soon they become
close friends. As Park’s best friend and passionate supporter, Kibe saves Park
from a flurry of problems Park confronts, helps Park become the empire’s
38
most beloved pilot, and even she is the one who organizes Park’s last flight to
Manchuria by using her connections within the government, thus realizing
Park’s ultimate dream of undertaking a long distance flight. By highlighting
the strong tie between the two female pilots that crosses borders and
overcomes the animosity between the colonizers and colonized, the film not
only betrays the conventional national imaginary of colonialism and stresses
its atypical approach to the colonial history, but also addresses the gender
issue which is seriously marginalized in a nationalist historiography.
Quite opposite to Kibe’s character with which the film makes its
political stance obvious, another fictional character, Han Ji-Hyeok, Park
Gyeong-Won’s lover, plays a regressive role. Again very loosely based on a
historical figure, Han’s character did not even exist in Park Gyeong-Won’s
real life. However, the film places him at the center of Park’s life, and quite
interestingly he becomes simultaneously a major threat to and savior of Park’s
career, which in a way corresponds with the film’s challenge to the masculine
nature of nationalism. Park and Han meet each other as a cab driver and
passenger and become friends when they realize that they are both Koreans.
Han, a son of a politician (and, of course, Chinilpa), is depicted as a nihilist
and helpless intellectual who is soon forced to enroll in the Japanese Imperial
Army by his own father. After a brief departure while Han serves his military
39
duty elsewhere, Park develops her relationship with Han when he returns to
the city of Tachikawa as a meteorological army official. The crisis comes when
Han’s college friend, a member of the Korean liberation movement group
called Joseon Red Corp., assassinates Han’s father along with other Chinilpa
and Japanese officials at the military air base right in front of Han’s eyes.
Accused of being accomplices in the assassination, Han and Park together
find themselves under the military’s investigation. To save Park, Han admits
that he is an accomplice and as a deal Park is acquitted. The investigation
pushes Park to the edge, and it is Kibe who finally rescues Park’s career by
pulling political strings. Exploiting her fragile situation, the Japanese
government allows Park to fly but only for the imperial mission, the Japan-
Manchurian Communication Flight. Park, dismayed by the offer, visits Han in
prison, and Han persuades her to accept the offer by saying that she should
not be afraid of being called a betrayer of her country, since Korea gave
nothing to her, and it is the only opportunity for her to realize her dream.
Toward the end of the film, Han is executed while Park carries out her
imperial mission by flying to Manchuria via Korea and meets her death.
This completely fictional episode provides a convenient excuse for the
event that most tarnishes Park’s career, her last flight. Especially, the
investigation scene is filled with shot after shot of graphic acts of torture that
40
Han and Park are subjected to. The film’s use of the torture scene with which
Korean film-goers are all too familiar when it comes to the Japanese imperial
rule suggests nothing but that Park paid her dues as a colonial subject. More
problematically, the film describes Park’s last flight in such a way that it was
not her own choice, but that she was forced to make the decision due to the
situation from which she could not run away. In its attempts to challenge the
nationalist historiography, the film ends up depicting the Japanese Empire as
the ultimate villain and Park as a mere victim of the empire, giving her a
plausible reason, if not an “indulgence,” for her relationship with the empire
and thus cleaning up her image.
The film Blue Swallow does not entirely defy either the nationalist
historiography or the general perception of colonial history by incorporating
safe narrative devices that help the film escape from a possible public
denunciation. Nevertheless, those devices failed, and the film’s unusual
subject, Park Gyeong-Won, was just enough to cause angers among film-goers
who were not even patient enough to sit through the film. The crash of Blue
Swallow is a fine exemplar of how the complexities of modern Korean history,
particularly its colonial past, saturate the contemporary film culture and
influence film spectatorship. Film cultures in the Koreas are indissociable
from the nation’s tumultuous political and social conditions. From the
41
colonial period when film was introduced and became legitimate
entertainment, to the division of the nation that engendered the Cold War
politics and unstable political environments, the imprints of the political
atmospheres on film cultures have always been vivid and difficult to miss.
Due to political reasons that have generated severe censorship, regulations,
social fears and anxieties that strictly enchain film-viewing, in the Koreas at
any given time during this eighty year span, watching a certain type of film
might put a viewer in a danger, including risk of one’ life in the most dire
situations. It is not at all surprising that the grave weight of modern history
still sturdily directs the traits of movie-going and movie-watching. This trend
originated in the 1920s when film culture emerged within a context fraught
with political turmoil and from the start caught up in such various external
forces as colonialism, nationalism, and cultural and political imperialism, just
to name a few. What is more imperative to consider is the ways in which the
historiography shadowed by postcolonial nationalism has framed film history.
As the controversy over the film Blue Swallow enlightens us, the postcolonial
nationalisms of Koreas not only affect viewing patterns and film cultures of
cotemporary Korean societies but also modify and conceal actual histories to
partake in the nationalist narrative. In this regard, exploring the film culture
during the colonial rule should be performed on two different but closely
42
interconnected levels. Examining the origins of the film culture and
spectatorship in Korea by going through material evidences needs to be
accompanied with ruminations over how, why and which material evidences
have been suppressed, altered, distorted, and forgotten for what purposes. In
so doing, one might be able to at least salvage something from the crashes of
Park Gyeong-Won’s Blue Swallow and the film Blue Swallow.
Film Audiences without Movie Theaters:
Film Culture in Korea before the 1920s
A common perception of the 1920s in Korean film history has it that
this is the crucial period in terms of the foundation of the national cinema,
since it was the decade which witnessed the rise of local film production and
industry, the earliest Korean masterpieces, and film “authors” and stars.
However, this kind of figuration of the decade is primarily based on the
development in film production, and thus a dramatic surge in movie theaters
and film patrons and its direct impact on the film production, which is
another crucial aspect of the rapidly growing and changing film culture of the
decade, has been far less discussed and underappreciated.
43
On December 21, 1918, Danseongsa (also known as Dansungsa), the
oldest movie theater in Korea that exists today as a multiplex, reopened after
its second renovation in three years.
The winter night is getting longer, and the snow-covered earth makes
us feel melancholic. If you come to our theater when all sorts of
winter feelings captivate you, the hearth would warm your body, and
every time marvelous pictures you’ve never seen before are projected
on the snow white screen, you would suddenly find yourself thinking,
“this is the paradise.” So we believe you could not find a better night
entertainment than this.
12
With this poetic newspaper advertisement, Danseongsa, originally established
in 1907 for traditional performing arts spectacles, publicly announced its
reopening after being renovated to a theater solely devoted to film screenings.
It soon became the most popular and influential movie theater in Korea
throughout the rest of the colonial period. Danseongsa’s transformation from
a theater that accommodated various performing arts and occasional film
screenings into a movie theater at the threshold of the decisive decade was an
indexical event that represents another major facet of the 1920s film culture in
Korea: the institutionalization of movie theaters, the emergence of massive
movie audience, and the collective movie-viewing experience that movie
theaters made possible. Thus the fast growing film industry in Korea during
12
Maeil Sinbo, 2 December 1918.
44
the 1920s was closely intertwined with this newly appeared movie-going
pattern and the industrialization of film distribution and exhibition systems.
The significance of the 1920s could be thereby sought not only from the
emergence of and increase in local film productions but from the drastic
changes in how films were exhibited, viewed, consumed, and received, in
other words, a whole new way of movie-going and viewing activities
generated by movie theaters.
FIGURE 3. Danseongsa, the oldest movie theater in Korea, located in Jongno, Seoul (circa
1918 and present).
Movie theaters had appeared very slowly in Korea, and indeed it took
almost twenty years for movie theaters to become major sites of film
consumption. Certainly the 1920s saw the burgeoning film culture and
dramatically increased number in movie patrons, but it should be noted that
45
it was not as explosive as other countries. Toward the end of the 1920s, Korea
had only about forty movie theaters, and Seoul had eight movie theaters in
total. The traveling movie projection troupes wandering all across the
peninsula and special screenings organized by diverse social and cultural
organizations were still the chief methods of experiencing the wondrous
world of movies for many, and these trends continued to exist throughout the
colonial period, and even after Korean War in the 1950s. One of the apparent
reasons why Korea had such a small number of movie theaters is the unstable
political and unstable economic state of Korea as a Japanese colony, which
significantly affected and limited not only the growth of the film business but
the overall culture and media industry. However, the unusual scarcity of
movie theaters also originated from the innate cultural background, that is,
the absence of a permanent indoor theater tradition in Korea. The western
style stage drama and film arrived to Korea almost simultaneously, and the
permanent indoor theater came to Korea along with these two western
cultural products. Korea’s first permanent indoor theater for stage drama and
performance, Hyeobyulsa Theater, opened its doors in 1902; before
Hyeobryulsa there was no single permanent indoor theater in Korea. In this
regard, it was not just film that Korea imported, but theater per se came
together with film as a brand new cultural institution. The entire theaters,
46
including movie theaters, were newly built, most of them were established
only after Japan colonized Korea, and the majority of theater owners and
managers were the Japanese. Therefore, before movie theaters competitively
appeared around 1920, movie-going experiences in Korea were not really tied
to movie theaters but occurred at various places not typically associated with
film screenings, and were often limited to a small number of spectators. The
experience of going to grand theaters and mingling with total strangers from
an array of social backgrounds was something unexperienced by many
Koreans prior to the 1920s.
Before leaping into the 1920s, I would like to briefly discuss film
exhibition and spectatorship before the 1920s, focusing on where and how
people enjoyed movies when movie theaters were not widely available, so as
to highlight the major changes that were brought to the film culture and film-
viewing experience in the 1920s when movie theaters became the central sites
for movie consumption unlike the earlier decades. The following section
interrogates various film screening spaces and film audiences during the first
twenty years of film culture in Korea and several of the earliest movie theaters
to appear in the early 1910s up through the reopening of Danseongsa at the
dawn of the 1920s.
47
In his article “A Theory on Korean Cinema [Joseon Yeonghwaron]”
written in 1942, Yim Hwa, a leftist KAPF
13
writer and literary critic who
contributed to several film productions in the 1930s, discusses a couple of key
social and cultural conditions that have impeded the early development of
cinema in Korea. Yim notes:
The main reason why no serious filmmaking has been possible could
be the lack of financial capital which is the unique social condition.
Yet the bigger problem lies in the weak stage drama tradition…Before
one pioneered [the film], he had to turn to stage play. In other words,
the stage drama was the most fundamental base that nurtured the
first phase of film medium, and the fact that the stage has the weakest
tradition among all the artistic forms is one of the core cultural
conditions that delayed the film production in Korea. Under these
conditions, it was the natural destiny that the first Korean film was a
chain drama that links stage and film, and the first pure film was a
propaganda piece on sanitary administration made for the
government by sinpa [New Theater] people, which was an inevitable
result that stemmed from the poor financial state of the country.
14
Yim’s argument, which focuses on the weak stage tradition as the
most pressing issue facing the development of Korean cinema, clearly shows
how much the lack of stage tradition influenced the film production, style,
13
Formed in 1925, Korea Artista Proleta Federatio (Esperanto, KAPF) was a cultural group
that aimed for socialist revolution and attempted to use culture for social activism. Its
members worked in various cultural fields, including literature, theater, music and film. Due
to the constant oppression from the Japanese authorities and disputes among its members
over their ideological and artistic differences, KAPF disbanded in 1935.
14
Yim Hwa, “Joseon Yeonghwaron,” Chunchu 2, no.10 (November 1941), 89-90.
48
and even the course of national film history. Indeed performing arts and stage
drama were never considered nor institutionalized as legitimate art forms for
hundreds of years in Korea, as they were rather seen as indecent forms of
lowbrow entertainment. Inevitably, theater did not exist in such a cultural
environment that ranks all kinds of performing arts as the bottom tier of
cultural and artistic hierarchy. As a result, the lack of stage tradition affected
not only the filmmaking, as Yim argues, but also the ways in which movies
were exhibited and consumed.
Up until 1902 Korea only had temporary outdoor theaters—
traditionally, public spaces were temporarily turned into performing spaces.
There was no national theater either, instead dance and other performances
for the aristocrats and the royal family were held at gardens and courtyards
inside of imperial palaces, which were turned into open, outdoor, and
temporary theaters only on special occasions. Traditional Korean theater
scholar Sa Jin-Sil categorizes these temporary outdoor theater spaces for
performing arts into four distinctive performance spaces that were formed
toward the end of Joseon dynasty.
15
According to Sa, all these four spaces
functioned as temporary performing spaces only for special occasions, and
they were divided by the nature of audience and physical conditions of spaces.
15
Sa Jin-Sil, Hanguk Yeongeuksa Yeongu (Seoul: Taehaksa, 1997), 281-303.
49
Sa points out that these four different spaces had specific audiences for which
performances were intended, and the characteristics of spaces and audiences
were essentially tied to the class and social background of audience members.
Sa names each space according to a degree of their openness to the audience
and labels the first of the four spaces as “the closed performance space,”
which was the royal palace. Sa explains that royal courtyards at the imperial
palaces were used for various performances by musicians and female dancers
hired exclusively for the government to celebrate national events or feasts for
royal family members. Performances at this closed performance space, as the
name itself suggests, had extremely limited numbers of audiences with pre-
designated seats in keeping with attendees’ official ranks and social positions.
The next type of space, “the semi-closed performance space,” was also
associated with the royal family, but what demarcated this space from the
closed space were its slightly broader audience as well as its location. The
performances at the semi-closed space were held to publicly show off and
admire the kings’ dignity during selected national events near the palaces.
Although members of the audience were controlled, ordinary people could
enjoy the performances as they were intended as an opportunity for the
public recognition of the kings’ power. The royal family did not attend these
performances, but instead just briefly glanced over the performances from
50
afar. The third space, “the semi-open performance space,” was organized by
the government officials and aristocrats when they threw personal and official
parties or feasts. Although shows featuring dances and singings were hosted
by the upper class people for the purpose of entertaining themselves, people
outside this class—servants, maids, helpers and just onlookers—could peep at
the shows. Lastly, there was “the open performance space.” Held in an open
public space, typically a market place, traveling troupes of performers
gathered people and delivered unscheduled performances in front of random
audiences, mostly comprised of middle or lower class audiences. These types
of shows, which featured mask dances, circuses, and singings, did not have
fixed entry fees. Instead, audiences decided how much money they were
willing to pay based on their own judgment of the quality of the show.
For the first two decades of film history in Korea, film screening and
viewing mostly followed these four distinctive open-theater patterns due to
the limited availability of permanent indoor theaters. The most notable spaces
among these were the closed and semi-closed spaces—palaces and royal
courts—where series of special screenings were held for extremely limited
members of audiences. Early cinema historians tend to associate the first
decade of film history mainly with the working class audiences, especially in
the European and American context. For instance, as many important
51
scholarly works show, in the United States film was a popular and cheap
entertainment geared mainly towards the working class and immigrants until
the mid-1910s when the film industry sought to expand and “upgrade” its
patrons by way of producing more and more sophisticated epics, spectacles,
and features with complex narratives as well as introducing new theater
venues such as lavish movie palaces. In Korea however, the new medium
attracted people with different social and class strata because film was not a
simple entertainment but the very distillate of western modernity, an
“astonishing development of westerners’ scientific technology.”
16
Even the emperor and royal family did not hide their curious interests
in films, and following their specific stage or dance-viewing tradition, they
arranged special screenings and brought in screening crews into the palaces
rather than venturing out to movies. The earliest record of film screening at
the palace dates back to circa 1901. A Chicago-born traveler Elias Burton
Holmes (1870-1958), the inventor of the travelogue, who traveled all around
the world and gave lectures on his travels with vast numbers of photos and
films he took, published his travelogues, The Burton Holmes Lectures, in 1901.
In the tenth volume of The Burton Holmes Lectures which records his trips to
16
Mansebo, 29 June 1907.
52
Korea and Japan, Holmes recounts an anecdote related to film screening for
Emperor Gojong.
We entertain His Highness [Prince Yi Jae-Sun] with our portable
machine for showing miniature motion-pictures, the like of which he
has never seen before. He grows enthusiastic and begs us to allow
him to take the instrument to the Palace to show it to the Emperor.
We gladly acquiesce, and after teaching him how to operate the
instrument, we resume our tramp through the suburban villages and
along the country roads all submerged in sunshine.
17
As for the new palace, where the Emperor now lives, venturing out
only once or twice a year, we gained admission to its precincts
through the influence of our little motion-picture machine. As I have
already told you, it was taken to be shown to the Emperor by the “Fat
Prince,” Ye Chai Soon[Yi Jae-Sun]. It was retained two days at the
palace and sent back in the dead of night by Imperial messengers,
who came with torches and lanterns through the streets, roused the
hotel, and delivered the magic-box accompanied by several presents
from his Majesty, including twenty yards of rich green silk and half a
dozen fans, together with and explanation of the delay, due to the fact
that the baby prince, youngest son of the Emperor and actual palace
tyrant, had been fascinated by the toy and had wept when they
attempted to take it from him, falling asleep still gripping it firmly in
his chubby hands.
18
The story of Holmes’ “magic-box” continues as “the Fat Prince” asks
him to see it again, and this small projector finally ends up being Holmes’ gift
for the baby prince. As a token of appreciation, Holmes was invited to the
17
Burton Holmes, The Burton Holmes Lectures Vol. X (Battle Creek, Michigan: The Little-
Preston Company, Limited, 1901), 86.
18
Ibid., 106.
53
imperial gisaeng (female entertainer) performance at the Imperial Palace,
which he found not at all entertaining. It is difficult to determine whether the
screening involving Holmes’ projector at the palace was the first movie
experience for the Emperor Gojong, but Holmes’ travelogue is the oldest
record that tells the story of film screening at the palace—the closed screening
space—and also imperial members’ deep fascination with movies. Indeed
from the first decade of 1900 throughout the 1910s newspapers continually
reported of screenings held at the royal palaces or “the Emperor’s inspection
of moving pictures” (Hwaldong Sajin Eoram), detailing the time, space,
attendants, projectors, and often a brief introduction of films screened, and
the newspaper reports indicate that these screenings were solely done for the
emperor and other royal family members.
19
Royal families often invited guests over to the palace and enjoyed
movies together with them. The following newspaper article vividly
reconstructs how this slightly different type of screening at the palaces, as it
were, a screening at the semi-closed space, was held.
Patriotic Housewives’ Association’s Korean Headquarters received an order
from the Deoksu Palace, and watched films with His Majesty at the
Dondeok Royal Court from 8 pm on the 15
th
, and about a hundred including
19
Hwangseong Sinmun, 8 March 1908, 14 April 1908, 17 April 1908, 28 October 1910; Maeil
Sinbo, 15 May 1912, 6 September 1913; and Hayangyeongu Sobo, 14 April 1910.
54
His Highness and Her Highness, royal families, cabinet members, and
female officials joined the screening. As the Emperor sat on his chair,
wearing the formal Korean attire, at 8 sharp, the head of the Headquarters
explained, and Mr. Seo Byeong-Hyeop translated, such films as the training
of firefighters, brothers in a snow storm, war in the Japan Sea, army drills,
and some comedies. They also screened a film that documents the Royal
Prince and Jukjeon Prince playing with ducks and fish which were
presented to them last year by the demised Governor-General Ito [Ito
Hirobumi] and another documentary that shows the Royal Prince’s trip with
the demised Mr. Ito to the northeast region. His Majesty was very satisfied
and every time film reels were changed His Majesty had pleasant
conversations with others sitting next to him. The screening was over at 10
pm, and it is said people were served teas and cookies at a guest room as
they left the screening.
20
This newspaper account shows that Emperor Gojong and the imperial family
held a special screening for slightly bigger audience and employed it for the
opportunity to socialize with people from the outside of the palace. Hence,
although the screenings in this case still transpired within the royal palaces
for the selected members of audiences, they were organized by the royal
family members in order to intermingle with “ordinary” people and display
their authority and dignity. In terms of “showing off” the royal dignity, it is
important to note the function of newspapers as this kind of special
screenings at semi-closed and at closed spaces were reported by newspapers
so that the royal dignity could reach many more people.
21
This movie-
viewing practice specific to the royal family members and a small group of
20
Maeil Sinbo, 17 May 1912.
21
Hwanseong Sinmun, 28 March 1908, 10 May 1908, 10 September 1909, 15 December 1909, 28
May 1910; Maeil Sinbo, 25 November 1922.
55
the selected audiences did not entirely disappear even in the 1920s when
movie theaters had become the major sites for film experiences. The special
screenings for the royal families in both closed and semi-closed spaces
continued until Sunjong, the last emperor of Joseon dynasty, passed away in
1926. Hence the film screenings at the imperial palace had become the integral
part of Korean royal court culture.
Outside of the palaces, there were also various kinds of film
screenings at “the semi-open space” and “the open space” before the movie
theater became fully institutionalized. For instance, many social organizations,
religious groups, and newspaper companies managed by the aristocrats, high
officials, and intellectuals regularly arranged special screenings for
promotional and, more frequently, educational purposes. These screenings
were sometimes limited only to members of a specific society, but more
commonly they were open to the public. These types of film screenings were
held at various locales, including office spaces, performing arts theaters,
schools, lecture halls, private residences, and so on. Such special screenings
organized by a variety of societies, newspaper companies, and social
associations and groups continued throughout the colonial period until the
early 1940s when the Office of the Governor-General banned the use of the
56
Korean language and implemented strict regulations regarding public
exhibition and social gatherings.
Through the institutionalization of a permanent and indoor theater,
the movies, along with stage drama, began to emerge as a modern mass
entertainment. Changes in terms of movie-screening and movie-viewing
practices began to appear as movies started screening in theaters designed for
stage drama and performing arts. Hyeobyulsa was erected in 1902 as a
government’s response to public request for a permanent indoor theater.
Hyeobyulsa bought a film projector in 1903 and as soon as it began to screen
films, although it was done irregularly, the theater attracted thousands of
spectators.
22
Besides Hyeobyulsa, other performing arts theaters occasionally
included film screenings in their programs.
FIGURE 4. Court gisaeng (female performing artists/entertainers) on the stage of Hyeobryulsa,
Korea’s first indoor theater (1902).
22
Hwangseong Sinmun, 10 July 1903.
57
Hyeobryulsa, which became a private theater in 1903, was shut down
by the government in 1906, but it was reopened as Wongaksa in 1907.
Wongaksa’s manager Yi Yin-Jik was an emerging sinpa dramatist, and
Wongaksa mainly featured stage plays and pansori, a traditional narrative
song, until it was permanently closed in November 1909. Toward the end of
the decade, more theaters were built, especially in the Japanese residential
areas, and finally, in 1910, Korea’s first movie theater, the Gyeongseong High
Entertainment Theater (Gyeongseong Godeung Yeonyeogwan), was
established on the Second Euljiro Street ( Ōgon-machi), a borderline area
between Korean and Japanese residential areas in Seoul. The High
Entertainment Theater was a two-story building whose second floor had
Japanese tatami mats and first floor had only small numbers of seats, and
thereby the majority of audiences watched movies while standing. The theater
could accommodate six hundred people, but since most of spectators had no
seats, attendance was always over capacity, sometimes reaching astonishing
two thousand spectators. Its patrons were a mixture of both Koreans and
Japanese, which was quite unusual as the separation between Korean and
Japanese film culture was soon to begin with the establishment of the theaters
geared towards each ethnic group in the mid-1910s. Its programs,
58
predominately French Pathé shorts, changed approximately every four days.
23
Over the next two years, two more movie theaters, Taishokan and Ōgonkan,
were introduced specifically for Japanese audiences. These three earliest
movie theaters were owned by the Japanese, emphasizing the pivotal role of
the Japanese in the advent of movie theaters and to the overall film culture in
Korea.
24
The High Entertainment Theater changed its name to Umigwan in
1915, targeting Korean audiences, although its new owners were Japanese.
Umigwan became one of the three major movie theaters geared toward
Koreans in the 1920s, along with Danseongsa—converted to a movie theater
in December 1918—and Joseon Geukjang (1921).
The main narrative of this dissertation begins in 1919, a year that left a
tremendous mark on modern Korean history and also film history in Korea.
The so-called “March 1
st
Movement” in 1919 triggered a series of nationalist
revolts and uprisings against Japan’s colonial occupation across the Korean
peninsula. This first nation-wide nationalist movement has been recognized
as the biggest and most significant anti-imperialist movement. This
movement brought about a new imperial policy called “Cultural Rule” or
“Cultural Policy” (Munhwa Tongchi/Bunka T ōchi) that was introduced in the
23
Kim Jong-Won and Jeong Jung-Heon, Uri Yeonghwa 100nyeon (Seoul: Hyeonsamsa, 2001),
38.
24
Ch ōsen Eiga Bunka Rengusho, “Ch ōsen Eiga Sanjunenshi,” Eiga Junpo 87 (1 July 1943), 16.
59
same year, which replaced the previous “Militant Rule” (Mudan
Tongchi/Budan T ōchi [or Budan Seiji]) as the Office of the Governor-General
feared that the oppressive and violent Militant Rule based on the brute force
and violent repression of military might cause even more resistance from
Koreans after witnessing the March 1
st
movement. The nationalist movements
in 1919 opened the second phase of Japanese colonial rule in Korea, Cultural
Rule Period (Munhwa Tongchi Sidae/Bunkai T ōchi Jidai, 1919-1931), which
changed the dynamics between the empire and its colony and shaped the
colonial culture in Korea of the 1920s in ways quite different from the
previous decade. The newly implemented Cultural Rule resulted in the
introduction of relatively lenient colonial laws and regulations. As the policy’s
name itself suggests, it afforded Koreans an albeit limited freedom to manage
their own journalism, media, publication, and culture industries. This
transformation became one of the bases for the flourishing film culture in the
coming decade.
Although the main period that this dissertation covers more or less
overlaps with the Cultural Rule era, the change in colonial policy is not the
single most important reason for my periodization. Between 1918 and 1920,
sixteen movie theaters were newly established in Korea, including the re-
opening of Danseongsa as a movie theater. Considering that by 1930 there
60
were about forty movie theaters in business in Korea, and this sudden
increase in the number of movie theaters clearly signaled that Korea finally
entered into the movie theater era. The accelerated institutionalization that
accompanied the establishment of a great number of new theaters circa 1919,
also spurred the emergence of a mass audience which altered the film-
viewing and film-going practices of the previous decades. “Mass audience” is
not employed here as a kind of phrase that bears a regressive cultural
connotation indicating the passiveness of audience, rather it denotes the
rapidly growing body of movie spectators, especially those who regularly
enjoyed the collective movie-viewing experiences that movie theaters began
to offer for the first time. The following chapters will trace what changes
transpired in the Korean film scene in this pivotal decade of the 1920s with a
specific focus on this “mass audience” and how those changes resonated with
Korea’s social, cultural, political and colonial realities.
61
CHAPTER 2
THE ARIRANG LEGEND:
Origins of National Cinema and Nationalist Film Spectatorship
In late 1927, the Fox Film Corporation sent a small gift to Danseongsa
Theater in hope of forging a business relationship and ultimately a
distribution contract with Korea’s premier movie theater. The present
consisted of a pair of elaborate Native American costumes, which Fox
requested the theater to put on display as an attraction in the theater’s lobby
for the promotion of upcoming Fox westerns featuring Tom Mix, one of the
Fox’s top western stars. Upon receiving the present from Fox, however, Yi
Gu-Yeong, the PR head of Danseongsa, determined that he must capitalize on
this rare opportunity by using these elegant suede clothes as props for a film.
Yi quickly notified some filmmakers he befriended about this promotional
gift and they all agreed that they must take advantage of this opportunity.
The clothes were only available for a couple of weeks before they had to be
placed on display for the duration of the screening of the Tom Mix westerns.
They were lent to the production crews of Oknyeo (1928), which happened to
be in the middle of shooting. The crew decided to let the female lead wear
one of the Native American costumes during a scene in which she was to be
found unconscious in the desert by the male protagonist, a rather
62
incongruous scenario having nothing whatsoever to do with this melodrama
about a love triangle involving two brothers.
This amusing but also rather gloomy anecdote straightforwardly
shows the impoverished conditions of the film industry in Korea during the
colonial period. Due to the unstable economic and political circumstances,
film production in Korea only began about two decades after the movies
arrived in the country. Although there were many short documentaries and
travelogues shot and made in Korea before the 1920s, they were produced
and filmed by foreigners (and often for foreign audiences), especially by the
Japanese for the propaganda and/or political purposes. As discussed in the
previous chapter, local film business did not emerge until the 1920s—a crucial
period in Korean film history that witnessed the development of a much more
sophisticated film industrial system and the efflorescence of locally produced
movies, filmmakers, stars, film critics, and film marketing and promotion
strategies accompanied by a surge in the construction of movie theaters and
an increase in film patrons. Hence in the 1920s film became one of the most
popular modern forms of entertainment and culture. This decade saw the
rapid growth of overall film industry and culture, but as the tale of the small
contribution a pair of Native American costumes made to Korean film history
exemplifies, film production and business in Korea were still in a dire
63
situation. Film production companies were repeatedly established only to
disband after—or even during—a single project. At the time, there were only
two available film cameras in Korea, and many movies were shot on positive
film instead of negative film. As for movie theaters, only eight movie theaters
were in business in Seoul and about forty theaters across the country in the
late 20s, and almost two thirds of movie theaters catered to Japanese
audiences. Only a single screening print of a film, whether it be an imported
film or locally produced one, was circulated amongst all of the theaters, so it
normally took months and even years for films to reach audiences in small
size cities, towns, and the countryside. Restrictive censorship codes were just
one of countless challenges, concerns, and hardships Korean filmmakers and
film business people had to deal with.
Nevertheless, there were many signs of the growing momentum of
Korea’s film business and culture, which in 1926 appeared to hit critical mass
with the huge success of the film Arirang, directed by Nah Un-Gyu (1902-
1937). From its unprecedented high production values to its box office success,
Arirang was undeniably a groundbreaking film. The film cost fifteen thousand
won (about seventy five hundred U.S. dollar), almost ten times more than the
average production cost at the time. Nah immediately became the most
prominent and respected filmmaker, and the three principle actors and actress
64
—Nah in the leading role, Shin Il-Seon as the female lead, and Namgung
Eun—became the nation’s first movie superstars. Arirang had two sequels,
and most importantly, the film enjoyed numerous theatrical re-releases
during the two decades following its initial screening.
1
In addition to its high
production quality, commercial success, and immense influence on
subsequent film production and culture in colonial Korea, Arirang has been
hailed as the most significant work expressing fervent Korean nationalism
against Japanese imperialism, and as the foundational text of Korean national
cinema.
FIGURE 5. Nah Un-Gyu and Shin Il-Seon from Arirang (1926)
In February 2005, the death of a Japanese film collector Abe
Yoshishige, who claimed to own about fifty thousand film prints from various
1
The sequels did not achieve the success of the original Arirang, and Nah passed away in the
middle of the last Arirang film production. All three Arirang films are believed to have been
lost during Korean War, and only scripts have survived.
65
Asian countries, stirred the film archive world in East Asia, and reactions to
Abe’s death prove how important Arirang is for Korean national film history.
Abe and his father, a police officer who worked in colonial Korea, were
believed to collect films during the later years of World War II. While Abe
was alive, film archivists and historians from Japan, North and South Korea
had tirelessly tried to persuade Abe to allow them to inspect and preserve
films, but he refused to do so, and it is said that when archivists visited him,
Abe just showed them a film list he himself created and did never show them
an actual film. His film list includes Korean silent films believed lost,
including Arirang, as well as rare Japanese silent films, but nobody had a clear
idea about just how many films were in fact viewable and were unsure if Abe
actually had the films as he claimed. After his death, Japanese National Film
Center (JNFC) retrieved all of his collections on behalf of Japan Foundation,
since Abe had no heir, and JNFC has been cataloguing his estimated 450,000
reels of film since then.
2
Upon reporting Abe’s death and the possibility of
excavating many early Korea films, South Korean media focused exclusively
on Abe’s possible ownership of Arirang. Interestingly, Mainichi Shimbun, a
Japanese newspaper that first reported Abe’s death, also formed its story
2
According to Mr. Itakura Fumiaki, the assistant curator at the Japanese National Film
Center, unfortunately most of the films that JNFC has examined are not in viewable condition.
He added that the investigation was far from over, so it is still hard to tell which films would
be salvable (Interview with the curator Itakura Fumiaki, 21 July 2006).
66
around Arirang. The newspaper article entitled “Origin of Hallyu: Where is the
Masterpiece Arirang?” details in Abe’s life and death, introduces the story and
historical significance of Arirang, and notes, “at the last scene where the
protagonist who murdered an evil landowner’s son is arrested by a Japanese
policeman, it is said that Korean audiences sang the theme song “Arirang,” a
[Korean folk] song even well known to the Japanese, together.”
3
The different ways of describing the film Arirang in relation to the
Japanese film collector’s death, by the former colonizer and colonized,
characteristically summarize how the histories of East Asian cinema during
Japanese imperial rule have been perceived, written, constructed, and
reconstructed in both nations. Korean media singled out only one film out of
sixty Korean films that Abe might have possessed and thus participated in
elevating the status of Arirang to a “legend” which, Koreans believe, is the
ultimate piece that most effectively captures Korean nationalist sentiment
despite the fact that there now remain only a handful of people who actually
watched the film. In the meantime, by employing the “Korean Wave” (Hallyu),
a term that denotes the huge popularity of Korean cultural products across
the Asian region in recent years, the Japanese newspaper, in its account of
Arirang, appeals primarily to Japanese readers’ intimacy with Korean culture
3
Mainichi Shimbun, 12 February 2005.
67
and, as a result, downplays and mitigates the seriousness of the film as well as
the grave historical relationship between the two countries.
Nonetheless, the fact that both Korean and Japanese media reports on
Abe’s collection center on the film Arirang clearly illustrates the historical and
historiographical implications this film carries, even though they describe the
film’s significance in a “slightly” different fashion. In fact, there have been
innumerous cases that point to how the film Arirang has been historically
perceived and especially mobilized for nationalist endeavors. In 1997 the city
of Seoul designated Jeongreung Hill, where the film was shot, as “Arirang
Hill.” In 2001 the Seongbuk District of Seoul opened “Film Street” (Yeonghwa
Geori) with a newly built non-profit community film theater—Arirang Cine-
Center—as the center piece of the Arirang Hill area, and initiated the Arirang
Festival to attract tourists. The director Nah Un-Gyu himself is regarded as a
nationalist hero and anti-Japanese activist, and accordingly he was buried in
the National Cemetery in the city of Chuncheon, South Korea. For the past
fifteen years, the annual Chunsa Film Festival named after Nah’s pen name
has successfully commemorated Nah who is, according to the film festival’s
official statement, “the legendary figure in Korean cinema, and his position in
68
the national film history is so apparent and concrete that his career is Korean
film history itself.”
4
Very much like in South Korea, in North Korea the film Arirang also
has been an important nationalist signifier. Since the 1960s, the folk song
“Arirang” has been one of the most crucial expressions of cultural heritage
designating the North Korean version of nationalism that dates back to the
colonial period, and it was the film Arirang, although already lost, that
rekindled interests in this folk song in North Korea during the 1960s. The
“legend” has it that Kim Il-Sung, the deceased ex-leader of North Korea,
watched Nah’s Arirang when it came out and was deeply moved by the film’s
nationalism. The film was credited as the catalyst that inspired him to find a
serious interest in the folk song and the nationalist message therein. The 1962
publication of the biography Nah Un-Gyu and His Art earned Nah the
distinction of being the first historical figure other than Kim Il-Sung to
become the subject of a biography in North Korea.
5
The Juche (Self-Reliance)
historiography of the 1960s aimed to rewrite the nation’s history by situating
Kim Il-Sung as the primary historical agent in the founding of New Korea
(North Korea). Everything preceding Kim, including traditional cultural
4
www.chunsafilmfestival.com
5
Hankyoreh Sinmun, 8 February 2002.
69
heritage, was judged as regressive and counter-revolutionary. In this context,
the state’s valorization of the traditional folk song “Arirang” was quite
exceptional. Justifying the cultural and ideological value of this folk song
required articulating its value to Kim Il-Sung or his personal contact with it;
Nah’s film Arirang created such a bridge. As a result, the creation or
recreation of the folk song “Arirang” as the ultimate aural icon of Korean
nationalism during the colonial period in North Korea started with the film
Arirang and its direct impact on Kim Il-Sung rather than with the old folk
song itself.
Simply put, it is not an exaggeration to assert that the film Arirang is
both the pinnacle of colonial cinema and the very starting point of national
and nationalist cinema in Korea. More precisely, it is considered as such
according to the national film history. For this reason, the stories of the
colonial cinema and especially the Korean cinema and film culture of the
1920s recounted in this chapter begin by examining the histories and legacies
encompassing this particular film. However, rather than simply investing in
its cult status or dismissing the film’s place in the nationalist discourse that
dominates the colonial film history, I will use the film to open up some of the
issues that will be further tackled in the subsequent chapters by employing
the film Arirang as an aperture to the film culture of the 1920s in Korea. This
70
chapter, especially the earlier segment of it that discusses Arirang, is
principally interested in providing a new dimension to the historical and
historiographical status of the film and thus looks into the processes and
narratives of how the film became a legendary masterpiece. I will bring the
triangular associations between the colonial film history—or writing colonial
film history— film production, and film spectatorship of the 1920s into focus
as the nationalist discourses attached to the film are almost always explained
by the director’s intention—Nah’s being a nationalist— marginalizing the role
of audience in the narrative of the Arirang legend. Hence the discussion of the
film Arirang will illuminate that film spectatorship in the pivotal decade of the
1920s influenced not only the nationalist historiographical paradigm but also
the formation of national cinema.
Arirang, Film History, and Film Spectators
The film Arirang tells the story of Yeong-Jin, a mad man, who is
arrested by Japanese police after he murders a landlord’s son who attempted
to rape his sister. The film inferentially deals with the nihilist atmosphere of
the colonial situation through the mad man character, but it also includes
such politically charged issues as class disparity, Japanese police, and pro-
71
Japan collaborators (Chililpa). The film does not address these issues directly,
but considering that the year of 1926 was filled with the political tension and
unrest due to the death of Sunjong, the last emperor of Joseon dynasty, that
marked the end of the five hundred history of the dynasty, the issues the film
touched upon were certainly provocative. Arirang is typically conceived as the
quintessential cinematic expression of Korean nationalism and as the
cornerstone in the formation of Korean national cinema in Korean film history.
In 1926, the Korean film industry began producing/making
nationalistic films. In spite of the Japanese occupation, the industry’s
childish imitation, and old style films, nationalistic films were
produced. Arirang was the first such film and it’s here where the
famous film star, Nah Un-Gyu made his debut… This film nurtured a
fresh, new national spirit in people’s minds who were frustrated and
full of nihilism by the failure of the March 1
st
Independent
Movement….Nah Un-Gyu was different from other filmmakers in
that he depicted real lifestyles of farming villagers with such realism.
6
Arirang articulates the essential spirit of Korean people (Korean
minjok), incorporates anti-Japanese ideology, and also expresses the
affection toward the poor who suffered under Japanese colonial rule.
This silent film made contributions to the nation’s patriotic
enlightenment movements and was a masterpiece representing
Korean filmmaking in the ‘20s and early ‘30s. In particular, the film
was the first Korean film that explored critical realism….Due to its
artistic achievements, it is said that no audience could watch the film
without shedding tears.
7
6
Yi Young-Il, The History of Korean Cinema, trans. Richard Lynn Greever (Seoul: Motion
Picture Promotion Corp., 1988), 25-27. Translation modified.
7
Choi Chang-Ho and Hong Gang-Seong, Nah Un-Gyuwa Sunangi Yeonghwa (Pyongyang:
72
The above quotes well display typical views on Nah’s Arirang in South and
North Korea respectively. Interestingly, despite their long contest over
national history or histories from the Korean War onwards, in these quotes at
least, two Koreas seem to chorus their agreement with each other’s
perspectives on the place of Arirang in the history of national cinema.
Yet since only the remnants of the script exist, and thereby most of the
film story and its cinematic achievement have come down to today orally, the
film’s story, content, and aesthetic remain inevitably incomplete. As briefly
mentioned above, therefore, the case of Arirang signifies how the entirety of
filmmaking in Korea during the colonial period has been measured according
to the nationalist historical paradigm. Indeed the actual circumstances
surrounding the film’s production tells a different story that puts the
nationalist understanding of the film to the test. In fact, it is rather doubtful
that the film was the simple product of Korean nationalism or Nah’s personal
patriotic impulse. Particularly, in the nationalist readings of the film, the
foreign influences on the film are conveniently repressed.
When I first conceived an idea, I decided to make a film which is not
boring or does not make the audience feel dull. To do so, it must also
have a sentimental tone and HUMOR. Since viewers’ eyes got used to
Western spectacles, it must have a huge cast. Thus for the first time in
Korea I cast eight hundred extras for my film. Therefore, quite
Pyongyang Chulpansa, 1999), 89.
73
surprisingly, the film was embraced by the audiences. It was not a
boring but a humorous film. Its tempo was speedy and accurate. This
film that mimicked foreign films certainly satisfied Korean audiences’ taste.
8
It is widely recognized that Arirang was stylistically influenced by
German Expressionist film. Yet this personal memoir of Nah demonstrates
that Nah’s chief intention was not only to incorporate foreign styles but
produce a “well-made” spectacle with which he hoped to appeal to Korean
audiences who had been spoiled by high quality films from the west,
especially Hollywood. In his other writings, Nah almost always passionately
examines foreign films, directors, actors, and film movements and compares
them with the poor production quality of filmmaking in Korea. For instance,
in an interview, he said that A Hero of the Troubled Time (Pungunah, 1926),
Nah’s next project after Arirang, was an action flick modeled on Douglas
Fairbanks’s swashbucklers, which were immensely popular among Korean
audiences.
9
As a matter of fact, due to his keen interest in Hollywood films
and attempts to localize Hollywood film aesthetics, in his time Nah was often
criticized by film critics and especially by the leftist artists who saw Nah as a
commercial filmmaker caring only about financial success. However, the
8
Nah Un-Gyu, “Arirangeul mandeultae,” Joseon Yeongwha (November 1936). Words in capital
indicate the author’s own use of English words. Emphasis added.
9
Samcheollii 9, no. 1 (1 January 1937), 139.
74
film’s commercial nature, its spectacular elements, and the strong influence of
Hollywood films, and Nah’s desire to produce an upscale Korean spectacle
have been effectively silenced. Furthermore, the fact that key crew members
involved in the production including as a producer, a cinematographer, and
an editor were Japanese has also been habitually overlooked.
As Tom O’Regan and then Susan Hayward have enlightened us, in
framing a national cinema, “what is instructive are the discourses mobilized
to do so—what they include and exclude; how they choose to frame matters;
the assumptions and presuppositions they make.”
10
In this sense the current
historical status of Arirang is very much indebted to the nationalist film
historiography’s specific way of defining national cinema, which is based on
the obsession with purity: Korean national cinema’s essential standard to
decide what to include and what not to. The film’s overdependence on
foreign styles and the involvement of Japanese crew members should be
hushed up in order to underline the film’s incarnation of “pure” Korean-ness
and Korean nationalism. This issue of purity is not just limited to the case of
Arirang. Film historians in two Koreas are still debating which film counts as
the first “authentically” Korean film: The Border (Gukgyeong, 1923), The Vow
Made under the Moon (Weolhaui Maengse, 1923), and Loyal Vengeance (Uirijeok
10
Susan Hayward, “Framing National Cinemas,” Cinema & Nation, eds. Mette Hjort and Scott
Mackenzie (Routledge: London and New York, 2000), 91.
75
Guto, 1919). In South Korea, Loyal Vengeance is officially considered the first
film although many film historians disagree with this view; since 1962, South
Korea has celebrated its annual national film day on October 27, the day when
Loyal Vengeance was theatrically released in 1919. Strictly speaking, Loyal
Vengeance was not a film; it was a chain drama, a hybrid genre between film
and stage drama, which used documentary-like filmed sequences in key
scenes—e.g. a car chase, changes in backdrops and scenes, etc.—of live stage
performance. Nevertheless, Loyal Vengeance was authoritatively designated as
the first film by the government, and it left a margin for never-ending debates
over its legitimacy as the first Korean film. The logic behind this decision is
that Loyal Vengeance was the first film produced by Koreans, Kim Do-San and
his theater group, and its casts were “mostly” Koreans, while the other two
films The Border and The Vow Made under the Moon were financed by Shochiku,
a Japanese film studio, and the Office of the Governor-General respectively.
11
Consequently, the degree to which a film is “untainted” by Japanese hands or
how “pure” it is has become the sole standard for determining the first
Korean film. Quite ironically, however, Loyal Vengeance embodies a distinctive
Japanese influence; the cinematographer and editor of the film were the
Japanese, and more importantly the chain drama was a genre invented in
11
Cho Hee-Moon, “Hanguk Yeonghwaui Gaenyeomjeok Jeonguiwa Gijeome gwanhan
Yeongu,” Hanguk Yeonghwaui Jaengjeom 1 (Seoul: Jibmundang, 2002), 15.
76
Japan, which gained its popularity in Korean from the late 1910s through the
early 1930s after it was imported from Japan.
12
In the meantime, North Korea sees The Vow Made under the Moon as
the first Korean film, because “although the film was produced by the Office
of the Government-General to effectively exploit Korean capital by promoting
the use of bank accounts, the director Yun Baek-Nam and his crews had a
different intention…the film has its significance as a cultural enlightenment
movement.”
13
By imagining the filmmakers’ resistant position without
offering any concrete proof, North Korean film history implies that the degree
of Japanese intervention in The Vow under the Moon is tolerable, and it is safe
to regard this film as the very first Korean film. The contradicting
understandings, standards, historiographical methods of North and South
Korea over the first Korean film undoubtedly reveal the degree of
arbitrariness of the nationalist film historiography and its vain attempt to
define “pure” Korean-ness or Korean films.
12
In Japan, the chain drama genre was banned in the early 1920s due to the sanitary and
safety reasons, but in Korea it continued to flourish until the early 1930s. For more studies on
chain drama, see Joanne Bernardi, Writing in Light: Silent Scenario and the Japanese Pure Film
Movement (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), chap 1; J. L. Anderson, “Spoken
Silents in the Japanese Cinema; or Talking to Pictures,” Reframing Japanese Cinema, eds. David
Desser and Arthur Nolletti Jr. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992); and Jeon
Pyeong-Guk, “Uri Yeonghwa Giwoneuroseo Yeonsoigeuke daehan Siron,” Yeonghwa Yeongu
24 (January 2005).
13
Choi and Hong, 15.
77
In 1997 Cho Hee-Moon, a renowned early Korean cinema scholar,
published an essay entitled “Reevaluation of Arirang,” which questions the
nationalist discourse surrounding Arirang by pointing out commercial
elements of the film. In the essay, he concludes, “[I]t is not correct that Arirang
represents Korean nationalism or symbolizes anti-Japanese ideology. Arirang
was a popular film with exceptional realism.”
14
In his book, Nah Un-Gyu, that
came out in the same year, Cho even argues that the director of Arirang is not
Nah but Tsumori Shuichi, a Japanese film producer who worked for Joseon
Kinema Production in Korea that produced Arirang as well as several of Nah’s
other films such as A Bird in Cage (Nongjungjo, 1926), A Hero of the Troubled
Time (Pungunah, 1926), and Wild Rat (Deuljwi, 1927). Not surprisingly, Cho’s
bold claim shook up Arirang’s uncontested image as the utmost nationalist
work, quickly generating debates over Arirang as well as Cho’s reevaluation
of the film. In his response to the critiques against him, Cho sustained his
argument and further argued that the historical materials themselves from the
1920s through the 1940s that credit Nah as the director of Arirang need to be
carefully re-examined in order to determine whether or not they intentionally
participated in making Nah a national hero. In fact, Cho’s argument is based
on firm reason, and the question of whether Nah was the director of Arirang
14
Cho Hee-Moon, “Yeonghwa Arirangui Jaepyeongga,” Hankuk Yeongwhaui Jaengjeom 1, 204-
205 (reproduced version).
78
has been another confusing, if not mysterious, aspect of the film since there
are some materials that indicate otherwise. Significantly, a newspaper
advertisement for Arirang on the day of the film’s release, October 1, 1926,
credited Nah as the screenwriter and main actor and Tsumori as the
director.
15
Yet it is widely believed that crediting Tsumori as the director was
a strategic move to elude a potential censorship issue, and many records and
materials in both Korean and Japanese, as well as many filmmakers from the
1920s and 1930s, indicate that Nah was the actual director of the film.
16
Nevertheless, Cho rigorously demystifies the ultra-nationalistic
figuration of Arirang and unearths Arirang’s rarely discussed commercial
nature through his extensive research. It is quite unfeasible to locate any other
attempts to challenge the Arirang legend and Nah’s position as a national hero.
Cho’s position, however, harbors its own critical lacunae—most significantly
the fact that his argument has a tendency to simplify the question of writing a
film history to an issue of “correctness” and thus fails to recognize the more
imperative issue of why and how the film has become the nationalist
masterpiece representing the entirety of filmmaking and film culture in the
colonial milieu, from its debut to the present, eighty years later. Cho notes,
15
Joseon Ilbo (aka Chosun Ilbo), 1 October 1926.
16
For the detailed accounts of this debate, see Kim Ryeo-Sil, Tusahaneun Jeguk Tuyeonghaneun
Sikminji (Seoul: Samin, 2006), 88-90; and Kim Gab-Ui, Chunsa Nah Un-Gyu Jeonjib (Seoul:
Jibmundang, 2001, 140.
79
“[D]etermining Nah as a director of Arirang by ignoring the objective
materials may help mystify the film and make Nah a hero, but it cannot be a
proper historical research method.”
17
To put it differently, Cho critiques the
ways in which Korean film history has molded Arirang and Nah into the
nationalist film historiography and concludes that Arirang is not a nationalist
work. However, his criticism does not elucidate why this film was and has
been hailed and enthusiastically received as the nationalist work not just by
film historians but film spectators of the 1920s, 1930s and even subsequent
generations. As Cho argues, the film entails lots of commercial elements, and
indeed it was intended as such when the project was first conceived, as
explained earlier. Of paramount importance, a whole new meaning was
created between the silver screen and the people in the audience within the
colonial context, and thus audience reception was the major impetus for the
birth of the Arirang legend.
In this regard, what is decisive in examining Arirang’s status as “the
legend” is the exhibition and reception context surrounding the film, since, as
Yuri Tsivian aptly points out, “the reception not only completes the film but
does so in a very specific way that bears the mark of the historical and social
17
Cho Hee-Moon, “Nah Un-Gyu, Jaepyongahaeya handa,” Cine 21 (19 August 1997,
www.cine21.com).
80
position of the viewer.”
18
It is impossible to separate Arirang’s commercial
nature from Korea’s colonial state and it is far-fetched to employ the mere
revelation of commercial elements embedded in the film and its commercial
appeal as a chief historical evidence for dismissing and unsettling the film’s
nationalist image and legacy. In fact, the audiences’ enthusiastic responses to
Arirang were quite astonishing. The film was initially released in 1926, but it
continued to be re-released throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and even after
1945 when Korea was liberated from Japanese colonial rule. The last theatrical
screening recorded indicates that there was a commercial screening of Arirang
at the Mangyeonggwan Theater in the city of Daegoo in 1952, right in the
middle of Korean War, during which the film is believed to be lost.
19
In a
review of Arirang, a film critic notes:
As the lights went off and the title Arirang emerged, the audience
began to clap hard. This applause is something different from that for
western spectacles. Although they say there is no border in the world
of arts, it is much more pleasurable to see the film produced by our
own hands. More than that, the audience who only saw curvy English
characters missed Korean words that just appeared on screen so
much.
20
18
Yuri Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and Its Cultural Reception (Chicago and London: The
University of Chicago Press, 1991), xvii.
19
Kim Gab-Ui, 139.
20
Goh Seung-Han, “Sinyeonghwa Arirangeul bogo,” Maeil Sinbo, 10 October 1926.
81
This review illustrates Korean spectators’ strong craving for “Korean” films
as local films were rarely produced at the time, averaging only five to six
films per year. This indicates that being a Korean film or a film produced by
Koreans was a considerable advantage to filmmakers in Korea. For example,
when the chain drama Loyal Vengeance came out, film-goers went berserk
because they were impatient to see the filmic representation of Korea, and as a
result, it extended its screening days from five to seven days.
Realizing the commercial potential in “Korean” films, a Japanese
theater manager Hayakawa Koshu produced the first feature film, The Tale of
Chunhyang (Chunhyangjeon) with a Korean crew and cast in 1923. Although
the film was more like a crude photoplay that played still photos over
byeonsa’s narration, The Tale of Chunhyang attracted a record-breaking ten
thousand audiences for its eight-day release.
The Tale of Chunhyang was the first film that featured Korean actors
and used a Korean script. As the screening began at Joseon Theater,
the profit was so much higher than anticipated that it could retrieve
the production cost just from the screenings in Seoul, and after
traveling to Pyongyang, Daegoo, and other cities, the film made huge
profits. Now the film people wished to produce a film with stronger
greed.
21
21
Donga Ilbo, 19 November 1925.
82
In 1924, two other features were produced by Joseon Kinema owned
by Japanese investors, and even though they were not as successful as The
Tale of Chunhyang, they managed to break even, and its first film was even
theatrically released in Japan. Arirang followed this path, appealing to Korean
spectators’ thirst for “Korean” films, but the expectation for this film was
much higher as discussed above. Even the censorship issue contributed for
igniting public interests in Arirang; a day before the film’s release, about ten
thousand copies of the film’s promotional pamphlets were confiscated by
Japanese police since the lyrics of the folk song “Arirang” printed on the
pamphlets violated the public security law according to the police.
22
Word
quickly got out, and newspapers reported this incident, and it thereby fueled
the audience’s expectation for the film. From the first screening at Danseongsa,
the theater was flooded by the curious audiences. Demand was so high that
crowds turned away from sold out screenings caused a fracas, damaging the
doors and windows of the theater. Another key component in the frantic
reception of Arirang was the presence of the byeonsa, film narrator (benshi in
Japanese), who explained and interpreted the images on screen. Arirang’s
enormous success was also indebted to byeonsa who successfully appealed to
22
Maeil Sinbo, 3 October 1926.
83
and even mobilized Korean audiences’ nationalist sentiments, which will be
further discussed in the last section of the chapter.
Nationalism and commercialism often went hand in hand, or more
precisely, economic exploitation was always intermingled with strong
nationalism. Everyone in the film industry was keenly aware of the nationalist
and anti-Japanese sentiments of Korean movie-goers and tried to figure out
how to effectively appeal to the audiences’ nationalistic sentiments. What
makes this uncomfortable truth more uneasy is that, as Arirang and other
films discussed above show, the majority of the “Korean” films were either
fully or partially financed and produced by Japanese capital, with Japanese
filmmakers, actors, and other key crew members participating in film
productions. In exploring this question of how to define the Korean national
cinema—and Japanese national cinema—and the role of spectators in the
formation of colonial film culture, another significant aspect to consider is the
domination of Hollywood cinema in the Korean film scene. In order to further
examine the concepts and boundaries of Korean national and colonial cinema,
the next section explores how the social and cultural reception of Hollywood
films shaped the colonial film cultures in Korea.
84
Korean Film Spectatorship: Nationalist Enough?
In an article entitled “The Trajectory of Korean Cinema I [Joseon
Yeonghwaga geoleoon Gil I]” (1946), the film critic Kang So-Cheon notes that
Universal Pictures’ movies from Hollywood enjoyed enormous commercial
success in Korea during the 1920s. The author contends that this popularity of
Universal films among Korean film spectators embodies the nationalist nature
of colonial spectatorship. According to this author, Korean movie-goers, as a
way to express their anti-Japanese imperialism sentiments, ignored Japanese
movies in favor of Hollywood productions. The author further argues that
Japanese films in Japanese movie theaters were only consumed by Japanese
occupants while Korean film-goers went to foreign films, and this ethnically
segregated movie-going practice eventually made Japanese movie theaters
second-rate theaters, compared to the theaters geared toward Korean
spectators.
23
Kang’s essay typifies the general historical perspective on colonial
film spectatorship in Korea, and thus its overly nationalist account of colonial
Korean film spectatorship needs a closer examination. However, before
discussing how it overstates Korean film spectators’ nationalism by
23
Kang So-Cheon, “Joseon Yeonghwaga geoleoon Gil I,” Yeonghwa Sidae 1, no.1 (1 April 1946),
38.
85
manipulating historical materials, I would like to focus first on aspects of this
essay that reveal some features of Korean film culture and spectatorship in
the 1920s. At the very least, this essay describes the historical and cultural
background in which Korean film audiences were under the strong influence
of two different types of powerful foreign cultural forces: Japanese and
Hollywood cinemas. More importantly, it shows that due to the feeble local
film industry and the considerable lack of local films, Korean film spectators
had to find a way to communicate their cultural and social ethos mainly
through the appropriation of foreign texts. In particular, the essay suggests
that Korean audience willingly embraced Hollywood, rather than seeing them
a “threat,” despite the fact that Hollywood movies almost monopolized the
Korean film market at the time.
This movie-going pattern exemplifies Korea’s ambivalent relation to
imperial forces and thus reveals the relative nature of imperialism and also
nationalism. Nick Deocampo, for instance, points out that in the Philippines,
where cinema was introduced in 1896, only one year before Spanish
imperialism was almost immediately replaced by American imperialism, the
indigenous film culture suddenly valued and nativised Spanish elements in
its attempt to counter a new form of imperialism in the early twentieth
86
century.
24
Similarly the immediate presence of Japanese imperialism led
Korean spectators to embrace and adopt one form of “imperialism”—
Hollywood which represented the dominance of American culture across the
world since the World War I without much resistance, while sturdily resisting
against another: Japan’s colonial occupation of Korea. This analysis of Korean
film culture in the 1920s suggests that all the imperial forms were not
considered equally oppressive, but according to a specific colonial context,
some imperialism could be interpreted or “disguised” as a positive and even
liberating force for the colonized in contrast to the presence of a more
oppressive imperial force.
What happened at the movie theaters in Korea under the colonial rule
leads us to reconsider and re-evaluate the role of Hollywood as a powerful
cultural imperialism in the construction of a national cinema. In a national
cinema building process Hollywood functions primarily as an anti-thesis,
being constantly situated in hostile dialogue with the national cinema under
consideration and often directing the shaping and re-shaping the concept and
boundaries of a national cinema. Andrew Higson, who highlights the crucial
part that the audience reception—especially the reception of Hollywood
cinema and the way it is morphed into a national cinema—plays in the
24
Nick Deocampo, Cine: Spanish Influences on Early Cinema in the Philippines (Manila:
National Commission for Culture and Arts, 2003), xv.
87
formation of a national cinema in his influential essay “The Concept of
National Cinema” (1989) and again in “Limiting Imagination of National
Cinema” (2000), however, shows us that the conversation between a local
cinema and Hollywood cinema cannot be characterized as merely an
antagonistic one. Highlighting the transnational movements of films across
borders and the diversity of audience reception in the debates about national
cinema, Higson recognizes three distinctive responses to cultural imperialism
by the local culture. According to Higson, the first response is an anxious
concern about the effects of cultural imperialism that might possibly infect the
local culture or even destroy it. The next response is that the introduction of
exotic elements may have a liberating/democratic effect on the local culture,
and a third possibility is that the foreign cultural products are not treated as
exotic by the local audience, but instead are interpreted according to a local
frame of reference.
25
The reception of Hollywood films in colonial Korea
demonstrates the second and third responses that Higson describes, and in
other words, Hollywood cinema became one of the major determinants in the
formation of Korean colonial and national cinema. However, what
complicates the ways in which the reception and consumption of Hollywood
movies had interacted with and been forged into Korean colonial cinema is
25
Andrew Higson, “Limiting Imagination of National Cinema,” Cinema & Nation, 69.
88
that colonial Korea was torn between two different national identities: finding
and maintaining a Korean identity under Japanese imperial rule and
negotiating with and battling against a forced Japanese identity imposed on
them. In this sense, the reception of Hollywood movies in colonial Korea
reveals how the reception of foreign cultures could become a sphere where
the formations of two different national identities collide with each other.
For the discussion of how film spectatorship of the 1920s in colonial
Korea exhibits the convoluted interactions between imperialisms and the
constructions of national as well as imperial identity, I would like to first
point out that from the outset the commercial film exhibition in Korea was
literally intertwined with the imperial incursions into Korea. In the late 1890s,
about a decade before Japan colonized Korea, the Korean peninsula was a
fierce battlefield for the heated imperial competitions involving Russia, China,
the United States, France, and Japan. At the time, Korea poured all its efforts
into upgrading its underdeveloped social infrastructure in order to compete
with the imperial forces. These imperial forces tried to persuade the Korean
royal family and its government that they were not only a trustworthy
political ally but also a noble business partner with goodwill who could help
Korea’s urgent modernization efforts, and Japan and the U.S. were
particularly serious about getting involved in the Korean government’s plans
89
to construct roads, railroads, and the infrastructure to deliver electricity. In
1898, for instance, American businessmen Henry Collbran and H. R. Bostwick
became partners with the Korean royal family in the electricity business.
Emperor Gojong and the Americans co-invested to found a joint-venture
enterprise called Hanseong Electric Company—later renamed the American
Korean Electric Company in 1904—in January 1898, the first electric company
in Korea. In December, the company began the construction of a single-track
streetcar line operating between the West Gate and Hongreung, a tomb where
the emperor’s beloved late queen was buried, in Seoul. The opening
ceremony for this first streetcar line in Asia was held on May 17, 1899, and the
company completed its first power plant toward the end of the year. Shortly
afterwards, it turned on its electric lights in downtown Seoul, inaugurating
the age of the electricity in Korea.
The streetcar quickly became the public attraction, but incessant
horrific accidents scared people off, and many were fearful of electricity as an
apparition, calling the streetcar a monster craving for human blood. As a
result, the streetcar business was much slower than anticipated. To make the
matter worse, Collbran who took advantage of Korean government’s lack of
knowledge about international law when they documented the deal had
constantly threatened the emperor to make up for the company’s deficit, and
90
the emperor finally sold the company to Collbran as he feared unpleasant
diplomatic tension with the United States. This scandal infuriated the Korean
public.
FIGURE 6. The caricature of Collbran and his streetcar that reflects Koreans’ enmity against
him; the caption plays with his name transliterated in Korean (written in old Chinese
characters), Go-Bul-Ahn, by adding one more character to sound like Go-Bok-Bul-Ahn, which
means The Fat Belly Collbran. Daehan Minbo, 18 July 1909.
Recognizing Koreans’ enmity toward him, Collbran created an
amusement department in his company and then held a series of circus shows
and operated a merry-go-around to promote the streetcar and its electricity
business and also subdue the Koreans’ hostility against him. On June 24, 1903,
the company placed an advertisement in Hwangseong Sinmun to publicize its
brand new promotional event.
91
The motion pictures screened at the Electric Company’s power plant
inside of the East Gate will be played from 8 pm to 10 pm everyday
except Sunday and rainy days. The pictures include the stunning
sceneries of lively cities of Korea and the west. The admission fee is
ten cents (jeon).
26
This was the advertisement for the first commercial film screening
and the first newspaper ad of a commercial film screening in Korea. Although
the ad says there is an admission fee, it was actually free for the streetcar
passengers. After all, the first commercial and public film screening in Korea
was in fact the promotional event for an American-owned company. It is not
known how much this promotional film screening itself had changed the
public view on Collbran and his company, but unquestionably the film
screening was a huge success, and the power plant eventually became a
temporary movie theater known as East Gate Moving Picture Site
(Dongdaemun Hwaldong Sajinso) which occasionally screened movies. It
later became Gwangmudae Theater in 1907, a makeshift theater, and in the
next year American Korean Electric Co. sold the management of the theater to
Park Seul-Pil, who later became the most important film exhibitor as a
manager of Danseongsa Theater in the 1920s. The electric company itself was
sold to a Japanese firm in 1909.
26
Hwangseong Sinmun, 24 June 1903. Considering the exchange rate at the time, ten jeon was
approximately equal to a nickel.
92
Even though Koreans were seriously concerned about the invasion of
foreign capital and imperial aggression as Collbran’s case shows, it seems that
they could not resist the powerful allure of movies. Hanseong Electric
Company’s groundbreaking promotional event featuring film screening
became a benchmark for many other foreign companies interested in the
Korean market. Another famous film screening for product promotion was
done by British America Tobacco in 1906. Hoping to change Koreans’ taste
from the traditional leaf tobacco to the western style cigarettes and compete
against Japanese tobacco companies over Korean market, the firm gave free
movie tickets to people who brought in their empty cigarette packs.
27
As discussed in the first chapter, before the movie theaters began to
appear in the 1910s, there were only special screenings organized by the royal
family, various social activity organizations, businessmen, and foreigners in
Korea. Commercial film screenings for the mass public finally began in 1907
when Korea saw its first professional film exhibitor, named L. Martin.
Unfortunately, nothing specific is known about this French film exhibitor, but
there remain newspaper reports and ads that include the location of the
temporary movie theater he managed near Seoso Gate in Seoul’s downtown,
the film programs—mostly French Pathé shorts— admission fees, and the
27
Hwangseong Sinmun, 30 April 1906.
93
screening hours (figure 7).
28
Korean exhibitors began their businesses shortly
after, and Japanese entrepreneurs soon started their film-related business in
Korea, by building movie and live performance theaters, distributing films,
and selling film stocks and equipment.
FIGURE 7. L. Martin’s newspaper advertisement for his theater which is only referred to as “a
brick house on the east, right outside of the Gate”; the ad claims that the theater just acquired
films from France, which have been very popular in Paris, and the royal family of Korea
already enjoyed them. Mansebo, 8 June 1907
In the mid-1910s when only a few movie theaters and play houses
had just started seriously exploring the movie business, Hollywood movies
were not particularly popular. However, Universal’s movie serials quickly
gained public recognition as they were more regularly imported than any
other Hollywood movies through G. H. Morris, an American businessman,
who served as Universal agent, while running his auto sales and repair shop,
Morris Trading Co. (Morris Sanghoi) opened in Seoul in 1915. Toward the end
of the decade, the film distribution system in Korea underwent a significant
28
Mansebo, 8 June 1907.
94
change and it transformed the status of Hollywood products in the Korean
film market. The newspaper advertisement of Umigwan Theater, a Korean
movie theater, that listed its daily film program on December 19, 1919 claims
that it made a contact with Universal through its Japanese branch office to
directly import films from the studio and boasts that its direct distribution
system did not involve a distribution agency for the first time in Korea.
29
The ad further explains that this contact was inevitable due to the America
film industry’s dominance in the world market after the war in Europe.
Subsequently, in 1920, Tokunaga Kumaichir ō, a Japanese migrant, opened his
Tokunaga Moving Picture Trading Co. (Tokunaga Katsud ō Shashin Shokai)
and distributed Warner Brothers’ and F.B.O.’s movies, and the American
George Allen opened the Paramount’s Seoul office in 1922.
Hollywood began to dominate the Korean market in the same manner
it did in the rest of the world, by means of its systematic distribution network.
In particular, Universal, one of the minor studios (Little Five), which had
already established a strong distribution network in East Asia with its offices
in Shanghai, Tokyo, and then Seoul, became dominant in Korea. To compete
with the Umigwan Theater, Danseongsa which reopened as a movie house in
December 1918, soon brought in other Hollywood movies, but it could not
29
Maeil Sinbo, 19 December 1999.
95
sway Korea movie-goers’ loyalty for Universal, which had been formed over
a decade.
30
As a result, in the 1920s, about ninety percent of films screened in
Korean theaters—excluding Japanese theaters in Japanese communities—
were Hollywood movies and more than half of Hollywood films were
products of Universal, which means almost forty-five percent of the films
were Universal movies.
31
If Japanese films screened in Japanese theaters are
included, the proportion of Korean films to Japanese films to Hollywood films
is one to eight to fifteen from the 20s throughout the mid-1930s. This statistics,
again, shows that the dominance of Hollywood cinema in colonial Korea.
32
This industrial context that allowed Hollywood—and Universal—to
control Korean film market certainly challenges the assertion made in the
essay by Kang So-Choen I opened this section with. As I discussed earlier, the
essay links Universal’s popularity among Korean spectators directly to their
nationalism. The distribution of Hollywood and Universal movies in Korea of
the 1920s, however, shows that Korean audience’s accessibility or
inaccessibility to specific films was already limited by both local and global
30
Yi Gu-Yeong, “Joseon Yeonghwagyeui Gwageo, Hyeonjae, Jangrae (4),” Joseon Ilbo, 26
November 1926.
31
Jeong Jae-Wal, “Hanguk Yeonghwa Deungjangijeonui Yeonghwa Sangyeonge daehan
Yeongu,” M.A. Thesis, Korea University, 1996, 30.
32
Cho Gyeong-Hwan, “Chochanggi Hanguk Yeonghwaui Teukseonge gwanhan Yeongu,”
MA Thesis, Chung-Ang University, 2000, 56.
96
film industrial conditions. Furthermore, quite opposite to the author’s claim
that Japanese movie theaters in Korea were inferior to Korean theaters and
financially struggling, Japanese theaters for Japanese migrants ran successful
businesses and in fact massively outnumbered Korean theaters. Although it is
true that Japanese movies were seldom played at Korean movie theaters and
Korean movie-goers preferred Hollywood and Western movies to Japanese
pictures, but this fact alone did not push Japanese movie theaters out of the
competition. In addition, the Japanese film industry was apparently not in the
position to compete against Hollywood films, as Hollywood’s dominance was
not a phenomenon specific only to Korea, and Korean film industry was in
much worse condition than the Japanese film industry. Therefore, the
argument that foregrounds Korean film spectators’ nationalism simply on the
popularity of Hollywood movies and disregards the cultural, institutional,
and industrial context is a fine example of how a nationalistic framework is
entrenched in Korean film historiography.
In order to delve into the issue of the film spectatorship in relation to
nationalism, the major focus needs to be shifted from the distribution context
and “imagined” spectator’s receptive behavior to the actual exhibition context
and audience reception. Indeed, up until 1934 when Japanese government
introduced its first quota system with regards to the screening of foreign
97
movies—another stricter restriction on foreign films followed at the threshold
of the Pacific War in 1941— the dominant influence and popularity of
Hollywood movies in Korea was truly immense. Korean film critics from this
period sometimes critiqued the profit-driven nature of Hollywood and its
negative effects on the global film markets, but the majority of movie-goers
passionately embraced Hollywood movies. Korean newspapers and popular
magazines from the 1920s reflect this movie-goer’s deep affection for
Hollywood. Korean newspapers began to have separate sections for film
previews and reviews around 1924, and photos of Hollywood stars, recent
Hollywood flicks, and reviews of the latest Hollywood films frequently filled
the film sections. As the time went on, the newspapers had more and more
reports and previews of Hollywood movies, eventually running articles and
reviews on Hollywood movies almost everyday. In addition to daily reviews,
the newspapers often had special sections and serialized reports dedicated
solely to the introduction and analysis of Hollywood movies, film industry,
and stars.
From 2003 a collection of books that record the extensive interviews
with filmmakers from the colonial period, conducted by the renowned film
historian Yi Young-il, who devoted himself to interview early filmmakers and
excavate film-related materials, was posthumously published. The entirety of
98
the interviews in this priceless multi-volume collection that documents the
early Korean film scene were conducted in the 1960s and 1970s. As a result,
the interviewees often struggle to recollect events and incidents from thirty,
forty years earlier and occasionally they give incorrect information when it
comes to dates and years, which is a typical limit of oral records. Yet very
interestingly, in order to refresh their old memories and determine when the
events that they try to recall happened, the interviewees almost habitually
used the release or imported years of some of most popular Hollywood
movies like The Broken Coin (1915) and The Orphans of Storm (1921), as memory
triggers. This recollecting or writing Korean film histories through Hollywood
movies by Korean filmmakers, actors, and film historians evidences how
popular these Hollywood movies were, as well as how deeply these films
saturated Korean film history.
As the popularity of a foreign film and its impact on the local cinema
and audience is not an uncommon phenomenon, it is not my intention to treat
this dominance of Hollywood in the Korean film scene in the 1920s as if it is a
special case. The most important question here concerns the ways in which
these Hollywood movies were actually received, interpreted, or appropriated
by Korean spectators according to the specific context of Japanese colonial
rule of Korea. As explained, Hollywood cinema and its films became the
99
objects of idolization and adoration rather than something that needed to be
rejected or expelled, and often this affection carried with it a political
connotation. Joseon Ilbo, one of the major Korean newspapers, initiated its fan
review section, “Impression of a Film,” on May 9, 1925, with an account of
Peter Pan (1924, filmed for Famous Players-Lasky and distributed by
Paramount Pictures). The reviewer/fan, “Mr. H,” writes:
Their country that produced a movie as dreamy and beautiful as Peter
Pan must be a happy place. A spectator who listens to and sees this
beautiful story is also happy… the scene where the children fight the
pirates on the pirate ship made me feel, “how free is their world? Oh,
how happy their country must be?” When the children sing, “my
country is your country, Oh land of freedom, a great country,” while
replacing the pirate flag with American national flag, I burst into tears.
My heart had a dull pain from too much joy. Miss Betty Bronson and
the others also acted freely.
33
FIGURE 8. Betty Bronson in Peter Pan (1924)
33
Joseon Ilbo, 9 May 1926.
100
This fan review that starts with the word “free” and ends with “free”
is the first of many more reviews on Hollywood movies submitted for this fan
review section. More importantly, it is indicative of how Korean spectators
saw Hollywood movies and what they “decoded” from those texts. What this
particular fan review of Peter Pan demonstrates is how a Hollywood text, one
form of cultural imperialism, with its undisguised Americanism was
positively interpreted in the colonial context of Korea. It also reveals that the
popularity of Hollywood movies often go much deeper than just cinematic
and cultural levels.
The affection for American cinema in this particular case was related
to Korea’s colonial state which made Koreans consider the United States a
potential ally or even a savior who could possibly help Korea liberate itself
from Japanese colonial occupation. The publicly built image of the States was
that it was the ultimate democratic society, especially in light of President
Woodrow Wilson’s vital role in founding the League of Nations and shaping
the Treaty of Versailles, which denounced all kinds of imperialism from the
previous century. Yet it is important to note that this “makeover” of the
United States as a defender of humanity was in fact a systematic political
maneuver by the American government, especially under Woodrow Wilson’s
presidency in the late 1910s. Wilson’s administration emphasized
101
universalizing the individual’s right and extending it to the colonized people,
and what this commitment to the right of independence for colonized nations
did in actuality was to allow the United States to get deeply involved in the
world politics, spread American way of democracy, and, more importantly,
develop the economic interests of the United States.
34
As Maria Josefina
Saldana-Portillo explains, disseminating its ideas of democracy and freedom
was closely intertwined with “expanding the network of trade for the United
States.”
35
Whereas the United Stated certainly broke away from the old forms
of imperialism, it also moved towards a new kind of hegemony which was
based primarily on capitalist expansion and economic exploitation articulated
to rhetorics of freedom, liberation, and democracy. This awkward marriage
between the political benevolence and economic expansion has been the
central theme in American foreign affairs from the late 1910s to the present as
we know it.
The idolization of America expressed in Korean film patrons’ love for
Hollywood movies verifies how successful America’s endeavor to demarcate,
distance, and break itself from “old imperialism.” Indeed, the newly
constructed image of America as a fighter against imperialisms was much
34
Immanuel Wallerstein, After Liberalism (New York: New Press, 1995), 108-110.
35
Maria Josefina Saldana-Portillo, The Revolutionary Imagination in the American in the Age of
Development (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 19-20.
102
more amplified in colonial Korea. An editorial published in Donga Ilbo, on the
occasion of a visit by a delegation of American congressmen in 1920, opines
that: “In the name of twenty million Koreans we extend our heartiest
welcome to the congressmen who are just entering our land.” The piece
continues:
Coming as they do from a great country, a country that Nature has
endowed with the awe-inspiring Rockies, with mighty rivers and
opulent prairies; a country that has produced men like Lincoln and
Washington; a country that has for its foundation liberty of conscience
for all its people; a country which is in the vanguard of humanity as
regards freedom and justice.
36
The United States as a land of freedom and justice or “utopia”
picturesquely portrayed in this editorial writing, written in English for the
benefit of visitors from the States, echoes the film fan’s heartfelt longing for
America that he discovered while watching the film Peter Pan. Hence the very
positive reaction to Hollywood cinema was not just indebted to Hollywood’s
sophisticated cinematic achievement or its advanced global distribution
network but instead it was one of many reflections that mirror Korea’s strong
sense of connection to and anticipation for the United States, which were
firmly grounded in Koreans’ aspiration for their nation’s independence.
36
Donga Ilbo, 24 August 1920.
103
FIGURE 9. A newspaper report on “Manse (Hurrah) Revolt” that transpired at the welcoming
ceremony for the American Congressmen. Donga Ilbo, 26 August 1920 (with the photos of the
American visitors).
Considering the ardent response of Korean film spectators to
Hollywood movies which reflected their secretive desire to liberate
themselves from Japanese colonial rule, it is not surprising that Japanese
authorities as well as the film industry were alert to Hollywood’s popularity
in Korea. From a business perspective, the Japanese film industry, which saw
the potential of the Korean market, felt threatened by Hollywood’s immense
popularity since the international market for Japanese movies was extremely
limited. Acknowledging the nationalist spectatorship, a Japanese film
magazine article expressed the concern for the influence of Hollywood
movies on Korean film patrons by noting “[I]n Korean-owned eleven movie
theaters, only Korean and Western films are screened and no Japanese films
are shown…anti-Japanese spirit is strongly inscribed in both production and
104
spectators’ response.”
37
The economic issue was not necessarily a decisive
concern, however, as Japan began to see the United States as a major threat to
its colonial system due to its policies of obstructing Japanese imperialism. In
other words, the seeds for the war between two countries were already sown
in the 1920s, and this antagonism continued to escalate and eventually
became one of the catalysts for the Pacific War. Hence Japanese film industry
and media frequently critiqued Hollywood movies for their “immoral”
contents and entertainment-oriented nature, and considered this “invasion”
of Hollywood movies a serious social issue that needed to be addressed.
38
Koreans’ deep affection for Hollywood films had become more grave
issue as the Japanese empire tried to assimilate its colonies into Japan under
the imperial agendas of “Nai-Sen Y ūwa (The Merge of Japan and Korea,
1919),” “Minzoku T ōwa (The Harmony between the Ethnic Groups),” “Nai-Sen
Ittai (Japan and Korea are One Body, 1937),” and so on. An article from
Japanese film magazine, Eiga Junpo (July 1943), that chronicles a brief history
of film censorship in Korea, notes:
In fact Korean film-goers were inclined to love foreign films from the
outset, and the film industry cared only about making profits and
37
Kinema Junpo (1 March 1928).
38
For more discussions of the social reactions to Hollywood movies in Japan proper, see
Peter B. High, The Imperial Screen: Japanese Film Culture in the Fifteen Years’ War, 1931-1945
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), esp. chap. 3.
105
thus foreign films with great entertainment values flooded into
[Korea], and as a result, the influences of the frivolous and low brow
cultures and customs that American films contain became gradually
apparent….In the meantime the fundamental policy of Nai-Sen Ittai in
governing Korea must be firmly rooted in, and thus the needs to
spread Japan’s good customs and cultures inherent in domestic
[Japanese] films are urgent. Hence in August, the 9
th
year of Sh ōwa
[1934], Moving Picture Film Censorship (Government Order No.802)
that limited the screenings of foreign films went into effect….It would
give Korean people more opportunities to appreciate domestic
[Japanese] films by reducing the screening ratio of foreign films and
allow domestic films to easily reach Korea.
39
What is most intriguing about this article from a special edition on
filmmaking in Korea is that Koreans’ deep affection for Hollywood films is
deemed as an obstacle for Japanese Empire’s assimilation policy. As this
article indicates, the literal annexation and assimilation of Japanese colonial
subjects into the empire was the fundamental principle of Japanese imperial
structure as Japanese imperial project’s ideological justification from its very
beginning was grounded on its “Pan-Asianism” that aimed at solidifying
Asian countries under Japan’s leadership in order to fight off the western
imperial expansion into the region. In Korea, this assimilation effort was
accelerated since 1919 when the Cultural Rule era began. Thus even before
Nai-Sen Ittai policy, the best known assimilation policy mentioned in the
above magazine, was proclaimed in 1937 by then Governor-General Minami
39
Eiga Junpo (11 July 1943), 22.
106
Jiro, Japanese Empire had always been serious about the assimilation.
However, until the late 1930s when the much more serious and systematic
integration and assimilation policies that aggressively destroyed colonies’
languages, traditions, customs, and cultures were introduced, in Korea, the
colonizers—migrants to Japan’s colonies—and colonized lived separated and
segregated lives.
The Japanese magazine article quoted above blames the profit-driven
film industry in service of the popular taste as a primary reason for not only
spoiling Korean spectators but impeding Japan’s assimilation efforts. The
essay calls for the upholding of the assimilation policy in the fields of
filmmaking and film exhibition, but paradoxically, it only reveals that Japan’s
assimilation plans were not going very smoothly. As a matter of fact,
assimilation always coexisted with the differentiation efforts between the
colonizers and colonized as a means to maintain the colonial order. The
exclusive Japanese communities formed across the Korean peninsula are one
of many examples that testify to the serious imbalance between the ideal of
assimilation and its actual application, which also resulted in the ethnically
segregated film cultures in colonial Korea. Beginning with the arrival of
migrants in Korean in 1876, the Japanese built Japanese communities and
areas where only the Japanese resided, so their everyday lives were the same
107
as when they lived in Japan. Also up until the late 1930s Koreans did not
necessarily need to learn the Japanese language unless they were politicians
or government workers who were required to speak Japanese. Consequently,
every social sector was segregated according to ethnicity, and the film
cultures were no exception. For instance, Seoul where Japanese migrants
accounted for over one-fourth of the city’s entire population was socially and
culturally segregated between so-called North Village (Bukchon) where
Koreans resided and South Village (Namchon) where Japanese migrants built
their own haven. As a result, in Seoul of the 1920s, there were two separate
film distribution, marketing, and exhibition systems. While theaters geared
towards Korean audiences in North Village played foreign and Korean films
but never played a Japanese film, theaters catering to Japanese audiences in
South Village programmed the latest Japanese films alongside American and
European films, but never showed a single film produced by Koreans. These
segregated film cultures in Korea, the subjects of the next chapter, exemplify
the selective application of Japan’s assimilation policies. In other words, the
paradox of the Japanese imperial project that produced both the assimilation
and discrimination—or similarity and difference—in its imperial and colonial
subjects was certainly inscribed upon the symbiosis of the film cultures of the
colonizers and colonized. What impeded the assimilation endeavor was the
108
inherent limit of assimilation policy itself, not Hollywood movies, not profit-
driven film industry, nor Korean film spectators’ particular tastes.
In this regard, Hollywood films, or more specifically Korean
spectators’ reception of Hollywood films directly reflects the tensions
between the colonizers and colonized. As I have discussed, Korean spectators
attempted to interpret those foreign texts and appropriate them to ponder
over and address their colonial reality and politics. In the meantime, the
colonizers saw the popularity of these films among the colonized as a
potential threat to the colonial order, especially to their agenda of assimilation,
in other words, their political endeavor to create and develop “an imperial
identity.” This contested interpretation of Hollywood film, which mediates
the colonial realities of Korea, demonstrates how the consumption and
reception of foreign cultures could become a culture sphere in which political
tension surrounding the colonial situation, especially the formations of
national and imperial identities, arose.
The following section further elaborates on this relationship between
the identity formation and consumption of Hollywood movies by
interrogating the arguably most important element in the film exhibition
practice in Korea of the 1920s and its role and function in the formation of
109
colonial film culture and, especially in shaping colonial film spectatorship: the
figure of byeonsa, or a film narrator.
Benshi/Byeonsa across “Borders”
Back then Seo Sang-Ho was the finest byeonsa in Korea and he even
spoke Japanese fluently. As a main byeonsa at the Gyeongseong High
Entertainment Theater, he danced better than anyone and was very
amusing. One day when I went to the movies, a film featuring a duel
between a Western boxer and a Japanese Judo player was screened.
Seo narrated the film more passionately than usual. Suddenly the
tension escalated between Korean and Japanese audiences. I myself
clenched my fists and impatiently waited for the result of the duel.
When the boxer won the first match, the Korean audiences celebrated,
while the Japanese audiences cursed at the screen. Then in the next
match the Judo player won which brought the praises of the Japanese
and the disappointment of the Koreans. At one point, Seo cheered for
the Judo player. The Koreans shouted at him, “You bastard, you are
also a Korean! Which side are you on!?” The film finished with the
victory of Judo player. In the dark, a fighting erupted – the Japanese
and Koreans hurled floor cushions and mandarins at one another. The
screening ended in chaos. Even Japanese police could not control the
situation. I will never forget this incident.
40
In her study of African American spectatorship and its manifestation
of American racial politics in the segregated American urban spaces of the
early twentieth century, Jacqueline Stewart illuminates the ways in which
African Americans negotiated confrontations with cinema as a major feature
of modern American culture. Expanding the discussions of the politics of
40
Yi Gu-Yeong, “Sageonuirobon Yeonghwasa,” Yeonghwa Yesul (December 1970), 80-81.
110
racial representations, Stewart introduces the notion of “reconstructive
spectatorship” which refers to “a formulation that seeks to account for the
range of ways in which Black viewers attempted to reconstitute and assert
themselves in relation to the cinema’s racist social and textual operations.”
41
According to Stewart, this reconstructive spectatorship illustrates how the
public dimension of spectatorship persisted for black viewers, complicating
the presumed pleasures and limitations of classical absorption and distraction
designed for the idealized spectator; black audiences at the beginning of the
classical Hollywood era were not meant to be fully integrated into the
developing narratives on screen nor into American theater audiences because
“the conspicuousness of Black bodies did not disappear in darkened
theaters.”
42
The opening anecdote for this last section of the chapter that recounts
a firsthand film-viewing experience by a movie fan in Korea under Japanese
colonial rule resonates in many ways with Stewart’s study of the constitutive
relations between the early film spectatorship and “internal colonialism” as
well as her notion of reconstructive Black spectatorship. However, what
fundamentally demarcates Korean colonial film spectatorship from that of
41
Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity
(Berkeley, L.A. and London: University of California Press, 2005), 94.
42
Ibid., 110
111
African Americans described in Stewart’s study is that most of the films
watched by Korean audiences did not directly concern them in terms of their
subjects, narratives, and representational politics, since they were foreign in
origin. As argued in the previous section, the above quote illustrates that
Korean film spectators still found a way to address and express their colonial
realities by way of appropriating the film texts that seemingly had little to do
with their social realities and cultural backgrounds. Significantly, this film-
viewing experience also verifies the critical function of an extra-diegetic
element in film exhibition and film-spectator relations in colonial Korea: the
practice of byeonsa.
This section examines byeonsa, which designates a practice from the
silent cinema era where a film narrator or voice performer narrated and
commented on events that occurred on-screen, and its important cultural
function in the formation of colonial film spectatorship in Korea. Through the
discussion of this filmic practice, which originated in Japan, this section
ultimately interrogates the ways in which modes of exhibition were
inextricably tied to the construction of national cinema, nationalism and
national identity in Korea under Japanese colonial rule. In particular, by
investigating Korean film spectators’ attempts to decode and re-signify the
meanings of foreign texts and the byeonsa’s role as a mediator between those
112
texts and Korean audiences, I will elucidate the physical and discursive
formations of colonial and national cinema at the sites of film exhibition and
consumption.
As the opening quote for this last section of the chapter explicitly
demonstrates, the byeonsa’s presence at movie theaters was decisive in
forming early film-audience relationship and film culture in general in Korea.
The byeonsa, who usually sat on the left side of the screen and narrated
and/or interpreted the images, served more than just an explanatory function.
Commenting on the crucial role of byeonsa, an anonymous film critic notes:
Moving picture is a sort of pantomime that expresses its beauty just
with its forms. Hence only after a byeonsa’s explanation, a spectator
understands it [its beauty] in details. Also through the byeonsa’s
explanation, the artistic value of a picture could be exposed. Therefore
a byeonsa must completely understand the facts and nature of a
picture and explain it properly according to the actors’ expressions in
a picture. Only then can its artistic value be fully revealed. Thus,
moving picture byeonsa must possess more knowledge than stage
actors and even analyze the progression of human knowledge in
order to satisfy audience’s needs.
43
As this quote suggests, byeonsa was regarded as the final touch that
would complete a (silent) film by delivering its innermost “beauty” to the
audience after carefully examining a film’s every aspect. In other words,
43
Maeil Sinbo, 22 August 1919.
113
byeonsa was not just a component of a film’s screening or exhibition but was
part of the very film itself. Thus, only after byeonsa’s accurate interpretation
and transference of a filmic text could film spectators appreciate its final form.
For these reasons, film-goers’ expectations of byeonsa was incredibly high,
which means that being a byeonsa was never an easy job since she or he was
expected to possess extensive knowledge of the film language and style,
actors/actresses, and even the cultural and historical backgrounds of the
countries from which the films came. Even worse, they had to face ferocious
film fans who did not restrain their strong desire for a qualified byeonsa, nor
contempt for a poor performance. It was quite common for spectators to
openly express their angers at a byeonsa’s poor performance during a
screening. Many devoted fans also sent fan letters to newspapers and
magazines to analyze or criticize byeonsa’s routines and even denounce some
byeonsa’s morally inappropriate life styles. One of the most notorious
incidents involving a byeonsa happened at the Umigwan theater when a
spectator enraged by byeonsa’s meager explanation threw burning charcoal at
him in the middle of screening.
44
44
Maeil Sinbo, 18 January 1919.
114
FIGURE 10. A theater listing in a newspaper with the photos of byeonsa, which evidences the
significance of byeonsa practice in early film culture and business in Korea. Donga Ilbo, 30
August 1920.
All these indicate the importance of byeonsa’s function in film
exhibition in Korea during the silent movie era. In this regard it is not
surprising that the Korean byeonsa was the pivotal figure in shaping early
film-spectator relationships. Although the films that byeonsa explained were
almost entirely foreign films, mostly from Hollywood, it did not matter since
byeonsa constantly linked images on the screen to Korea’s colonial realities
during their performances. Despite its nationalist image, however, Korean
byeonsa was the direct import of Japanese benshi, a well-known Japanese silent
film practice. Therefore, the paradoxical nature of byeonsa stems from the
localization process of its Japanese counterpart.
There were also a significant number of Japanese benshi in Korea who
performed for Japanese audiences in Japanese movie theaters located in
115
Japanese communities. Japanese benshi and Korean byeonsa therefore had
considerably different audiences and political constituencies, but they shared
a certain fate at the same time. Due to their stardom, immense influence over
the audience and, most of all, their improvisational performance style, benshi
and byeonsa were under the constant scrutiny of the Japanese government and
policed by the same censorship and regulations. Most importantly, the active
movement of this unique Japanese film practice across “borders,” insofar as it
was not contained within the “borders” of its original nation, verifies the
prevailing influence of Japanese cinematic practices over Korea as well as the
East Asian region. Specifically, byeonsa is indicative of colonial cinema’s
ambivalent relationship with imperial cinema, which reflects both the
tensions and negotiations between the cultures of the empire and the colony. I
use the word, “border,” in an ironic way, because the “borderless” East Asia
was the imperial agenda of Japanese imperialism and was often expressed in
its numerous political slogans such as “Ni-Man (Japanese-Manchuria) Bloc”
(1931), “Ni-Man-Shi (Japan-Manchuria-China) Bloc” (1933), “T ōah Shinjitsujo
(New Order in East Asia)” (1938) and “Dai T ōa Kyōeiken (Greater East Asia Co-
Prosperity Sphere)” (1940), which sought to ideologically justify Japan’s
colonization of other Asian countries. Yet, in reality, there were many
distinctive “borders” and hierarchies wedged between and among the
116
colonizers and colonized. Hence whereas Japanese benshi and its influence
over the cinemas of Japan’s colonies cinematically embody Japanese Empire’s
pan-Asianist ideal —an imperial transnationalization of the region— the
Korean byeonsa reflects the emerging nationalism of colonial Korea which
defied the spread of the empire’s transnational ideal—or the nationalism of
the colonizers—. The very culture of the colonizer was thereby transformed
into an effective cultural means of bolstering local nationalist sentiments and
challenges to the empire. This conflict was noticeably visible even inside the
Korean peninsula since both benshi and byeonsa coexisted in the same urban
spaces, often competing against each other, and sometimes struggling
together under the film censorship.
Ever since Joseph L. Anderson and Donald Richie’s influential and
comprehensive study of Japanese national cinema, The Japanese Film (1959),
boosted scholarly interests in Japanese cinema in the Anglophone world,
benshi has been one of the most popular subjects when discussing early
Japanese cinema, as it has been deemed as a unique Japanese tradition that
overtly distinguishes its cinematic idiom from that of the west. However,
while benshi is a Japanese film tradition in origin but it was not solely
practiced in Japan; benshi was widely practiced in Korea, Taiwan, Thailand,
and also among Japanese communities in Hawaii and on the west coast of the
117
United States.
45
Yet there are rare scholarly works that extensively deal with
the practices of benshi in a wider Asian or transnational context. This omission
may be attributed to some limitations in research practices, but it can be
traced more so to a film historiographical tendency in studies of imperial
Japanese cinema. For instance, works most recently published on imperial
Japanese cinema certainly evidence this trend. Abe Mark Nornes’ Japanese
Documentary Film: the Meiji Era through Hiroshima, which traces a history of
Japanese documentary up to 1945, focuses excessively on the internal conflicts
between the dominants and the subordinates within Japan and their impact
on the historical development of Japanese documentary film. By locating his
argument in contests over hegemony, Nornes rather dangerously attempts to
separate Japan (the State) from its people (Citizens).
46
More problematically,
Nornes’ history of Japanese documentary film wholly excludes numerous
ethnographic films and travelogues dealing with Japan’s colonies that display
Japan’s own orientalist perspective on and ethnic taxonomy of its colonial
subjects to serve as justification for its imperial enterprise. Peter High’s The
Imperial Screen examines Japanese film culture during the so-called Fifteen
45
Sato Tadao, “Benshinitsuide,” Katsud ō Benshi (Tokyo: Urban Connections, 2001), 4; and J. L.
Anderson, “Spoken Silents in the Japanese Cinema; or, Talking to Pictures,” Reframing
Japanese Cinema, 261.
46
Abe Mark Nornes, Japanese Documentary Film: The Meiji Era through Hiroshima (Minnesota
and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), xxii.
118
Year War (1931-1945) and also shares a similar problem with Nornes’ study.
High notes, “[F]ilm production under Japanese leadership was in fact also
carried out in other parts of the Empire…. Adequate treatment of these
activities requires a book of its own, and I touch on them here only when they
are relevant to the domestic Japanese situation.”
47
Although High
acknowledges the limits of his study, his above statement suggests that he
regards Japan as a separate national entity from its colonies. Both High and
Nornes disregard the fact that such countries under Japanese colonial rule as
Korea and Taiwan were actual part of Japan at the time. Especially after the
late 1930s the Koreans and Taiwanese were finally granted full citizenship by
means of “rights” to be imperial “soldiers,” a history that complicates the
very notions of “Japanese-ness” and Japanese national. Joanne Bernardi’s
Writing in Light presents a similar but slightly different issue concerning
Japanese film historiography. In her study of the Pure Film Movement
(Jun’eigageki Und ō) in the 1910s, Bernardi tries to locate early Japanese cinema
on the international map by exploring the Pure Film Movement’s attempt to
uplift cinema’s social and cultural status. Bernardi’s major focus lies on the
relationship between Japanese cinema and Western cinema, specifically using
Hollywood and European cinemas as her points of comparison and reference.
47
Peter High, Imperial Screen:: Japanese Film Culture in the Fifteen Years’ War, 1931-1945
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), xxvii.
119
Like many other Japanese film scholars, Bernardi depicts Japanese cinema as
one that is always under constant foreign influences rather than as a national
cinema that influences other national cinemas. Japanese cinema’s
international position during their moment of empire tends to be determined
in its relation to the West, the United States, and Hollywood. And, quite often
the Japanese cinema’s internationality or “uniqueness” is sought from its film
style rather than its historical presence in its former colonies. As a result, these
types of historiographical approaches obfuscate, sometimes actively, the
presence and influence of imperial Japanese cinema over its surrounding
region.
In this sense, the conspicuous absence of discussions on the
circulation of benshi outside of Japanese “border” is symptomatic of this
specific historiographical problem in the studies of Japanese imperial cinema.
In the meantime, in Korea which had a prolific byeonsa tradition only second
to Japan, film historians have casually embraced byeonsa as a Korean film
tradition without ruminating much on its origin. Interestingly, studies of
byeonsa in both North and South Korea have been mostly confined to the
Korean context; byeonsa has been regarded as “an amalgam of media
developed in the arts of conversation of the orient,”
48
”a prominent artist in
48
Kim Jong-Won and Jeong Jung-Heon, Uri Yeonghwa 100nyeon (Seoul: Hyunamsa, 2001), 142.
120
[Korean] silent cinema,”
49
and “a figure who is so crucial in discussing
[Korean] national cinema”
50
rather than as another example of an imperial
culture imposed upon colonized Korea. Thus, this naturalized acceptance of
byeonsa as a “unique” or “traditional” Korean film practice generates the same
historiographical problematic that arises when studies of benshi remain
geographically confined to Japan, since both paradigms neglect the exchanges
between the film cultures of Japan and its then colonies, like Korea.
Byeonsa was in fact so quickly localized and integrated into early
Korean film culture without any resistance from either the Korean film
industry or Korean spectators that it is difficult to accurately pinpoint how
and when benshi was Koreanized as byeonsa. The primary reason for the
smooth localization of the Japanese benshi practice in Korea is related to the
absence of a theatrical tradition—as in stage dramas—in Korea, as I discussed
in the first chapter. Due to this absence, the so-called New School (sinpa)
51
groups, which performed western-style modern stage dramas with
contemporary subjects, had to study modern Japanese dramas as modern
western culture was primarily channeled through Japan at the time. Hence
many sinpa performers went to Japan to pursue modern dramaturgy. Yet they
49
Choi and Hong, 191.
50
Ahn Jong-Hwa, Hanguk Yeonghwa Cheukmyeonbisa (Seoul: Hyeondae Mihaksa, 1998), 33.
51
The term sinpa is a Korean transliteration of shimpa, a Japanese word.
121
did not even have to go to Japan since they could study at any number of the
early theaters that had been built in Korea by the Japanese as a place to house
Japanese stage dramas for Japanese migrant audiences. Thus, the key figures
who adopted the western-style drama circa 1910 learned the very basics of the
modern stage drama from these Japanese theaters located in Seoul, such as
Keijoza, Kotobukiza, and Kabukiza.
52
As a result, Korean sinpa groups
employed many of Japanese drama’s unique traits like onnagata (a male actor
impersonating female characters), chain drama, and the use of a narrator,
which would later become the inspiration for Japanese benshi. Korean
theaters’ and theater groups’ names followed Japanese styles, and
performance styles used in the earliest of stage productions were heavily
influenced by the modern Japanese stage play. From production to reception,
the institutionalization of theater as a new cultural venue in Korea was closely
tethered to the modernization of the Japanese theater system. It was
“modern” culture that Korean stage and film attendees aspired to learn, not
specifically Japanese culture. Byeonsa was part of this process of importing
western or “modern” theatrical and cinematic institutions from or through
Japan, and thus the fact that byeonsa was a Japanese invention put neither the
Korean film industry nor spectators under any kind of moral dilemma.
52
Jang Han-Ki, Hanguk Yeongeuksa (Seoul: Dongguk University Press, 2000), 199-213.
122
Hence benshi—Katsud ō Eiga Benshi (Moving Picture Benshi) in its full
name—was naturally incorporated into Korean film practices. In fact, the
term did not even change, except that it was transliterated as byeonsa
(hwaldong yeonghwa byeonsa) in Korean. Korean byeonsa began to appear
around 1910, much later than when the benshi appeared in Japan; the first
Japanese benshi performance dates back to 1899.
53
However, the precursors of
byeonsa existed in the form of lecturers, translators, or commentators.
54
The
term “byeonsa” began to be used around 1908
55
but it did not widely
disseminate right away because lecturers or translators were more often used
as late as the early 1910s. It was in the 1910s when byeonsa was officially
integrated into film culture and exhibition practice and became part of the
major attraction in the movie-going experience. The emergence of byeonsa in
this decade came with arrival of movie theaters and as film screenings became
a crucial component of performing arts theater programs. A 1914 newspaper
article reads:
It [the moving picture] has been a mere part of various shows, but it
has developed quickly for the last two, three years, and naturally five,
six movie theaters have opened in Gyeongseong [Seoul], and even
53
Katsud ō Benshi, ed. Musei Eiga Kanj ōkai (Tokyo:Urban Connections, 2001), 11.
54
Mansebo, 12 May 1907; Maeil Sinbo, 17 May 1912.
55
Cho Hee-Moon, “Museong Yeonghwaui Haeseolja, Byeonsa Yeongu,” Hankuk yeonghwaui
Jaengjeom 1, 130.
123
byeonsa who explain the pictures began to appear… Now we have
several Korean byeonsa, and many more will follow soon, but Kim
Deok-Gyeong has a promising future and will be considered as the
best of the bunch.
56
This newspaper article demonstrates that the rise of byeonsa was indeed tied
to the advent of movie theaters and also attests to the speed with which film’s
popularity grew in Korea from the early 1910s on.
The first byeonsa in Korea was Wu Jeong-Sik, an aristocrat from a
renowned family, who was an avid movie fan that frequented the
Gwangmudae Theater, a temporary movie theater. Wu was recruited by the
manager of Gwangmudae, Park Seung-Pil, who felt that a commentator was
in demand since films’ narratives were becoming increasingly sophisticated
and complicated. However, due to his weak voice and slow pace, Wu
promptly lost the audience’s favor and his job as well.
57
The first professional
and byeonsa star was Seo Sang-Ho who served as the chief byeonsa for
Gyeongseong High Entertainment Theater, the very first movie theater in
Korea, which opened on February 18, 1910. Before he became a byeonsa, Seo
worked as a Japanese interpreter, so he was fluent in both Korean and
Japanese, which made him a perfect choice for High Entertainment Theater’s
56
Maeil Sinbo, 9 June 1914.
57
Ahn, 31-32.
124
first few years of mixed Korean and Japanese attendance. Seo turned out to be
a great performer; his eloquent voice acting and his signature dance prior to
each screening made him movie fans’ favorite byeonsa which catapulted him
into stardom. Seo’s rivals started to appear soon; Kim Deok-Gyeong, who
would later become the chief byeonsa for the Second Daishokan Theater in
1914 and then for the Danseongsa Theater in the 1920s, joined Seo at the High
Entertainment Theater a year after Seo’s debut. Yi Han-Gyeong, another
byeonsa on the rise, was hired by Umigwan, a movie theater built in 1912
which catered to Korean audiences. Many other byeonsa stars would emerge
after these three early celebrities made their mark.
FIGURE 11. Wu Jeong-Sik, the first Korean byeonsa
As movie theaters began to serve Japanese and Korean spectators
separately, the ethnic segregation of film cultures took place toward the mid-
125
1910s. Simultaneously, Japanese benshi began to appear in Korea and
immediately outnumbered Korean byeonsa as most of the theaters were
targeting Japanese audiences. This preponderance would continue
throughout the entire silent film period in Korea. Daishokan and Ōgonkan,
the first two Japanese movie theaters established right after High
Entertainment Theater (both built in 1913), had multiple numbers of benshi
respectively and thus had the luxury of each benshi playing a film character or
two. Thanks to the different target audiences of each theater, benshi and
byeonsa did not necessarily compete against each other. However, when a
movie theater decided to change its nature, in other words, its intended
audience, it implied oncoming trouble for one party. The Second Daishokan
theater, which changed its name from High Entertainment Theater after the
Daishokan theater acquired it in 1914, initially catered to Japanese audience,
and thus hired a number of Japanese benshi. Yet when it became a theater for
Korean patrons in June 1914, it fired all of the Japanese benshi and hired Kim
Deok-Ryong and Choi Byeong-Ryong, two Korean byeonsa.
58
The theater
shifted its target audience once again after the notorious
Umigwan/Daishokan deal, which allowed Umigwan to monopolize the
market for Korean movie-goers. This time, Korean byeonsa were released and
58
Maeil Sinbo, 3 June 1914.
126
replaced by newly-hired Japanese benshi.
59
Sometimes Japanese benshi who
performed in Japan traveled with certain films to Korea. When D.W. Griffith’s
Way Down East (1920), one of the most popular silent movies ever screened in
Korea—theatrically released five times in Seoul and countless times in other
major cities and towns throughout the 1920s— was imported for the second
time in 1923, its distributor, Yi Pil-Wu, bought the rights to the film from a
Japanese agency
60
and contracted two top-rated benshi affiliated with the
Shochiku Studio along with it. These Japanese benshi became a major selling
point in the promotion of the film. Even in the 1920s, the numbers of Japanese
benshi far surpassed those of the Korean byeonsa. As of 1922 when the
byeonsa/benshi permit system was introduced, records indicate that in Korea
fifty four byeonsa and benshi applied for the qualification test and only thirteen
were Korean byeonsa.
61
In fact, not all byeonsa/benshi applied for this permit at
first and only a handful of those who did actually passed. In response, the
police department of Gyeonggi Province, which was in charge of film
censorship at the time, decided to pass all byeonsa who applied,
acknowledging that the hasty implement of this new regulation policy
59
Maeil Sinbo, 24 April 1915.
60
Actually Yi acquired a film’s copy from a Japanese agency that bought the rights to the film.
There was no copyrights law either in Japan or Korea at the time.
61
Donga Ilbo, 28 June 1922.
127
required some time for adjustment. Nevertheless, these statistics reveal that
there were significantly more Japanese benshi than Korean byeonsa in Korea,
suggesting that Japanese theater businesses in Korea were flourishing much
more so than Korean theaters.
The introduction of the permit system in both Japan and Korea in
1921, though the first annual test was offered in 1922, indicates that Korean
byeonsa and Japanese benshi became the sites of active film censorship in the
empire and attests to their popularity and influence. In other words, they
were considered “dangerous” public figures particularly because of their
improvisatorial performance style and stardom. The following incident in
1920, the year after the March 1
st
Uprising, involving an overtly political
gesture made by a byeonsa during his performance portrays how
unexpectedly a byeonsa could utilize his position and his influence over the
audience for his political ends:
Around 9:30 pm on July 5
th
Jeong Han-Seol (22), who has worked
diligently as a byeonsa at the Umigwan Theater for the past three years,
suddenly appeared on stage during the ten-minute intermission,
faced the audience with a tense look and excited voice, and shouted
with his fists firmly clenched, “Today is the day we are shouting out
freedom and today is the day we are waiting for action. Let’s spill our
pure and boiling red blood all over the world to draw the world’s
attention to us and make all the countries in the world realize our
existence and efforts.” Since he made inappropriate comments which
had nothing to do with the moving picture, he was immediately
arrested by a police officer present at the screening and is under
128
custody at the Jongno police station as of now. This is the first speech-
related arrest involving a byeonsa.
62
This incident that transpired before any specific film law had been
initiated certainly reveals the potentially threatening nature of byeonsa/benshi
performance, and thus it clearly shows why the permit system was to be
instituted. At the same time, film censorship and regulations of the silent film
period illuminate the various ways that film exhibition practices, especially in
relation to byeonsa/benshi, were censored and controlled. It was not until 1917
when the Japanese government took a serious measure with regards to film
censorship. The police took in charge of film censorship and initiated a pre-
censorship screening process as its main method of surveillance. In the 1920s
two major film regulations were finally introduced in Korea in 1922 and 1926,
respectively. The 1922 Exhibition and Exhibition Sites Regulation that sought
to monitor entertainments including film, stage, and dance performance drew
all kinds of other public spaces—schools, factories, hospitals, etc. —under a
watchful eye. However, this regulation was not nationally implemented but
instead limited to the Gyeonggi Province which included Seoul. Korea’s first
official film censorship law, Moving Picture Film Censorship Regulation was
announced on July 5, 1926, and was one part of a larger censorship movement
62
Donga Ilbo, 8 July 1920.
129
being crafted by the Japanese Empire, not only in its colonies but in Japan
proper where the leftist movement had become a growing concern for them.
Under this 1926 regulation, the Office of the Governor-General (Department
of Documentation and Publication, Tosh ōka) took in direct charge of the film
censorship in Korea. What is most compelling about this regulation is that in
order to get a permit for each film, exhibitors first had to submit a film along
with two copies of the so-called explanation (setsumei) scripts, in other words,
benshi/byeonsa’s performance scripts (the second clause).
63
In addition, among
its total thirteen clauses, four deal with how to manage the process of
submitting explanation scripts, like how to deal with the revision and
resubmission of initially rejected scripts, lost scripts, fines for failing to submit
a script in a timely manner. Significantly, this film law focuses mostly on film
exhibition without including any specific clauses on the production side. It
shows that Japanese film censors were just as much interested in how films
were screened as what was being screened. And, of course, attention was
focused on benshi/byeonsa performances.
63
“Katsud ō Shashiin Kenetsu Kisoku,” Ch ōsen Sodokufu Kanp ō, no. 4162 (5 July 1926), 41.
130
FIGURE 12. The Moving Picture Film Censorship Regulation which focuses on film exhibition
and byeonsa/benshi performances. (The Office of the Government-General Official Report, no. 4162,
5 July 1926)
Understandably the Office of the Governor-General tried to censor
byeonsa performances by carefully examining their scripts along with the film
text in advance, but there was never an absolute guarantee that a byeonsa
would adhere to the approved scripts. Not to mention, the police officers
present at each screening could only censor a byeonsa’s actions retroactively
after the performance was done. Many reported incidents disclosed the
logical “holes” of the censorship system as well as the difficulties in
regulating byeonsa performances. One of the most famous cases occurred at a
screening of a MGM spectacle, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925), at the
131
Danseongsa theater in 1929. In particular, the scandal surrounding Ben-Hur’s
screening bears witness to the contesting relationship between film censorship
policies and the abilities of the byeonsa to galvanize nationalist sentiments
among Korean film spectators.
Yun Chi-Ho (1865-1945), a progressive political activist and renowned
English interpreter who for more than fifty years kept journals, mostly in
English, that vividly record his colonial experiences, provides his fragmentary
impression of the Ben-Hur screening. He remarks, “[I] went with Jang and Ki
to Danseongsa to see Ben-Hur screened. The Byeonsa or the interpreter used
the word Gamsa (a governor) instead of Chongdok (a governor-general) to
designate the Roman Governor of Palestine. Strange the police had permitted
the films in Korea at all.”
64
As Yun’s depiction astutely points out, it was
indeed quite peculiar for a film like Ben-Hur to be permitted, given this
biblical epic’s narrative implications; the film’s depiction of the Jewish
people’s struggle for liberation from the oppression of the Roman Empire
inferentially evoked the colonial condition of Korea. Yi Gu-Yeong, a
filmmaker who began working as the head of PR department for Danseongsa
64
Yun Chi-Ho, Journal No. 9, 16 January 1929. n.p. Yun has been a controversial historical
figure after his collaboration with the Office of the Governor-General during the later years of
the Japanese Empire. Yun began to write his journal in English in 1899 when he studied in the
United States.
132
in 1925, told a story concerning Ben-Hur’s release in his extensive interview.
65
Upon previewing Ben-Hur, Yi realized that the film could be a huge success as
its issues could potentially appeal to Korean spectators. He thus came up with
an idea for how best to evade the censorship problem. Yi found out that
Detective Yoshida had been assigned as the censor for the screening of Ben-
Hur. He then researched Detective Yoshida’s background and learned that he
had just published a haiku poem in a magazine. When Yi screened the film for
Yoshida for his approval, he began to praise Yoshida’s haiku skills just as it
approached the most politically-charged scene. Both distracted and pleased
by Yi’s praise, Yoshida approved the film. Yi, aware that the film could be still
banned after its release, instructed his byeonsa, Seo Sang-Pil, to read the
carefully prepared script and not to improvise lest the audience get too
excited. Despite Yi’s instruction, Seo got carried away and became very vocal
and enthusiastic during his performance, at one point proclaiming, “[Y]ou
Roman’s one hour is equivalent to a hundred years for us Jews,” thus
invoking the hardship of Korean people. A policeman who attended the
screening came up to Yi immediately after the screening and requested the
byeonsa’s explanation script. On the next day, Yi was ordered by the police to
re-submit the film, which subsequently was temporarily banned. Yet at the
65
“Yi Gu-Yeong,” Yi Young-ilui Hanguk Yeonghwareul uihan Jeungeonrok 4, ed. Korean Art
Institute (Seoul: Sodo, 2003), 283-286.
133
time Yoshida, the elite policeman who was newly appointed to the film
censorship board in Korea, had inner political rivalries with other censors
who had been in Korea for more than a decade, and thus refused to admit his
mistake and ardently deflected any challenge to his authority. As a result,
Ben-Hur was re-released after only a three-day suspension, and it was the
enormous success that Yi Gu-Yeong anticipated.
The screening of Ben-Hur exemplifies and epitomizes some of the core
features of film spectatorship in colonized Korea. Most significantly, the
enthusiastic response to this Hollywood spectacle suggests that Korean
spectators felt strong connections with this foreign text. In spite of the film’s
remote relationship to Korea’s actual colonial situation, they partook in a
paradoxically cross-national and cross-racial identificatory practice through
their decodification and reconstruction of this text’s alternate meanings. The
reception of foreign films in colonial Korea exemplified by Ben-Hur’s success
again demonstrates that within the historically, culturally, and institutionally
conditioned national context where the exhibition of foreign films massively
outnumbered that of locally produced films, the reception and consumption
of foreign films became one of the determinants in the construction of Korean
national cinema. And its center was the byeonsa who incessantly and directly
134
influenced, shaped, and intervened in the ways the audiences received,
appropriated, and recreated the meanings of the films they watched.
In 1938, Seo Sang-Ho, the first byeonsa star, was found dead in the
Umigwan Theater from a drug overdose. Seo’s drug problem put an end to
his career prematurely in the mid-20s when he was repeatedly sent to prison
for opium use and, near the end of his life, he was spotted on the downtown
Jongno streets begging for change. The infamous death of Seo was an
emblematic event that signaled the dusk of the byeonsa era. In fact, one
magazine article that chronicles the rise and fall of Seo right after his death
parallels his career with the destiny of byeonsa in general:
Now the time has changed, we live in a talkie era, and the trace of
byeonsa can only be found at third or fourth-rate theaters outside the
city or in the countryside. Yet only seventeen or eighteen years ago,
when the silent movie reached its peak, the quality of byeonsa was so
crucial that it literally determined the fate of movie theaters. Every
theater was more serious about getting a good byeonsa than good
movies and invested their effort and money into bringing in a
topnotch byeonsa. Among all those byeonsa, Seo Sang-Ho was without
question the best in all of Korea…. His death and tough life make us
realize how harsh the world we live in is once again.
66
This quote shows how quickly the practice of byeonsa had declined. It
neared extinction only three years after the release of the first Korean talkie
66
Yoo Heung-Tae, “Dangdae Ingi Byeonsa Seo Sang-Ho Ildaegi,” Jungang 4, no.10 (October
1938), 120-121.
135
The Tale of Chunhyang (Chunhyangjeon) (1935) came out. Yet this same article
also indicates that byeonsa was not entirely gone and was still practiced in
culturally underdeveloped areas. Korean byeonsa did linger on for a while, as
some byeonsa created a theatrical drama genre called Byeonsa Drama and even
formed a theater group called Yeowonjwa (1935).
67
The Byeonsa Drama,
which incorporated byeonsa performance with popular songs and short
dramas, was short-lived. Byeonsa practice finally disappeared around 1940.
FIGURE 13. The caricatures of Seo Sang-Ho, the first celebrity byeonsa, as a heavy drinker and
womanizer from a magazine article chronicling the rise and demise of byeonsa practices.
Jungang 4, no. 10 (October 1938).
As discussed so far, the migration and the localization processes of
Japanese benshi in Korea reveal both the immense influence of Japanese film
67
“Seong Dong-Ho,” Yi Young-ilui Hanguk Yeonghwareul uihan Jeungeonrok 3, ed. Korean Art
Institute (Seoul: Sodo, 2003), 38.
136
practices held over the formation of national cinema in Japan’s former
colonies and the ways in which the colonial cultures adapted to and
reciprocally transformed imperial film cultures. Moreover, the adaptation of
benshi practices and the coexistence of byeonsa and benshi in Korea display the
ways in which the film cultures and histories of Korea and Japan are tightly
interwoven and mutually constitutive. In order to further delve into this issue
of a shared history of early Japanese and Korean cinemas, the next chapter
explores Japanese film cultures within colonial Korea and their interactions
with local film cultures: anther eclipsed aspect of colonial and imperial film
histories of Korea and Japan.
137
CHAPTER 3
GYEONGSEONG OR KEIJO?:
Dual Urban Modernities in Seoul
Who Owns Seoul? : “Great Migration” and Japanese Film Cultures in Korea
In the New Year’s Day edition 1929 of Joseon Ilbo, the newspaper
devotes a full page to its special column on the past, present and future of
Seoul after the twenty years of Japanese colonial rule in Korea. The column
traces the rapid development and transformation of Seoul during the
previous two decades and projects how Seoul will change in the next ten
years. It is not delicate about expressing its deep concern regarding who
actually “owns” the colonial capital of Seoul. According to statistics presented
along with the column, as of 1928 the total estimated value of real estate
owned by Koreans was sixty-five million won, while those owned by the
Japanese exceeded one hundred fifteen million won. In other words, Japanese
migrants who accounted for one-fourth of Seoul’s population, possessed
approximately sixty-four percent of land in Seoul; a sharp increase from 1919
when the Japanese already held half of Seoul’s total real estate. “Assuming
that change patterns in real estate holders for the past ten years continue in
the coming years,” Joseon Ilbo extrapolates:
138
The Japanese will hold about seventy-four percent of Seoul while
Koreans will only possess twenty-four percent in the next ten
years….the movement of the ownership in real estate is getting more
intensive every year, and we must think about from whom all these
lands are turned over and into whose hands.
1
Such economic aggression is not a characteristic particular to Japanese
imperialism, as all forms of imperialism and modernization in empires were
fundamentally built on the ideas and practices of imperial expansion and
economic exploitation. The above newspaper expresses the various aspects of
the exploitive nature of Japanese imperialism from financial encroachment to
the notorious land reforms by the Office of the Governor-General, which was
designed to support Japanese migrants’ acquisition of real estate in Korea. Yet
what essentially demarcates Japanese imperial project from other Western
imperialisms is that it did not simply consider its colonies as the remote
sources of natural resources but instead saw them as the extended territories
of Japan itself. Terauchi Masatake, the first Japanese Governor-General of
Korea and executor of the 1910 Korea-Japan Annexation Treaty explained in
an interview that “[I]n tandem with the Unification Politics, one of the core
national policies, my main idea for colonial rule of Joseon [Korea] is to make
Joseon a place for Japanese migration as well as an investment site for
1
Joseon Ilbo, 1 January 1929.
139
Japanese capitalists.”
2
Terauchi, who later became the prime minister of
Japan in 1926, further argued that his approach would help Korea’s
industrialization and benefit Koreans. Terauchi‘s interview presents an issue
specifically pertinent to the Japanese imperial project. In other words, his
remarks suggest that Japan’s imperial project was intertwined with the
empire’s emigration policy, intended to transport massive number of
Japanese colonial subjects to various areas in order to concurrently carry out
modernization endeavors across colonial territories, including those inside of
Japan proper. For example, upon the end of war in 1945, the transport and
repatriation of the 705,000 Japanese citizens living in Korea became one of the
biggest concerns for the Japanese government. In the same year in Japan there
were two million Koreans, and the majority of them stayed in Japan and
confronted new kinds of identity crises, with which they are still struggling
even today, as the post-war Japanese society suddenly stripped them of their
Japanese citizenships and labeled them as foreigners. Thus the massive
emigration to Korea and to other Japan’s colonies from Japan and vice versa
characterizes Japanese imperialism and its legacies.
The Joseon Ilbo’s special column raises concerns about the
encroachment of Japanese capital, but it also expresses fears concerning the
2
Maeil Sinbo, 27 June 1913.
140
physical presence of the Japanese in Seoul, which “visibly” influenced and
formed everyday urban lives. The newspaper article voices the anxieties
shared by many Koreans regarding Japanese emigration, which threatened
colonial Korea on the multiple levels from the get-go. Before Hurrah (Mansejeon,
1924), a novel by Yeom Sang-Seob, a Korean writer, one of the most highly
regarded and important Korean writers of the colonial period, resonates with
the angst expressed in Joseon Ilbo. The novel testifies to what Terauchi meant
by turning Korea into a place for Japanese business ventures, and also shows
how migration policy became the backbone of Japanese imperial project.
3
Set
in 1918, a year before the March 1
st
Independent Movement of 1919, (often
referred as Manse Undong [“Hurrah” Movement]
4
), the novel with a unique
title is known for its vibrant description of colonial life in Korea during the
closure of the first phase of Japanese colonial rule. Before Hurrah is commonly
deemed as a naturalist novel, owing to its candid depiction of colonial reality,
but it is also a rather unusual travelogue documented by a colonial subject,
particularly considering that the voyage narrative of travelogue has been
traditionally associated with imperial expansion and adventure. This first-
person story is told by Yi In-Hwa, an upper class college student who studies
3
Yeom Sang-Seob, “Mansejeon,” Hanguk Soseolmunhak Daegyeo:Yom Sang-Seob (Seoul: Donga
Chulpansa, 1995).
4
The name of the movement came from the catch phrase of the movement that was shouted
by Korean protesters: “Hurrah for Independence.”
141
at a prestigious university in Tokyo, and records his trip from Tokyo to Seoul.
Upon receiving a telegram from his family that says his wife is in critical
condition due to a chronic disease, Yi reluctantly sets on a journey to Seoul to
visit his sick wife. Along his journey, Yi makes stops at cities and towns in
Japan and Korea such as Osaka, Shimonoseki, Busan, Kimcheon, and Seoul,
meets and interacts with a wide range of people, and allows readers to view
his inner world, thoroughly delineating his thoughts, impressions, and
emotions.
Yi’s entire journey captures a remarkable array of colonial and
imperial reality in both Korea and Japan from the perspective of the colonized.
I would, however, like to single out a particular “incident” which illuminates
the main subject of this chapter. On a ferry operating between the port cities
of Shimonoseki (Japan) and Busan (Korea), Yi goes to a public bath wherein
he overhears the conversation among Japanese businessmen heading to Korea
to seek their fortunes. When one of the Japanese men who has visited Korea
some often that he speaks of the country as if it were “his own house,” starts
doling out advice, Yi becomes extremely upset by what he overhears. The
Japanese businessman, while applauding the Governor-General Terauchi’s
immense achievement in Korea, also contends that the very successes which
have spurred the modernization in Korea makes it difficult for Japanese
142
capitalists to thrive there any more as Korea has become “enlightened.” He
further claims, however, that there are still ample opportunities in rural areas
because Korean people in the underdeveloped areas are only slightly better
than Taiwanese aborigines. He advises the others of his line of work—which
does not require significant capital or effort and pays handsomely:
headhunting. He explains to his fellow countrymen that one can get rich
traveling through the impoverished rural areas of Korea recruiting “ignorant”
and poor farmers to work as laborers in the factories in Japan, which are
always seeking an easily exploitable workforce. In exchange for placing them,
he receives a commission fee from the Korean migrants. He adds that this is
his third trip to Korea as a recruiter, and that the previous trips made him
quite a fortune. Yi finds himself enraged at the shameless schemes to exploit
his poor Korean fellows. Yet spurred by his dual shame—of learning of the
abject poverty of his fellow countrymen from the Japanese and at being an
implicit object of the businessmen’s derision—Yi refers to himself as “a young
master at his desk”; entirely blind to real world and solely devoted to his
books and the arts.
This encounter between a group of the Japanese and the protagonist,
which leaves him angry and frustrated about the colonial situation as well as
himself, exhibits three different types of “travels” concerning the emigration
143
throughout Japanese colonial territories. First, we see Japanese migrants in the
Japanese businessmen coming to Korea in hopes of capitalizing on Korea’s
developing economy under the policies designed to support those efforts.
Second, we have the Korean migrants who serve to provide cheap labor for
Japan’s industrialization efforts. Third, the protagonist’s personal journey in
the story, the last type of “travel” entailed in this particular scene, signifies a
slightly complicated aspect of the emigration. As a colonial subject, Yi
confronts “unpleasant” moments throughout his journey. Although Yi is
upset with the Japanese’s dialogue about “human trafficking,” Yi does not—
or cannot—express his anger externally, but instead he continues to disguise
his identity, pretending to be Japanese, and quietly leaves the public bath. Yet
his identity is soon revealed as he is approached by a policeman working at
the Simonoseki harbor, and escorted to the police box for further interrogation.
This is the first of many more similar situations involving policemen during
Yi’s trip. Yi is continually harassed by Japanese police in every city he passes
through. Each time he is questioned, Yi becomes upset, resulting in hostile
dialogues with policemen, but all he can do is bicker.
Yi’s travel is frequently disturbed and halted by his status as Korean.
It should be noted however, that Yi possesses relative freedom to move across
“borders”; whereas his Korean-ness sometimes impedes his physical
144
movements, his economic and cultural capital allow him to freely travel
around and across Japan and Korea. Yi says himself that he is reminded of
being a second class citizen only when policemen randomly pick on him on
streets, but other than that, he rarely ponders over his colonial citizenship.
Yi’s social status bestows a certain privilege in terms of “movement,”
emphasizing a crucial characteristic of emigration experiences: the issues of
class. Indeed, impoverished Japanese farmers also became the subjects and
victims of the empire’s emigration efforts, as they were often forcefully
relocated to diverse underdeveloped and under-populated colonized areas
for either political or economic reasons.
Yi’s experience as a colonial subject across “borders” and in various
urban spaces during his journey recounted in Before Hurrah sheds light on the
main issues of the following two chapters, further elaborating the intertwined
film histories of Japan and Korea during the colonial period. Yi’s identity as a
colonial subject, especially as a frustrated male intellectual, and his experience
in urban spaces will be discussed again in the next chapter in which I will
endeavor to interrogate the cultural ramifications of colonial urban modernity,
with a specific attention to the issues of mobility. The present chapter
examines the aspect of “border-crossing” and its key role in the formation of
film cultures in colonial Korea from within. The development of modernity in
145
Korea was closely associated with external influences even before Japan
colonized Korea. Many scholarly works on the Korean version of modernity
in Korea tend to focus on whether or not these external forces, including
Japanese colonialism, contributed to the configuration of Korean modernity
despite its exploitive nature or whether they were mostly an obstruction
against Korea’s progress towards a modern society, which was in full swing
during the last decades of the nineteenth century. What Yi’s journey suggests,
is that Korea’s colonial modernity and modernization efforts were not simply
affected by the external forces. The co-existence of Japanese and Koreans in
the same but segregated urban space during the colonial period calls for more
nuanced approach to the concept of Korea’s colonial modernity.
In the same vein, it is unfeasible to discuss colonial cinemas, or
contemporaneous Japanese national cinema, without taking into
consideration Japanese film cultures implanted and embedded in colonial
film cultures. In other words, Japanese film culture did not just impact the
colonial film cultures externally, but instead it was tightly interwoven within
colonial film cultures, exercising its influences on them from within on a daily
basis. In order to understand the histories of the colonial cinemas, and
particularly the blurry boundaries between Japanese and Korean national
cinemas, it is necessary reflect upon the very nature of how one understands
146
the cut that both severs and connects imperial and local film cultures. While
this chapter continues to trace the historical and discursive constructions of
the national and regional film histories, it will examine more direct and often
physical interactions between imperial and colonial film cultures in the
contexts of film production and reception.
In the following sections, especially the interrogation of the ethnically
segregated film exhibition practices in the final section of the chapter, I will
focus specifically on how intricate interrelationships and interactions between
the two ethnic groups’ film cultures were inscribed upon the imperial and
colonial film cultures across the colonized urban space of Seoul. There are
multiple reasons for limiting the scope of examination to the colonial capital
of Seoul. First, due to the serious urbanization during the colonial period, the
cultural industry including the film business in Korea was disproportionately
concentrated in Seoul. As the colonial capital of Korean peninsula, a crucial
entryway for Japanese imperial expansion to the Asian continent, Seoul
functioned not only as the center of Japanese colonial rule of Korea, but as one
of the most significant cities in Japanese imperial territories, accommodating
all the major imperial, political, and economic institutions. Accordingly, Seoul
had the largest Japanese population outside of Japan and thus produced rich
Japanese urban and film cultures. In this regard, ethnic segregation was a
147
chief factor that characterized the urban cultural scene of Seoul and played
the decisive role in shaping urban modernity. A careful examination of this
segregation most evidently displays the ways in which the film cultures of the
colonizer and colonized interacted with one another.
“Intra-Imperial” Co-Productions
In chapter two I discussed the logics and problems regarding how the
chain drama Loyal Vengeance was officially selected by South Korean
government as the very first Korean film from amongst three pretenders to
the title of the first Korean film: Loyal Vengeance, The Border and The Vow Made
under the Moon. Recently some film historians argue that The Border should be
considered the first Korean film based on three factors. First, Loyal Vengeance
is not a film but a chain drama. Second, new material has surfaced indicating
that The Border was released three months before The Vow Made under the
Moon. Third, the film was made in Korea for Korean audiences, even though
it was produced by Shochiku, a Japanese film firm.
5
A film historian,
however, discovered a newspaper advertisement that might challenge The
5
Cho Hee-Moon, “Geukyeonghwa Gukyeongui Yeonghwasajeok Uisange daehan
Yeonggu,” Sahoi Jeongchaek Nonchong 13, no. 1 (June 2006).
148
Border’s newly appraised historical significance. Curiously, he seems to be
rather nervous about his own discovery:
Even the Research Department of Joseon Ilbo does not possess this
advertisement [of The Border] published in a special issue. This
newspaper ad (14 January 1923) does not even mention Kim Do-San
(the director), and according to this ad, except twenty-three members
of the sinpa [New Theater] troupe, all of the staff—producer, director,
screenwriters, director of photography, film developer, still
photographer, assistant director, art director, editor, and researcher—
appear to be the Japanese; excluding actors, no Korean is introduced
as a part of the production crew. This ad negates the nature of The
Border, the film in which Kim Do-San was deeply involved, that we
have known up until now. It makes us seriously rethink about how to
look at The Border, produced by the Japanese Shochiku Kino Drama
Company. I felt I needed to brood over this, so I did not make this
finding public even though I own it myself, which makes me very
uncomfortable.
6
This film historian appears to be awfully perturbed by his own
finding, which potentially deteriorates the historical significance of The Border
and perhaps calls for yet another rewriting of early Korean film history. His
frustration well evidences how much force colonial film history written with
nationalist perspectives exerts on even an individual historian, so much so as
to compel him to literally withhold a factual historical material just because it
is incongruent with the grand narrative of national film history. What this
anxious film historian’s discovery especially challenges is the obsession with
6
Kim Jong-Wook, Hankuk Yeonghwa Chongseo (Sang) (Seoul: Gukhak Jaryowon, 2002), 153.
149
“purity” in narrating the nation’s colonial film history. As discussed in the
earlier chapters, a spotless “Korean-ness” is the ultimate qualification for
becoming a Korean film, but the fact that the entire staff for The Border was the
Japanese significantly undermines the film’s “pureness” and thus its assumed
“Korean-ness.” Apparently this is the nature of disturbance that this film
historian experiences.
The issue at hand here goes beyond a single film; the actual
suppression of historical materials not only verifies problematically
manipulative efforts in nationalist film historiography that attempt to keep
the carefully constructed historiographical paradigm intact, but displays the
ways in which this specific historical writing thwarts a critical engagement
with the concepts and boundaries of Korean national cinema. Defining a
national cinema is always an exigent matter, and, as many argue, this is
especially so in the age of late capitalism, as the global flows of capital and
human resources have been accelerated vertiginously for the past several
decades, often challenging the conventional understandings and definitions
of national borders. However, it is false to consider that these vectors that
complexly affect the concept of a national cinema are the sheer symptoms of
globalization or transnationalization of recent decades. The flows of capital
and human resources on regional and global scales in the film world have
150
been part of the medium’s history from the outset. Especially, during the first
several decades of cinema’s history, it is noticeably intertwined with imperial
projects, although their premises and practices are different from the recent
neocolonial expansion. Many discussions of national cinema, however, have
not actively taken imperialism into consideration, despite the fact that all
different kinds of the imperial expansion at the turn of the last century
vigorously altered and transformed territorial, political, and cultural borders
across the globe. As Stephanie DeBoer cogently argues, national cinema
models have often done little to acknowledge imperialist projects and its
many contradictions, although colonialist histories and experiences
complicate the boundaries of national cinema.
7
In order to examine the correlation between imperialism and the
concepts of national cinema in the specific context of Japanese colonial rule of
Korea, let me raise the following questions in relation to the film The Border.
How can we define the nationality of The Border, a film financed by a Japanese
studio, made by Japanese filmmakers with Korean actors, and released for
Korean spectators? An easiest answer would be that The Border is a Japanese
film since Korea under Japanese colonial rule was considered a Japanese
territory according to international law at the time. Yet it is not that simple to
7
Stephanie DeBoer, “Sayon no Kane (Sayon’s Bell),” The Cinema of Japan and Korea, ed. Justin
Bowyer (London: Wallflower Press, 2005), 24.
151
be content with this kind of explanation, and not just because Japanese
colonial rule was declared “illegal” and thus officially dismissed upon the
governmental agreement between Japan and Korea in the 1960s. First of all, if
we accept this answer, then we have to face a serious political and historical
question, erasing the colonial period from Korea’s national history. In other
words, assuming that Korea completely disappeared from a map in both
political and physical senses during this period as it was a Japanese territory
is nothing but colluding with Japanese imperial logic. Besides, as already
explained, in actuality Japan saw Korea simultaneously as part of Japan and
“other”, and this paradoxical understanding of the Korean peninsula
stemmed from Japanese imperialism’ dual policies of assimilation and
differentiation which resulted in efforts to create the demarcation between
Japan and Korea. Although the Korean peninsula was officially part of Japan,
both the Koreans and Japanese were constantly and consistently reminded
that they were two different groups of minjok/minzoku [ethnic people].
Another possible answer to the above question is that The Border is a
Korean film, but the problems entailed in this answer are well reflected on
Korean film historians’ struggle to define a “Korean film” and “Korean
national cinema” in the colonial context, as explained in the previous chapters
and again exemplified by the aforementioned film historian’s disturbance
152
with his own research. If one strictly adheres to the “purity” discourse of
Korea’s nationalist film historiography, there is no single film qualified to be a
Korean film, since no film from the colonial period was completely free from
Japanese intervention in one way or another. This arbitrary definition of what
constitutes a “pure” Korean film in Korean film histories has allowed many
“questionable” films to be categorized as Korean films while dismissing and
branding others as “lesser” Korean films. As a result, such unreflexive
positions have naturally fueled a seemingly never-ending series of debates
concerning the nationalist film historical paradigm.
The very same question can be easily extended to the Japanese
national cinema. In a similar fashion to Korean film historiography,
innumerable filmmakers, film business personnel, film companies, and movie
theaters across the Japanese imperial territories have been yet to be
sufficiently explored in Japanese national film history. Furthermore, it is even
less discussed that the influence was not always one-way communication, as
many filmmakers from Japan’s former colonies directly impacted the
development of Japanese film industry as well. In a rare discussion of
collaborations between Japanese and Korean filmmakers, Donald Richie and
J.L. Anderson note:
153
Japan influenced the Korean industry in more ways than one. Most of
the Koreans active in films had been trained in Japan, usually as
actors or assistant directors, and used techniques borrowed from
Japan. Even the new talents which have emerged after World War II
have a Japanese background. As a result of this, or perhaps in spite of
it, next to Japan, the Koreans, among all the nations of Asia, have
gone the furthest in developing the motion picture as an art.
8
As Richie and Anderson explain, the influences of Japanese cinema
over the development of the film medium in Korea were multi-faceted. Yet
the authors present a mono-directional flow of cultural influence, assuming
that the development of Korean film industry was affected by Japanese film
practices but not the other way around. Nevertheless, if one interprets the
authors’ statement from a slightly different angle, it also implies that many
Korean filmmakers made significant contributions to Japanese film industry
as well. As a matter of fact, as early as in the mid-1910s, Korean filmmakers,
like many other intellectuals, students, and artists, went to Japan, and some of
them returned to Korea after studying filmmaking while others stayed in
Japan and pursued their film careers in Japanese film studios.
Among those figures, Yi Pil-Wu, a pioneering filmmaker/film
entrepreneur, certainly stands out. Yi, who worked in both the Japanese and
Korean film industry, produced and directed films and distributed foreign
8
J.L. Anderson and Donald Richie, The Japanese Film: Art and Industry (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1982), 151.
154
films in Korea, opened a film distribution office in Japan, and co-produced
films with Japanese studios. Significantly, during a visit to Japan in the early
1930s, he was invited to participate in inventing the Tsuchihashi system, a
sound-on-film technology, used for Japan’s first talkie, My Neighbor’s Wife and
Mine (Madam to Nyobo, 1931) directed by Gosho Heinosuke.
9
As one of three
inventors of the Tsuchihashi system, along with Tsuchihashi Takeo and
Nakajima Ky ōshi, Yi acquired a patent right to it, though this right was
limited to the use in Korea, instead of sharing a profit from it. Yet he did not
simply use this technology, instead he worked with his brother Yi Myeong-
Wu to create their own P.K.R. system (1933), a sound-on-film technology.
During a production tour of Japan, Joseph von Sternberg was amazed by the
P.K.R. system when he briefly stopped in Korea and watched The Tale of
Jangwha and Hongryeon (Jangwha Hongryeongjeon, 1936), the second talkie that
used Yi brothers’ sound technology.
10
Interestingly, The Tale of Chunhyang
(Chunhyangjeon, 1935), Korea’s first talkie film, which also used Yi brothers’
P.K.R. system, was produced by Gyeongseong Film Production
(Gyeongseong Chwalyeongso) that was owned by the Japanese producer
9
The Tsuchihashi system was named after Tsuchihashi Takeo, its chief inventor. When
inventing the Tsuchihashi system, Tsuchihashi Takeo worked for Shochiku Film Company
(Kamata Studio). Tsuchihashi participated in about forty Shochiku films from 1931 to 1938 as
a sound recorder.
10
“Yi Pil-Wu,” Yi Young-ilui Hanguk Yeonghwareul uihan Jeungeonrok 3, ed. Korean Art
Institute (Seoul: Sodo, 2003), 271-272.
155
Wakejima Fujiro. Wakejima settled in Seoul and became an influential
business man in the 1910s. With his acquisition of Keijo Theater in 1919,
Wakejima entered into the entertainment business and later opened
Gyeongseong Film Production in 1933.
11
In this regard, the active movement
of film people across the Korean Strait brought about mutual influences
between the Japanese and Korean film industries, although the degree of
influences apparently differed due to their colonial relationship.
A Plaintive Melody of Sea (Haeui Bigok, 1924), a film produced in Korea
by Japanese capital with a Korean and Japanese cast and staff, shows another
form of the collaboration between Japanese and Korean filmmakers and
reveals a shared history of early Japanese and Korean cinemas. A Plaintive
Melody of Sea, a melodrama that tells the tragic love story of a Korean couple
who later turn about to be half siblings, was produced by a film production
company, Joseon Kinema Corporation. Joseon Kinema, the first film
corporation in Korea established in 1924, was based in Busan, a port city in
the southeastern region which was the literal gateway to Korea from Japan.
The founders of the firm consisted of Japanese investors including Nade
Otoichi (a company executive), Kato Sheichi (the director of a hospital),
11
Kim Ryeo-Sil, Tasahaneun Jeguk, Tuyeonghaneun Sikminji (Seoul: Samin, 2006), 136.
Wakejima initially hired Yi Myeong-Wu as the head of the studio, but when Yi Pil-Wu
returned from Japan, he became the new head of the studio.
156
Watanabe Tatsuchiru (a painter), Kuboda Or ō (a lawyer), and Takasa Kanjo (a
Buddhist monk).
12
Joseon Kinema made a contract with Korean Literary Arts
Association (Joseon Munyeo Hyeobhoi), a sinpa group whose members were
mostly dramatists and actors. A Plaintive Melody of Sea was Joseon Kinema’s
first project, and the film was quite successful in Korea when it was released.
The staff for the film, including the producer and director, were Japanese, but
the actors were mostly Koreans. Yet the film was not geared only towards
Korean audiences; the company aimed to “practice harmony between Japan
and Korea (naisen shinwa) through filmmaking and introduce Korean situation
to the Japanese.”
13
Thus, the film was “exported” to Japan through Nikkatsu
studio and was quite successful, clearing a 3,000 won profit from the Japanese
and Korean markets combined.
14
A Japanese film magazine from 1924
reports on “Joseon (Korean) Drama by Joseon Kinema and Shochiku”
(“Joseon Kinema to Shochiku no Ch ōsengeki”) with still photos of film scenes,
actors, and actresses from The Tale of Unyeong (Unyeongjeon, 1924), the second
production by Joseon Kinema, and Shochiku’s Standing Against the
12
“Ch ōsende Eiga no Zeisakuokaishi,” Kastudojatki 10 (July 1924), 70-71.
13
Ibid.
14
Maeil Sinbo, 13 November 1924.
157
Countercurrent (Gyakuryuni ritsuchite, 1924) and Wizard (Sennin, 1924).
15
The
magazine includes the photos of a Japanese actress wearing a traditional
Korean dress (a hanbok, see the photo on the far right of figure 14), Yim
Cheon-Se, a Korean actress who worked for Shochiku Studio (the far left at
the bottom, figure 14) and a shooting location in the Chiba Prefecture for
Standing Against the Countercurrent (the middle at the bottom, figure 14),
which shows that Joseon drama was an established film genre in Japanese
film industry.
FIGURE 14. “Joseon Drama by Joseon Kinema and Shochiku.” Shibakyo to Kinema (October
1924).
15
“Ch ōsen Kinema to Shochiku no Ch ōsen Drama,” Shibakyo to Kinema (October 1924).
Actually the captions describing The Tale of Unyeong say the scenes are from A Plaintive
Melody of Sea, Joseon Kinema’s first film, but these descriptions are incorrect.
158
Toyama Mituru Production, another film production established in
1931 by Japanese investors, followed almost exactly the path paved by Joseon
Kinema Corporation. Toyama Mituru Production, led by Toyama Mituru, a
popular Japanese period drama actor, produced its first film, Sadness at
Geumgang Mountain (Geumganghan) in 1931. It hired Nah Un-Gyu as a director,
and both Nah and Toyama starred in the film as well. The firm, with its one
hundred thousand won investment —partially financed by Wakejima Fujiro—
planned to “export” its films to Japan, but it failed to do so.
16
Toyama Mituru
Production made three more films, all produced by Toyama. Toyama made
his directorial debut with the production company’s last film, A Brilliant Life
(Bitnaneun Insaeng, 1933).
17
After his career as a film producer in Korea was
over, Toyama returned to Japan and his acting career, appearing in such
period films as The Last Day of Edo (Edo Saigo no Hi, 1941), Miyamoto Musashi:
Duel at Ichijo Temple (Miyamoto Musashi: Ichijoji Ketto, 1942), and Sasaki Kojiro
(1950), and working particularly close with Inagaki Hiroshi, a veteran
samurai movie director.
Joseon Kinema’s and Toyama Mituru Production’s ventures in Korea
as well as Shochiku’s Korean Drama genre embody the multiple aspects of
16
Maeil Sinbo, 22 November 1930.
17
Joseon Jungang Ilbo, 23 April 1933.
159
“border-crossing” between Japanese and Korean film production during the
colonial period. They demonstrate that the exchanges between the two film
industries included not only diverse forms of collaboration between Korean
and Japanese filmmakers but also the flows of capital, genre, and style across
“borders” in both directions. Hence while the entirety of films produced in
Korea during the colonial period had a clear imprint of “Japanese-ness” one
way or another, whether it be at the production phase or theatrical exhibition,
the Japanese film industry was anxious to expand its market and industry by
way of working with Korean filmmakers and capitalizing on Korea’s growing
film market. Therefore, Korean film industry’s contribution to the
development of Japanese film industry and culture is as important as the
marks Japanese left on early Korean film history when we consider a shared
early film history between two national cinemas.
Despite its pioneering and ambitious attempt to visually bridge the
empire and its colony, Joseon Kinema failed to follow up its initial success
and was dissolved after only three more mediocre films in 1925. Its second
feature, The Tale of Unyeong, was a disastrous failure and its director, Yun
Baek-Nam, a sinpa dramatist, took a lot of criticism from film critics for his
lack of knowledge about filmmaking. The more crucial problematic Joseon
Kinema faced was the “immature” or small Korean market, as it was not big
160
enough to sustain a corporation founded with an astonishing 200,000 won
investment.
18
Joseon Kinema wished to release its films in Japan, but with the
exception of its first film, none of its other films were distributed in Japan, and
thus they were just consumed by Korean audiences in Korea who were not at
all satisfied with the films.
What is intriguing about Joseon Kinema’s attempt to develop the
Korean film market is that the company did not even try to reach Japanese
audiences inside of Korean peninsula, another potential market in Korea,
despite its financial struggle. It would have been reasonably easy for the
company to consider expanding its target audience through appeals to
Japanese audiences within Korea, but the company was too preoccupied with
developing the “Korean” film market by disguising the company’s Japanese
origin, which eventually resulted in its total failure. For instance, the
director/screenwriter of A Plaintive Melody of Sea, Takasa Kanjo, one of the
founding members of the firm, and one of the main actors Ozawa used
Korean names—Wang Pil-Yeol and Ju Sam-Son respectively—for film credits
as a means to effectively evade Korean audience’s anti-Japanese sentiments.
19
In fact, this shrewd maneuver to “confuse” Korean audiences seemed to work
18
“Na Un-Gyuwa Shin Il-Seonuirobuteo Moon Yeo-Bong, Shim Yeonge Ireugikaji
Yisibnyeonganui Joseon Yeonghwa Baldalsa,” Samcheolli 12, no. 5 (1 May 1940), 227.
19
Cho Gyeong-Hwan, “Chochanggi Hanguk Yeonghwaui Teukseonge gwanhan Yeongu,”
MA Thesis, Chung-Ang University, 2000, 56.
161
just fine, as even some of Korean film critics at the time assumed that
Takasa/Wang was a Korean director when they expressed their
disappointment in the last two films Takasa/Wang directed for Joseon
Kinema.
20
The way Joseon Kinema limited its audience to Koreans shows that
the two film cultures in colonial Korea — Japanese migrants’ film culture and
Koreans’ film culture—were seen as two completely separate entities.
Significantly, the Japanese film culture in Korea was quite independent from
Japanese film industry in Japan proper as well. In this sense, in order to
understand colonial film cultures in Korea more comprehensively, it is crucial
to interrogate the Japanese film culture embedded in colonial film cultures in
Korea, which was on the “border” between Korean film culture and Japanese
film culture in Japan proper, not just geographically but also industrially and
culturally.
The Ethnically Segregated Film Audiences
There remain many questions still unanswered when it comes to the
earliest moments of Korean film history. In particular, the issue of when the
first movie screening transpired—or when the film arrived in Korea—is the
20
Maeil Sinbo, 13 December 1924; and Yun Yong-Gab, “Unyeongjoeneul bogo,” Donga Ilbo, 26
January 1925.
162
most difficult and challenging question with which film historians have been
afflicted. Hanseong Electric Company’s promotional film screening event
discussed in the previous chapter is now widely recognized as the first public
and commercial film screening in Korea (1903), but there is no consensus
made yet as for the very first film screening. There are several written records
that indicate there were some forms of film screening before Hanseong
Electric’s screening at the East Gate. Lately it has been discovered that the
London Times, a British newspaper, had a brief report on film screenings at a
barrack located in Seoul’s North Village in 1897 (October 10) in which the
British entrepreneur Esther House and The Korean Tobacco Company (Joseon
Yeoncho Hoisa) played a series of French Pathé shorts.
21
Now this three-day
film screening is considered the first film screening documented in Korea.
However, film historians believe that there must be other film screenings
prior to Esther House’s film screening.
22
21
Kim Jong-Won and Jung Jung-Heon, Uriyeonghwa 100 Nyeon (Seoul: Hyeonamsa, 2001), 20-
21.
22
During my research, I discovered an interesting new finding somewhat related to this issue.
Sir Min Yeong-Hwan, a special envoy sent by Gojong to celebrate the reign of the new
Russian emperor, Nicolas II (Nikolai Aleksandrovich Romanov), briefly illustrates his movie-
viewing experience in Russia in his travelogue by noting, “moving picture, the method is to
light the picture screen and shake the objects with electricity. Hence it is not possible to
fathom its exquisiteness.” (Min Yeong-Hwan, Minchungjeonggong Yugo 3 Gwon (18 June 1896;
8 May by Lunar Calendar), n.p) Although it happened in Russia, Sir Min and his men’s
encounter with the moving pictures predates Esther House’s screening of Pathé shorts as well
as any other existing records of Koreans’ film experiences.
163
The problem of pinpointing where the first film screening was held is
not an issue unique to Korea. Many national cinemas have struggled to trace
their early film histories due to the lack of historical materials and evidences,
generating contesting historical views and speculations. In Korea this issue is
much more difficult to tackle because Korea had no indoor theater tradition
and this significantly delayed the implement of public film screenings
including movie theaters as discussed in the first chapter. As a result, film
screenings were held at diverse locations which were not typically considered
as appropriate spaces for film screenings. In many cases movie screenings
occurred in private settings, which makes it even more difficult to find any
forms of written records that definitively establish the details of these film
screenings. The most commonly accepted assumption is that films were first
screened privately at various foreign residential areas and hotels by and for
foreign visitors or residents in Korea, and thus that is the main reason why no
written documents recording those screenings have remained. Recently, a
theory that the first screening in Korea happened in 1897 at a Japanese private
household or community center in Hon-machi, a Japanese residential area in
Seoul—the Chungmuro area today—, has gained increasing support.
Unfortunately, there is no single documentation that directly attests to this
screening, and only different versions of stories concerning this screening
164
have been orally passed down. In fact, several essays from the 1920s and
1930s on early Korean film history claim that the first screening was done in a
Japanese residential area without presenting any kind of concrete evidence.
23
Ichikawa Sai, a Japanese film historian, writes that the first film screening
took place in a Japanese residential area in his The Creation and Construction of
Asian Cinema (Ajia Eiga no S ōz ō oyobi Kensetsu, 1941), an attempt to film-
theorize Japan’s ideology of “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity,” but he also
notes that there is no documentation about it.
24
Whether or not the private film screening at a Japanese residence was
the earliest film screening in Korea seems quite difficult to determine unless
more solid materials turn up, but the fact that a film screening at Japanese
residential area is considered as one of the possible first film screenings in
Korea is certainly enough to be intriguing for many reasons. First of all, this
reveals how much Japanese and Korean film histories at their earliest stages
were intertwined and, more importantly, how deeply Japanese film culture
“intruded” into Korean film history and the film culture even long before
Japanese colonial occupation began in 1910. Another overriding issue here is
the very presence of the Japanese in the heart of Seoul in the late 1890s, a
23
Shim Hoon, “Joseon Yeonghwa Chonggwan (1),” Joseon Ilbo, 1 January 1929; and Son Wi-
Bin, “Joseon Yeonghwasa-Sibnyeonganui Byeoncheonsa,“ Joseon Ilbo, 28 May 1933.
24
Ichikawa Sai, Ajia eiga no S ōz ō oyobi Kensetsu (Tokyo: Tairiku Bunka Ky ōkai), 99.
165
decade earlier than Japan’s colonization of Korea, and their pivotal roles in
the formation and development of film cultures in Korea.
As a matter of fact, Japan’s “great migration” to Korea started in 1876
when Japan used military threat to force Korea, which had maintained a
serious policy of seclusion, Soiguk (“shutting off the nation”), as a means to
repel the trade demands from various imperial forces, to sign Ganghwa
Island Treaty (February 1876). This unequal trade treaty signaled the true
beginning of Japanese imperial march toward Korea. Importantly, it included
the granting of residential rights for the Japanese in Korea, accommodating
the specially designated areas for Japanese migrants where Korean law did
not apply. Migration was slow at first, and the real breakthrough happened
only in 1910 when Japan officially colonized Korea and many of the
restrictions to Japanese emigration to Korea were lifted and the peninsula
became a safer place for Japanese migrants to reside. From thereon, the
numbers of Japanese migrants sharply increased throughout the 1910s, and
the growth of Japanese population continued to accelerate through the 1920s.
Following the signing of the Japan-Korea Trading Treaty in 1885,
which legally allowed the Japanese to purchase real estate in Seoul,
25
the
majority of the Japanese migrants settled in Seoul, and thus so-called
25
Takasaki Soji, Sikminji Joseonui Ilbonildeul (Shokuminchi Ch ōsen no Nihonjin), trans. Yi Kyu-
Su (Seoul: Yeoksa Bipyeongsa, 2006), 39-54.
166
“Japanese streets” began to appear around Japanese Embassy located near
South Mountain (Namsan) and South Gate areas. Contemporaneous with
Before Hurrah’s publication as a serialized novel in the newspaper, which
vividly portrays these “Japanese streets,” Seoul was fully transformed into an
ethnically divided colonial—or hybrid—city where Japanese everyday
cultures and customs have migrated, blended, and clashed with Korean ways
of life. After the colonization, Seoul almost immediately lost its position as the
nation’s capital and became just a city that belonged to the Gyeonggi Province
in October of 1910. And its name was forcefully changed from Hanseong to
Gyeongseong (Keijo in Japanese pronunciation).
26
In spite of these changes,
Seoul continued to function as the colonial capital. The rapidly modernizing
colonial capital witnessed the sharp growth in its population throughout the
colonial period, in large part because it attracted not only Koreans people
from across the peninsula but also people from the other side of Korea’s South
Sea. Japanese migrants in Seoul accounted for about twenty to twenty-five
percent of the entire population of the city beginning in the mid-1910s
onward. In 1915, about sixty thousand out of Seoul’s two hundred fifty
thousand residents were the Japanese, and in 1925 when Seoul’s population
26
“Sodokufu Chih ōkan Kansei,” Ch ōsen Sodokufu Kanp ō 28, 30 September 1910, 125-126.
167
reached four hundred thousand, approximately one hundred thousand were
Japanese migrants.
27
TABLE 1. Korean and Japanese Population in Seoul (1910-1925, The Office of the Governor-
General Annual Statistics 1910-1926)
1910 1915 1920 1925
Koreans 176,026 181,829 247,404 279,865
Japanese 62,914 65,617 88,875 105,639
Total Population 242,085 250,028 342,626 394,240
Consequently, coming into the 1920s, Seoul had become one of the
biggest cities in the Japanese imperial territories. Throughout Japan’s
imperialist reign, Seoul was the colonized city that had the largest Japanese
population outside of Japan proper. The Cheonggye Stream (Cheonggyecheon)
served as a symbolic border between the Korean populated Bukchon or North
Village (today’s Jongno district) and the Japanese dominated Namchon or
South Village (today’s Chungmuro and South Gate areas). The ethnically
segregated city engendered distinct cultural forms. Unlike other Korean cities
where only one or two movie theaters were in business, Seoul, as the colony’s
actual capital, functioned as the cultural center and boasted a total of eight
movie theaters in the 1920s. Among those theaters, Taishokan, Geiryukan,
Kirakukan, Chuokan, and Ōgonkan, located in South Village, exclusively
27
Ch ōsen Sodokufu T ōkei Renkan 1926 (Seoul: Ch ōsen Sodokufu, 1928), 24-25.
168
served Japanese film patrons. Joseon Geukjang, Danseongsa, and Umigwan in
North Village, on the other hand, catered to Korean spectators. These
ethnically-specified film exhibition practices from the mid-1910s through the
mid-1930s created little chance or need for Japanese and Korean film patrons
to intermingle at a the cinema.
FIGURE 15. A postcard featuring Hon-machi in Seoul’s South Village (Namchon), circa 1920.
In order to discuss the ways in which Japanese film culture and
Korean film culture had formed and interacted with each other, I would like
to examine the film scene in 1926. The year 1926 saw a series of political and
social incidents and unrests that impacted the colonial governance in Korea
and Japan’s overall imperial policies and also anticipated the acceleration of
Japanese imperial expansion in the following decade. On April 24, Emperor
Sunjong, the last emperor of Joseon Dynasty and the short-lived Empire of
169
Great Korea (1897-1910)
28
, passed away, and with his death, the Joseon
dynasty, which lasted five centuries, passed into history. When Japan
colonized Korea in 1910, Sunjong was forcefully demoted from emperor to
king, a wholly symbolic position without any political power. Sunjong’s death
facilitated socio-political tensions between Japan and Korea and stimulated
nationalist movements in colonized Korea once again. Mounting tensions
culminated with the so-called “June 10th Hurrah Movement,” an anti-
imperial uprising across Korea on the day of Sunjong’s interment (June 10,
1926), which ended up with the arrests of over one thousand people by
Japanese police. This political turmoil in Korea had barely subsided when the
Japanese Taisho Emperor passed away in December. The end of Taisho era
(1912-1926) and beginning of Sh ōwa era (1926-1989) more or less overlapped
with the closing stage of a decade-long lasting experiment with a democratic
system in Japan, which is often referred to as “Taisho Democracy.” The Peace
Preservation Law (Chian Iji Ho, 1925), aimed at controlling and crushing
28
As one of many endeavors by Korea to cope with imperial threats during the last decades of
the nineteenth century, the Korean government wished to change the kingship to emperorship
in order to enhance the image of Korea as an independent nation and show off its serious
determination to maintain its independent sovereignty. On October 12, 1897, King Gojong
acceded to the emperorship, and on the next day the emperor declared that he named his
empire as The Empire of Great Korea (Daehan Jeguk). From this year to 1910, Korea was
officially called as The Empire of Great Korea or Great Korea (Daehan) in short, but its old
name Joseon continued to be popularly used among Koreans and Japanese even after Japan’s
colonization of Korea. For more discussions of The Empire of Great Korea, see Daehan Jeguk
Yeongu, ed. Korean Culture Research Institute of Ewha Woman’s University (Seoul: Baeksan
Jaryowon, 1998); and Andre Schmid, Korea Between Empires 1895-1919 (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2002), esp. chap. 2.
170
socialist and communist movements, heralded the shifts in political and
power structures in Japan, the rise of a militant government in Japan, and a
blaze of war throughout Asia in the next decade.
FIGURE 16. The crowd that gathered around the Emperor Sunjong’s funeral hearse, 10 June
1926. From the photo book, Sunjong: Gukjang Sajincheob (1926).
The significance of this turbulent year is not just limited to the
political and social aspects. In particular, the year bears a special imprint for
Korean film history since it is unequivocally recognized as the decisive
turning point for Korean national cinema. The year produced the masterpiece,
Arirang, which raised filmmaking in Korea to a new level and also saw the
birth of Korea’s first auteur and superstar in Nah Un-Gyu, the director and
protagonist of the film. Since the immense influence of Arirang on Korean film
industry and cultures during the colonial period and its legacy written in the
Korean film history have already been discussed in detail in the previous
171
chapter, it seems to be redundant for me to reiterate the whole saga of Arirang
again here. I believe it is sufficient to state that Nah Un-Gyu’s unprecedented
popularity and influence led his contemporaries and subsequent generations
to casually refer to the years between 1926 and the early 1930s as the Nah Un-
Gyu or Arirang era, which proves how vital Nah and Arirang’s roles were in
the foundation of Korean national cinema.
Without a doubt, therefore, in the first chapter of Korean film history,
Arirang is the film of the year 1926, and Nah is the filmmaker of the year. The
biggest story of the year and the one that intrigued the film worlds and all the
movie fans in Korea however, was neither Nah nor Arirang but a spectacle
from Hollywood that featured one of the earliest global stars Hollywood
produced: The Black Pirate (1925, United Artists), the first feature length color
film entirely shot in the two-strip Technicolor, starring Douglas Fairbanks. In
order to make more sense of this slightly baffling historical fact that to some
extent taints the glorious status that Arirang has enjoyed, it is crucial to
consider the ethnically segregated film cultures and film-going and viewing
practices. Simply put, this rather bold claim that Fairbanks outshined Nah in
this critical year of 1926 is based on the fact that Arirang did not mean much
to a great portion of the populace in Korea. Especially, in Seoul Arirang did
not reach almost one-fourth of the city’s population. In fact, these people, the
172
migrants from Japan, did not even have an opportunity to appreciate the film
Arirang at all; no Japanese movie theater in Seoul or other cities screened the
film, and no Japanese newspaper published in Korea wrote a single article on
Arirang or Nah. In other words, more than half of movie theaters in Seoul and
more than two-third of the entire movie theaters in Korea did not even play
the film Arirang.
Unlike Nah Un-Gyu whose fans consisted only of Koreans, Douglas
Fairbanks quickly emerged as the most powerful star appealing to all the film
fans in Korea. As Douglas Fairbanks was on his way to international stardom
with his swashbucklers in the mid-1920s, he became among the most
celebrated movie stars in Korea, with the commercial successes of such films
as The Three Musketeers (1921, released in Korea in 1924 and re-released in
1925), Robin Hood (1922, released in 1924), The Mollycoddle (1920, released in
1925), and The Thief of Baghdad (1920, released in 1925). The entertainment
section of the 1926 New Year’s Day special edition of Joseon Ilbo includes an
examination of foreign films released in Korea in the previous year and the
international movie stars Korean fans loved. It details the careers of the
world’s ten most influential actors and actresses, and Douglas Fairbanks tops
the list.
29
Taking advantage of a star for film promotion was not an
29
Joseon Ilbo, 1 January 1926.
173
unfamiliar marketing method in Korea, the names of Korea’s first Hollywood
movie star, Eddie Polo, the star of the Universal serial The Broken Coin (1915),
and other popular stars such as Charlie Chaplin and Harry Carey were
frequently used in film ads even in the late 1910s.
30
Yet due to success after
success of Fairbanks’ films and established stardom, his name guaranteed a
huge turnout, and his popularity and ticket-selling power were reflected in
much higher distribution rights fee for his films. In Korea of the 1920s the
average distribution fee for a program of Hollywood films—one program
consisted of a short, a feature, a documentary and a serial—was around 600 to
1,000 won. Some Hollywood features with popular directors or actors—D.W.
Griffith’s Way Down East (1920) and Orphans of the Storm (1921), for example—
cost 300-350 won alone. European films cost a little less than that, about 150-
200 won apiece. The distribution fee for Douglas Fairbanks’ films, however,
reached an astonishing 1,000 won, which equaled to 500 USD at the time.
In 1926 Fairbanks’ latest film, The Black Pirate, stirred up the film
business world in Korea once again, and the chase for the rights to this new
feature film became quite a show itself. The overheated competition to
acquire the distribution rights to The Black Pirate involved not just Korean
movie theaters and film distributors, but the Japanese movie theaters in Seoul
30
Maeil Sinbo, 14 July 1919, 8 October 1919, 20 April 1919, 2 October 1920, and 20 December
1920.
174
as well. Initially Kirakukan, a Japanese movie theater, approached United
Artists’ branch office in Japan, and was given a distribution right. Kirakukan
began to look for a Korean theater which would pay the half of the
distribution fee and release the film for Korean audiences. Umigwan and
Joseon Geukjang immediately expressed their interests in The Black Pirate, and
thus the notorious bidding began. Witnessing the overheated competition
between two Korean theaters, other Japanese theaters decided to approach the
agency covertly, and thus the situation became quite ugly while the
distribution fee kept rising due to the unexpectedly escalated interests. The
Japanese agent for United Artists, Koyama, who acknowledged the
abnormally heated competition that got every movie theater in Seoul
involved, threatened theaters that he would not ship the film to Korea on time
in order to make the bidding more competitive, which led the parties
involved to even travel to Japan to work out negotiations.
31
In the end the
police intervened, and the distribution and exhibition rights were garnered to
Danseongsa for Korean spectators and Ōgonkan for the Japanese, with each
theater paying 1,200 won (total 2,400 won), an unheard of amount at the time.
Danseongsa’s rival Joseon Geukjang, who lost the bid, decided to pursue an
extreme method in order to make up for its bitter loss, programming a bunch
31
Donga Ilbo, 13 November 1926.
175
of old Fairbanks’ films a week prior to and after the The Black Pirate week in a
hope to take advantage of the Douglas Fairbanks phenomenon at least.
Despite the unprecedented high cost of distribution rights, The Black Pirate
released simultaneously at Danseong-sa and Ōgonkan between November 16
through November 22 was a huge success, and pleased by its success,
Ōgonkan even put a special “thank you” ad for film patrons in a Japanese
newspaper.
32
FIGURE 17. A Korean newspaper review of Douglas Fairbanks’ The Black Pirate for Korean
audiences. Donga Ilbo, 13 November 1926.
32
Keijo Nippo, 23 November 1926.
176
FIGURE 18. A Japanese newspaper ad of The Black Pirate for Japanese audiences. Keijo Nippo, 8
October 1926.
The case of The Black Pirate indicates that there were two separated
but at the same time interconnected film cultures in Korea. Without question
Nah Un-Kyu was the star and hero of Koreans in 1926 but that does not
necessarily indicate that he was the star in Korea due to the ethnically
segregated film cultures which made it impossible for his Arirang to reach the
majority of Japanese film patrons in Korea. Yet the popularity of Douglas
Fairbanks and overheated competition to acquire distribution rights to his The
Black Pirate also demonstrate one manner in which the Korean and Japanese
film cultures were intertwined despite their distinctive film cultures.
What is most intriguing about Japanese film culture within colonial
Korea is that even though Japanese migrants established their own movie
theaters in order to feel connected to Japan, it still functioned autonomously.
For instance, the film Arirang was “exported” to and theatrically released in
177
Japan,
33
but Japanese movie theaters in Korea did not play Arirang at all. The
nation-wide boycott against Hollywood pictures led by film exhibitors in
Japan in 1924 is another example that proves the independence of Japanese
film culture within Korea. In July 1924, Japanese film exhibitors refused to
screen Hollywood product for several weeks in order to publicly express their
anger against the 1924 U.S. Immigration Act, also known as Asian Exclusion
Act, which prohibited the immigration from Japan. Hence during this period
movie theaters in Japan only played Japanese and European films.
34
However,
Japanese movie theaters in Korea did not participate in this national boycott,
but instead they continued to make profits from screening Hollywood films.
FIGURE 19. Theater ads listing film programs at Japanese theaters. From right to left,
Chuokan, Ōgonkan, Kirakukan and Naniwakan in Seoul. Keijo Nippo, 10 October 1925.
It is important to interrogate the very nature of Japanese empire—its
emigration and assimilation policies, in particular—to adequately understand
33
Cho Hee-Moon, “Yeonghwa Arirang Jaepyeongga,” Hanguk Yeonghwaui Jaengjeom I (Seoul:
Jibmoondang, 2002).
34
For more detailed discussion of this boycott of Hollywood movies in 1924, see Yuko Itatsu,
“The Hollywood Boycott Movement of 1924 Japan: The Dilemma between Anti-Americanism
and Consumer Urge” (Historical Journal of Film, Radio and TV, August 2008, forthcoming).
178
this unique position of Japanese film culture embedded within colonial Korea
in both Korean and Japanese film history and the social and cultural
implications of its independent film practices. As discussed earlier, the
vigorous flows of imperial and colonial subjects across Japan’s colonial
territories and Japan proper stemmed from Japanese imperialism’s
fundamental ideological and political scheme, which stressed assimilation,
turning colonial subjects into Japanese. With the exception of Russia, Japan
was the only modern imperialism to only colonize its adjacent countries.
Quite different from British, French, or American imperialist models,
Japanese imperialism encouraged and often forced the Japanese and other
imperial and colonial subjects to intermingle with each other and migrate to
other colonial territories. Emigration across the Japanese empire reveals the
unique characteristic of the Japanese imperial project, what Leo Ching calls,
“imperialism without capital”
35
; indicating that Japan itself was in dire need
of industrialization and modernization just like its colonies. As a result,
Japan’s migration policies were tethered to the modernization efforts across
Japanese colonial territories, which were in constant demand of labor forces.
The active migration and connectivity among Japan and its colonies in
association with the assimilation efforts formed the central agenda of
35
Leo Ching, Becoming Japanese: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation (Berkeley,
Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2001), 23.
179
Japanese imperialism. There was serious imbalance, however, between the
ideal of the assimilation and its actual application. Tessa Morris-Suzuki
argues that because, as Japan “attempted to juggle two essentially
contradictory principles—the principle of the nation-state on the one hand
and the principle of colonialism on the other— official definitions of
nationality and national identity in the Taisho period were almost inevitably
fraught with insoluble paradoxes,” and “one of the most important of these
paradoxes was that the colonial order needed to produce both similarity and
difference in its subjects.”
36
Thus, as Morris-Suzuki points out, assimilation
and discrimination, and Japanization and exoticizaton were different sides of
the same colonial coin.
37
After all, the colonial project was, in essence, hardly
in accordance with the ideology of equality.
It is erroneous, nevertheless, to presume that this paradoxical
ideology was in its essence a vain political manifesto. Indeed Japanese
imperialism ardently produced its imperial system and structure by firmly
grounding them in this very paradox. Regarding how this ideology took effect
in reality, Leo T.S. Ching writes:
36
Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Becoming Japanese: Imperial Expansion and Identity Crises in the
Early Twentieth Century,” Japan’s Competing Modernities: Issues in Culture and Democracy,
1900-1930, ed. Sharon A. Minichiello (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998), 159.
37
Ibid.
180
Doka [Assimilation] and Kominka [Imperialization], by urging and
then insisting that the colonized become Japanese, conceal the
inequality between the ‘natural’ Japanese, whose political and
economic privileges as citizens are guaranteed, and those
“naturalized” Japanese, whose cultural identities as Japanese are
required, but whose political and economic rights as citizens are
continuously denied. In short, it was to conceal the fundamental
problem of the citizenship of the non-Japanese within the empire that
the categories of “Japanese” and “imperial subjects” were constructed
and mobilized.
38
What is particularly interesting in his analysis of the intrinsic
problems of the assimilation efforts is the distinction Ching draws between
“cultural identities” and “political or economic identities.” The word
“culture,” or “bunka” in Japanese, as used here is in fact a tricky term to define,
because this term signified more than just “culture.” In August 1919, right
after the most serious and wide-spread nationalist movements since Japanese
colonization swept the Korean peninsula, the Office of the Governor-General
introduced the Cultural Rule that replaced the previous Militant Rule, a
coercive colonial policy, as a means to soothe the escalating Korean
nationalism. Under the new slogans of “Nisen Y ūwa (The Harmonious
Relationship between Japan and Korea)” and “Itshid ōjin (Universal
Benevolence)” proclaimed by the third Governor-General Saito Makoto, the
Cultural Rule loosed up Japan’s military-based colonial policy by showing a
38
Leo Ching, 6.
181
certain degree of tolerance. The Cultural Rule was designed to give a measure
of respect to Korea’s traditions and customs; allow the freedom of
communication and publication; get rid of inequality between Koreans and
the Japanese; and open the governmental positions to Koreans. Most
importantly, the Cultural Rule replaced military police with a regular police
force as a major mechanism of imperial governance, in order to alleviate the
oppressive image of the militarism of Japanese colonial occupation.
In this regard, the word “cultural” in “Cultural Rule” here was
employed as opposed to “militant” and thus it connoted “placatory,”
“peaceful,” “lenient,” and “civilized.” What is more striking about the
Cultural Rule is the ways in which the words “culture” or “cultural” are
associated with the assimilation. “Y ūwa,” which could be roughly translated
into English as “harmony”; but “wa” means “harmony” and “yū” actually
means “to melt down” or “to become one.” So “yūwa” as a whole connotes to
“melt down together to become harmonious.” “Itshid ōjin,” another term
representing the assimilation effort of the Cultural Rule, is a famous phrase
from a classic Chinese poem by Han Yu (768-824) which deals with the virtue
of benevolence to become a sage, and thus signifies equal care and love for the
Japanese and Koreans.
182
On the surface the Cultural Rule purports to pledge a certain degree
of autonomy for Koreans, modeling itself after Britain’s colonial rule of
Ireland, but it actually aims at gradually turning the Koreans into “the
Japanese” through more sophisticated or “cultural” ways of governing
colonial Korea and controlling colonial subjects, through its focus on
assimilation. Hence the Cultural Rule was based on the contradicting notions
of the differentiation and assimilation of the colonized population, reflecting
the general politics of Japanese imperialism and translating its paradoxes into
the practice of colonial rule in Korea. The internal discord of the assimilation
ideology remained the unresolved dilemma for Japanese imperialism until its
very end, even after the late 1930s when the empire administered more
thorough and organized assimilation policies, and this incompatibility was
clearly inscribed upon every social sphere in Japan’s colonies, like in Korea.
The symbiosis of Japanese and Korean film cultures and the ethnic
segregation between the two in colonized Korea, especially in the colonial
capital of Seoul, is indicative of the inherent problems and limits of cultural
rule and Japan’s general colonial politics as well as the limitation and
complexity of the empire’s assimilation endeavors. Importantly, I argue that
this paradoxical nature of the assimilation ideology was not incarnated on the
colonial and/or imperial film cultures in Korea in random forms, but instead
183
it manifested its specific patterns. To be specific, in terms of the film
exhibition the law of segregation prevailed, while at the levels of film
production and distribution the assimilation or integration between the
colonizers and the colonized were much more apparent. However, until the
early 1940s when the empire put every film industry under its direct control
so that the collaboration between Japanese and Korean filmmakers was not
only encouraged but coercively enforced, the “integrative” filmmaking
practice relied on commercial markets rather than the political endeavors of
the empire for assimilation. As explained earlier, the collaborations between
Korean and Japanese filmmakers in the field of film production in the 1920s
and 1930s were done for commercial purposes on the business level; there
were no governmental efforts to encourage or discourage such collaborative
filmmaking activities. What is worse, these collaborative efforts were
underplayed, often actively, by the very people who initiated and carried
them out. The Japanese-owned film productions in Korea seemed to practice
the assimilation principle of the empire but, as I discussed, they pursued
“covert” co-production in the disguise of their Japanese origin and only
catered to Korean spectators, which means that their collaborative plans was
actually built on the segregated film cultures.
184
The theater exhibition of The Four Feathers (1929, Paramount Pictures),
the first talkie film theatrically released in Korea, proves how segregation and
differentiation worked in the areas of film exhibition and spectatorship in
colonial Korea, while testifying to the “integrated” nature of film distribution.
The film’s release on January 29, 1930 at Joseon Geukjang, a Korean movie
theater, is recorded as the very first screening of a talkie in Korea. Actually the
film was also released on the same day at Chuokan, a Japanese movie theater,
for Japanese film audiences.
39
Therefore, the talkie era in Korea began with
exactly the same film screened at two separate theaters for two different
audiences. These double screenings of The Four Feathers clearly verifies how
seriously the film audiences were segregated between the Japanese and
Koreans. Thus this ethnically segregated film exhibition and consumption did
not correspond to and even challenged Japanese imperialism’s assimilation
policies and efforts. However, at the same time, the fact that Japanese and
Korean film patrons watched the same film and experienced the talkie for the
first time on the same day reveals that both audiences were in fact connected
without them realizing it, as Korean and Japanese film distribution systems in
Korea shared the same commercial interests and thus often worked together.
Eventually, Korean and Japanese film-goers shared quite similar movie
39
Keijo Nichinichi Nippo, 29 January 1930.
185
experiences as they continually watched the same kinds of films which
certainly made them develop similar tastes for films, although those
experiences occurred in totally different spaces since the ways in which the
films were screened were separated and segregated.
To conclude this chapter, I would like to present a compelling
example that “physically” represents the interrelated but at the same time
segregated film cultures between the two ethnic audiences as well as a shared
film history of the two national cinemas: “a bicycle boy.” As only a single
print was available for films screened at Korean and Japanese movie theaters
separately, movie theaters located on either side of Cheonggye Stream had to
schedule the same film at different time slots so that a film print could be
shuttled from one theater to another, in order to screen the film for their
respective film patrons. For example, if Joseon Geukjang, a Korean theater,
programmed The Four Feathers from 6 to 8 pm, Chuokan, a Japanese theater,
scheduled it from 9 to 11 pm, in order to allow a bicycle boy to deliver the
film’s print, riding his bike, from Joseon Geukjang to Chuokan during the
interval between the two screenings. In more extreme cases in which two
theaters’ screenings in North and South Village could not avoid the
overlapping, bicycle boys delivered the films reel by reel, as soon as they
186
finished being projected at one theater they would be shuttled to the others.
40
This certainly unique practice exemplifies both the segregation and
connectivity between two film cultures, and also raises the question of the
unclear boundaries between Korean and Japanese film histories and national
cinemas. In other words, as it is difficult to determine to which film history or
whose film culture these bicycle boys belong, it is almost impossible to neatly
pinpoint where Korean cinema ends and Japanese cinema begins due to their
complexly interwoven early film histories.
The question that begs asking here is whether the presence of
Japanese culture, filmmakers, distributors, exhibitors, benshi, movie theaters
and audiences in Korea is part of a Japanese film history or Korean film
history. A critical study of Korean and Japanese national cinemas suggests
that they do not belong to either. On one hand, Korean film history, which is
still firmly grounded on a nationalist historiography, easily dismisses this
symbiosis as just yet another concession made for imperial exploitation. On
the other hand, Japanese film history’s overwhelming silence over Japan’s
decisive and distinctive presence in its former colonies’ film cultures remains
largely intact. The lack of discussion of Japan’s influence in colonial cinema is
not a random choice but a part of historical writing mechanism in post-war
40
Cho Pung-Yeon, Seoul Jabhak Sajeon (Seoul: Jeongdong Chulpansa, 1989), 154.
187
Japan which tends to mitigate its imperial past. As the complex coexistence of
Japanese and Korean film cultures in Korea demonstrates, the link and
association between the two national cinemas during Japanese imperialism
reveal the convoluted nature of early East Asian cinemas. A suppression or
avoidance of historical materials and realities concerning the intertwinement
of early Korean and Japanese film cultures and histories, therefore, leaves out
the formative aspects of the region’s film histories.
188
CHAPTER 4
FILM AUDIENCES IN THE MARGINS OF FILM HISTORY
The previous three chapters of this dissertation have approached the
film cultures in colonial Korea by attempting to widen the historical views on
the colonial cinema. In a sense, this chapter continues to undertake the same
endeavor of expanding the historiographic approach of the earlier chapters as
it looks into aspects of colonial film cultures that have been overlooked and
overshadowed due to the limited ways of writing film histories in Korean and
Japanese national cinemas. Yet in the last chapter, I am principally interested
in moving beyond the discourses of ethnicity and nation, which have been the
major focus of the previous chapters. By “moving beyond,” however, I do not
mean to disregard the magnitudes of the national and ethnic in the
development of early film cultures in colonial Korea, but rather I would like
to underscore the significance of efforts to unearth the issues that have been
left aside as a result of often myopic emphasis on such questions of nation,
nationalism, and colonialism.
Not surprisingly, urban modern experiences in colonial Korea are
almost always synonymous with a history of exploitation. The period of
colonial occupation is commonly pictured as a cultural dark age tainted by
189
colonialism, economic exploitation, physical violence, policing, and political
oppression. However, it has been often overlooked that this pessimistic and
nationalistic description of urban culture in Korea was only one side of
colonial modernity. The word “modern” was the most discussed, studied,
and debated topic of the 1920s and 1930s. Such popular terms during this
period as New Woman (Sinyeonsoeng), New Humankind (Sinillyu), and New
Age (Sinsegye) heralded the arrival of new era of modernity. The so-called
“modern boys” and “modern girls” frequented to movies, cafés, bars, music
halls, cabarets, and department stores and imitated the latest fashions of
Hollywood stars. Modernity and modern life stood for pleasurable and
liberating experiences as well. An increasing number of scholarly works that
examine everyday modernity in colonial Seoul and rectify the conventional
views on the subject have been published in recent years in Korea. This
tendency is an important shift in historical writing on the colonial period in
Korea, signifying a crucial diversion from the dominant historical narrative,
which stresses the nation or minjok (Korean people) and thus tends to pay
little heed to the actual lives of ordinary urbanites during the colonial period.
Korean historians have finally begun to fathom more nuanced accounts of
everyday life in colonial Korea’s urban spaces. This new historical approach
focuses on the “double nature” of Seoul’s modernity; as Shin Myeong-Jik
190
points out, both the colorful neon lights in South Village, which even
fascinated Koreans, and the dirty waters gushing out from sewers and
Japanese police’s violence in North Village represent the double nature of
colonial urban modernity in Seoul.
1
This chapter resonates with this new historiographical trend,
examining how the double nature of colonial modernity influenced the film
and other urban cultures and underwrote the social perception of movie
theaters and specific groups of film patrons. The first half of the chapter will
discuss the figures of modern boys and modern girls, who emerged as the
main movie fans and played a decisive role in the formation of film culture in
the 1920s. The latter half will interrogate the presence of women in and
gender politics of the colonial film culture in order to scrutinize how the
nationalist film historiography is essentially gendered, erasing and
marginalizing women’s places in film history for the sake of the masculine
subject of the nation and national history.
Colonial Flanerie: Modern Girls, Modern Boys, and Movie Theaters
Besides colonial occupation, the collision between the pre-existing
cultural tradition and modern culture also played a crucial role in shaping the
1
Shin Myeong-Jik, Modern Boy Gyeongseongeul geonilda (Seoul: Hyeonsil Munhwa Yeongu,
2003), 15.
191
urban modernity and movie-going experience during the colonial period.
“Advanced” sciences, technologies, knowledge, and cultures from the west
were the sources of awes and shocks for many Koreans. These same wonders
were also always subject to the society’s suspicion-ridden scrutiny, as Koreans
often feared the destructive effects they might bring to the nation’s customs
and traditions and, more importantly, the nationalist efforts and aspirations
for the nation’s independence. Hence along with Japan’s colonial rule of
Korea, the dialogues between the cultural traditions and newly imported
Western modern cultures and how these clashes and negotiations between the
traditional and modern interacted with the colonial situation must be
recognized in an attempt to comprehend Korea’s version of modernity.
In the last several decades of the nineteenth century, many Korean
intellectuals and high ranking officials were eager to learn from western
modernity and directly employ the western systems in their efforts to
modernize Korea. Such figures were labeled as gaehawpa, which can translate
as The Enlightenment Group. Many gaehwapa members traveled to and/or
studied in Japan, Europe, and the U.S., and they tried to incorporate what
they learned from those modernized countries in their attempts to transform
Korean society. Gaehwapa became a powerful political force in the 1880s, and
their political influence culminated with Gabsin Jeongbyeon (1884, The Political
192
Unrest in the Year of Gabsin) and Gabo Gyeongjang (1894-1896, The
Reformation in the Year of Gabo). Gabsin Jeongbyeon, led by Kim Ok-Gyun and
his fellow radical gaehwapa, was a coup aiming at overthrowing the
government, which only lasted three days, and Gabo Gyeongjang was a top-
down approach to the reformation of Korean society led by the cabinet
members of Kim Hong-Jib, a moderate gaehwapa. The two reformist
movements failed miserably, and both Kim Ok-Gyun and Kim Hong-Jib were
later assassinated in the midst of the chaotic political turmoil that plagued
Korean society at the time. The modernization efforts in Korea prior to Japan’s
occupation were largely attributable to various political rivalries and tensions
between various political groups and partisans such as moderate gaehwapa,
radical gaehwapa, royal family members, and the so-called sugupa (The
Traditionalist Group).
At first, gaehwapa designated this specific group of people who shared
the same political and social ideals while eagerly trying to adapt Western
modern political and social systems, but gradually the term was widely used
for anyone who openly embraced western civilizations and cultures. While
gaehwapa referred to a group of people, an individual who belonged to
gaehwapa was called gaehwakun. “Kun” means a person, but it is a degrading
term that generally denotes a person whose ethnics are in question—e.g.
193
noreumkun (a gambler) and sachaekun (a loan shark)—which implies that
gaehwapa and gaehwakun were not socially respected. There was another term,
eolgaehwakun, which was used to scoff at people who blindly adapted the
western cultures and lifestyles. The affix “eol” signifies “incomplete” or
“flawed,” and the term eolgaehwakun was specifically employed to describe
people who embraced the modern thoughts, cultures, and lifestyles imported
from Japan and the west not for political reasons or the purpose of national
enlightenment but for only personal reasons. The newspaper caricature below
entitled “Mimicry of Others” portrays a group of eolgaehawkun as monkeys
wearing the western suits with top hats and canes, mocking their pursuit of
western or modern style.
FIGURE 20. ”Mimicry of Others.” Daehan Minbo, 17 June 1909.
194
Gaewhapa, gaehwakun, and eolgaehwakun were the prototypical figures
of modern boy and modern girl who began to appear in the 1920s. In
particular, the demarcation between gaehwakun and eolgaehwakun is quite
intriguing as it reveals how people who pursued the modern life style and
enjoyed modern cultures were socially perceived and also anticipates the
similar social denunciation of the next generation of “eolgaehwakun” in the
1920s. Patha Chatterjee notes that in colonial India, the figure of new woman
was to be modern, but she would also have to display the signs of national
tradition and thus there would be essentially different from the “Western”
woman.
2
To extend Chatterjee’s argument, in colonial Korea, being modern
was only selectively acceptable if it was meant to make contributions to the
nation’s modernization efforts and benefit the nation in one way or another. If
one had embraced the western modern cultures on a personal level, he/she
was considered decadent, unpatriotic, and not nationalist enough. The
following illustration of modern girls and modern boys from a popular
magazine in the 1920s shows a connection between eolgaehwakun around the
turn of the century and modern girls and boys of the 1920s in terms of how
both figures were publicly perceived.
2
Patha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993), 10.
195
FIGURE 21. Modern Boys and Modern Girls or “Things that crawl out when the autumn
leaves are falling.” Illustration by Kwon Gu-Hyeon. Byeolgeongon (December 1927).
The overtly demeaning tone of this 1927 illustration from the popular
magazine Byeolgeongon dehumanizes modern girls and boys by labeling them
as “things that crawl out when the autumn leaves are falling.” It is in many
ways quite similar to the manner in which eolgaehwakun or “monkeys” are
portrayed in a newspaper from 1909. The supposedly liberating force of being
modern aimed to dismantle the rigid social system, but like eolgaehwakun,
modern boys and girls frequently faced the severe social condemnation.
Another important parallel between the two periods’ portrayals of modern
figures is the focus on their fashion and style: the “surface” of being modern.
Byeolgeongon’s illustration depicts modern girls and boys in outfits combining
196
Western, Japanese, and Korean styles and thus look rather unorthodox and
even ridiculous, and in this sense, they are not that much different from
“monkeys” in the western suits.
Indeed, the popular discourses critical of the modern girls and boys
from the 1920s and 1930s threw suspicious looks mainly at their modern
consumerist lifestyle and especially fashion. Subsequently, the pursuit of
modern culture by these modern figures was simply reduced to the matter of
style and consumerist activity. The terms modern boy and modern girl came
into popular use during the mid-1920s and quickly became one of the most
socially debated terms. Byeolgeongon, one of the most popular culture
magazines at the time, published a special issue on modern boys and girls
from which the above illustration came, and the editor of the issue writes,
“[W]e should not see that a woman who has short hair and wears western
attires is more of a MODERN GIRL than a woman who wears traditional
attire. We should look at their social consciousness.”
3
Although the editor
tries to argue against the general focus on the “surface” with regard to
modern girl and modern boy, the contributors seem to beg to differ as their
writings categorize and criticize these figures of modern boys and girls solely
on the basis of on their looks. One of the writers notes:
3
Yoo Gwang-Yeol, “Modern Girl, Modern Boy Daenonjaeng,” Byeolgeongon (Decemeber
1927), 113. Words in capital indicate the author’s own uses of English words.
197
She has her hair cut short as if she were a traditional artist and wears
high heels. Nothing she wears is cheap. The red lipstick she wears on
her lips—that blood-like color makes people who look at her feel
agitated. People around me call her MODERN GIRL…Summarizing
their [modern boys’ and modern girls’] traits, they are lewd,
extravagant, and decadent. Even though these young people could not
earn their livelihood by themselves, they continue to pursue luxurious,
wasteful, and lavish lives...The majority of MODERN GIRLS are
harlots and prostitutes, and MODERN BOYS are sons of capitalists
and bourgeois.
4
FIGURE 22 and 23. Modern Girls, Fashion and Consumerist Lifestyle: “The Age of Fur” (Ahn
Seok-Yeong, Joseon Ilbo, 24 November 1931, left) and “Modern Girl’s Ornament Movement”
(Ahn, Joseon Ilbo, 5 February 1928, right)
Even though the style, fashion, and looks were the main sources for
social criticism against them, they often functioned as political statement for
4
Park Yeong-Hee, “Yusanja Sahoiui sowi Geundaenyeo, Geundanamui Teukjing,” Ibid., 115-
116. Words in capital indicate the author’s own uses of English words.
198
many modern figures. In her study of Japanese modern girl (Mo-Ga), Sarah
Chaplin argues that modern Japanese women tackled the gender problems by
aligning themselves with the west in order to move outside of the fixed
gender categories assigned to women.
5
Similarly, in Korea, modern figures
sought to defy the repressive social system and customs by making an
alliance with the outside force—the west—and the adapting western style or
fashion was the most important aspect of this maneuver. Among others, the
short cuts worn by modern girls, boys, and the figure of “new woman”
became a controversial subject for popular debates. The Confucius ideology of
Joseon society taught people to value one’s body as if it were not theirs, but
their parents, and thus cutting hair was traditionally considered as a complete
disrespect for and want of filial piety towards one’s parents. In 1895, the
reformist Kim Hong-Jib administration enforced the “Short Cut Order”
(Danbalryeong) which obliged people to cut their traditional long hairdos. The
law met with fierce resistance and even revolts. In the Short Cut Order’s wake,
countless essays and articles in magazines, newspapers, and books featured
seemingly ceaseless debates concerning the policy, and in the 1920s
throughout the 1930s when the short cut became a fad, the controversy
5
Sarah Chaplin, “Interiority and the ‘Modern Woman’ in Japan,” Images of the ‘Mondern
Woman’ in Asia: Global Media, Local Meanings, ed. Shoma Munshi (New York: Routledge, 2001),
57.
199
became particularly fiercer than ever, especially because many modern
women wore short cuts to visually convey their political stance and
dedication to the proto-feminist politics. In this regard, the criticism against
modern figures’ fashions and styles mirrored the social tension between the
traditional and modern.
In the construction of these modern figures’ styles, movies played
crucial roles, and especially Hollywood movies became the major inspiration
for modern boys and girls. Therefore, movies were frequently associated with
modern boys and modern girls.
The various fads of modern era, especially in Joseon [Korea], are
indebted to the powerful influence of moving pictures. The flickering
shadow on screen has more power than a school’s curriculum, a
pastor’s preach or a father’s switch. Fashion affects people much more
than the spiritual. Harold Lloyd’s horn-rimmed glasses became a fad
among the Joseon youth, Valentino’s sideburns brought goat hairs to
the cheeks of Joseon young males, Buster Keaton’s derby hat put
cattle dung on the heads of the Joseon youth, and the cowboy’s
leather pants from American westerns led the Joseon youth to put on
bell-bottomed trousers.
6
As this essay cartoon (manmun manhwa) illustrates, Hollywood movies
became the integral part of the cultures of modern boys and modern girls, and
naturally the movie theater became the main pilgrimage resort for them. For
6
Ahn Seok-Yeong, “Gasangsogyeon (2) Modern Boyui Sanbo,” Joseon Ilbo, 7 February 1928.
200
this reason, the movie theater was frequently critiqued along with modern
boys and girls, and particularly it was seen as a location that facilitated the
sexual “misbehavior” of modern girls and modern boys. In the essay cartoon
below, modern boys gather around the women’s section on the second floor
of a movie theater and attempt to flirt with the two modern girls sitting there.
The modern boys’ eyes are all fixed at these two modern girls, not at the silver
screen. The caption of the essay reads, “[E]ven in an empty theater, once a
woman appears, guys move to the corner close to the women’s section,
leaving their seats.”
7
Another essay cartoon entitled, “A Love-Obsessed
Patient with a Crescent Risen on Silver Screen,” tells a story of a modern boy
who comes to movie theaters to enjoy watching over the women’s section
during intermission. The story goes that after he gets conned out of money by
a woman he meets at a movie theater, he never goes to movies again.
8
Similarly, Yi Tae-Jun’s short story “Modern Girl’s Feast” (Modern Girlui
Manchan) pokes fun at a modern girl’s vanity. It features Kotbun, a modern
girl who is approached and invited on a date by a stranger at a movie theater.
She goes to meet with him next day with high expectations. Yet she finds out
that she is being mocked as the address she is given turns out to be that of a
7
Mr. A, “Manchu Punggyeong,” Joseon Ilbo, 26 October 1930.
8
Ahn Seok-Yeong, “Eunmake teun Chosaengdale Yeonaegeolsinbyeong Hwanja,” Joseon
Jungang Ilbo, 24 September 1933.
201
correctional facility, an interesting metaphor that seems to be a perfect place
to send this modern girl full of vanity. Kotbun returns home with a bitter
mind, and eats scorched rice for dinner instead of the fine dining at an
American restaurant she wished for.
9
FIGURE 25 and 26. Ahn Seok-Yeong’s essay cartoons: “Modern Boy’s Stroll” displays the
association between Hollywood movies, fashion, and modern boys (Joseon Ilbo, 7 February
1928, left) and Modern boys watching modern girls, not films, in a movie theater (Joseon Ilbo,
26 October 1930, right).
By setting the “unethical” conduct of the modern boys and modern
girls in cinemas, these examples emphasize the extent to which movies were
associated with another controversial modern phenomenon: free love. The
movie theater was thought to instigate modern boys’ and girls’ quest of free
9
Yi Tae-Jun, “Modern Girlui Manchan,” Yi Tae-Jun Danpyeon Jeonjib 1, ed. Kim Jong-Nyeon
(Seoul, Garam Gihoik, 2005), 59-63.
202
love, which was a significant social issue since it completely took apart the
gender and sexuality norms of the traditional Korean society. Yet this kind of
criticism against the movie theater in relation to sexuality began even long
before modern girls and modern boys appeared in the late 1920s. As a matter
of fact, it was quite universal phenomenon that movie theaters were often
socially criticized by conservatives, social reformists, and religious groups in
many countries when they became the major venue for popular entertainment.
In Korea, the situation was all the more serious since the theater as a brand
new cultural institution was believed to gravely disrupt the traditional
customs, especially the strict gender division. The anxieties surrounding this
brand new public space were multi-faceted. As Korea did not have strong
performing arts tradition nor theater culture, theaters per se were considered
as imports of western culture. As a new cultural institution, its nature,
characteristics, or social function were not clearly defined. Rather than stage
plays or movies, theaters were initially tied to the performing arts and dances,
which were considered indecent forms of art for the lower classes in Joseon
dynasty. Thus they were assumed to be places that generated immoral
activities and lewd conduct and ultimately deteriorated the social standards
of ethics, chiefly because men and women intermingled in a crammed space.
203
From the very beginning the theater was branded as an “immoral
space.” Hyeobryulsa, the first indoor theater in Korea, was established in 1902
by the government, and as soon as it opened, the theater caused social
controversies. In his official petition to Emperor Gojong submitted in 1906, Yi
Pil-Wha, a high ranking official who was in charge of public education,
singled out Hyeobryulsa as one of the main problems, obstructing the
government’s devotion to education:
Thirdly, I would like to point out the depraved practices at
Hyeobryulsa. Confucius once told his discipline Yan Hui that
dispelling Cheng’s music was a virtue required for ruling a nation. I
do not know who is in charge of this place called Hyubryulsa, but
they offer amusement all night long, and men and women blend
together and do lewd conduct. Isn’t this Cheng’s music or what? I am
gravely worried about the nation and people as this place misleads
people’s minds and destroy our good customs. We must have the
police department get rid of this origin of lewdness.
10
Yi concludes his petition by claiming that once people are properly
educated, they would no longer be interested in the lewd acts happening at
Hyeobyulsa at all, and for this reason the most urgent issue the emperor must
10
Joseon Wangjo Silok : Gojong 47, 17 April 1906, n.p. During the later years of The Spring and
Autumn Period, Chinese feudal era (B.C. 772- B.C. 481), whose name came from Confucius’
book Spring and Autumn Annals, music from Cheng country (Chengy īn) was considered the
most “lewd” entertainment. In his conversation with his discipline Yan Hui, Confucius used
Chengy īn as a metaphor that stands for all forms of lowly popular amusement which must be
expelled from the ideal country he envisioned. Yi Pil-Wha employed this famous Confucian
teaching to underscore Hyubryulsa’s negative social function.
204
take care of is education.
11
Gojong accepted Yi’s suggestions, and he closed
down Hyeobryulsa that year. In addition to the critiques of Hyeobryulsa as a
source of vice, another noteworthy issue is the way that Yi links the problems
of a theater to the nation’s dismal destiny. As theaters continued to appear,
social anxieties grew along with them. The emergence of theaters in Korea
happened around the time when Japan colonized Korea, and thus those social
concerns surrounding the spread of theater culture were intertwined with the
national crises.
Today so-called stage theaters such as Danseongsa, Hyeobryulsa,
Eumaksa have been established, and dancers, entertainers, and actors
gather together and perform shows like The Tale of Chunhyang and The
Tale of Simcheong every night. The audience members are young
debauchees and what happens there is nothing but lewd
conduct…Thus theaters are throwing the general society into chaos
and damaging the national economy as young people run through
their money there. Also they mislead our people and even threaten
people’s lives due to their unsanitary environments. Unchaste women
and female dancers gain wealth from their performances, which affect
other women very negatively. For these reasons, it is not exaggerated
to say that the nation’s demise originate from these theaters. People
running these places must reflect on their conduct.
12
11
Ibid.
12
Kim Won-Geuk, “Agukui Yeongeukjang Sosik,” Daehan Heunghakbo 1, 20 March 1909, 19-
20.
205
This article contends as if the theater single-handedly brought about the
nation’s downfall. Despite its highly exaggerated critique against the theater,
however, this article nicely summarizes the nature of the social condemnation
of a theater space which connects it with the discourses of sexuality, nation,
and modern culture. The same criticism against the theater continued to exist
in the 1920s in relation to “lewd” conduct of modern girls and modern boys
with no discernable differences, as I discussed above.
The bleak situation of colonial occupation fueled the social accusation
of the figures of the modern girl and modern boy and especially their interests
in modern culture and their lifestyles. In fact, they were deprecated as people
who were the good-for-nothing, the negative by-products of the burgeoning
capitalist society, immersing themselves into consumerist lifestyles while
paying no attention to the nation’s dismal state. Many essay cartoons from the
late 1920s throughout the mid-1930s often juxtaposed modern girls and boys
with the hard-working laborers in order to highlight the idle lives that
modern boys and modern girls were pursuing. In a similar vein, these
modern figures were constantly described as people who did nothing but
walk around the streets, showing off their fashion sense and looking for a
date, which accentuated their non-contribution to the society and selfish
indulgence in their private lifestyles. Ahn Seok-Yeong, the foremost essay
206
cartoon artist of the 1920s and 1930s notes in his essay cartoon, “[W]hen they
[modern boys] stroll across the streets of Joseon which only have collapsing
thatched cottages, they might still feel they are walking in foreign scenery. I
have no idea why you people walk around without anything to do.”
13
Ahn contrasts
modern boys with the destitute situation of Korean society here, and at the
same time this essay cartoon of his shows another cultural activity that was
associated with modern girls and boys: a stroll. Along with movies, fashion,
and sexual freedom, sanbo, leisurely streetwalking or strolling, and driving
around in a car were new cultural activities that appeared in the late 1920s
and they were often conceived as a modern culture that effectively
represented the slack lifestyles of modern boys and modern girls.
Quite interestingly, however, this leisurely streetwalking was even
enjoyed by those who most critiqued modern boys’ and modern girls’ stroll.
Originated from Japan in 1913,
14
the essay cartoon (manmun manhwa), which
combined a cartoon with a short essay explaining the content of a cartoon,
was an influential visual medium of the 1920s and 1930s in Korea, and
modern boys and modern girls were one of the most frequently discussed
subjects of the essay cartoons. Like Ahn Seok-Yeong, essay cartoonists were
13
Ahn Seok-Yeong, “Gasangsogyeon (2) Modern Boyui Sanbo,” Joseon Ilbo, 7 February 1928.
Emphasis added.
14
Shin Myeong-Jik, 9.
207
very critical of the lifestyles of modern boys and modern girls, including their
idle streetwalking. Yet ironically essay cartoonists often used such titles as
“My Opinion on the Street,” “Strange View on the Street,” “Scenery on the
Street,” and “Parade in Seoul” for their works, which evoke the streetwalking
of modern girls and boys. In this sense, sanbo or flanerie was not a cultural
activity monopolized by modern girls and boys but instead it was a
widespread social phenomenon reflecting urban modernization.
As Walter Benjamin explains in Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the
Era of High Capitalism, the figure of flaneur, the nineteenth-century stroller on
the city streets, was the “ur-form” of modern intellectuals. The flaneur’s object
of inquiry was modernity itself; the flanerie became one of significant methods
in critically understanding the rapid modernization and urbanization in turn-
of-the-century Europe. According to Benjamin, by strolling across urban space,
a flaneur—a person who performs flanerie—took on the role of the silent
observer whose inner life could be enriched by the city landscape only to the
extent that he remained physically distanced from it. However, the flanerie
does not mean a passive urban experience. Importantly, as his book title
explicitly suggests, Benjamin stresses the link between flanerie and the modern
capitalist society. Benjamin’s notion of the flaneur (for which Baudelaire
provides the prototype), immersed in the flux of high capitalism and urban
208
modernity, walked through boulevards, arcades, department stores, and the
urban crowd, observing the city “passively,” and trying to distance himself
from social reality, though he was always ready to “sell out” and fling himself
into the torrent of capitalism.
15
Benjamin sees flanerie as an intellectual tool to scrutinize modern
society. Like Benjamin, essay cartoonists in Korea of the 1920s and 1930s
critically observed the urban scenery and vividly described it in their essay
cartoons. However, the flanerie of these artists is vastly different from that of
Benjamin or other European intellectuals as their subject of critical
examination was colonized urban life. Colonial urban modernity was also
well reflected in literary works from the 1920s and 1930s, when the modern
urban landscape, consumerist culture, and colonial Seoul had become
legitimate literary subjects, and many writers incorporated colonial modern
urbanity into their works. Among those writers, Yi Sang is a particularly
important figure not only because he is the pioneer of modernist literature in
Korea, but also his works venture deep into the double nature and conflicting
aspects of colonial modernity and urban visual culture.
Yi Sang’s works are seldom discussed in relation to urban modernity
and urban visual culture since the avant-garde nature of his works has been
15
Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” Charles Baudelaire: A
Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: NLB, 1973), 35-66.
209
exclusively highlighted, but his literature keenly represents a male
intellectual’s colonial urban experience. In his short travelogue “Remaining
Feelings for A Mountain Village” (Sanchonn Yeojeong) Yi Sang uses “cinematic
techniques” in describing his trip to rural areas:
The simple nihility that I taste after watching a moving picture—
Zhuang Zi’s “Dream of Butterfly” must be like this. My round but
rectangular head just becomes a CAMERA, and how many times with
my weary LENS I have taken shots of and projected the landscape of
early autumn when the corn is getting ripe—melancholia floating as a
FLASHBACK—these are some STILLS of my heartbreaking grief I am
sending to a few lonely FANS still left behind in the city.
16
As the quote shows, in this travelogue Yi Sang uses his eyes like a
“camera”; he freely changes points of view—e.g. from a long shot to an
extreme close-up—to create the vivid portrayal of landscapes and employs
abrupt “editing” and inserts flashbacks when he uses his urban experience—
Hollywood movies, actresses, department stores, modern boys, female factory
workers and sales clerks, and the new woman—to depict and contemplate
objects and people he observes during his travels. Yi Sang’s use of Zhuang
Zi’s “Dream of Butterfly” story is also intriguing in a similar sense since it
shows his take on cinema’s illusionism. “Dream of Butterfly” refers to a
16
Yi Sang, “Sanchon Yeojeong,” Yi Sang Seonjib (Seoul: Eulyu Munhwasa, 1994), 160. Words in
capital indicate the author’s own uses of English words.
210
dream of Zhuang Zi, one of the founders of Taoism, from 4th century B.C.
China. One day Zhuang Zi dreamed that he became a butterfly flying happily.
When he woke up, he wondered how he could possibly determine whether
he was Zhuang Zi who just woke up from a dream in which he was a
butterfly or a butterfly that just began to dream he was Zhuang Zi. Thus with
this famous Taoist metaphor, Yi Sang illuminates the cinema’s powerful
reality effect.
More importantly, from his works, one could find a clear presentation
of flanerie. In the conclusion of his essay “Boredom” (Gwontae) in which he
describes his aimless drift in Seoul and retreat to the inner world, Yi Sang
writes:
I come back to my room and look into myself. My life detached from
everything—my life from which I can’t find a single clue even for a
suicide is the extreme of boredom itself. A moth flies into a candle fire.
It must be dead or burnt. Yet even a moth knows how to live—it can
jump into fire. Is there passion to look for fire or is there a flame? No,
nothing. I have nothing, I see nothing. I can’t anticipate a thing.
17
Benjamin considers boredom as the very characteristic of flanerie when he
writes, “[F]lanerie is the rhythmics of this slumber.”
18
He further defines
17
Yi Sang, “Gwontae,” Ibid., 232.
18
Walter Benjamin, The Arcade Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin
211
boredom and explains its relation to flanerie by noting, “Boredom is a warm
gray fabric lined on the inside with the most lustrous and colorful of silks.
…One can well imagine the elegant set mimicking the pace of this creature
more easily in the arcades than on the boulevards.”
19
Siegfried Kracauer also
deems boredom as “the only proper occupation, since it provides a kind of
guarantee that one is, so to speak, still in control of one’s own existence,”
20
and argues that in the state of boredom one could keep one’s subjectivity
intact against the drudgery demanded by capitalist society. Simply put, for
European male intellectuals, boredom was the self-controlling and self-
empowering intellectual apparatus. In contrast, Yi Sang’s boredom and
flanerie represent the absolute frustration of a colonized male intellectual. In
his other famous short story “Wings” (Nalgae), Yi Sang tells a story of a male
intellectual who, deprived of a professional opportunity, financially relies on
his wife’s prostitution, which symbolizes the de-masculinization—which is
often intertwined with misogyny, as discussed in the first chapter—of the
colonial male subject. Yi Sang’s excessive withdrawal to the internal world
stands for the social status of a colonial male subject whose political and
(Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 106.
19
Ibid., 105-106.
20
Siegfried Kracauer, “The Boredom,” The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y.
Levin (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1995), 334.
212
economic power has been forcefully stripped by the colonial occupation.
Although Yi Sang, a colonial flaneur, could wonder around the city, delve into
his inner world, and observe the colonized nation, unlike the European flaneur,
he could not “fling into the torrent of reality”; instead he hopelessly
continued to dream about someday he could get himself his own “wings.”
In Migration to the Movies, Jacqueline Stewart re-examines the
European male-oriented notion of flanerie/flaneur through her studies on black
urban modernity and film spectatorship. According to Stewart, flanerie and
boredom center normally around bourgeois, white male subjects who enjoy a
freedom of physical movement and anonymity in public space, unavailable to
most African Americans in racially segregated urban America:
Black spectatorship is elaborated within the contradictions of the
modernist promise of urban mobility, and the persistence of racial
hierarchies and restrictions impeding smooth transitions into and
through urban modernity. African American spectators share with the
flaneur, the surrealist, and [Giuliana] Bruno’s female streetwalker a
kind of cultivated distance from the immobile spectator-in-the-dark
position imposed by the classical cinematic apparatus and its
attendant theories of the gaze. But for Black viewers this distance can
prove unpleasantly isolating; it is not always voluntary; and it risks
the consequences of challenging mainstream cinema’s racial and
sexual economies of desire and identification.
21
21
Jacqueline N. Stewart, Migration to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (Berkeley
and L.A.: University of California Press, 2005), 106.
213
The immobility and inaccessibility of the colonial flanerie exemplified by Yi
Sang and African Americans in colonized urban spaces demarcate the
fundamental differences from its European (or imperial) counterparts. In
other words, the free roaming across urban space was intrinsically impossible
for those colonial subjects. Most importantly, the ethnically segregated Seoul
limited mobility of Koreans because Koreans could not freely step into
Japanese residential areas, as the racially segregated American urban space
constrained the movement of African Americans.
In addition, the presence of Japanese police was crucial in defining
modern sense of mobility and movement in colonized urban spaces in Korea,
as police were used as a main controlling mechanism in Japan’s colonies.
22
As
mentioned in the previous chapter, the protagonist of the novel Before Hurrah
is continually harassed by police in every Korean and Japanese city he passes
through during his trip from Tokyo to Seoul. In fact, the Cultural Rule that
replaced the Militant Rule in 1919 changed the main governing force that
controlled colonial Korea from the military and military police to the regular
police in order to tone down the oppressive image of colonial occupation. Yet
the police-based colonial system did not mean that the Office of the Governor-
22
See Ching-chih Chen, “Police and Community Control System in the Empire,“The Japanese
Colonial Empire, 1895-1945, eds. Ramon H. Myers and Mark R. Peattie (New Jersey: Princeton
University Press, 1984).
214
General had become more lenient with regard to controlling Koreans. Instead
it spawned more thorough surveillance system through its rapidly growing
numbers of police force. Before 1918, the total number of policemen in Korea
did not exceed more than five thousand, but in 1919, the year when the
Cultural Rule was introduced, the numbers were tripled (15,392) compared
with the previous year (5,402), and it reached its highest point in 1921 with
20,753 policemen.
23
The number of police boxes also drastically increased
from 751 (1918) to 2,761 (1919).
24
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the
number of policemen was sustained at 18,000-19,000, and when the Pacific
War broke out the number sharply increased, and there were about sixty
thousand policemen—one policeman to every four hundred people—in Korea
in 1941.
25
The police force as the primary governing apparatus for colonial
rule had been so intense that Koreans’ colonial memory is often associated
with their fearful memories and experiences with Japanese (and Korean)
policemen.
23
Ch ōsen Sodokufu T ōkei Renkan 1928 (Seoul: Ch ōsen Sodokufu, 1930), 334-335.
24
Ibid.
25
Andrew Nahm, “Korea under Japanese Colonial Rule,“ Korea: Tradition and Transformation
(NJ: Hollym, 1996), 226
215
Movie theaters were not free from this police surveillance; in every
film theater there were two reserved seats for police (“police box”),
26
and it
was local police stations that ran the film censorship before the film law was
implemented in 1926. It was not uncommon that film screenings were
disrupted by the policemen present in movie theaters. Sometimes even
military police forcefully stopped the screening and chased film patrons out
of movie theaters. One of the most notorious incidents involving the military
police transpired at the screening of Pudovkin’s Storm of Asia (1928), the first
Soviet film ever screened in Korea. When the film, which deals with the
independent movement in Mongolia, was played at the Joseon Geukjang
Theater in October 1931, the military police raided the theater and coercively
ended the screening. Pudovkin’s film was apparently “double trouble” for the
Office of the Governor-General as the film entailed the lethal combination of
its two most feared ideologies: socialism and nationalism.
In her Babel and Babylon, Miriam Hansen notes the potential function
of the film exhibition and movie-viewing site as an alternative public sphere
for the socially marginalized such as women and racial minorities. Hansen’s
notion of cinema as a potential alternative cultural space provides a critical
theoretical framework for a study of spectators in the margins. Hanson writes:
26
Brian Yecies, “Lost Memories of Korean Cinema: Film Policies during Japanese Colonial
Rule, 1919-1937,” Asian Cinema (fall/winter 2003), 82.
216
More than simply a formal opposition to the classical concept of
spectatorship, exhibitions varying from time to time and place to
place allowed for locally and culturally specific acts of reception,
opening up a margin of participation and unpredictability. In this
margin the cinema could assume the function of an alternative public
sphere for particular social groups, like immigrants and women, by
providing an intersubjective horizon through—and against—which
they could negotiate the specific displacements and discrepancies of
their experience.
27
The possibility of exhibition space serving as an alternative public
sphere applies to colonial Korea as well. As discussed in the earlier chapter
with the examples of the ways in which Korean film spectators appropriated
Hollywood movies to assess and address their colonial situation, movies
theaters often offered Korean film patrons a place in which they could express
their colonial experiences through culturally and socially specific forms of
film reception. However, Hansen’s emphasis on the alternative function of a
movie theater for the identity formation of people in the margins echoes
Habermas’s definition of the public sphere that posits it as a prerequisite
apparatus for a modern society and optimistically believes in its democratic
function. Although Hansen’s study of female spectatorship challenges the
white European male-oriented definition of modern public space by exploring
the confluence of gender politics and urban cinematic space, her notion of
27
Ibid., 43-44.
217
public space is still confined in and limited to the imperial metropoles or
“white” urban centers. In fact, Hansen’s characterization of a movie theater as
an alternative public space does not neatly apply to colonial Korea. When the
audiences were keenly aware of the presence of surveillance—e.g. Japanese
policemen—and that their specific ways of receiving and reacting to a film
text might get them into trouble, movie theaters could not fully render them
“an intersubjective horizon” or “a margin of participation.”
In colonial Korea, those who pursued modern life and enjoyed
modern urban culture had to confront and deal with the multi-layered social
condemnations. The oppressive colonial rule, rigid societal customs and
norms, and urgent modernization needs led the society to believe that the
figures of modern girls and modern boys were nothing but social nuisance,
neglecting and even obstructing the collective efforts to alter and improve the
nation’s dire situation. However, as the colonial flanerie of Yi Sang exemplifies,
while representing the modern urban cultural expreiences, the idle strolling,
mindless visits to movie theaters, and the boredom of modern girls and
modern boys often reflected the colonial reality which stripped them of an
opportunity to engage in socially “productive” activities and also generated
the nihilistic social atmosphere. At least, those intellectual flaneurs such as
essay cartoonists and novelists fulfilled their social “functions” as they turned
218
their streetwalking into the works of art. The majority of modern girls and
modern boys, however, could not find a venue where they could let out and
express their inner world. Or perhaps they were so unmotivated to even
initiate such acts. In the end, they were judged only by their “surfaces.”
Gisaeng: Challenging the New Woman Discourse
You could witness how movie spectators have changed lately when
you go to movie theaters—especially the quietness therein during the
screening. Also there are less under-aged spectators because the
admission fee is pretty expensive....And one more noticeable change
is that the women’s section, which used to be almost half-empty, is as
packed as the man’s section every night. Old ladies, middle class
young maidens, gisaeng, female students are those who occupy the
section, and the rare sight is that half of the female spectators are
young female students who just open their eyes for sexuality. The
more shocking thing is that at “Kiss” scenes, there are always gasping
shrieks coming from the women’s section—surprisingly from the
seats where young married women sit together. Go ask people who
frequent to movie theaters whether or not it is true. Anyway the
world has changed. For sure.
28
So far I have endeavored to shed light on the historical aspects and
issues related to colonial film history and culture that have been silenced and
marginalized engendered by the nationalist film history’s overemphasis on
the nation and nationalism. The last section of this chapter will discuss
28
Byeolgeongon 5 (1 March 1927), 95.
219
another significant aspect of colonial film culture that has been eclipsed by the
weighty discourse of nation: the presence of women in the film scene of the
1920s as well as in the film history. The opening quote for this section, which
shows how the gender issue became the constitutive element of the film
culture at the time, entails the main issues I am going to focus on. Most
obviously, the discussion of the increase in female film patrons as a major
change in the movie theater in this quote indicates that cinema became an
important part of the everyday life of women in the late 1920s, regardless of
their social background. Especially, it details in the female film spectatorship,
focusing on how the question of female sexuality is played out at the movie
theater, which again attests to the associations among movie theaters, modern
girl (and modern boy), and sexuality that I discussed earlier in the chapter. In
spite of its decisive role in the formation of the colonial film culture, the
gendered nature of colonial film spectatorship has been seldom explored in
Korea, as the colonial film history has been exclusively written under the
nationalist paradigm. Therefore, the critical analysis of the female
spectatorship would be the lynchpin for this section. Additionally, I will
consider more diverse aspects of the relationship between colonial film
culture and women, from film production to film consumption. In particular,
I am going to focus on an important subject mentioned in the above quote: the
220
figure of gisaeng. Along with modern girl, new woman, and female students,
gisaeng, a female entertainer, was not only the major constituent of the female
film patrons, but one of the “early adapter” of film and other modern cultures
in modern Korea. The reason why I deal mainly with gisaeng in this section
interrogating the intersection between the discourses of modern women and
film culture is twofold. First, by excavating gisaeng’s multi-faceted
contributions to the development of early film culture, I aim to show how the
nationalist Korean film historiography is essentially gendered, applying the
nationalist discourse to the roles of women in film history and thus
problematically marginalizing gender politics with regard to colonial film
history. Secondly, by examining her unique but ambivalent social status both
as a traditional and “new woman” figure in Korean society who conformed to
and cut across strict societal gender and class divisions at the same time, and
her engagement with film production, exhibition, and consumption, I will
challenge many cultural studies of urban modernity and new woman’s role
and place therein that frequently foreground new forms of commodification,
consumption, and leisure. In fact, the new woman or modern woman
discourse of cultural studies tend to confine the position of women in modern
cultures into the realm of consumption such as movie theaters, department
stores, arcades, and cafés and thus seek and valorize modern women’s
221
empowerment from their consumerist activities. While this approach is
significant in revealing the gendered formation of modern urban space and
reevaluating women’s relation to the sites of consumption, the rare public
spaces available to women, it has its limits as it leaves out other potential
activities of modern women in urban cultural scene. Besides, as access to
these places was by and large the privilege of the educated, affluent, and
middle class women, the class issue has often been left out. In this sense, in
digging up the presence of women in the urban space as well as the national
film history by investigating gisaeng, this section will examine modern women
not simply as a consumer of modern culture but as its creator and how the
issue of gender was complicated by other societal aspects such as class and
colonial situation.
From January 28 through June 11, 1914, the newspaper Maeil Sinbo
serialized a section called “One Hundred People in the Entertainment World”
(Yedan Ilbaekin) that introduced the most powerful and popular entertainers in
Korea, a person a day. Among the list of actual ninety nine people presented
by the newspaper are three byeonsa, one dramatist, three singers, and ninety
two female entertainers or gisaeng. This astonishingly large number of gisaeng
listed in the newspaper over the six months clearly indicates how crucial
222
gisaeng’s role was in Korea’s entertainment business and modern Korean
culture at the time.
FIGURE 26. “One Hundred People in the Entertainment World” featuring gisaeng Ju San-Wol.
Maeil Sinbo, 29 January 1914.
Although the prototypical figure of gisaeng can be traced back as far
as to the Three Kingdom Period (from circa A.D. 100 to A.D. 688), gisaeng is
generally considered the product of Joseon dynasty, and thus its origin dates
at least back to around the fifteenth century. Gisaeng were primarily dancers
who performed and served for the amusement and pleasure of aristocratic
males. Although they belonged to the lowest class (cheonmin) in Joseon
society’s class system, they were more than entertainers, since they must have
developed and nurtured their artistic and cultural character in order to satisfy
223
the male intellectuals they worked for. To be a fine gisaeng a woman must
have excelled in calligraphy, dance, poems, and singing. For instance, the
poems of Hwang Jin-Yi, one of the most renowned gisaeng from the sixteenth
century, are deemed as some of the first recorded literary works by a female
writer in the history of Korean literature. Gisaeng did not get involved with
prostitution unless they were at the bottom tier of gisaeng hierarchy, and those
who did the prostitution were even despised by their fellow gisaeng and
called “third-rated (sampae)” gisaeng.
As Korean society became modernized around the turn of the
twentieth century, the gisaeng practice accordingly underwent the major
transformation. Most notably, during the Joseon dynasty the local
governments were in charge of selecting and managing gisaeng, but this
system was replaced by the permit system, with the issuance of the “Gisaeng
Regulation Order (Gisaeng Dansokryeong)” and “Prostitute Regulation Order
(Changgi Dansokryeong)” on September 28, 1908.
29
Under this regulation, all
gisaeng were required to register with the police department and obtain a
permit to be in the business. The introduction of permit system and the
disbandment of the official gisaeng brought two important changes to the
gisaeng world. First, although the permit system was designed to more strictly
29
“Gisaeng Dansokryeong” and “Changgi Dansokryeong,” Gwanbo 4088, 28 September 1908.
224
control gisaeng, it resulted in the sharp increase in gisaeng’s numbers. After
attending a gisaeng school and getting a permit, one could become a gisaeng.
Also as gisaeng were controlled along with prostitutes, it gradually affected
the gisaeng’s public image. Especially Japanese visitors, tourists, and migrants,
the major patrons for gisaeng business beginning in the 1910s, did not have a
historical understanding of gisaeng and often saw gisaeng simply as sexual
objects. As a sexual object of the curious imperial male gaze, gisaeng’s images
were reproduced in innumerous Japanese postcards, photographs, haiku,
travel guidebooks, and travelogues during the colonial period. Even after
gisaeng completely disappeared in 1947 when the South Korean government
banned the gisaeng practice,
30
the legacy of the relationship between gisaeng
and imperial male gaze remained in post-colonial Korea and Japan; the
notorious so-called “sex tour” that Japanese men make in Korea has been
referred to as “gisaeng tour.”
The second noteworthy change triggered by the new gisaeng
regulation was that as the state did not manage gisaeng any longer, gisaeng
became privatized. As soon as the “Gisaeng Regulation Order” was
introduced, gisaeng gathered together and formed the private associations to
30
Gwonbeon and gisaeng were banned in 1942 by the Office of the Governor-General. They
were momentarily revived in South Korea after colonial occupation but officially disappeared
in 1947.
225
protect their interests and continue their practice. Since 1914, the gisaeng
associations (johab) transformed to gwonbeon, a Japanese term (kanban in
Japanese) which designates an association. This Japanization of the term
indicates that the “modernization” of the gisaeng practice was also under the
strong influence of colonial occupation, and the term was quickly spread and
became the norm around 1920. Gwonbeon functioned as a gisaeng company as
well as a gisaeng school; it had investors, hired gisaeng, scheduled gisaeng’s
performance both in the public settings (theaters and expositions) and private
locales (restaurants and private parties), and split the income with gisaeng. In
the meantime, women who wanted to be trained to become gisaeng could
enroll in gwonbeon as long as they could afford to pay tuition for the three-
year training. In the 1930s, many gwonbeon turned them into stock companies,
and as a result, some owners of gwonbeon and a number of the most popular
gisaeng became millionaires. With the privatization of gisaeng, what
determined the nature of gisaeng’s patrons was not their class status but their
economic capability. A writer who called for the abolition of the gisaeng
practice comments on this transformation by noting:
This is the age of popularization. Everything is under popularization,
so why not gisaeng? In the past, only high rank officials could hang
out with gisaeng, but ever since the aristocracy collapsed, gisaeng has
226
become completely popularized. Now even a bastard could flirt with
the finest gisaeng if he has gold.
31
In this new environment, gisaeng’s artistic heritage became underappreciated,
and instead gisaeng’s looks and patrons’ money were what dictated the
gisaeng practice. Meanwhile, as the employees of gwonbeon, gisaeng were able
to make money, although their income significantly varied based on their
popularity. In the 1920s, the average income of gisaeng equaled to that of
middle class households, and a gisaeng’s income was among the highest of
professions then available to women, which attracted many women,
especially those from the poor families.
32
Despite her association with the traditional Joseon culture, as its rapid
transformation into a modern cultural business institution demonstrates,
gisaeng was at the vanguard of modern culture. In particular, gisaeng made
huge contributions to the newly emergent theater business. As explained in
previous chapters, indoor theaters only began to appear around 1902, and due
to the absence of stage drama tradition, the dance performance by gisaeng
became the highlight of theater programs from the very beginning. This was a
major reason why Maeil Sinbo selected ninety two gisaeng for its “One
31
Han Cheong-San, “Gisaeng Cheolpaeron,” Donggwang (December 1931), 56.
32
Kawamura Minato, Malhaneun Kot Gisaeng, trans. Yoo Jae-Soon (Seoul: Sodam Chulpansa,
2002), 177-184; and Ahn Seong-Hee, “Gwonbeon Yeogi Yeongu,” M.A. Thesis, Sookmyung
Women’s University, 2005, 181.
227
Hundred People in the Entertainment World” section. In the 1910s, with the
emergence of the theater culture along with the economic institutionalization
of gisaeng, more and more people could enjoy gisaeng’s performance, which
naturally resulted in the growing influence of gisaeng in the overall culture
industry in colonial Korea.
The exposure of gisaeng to the mass public was not limited to
performance spaces, as the new generation of gisaeng, with their economic
power and rather unique ability to gain access to male-oriented public space
were eager to enjoy the new modern cultures. Soon gisaeng became the major
patrons of urban mass cultures including movies, expositions, dance halls,
museums, and cafés. Even the curriculum of gwonbeon quickly responded to
this change, including courses on western and Japanese dances and Japanese
language.
33
Gisaeng’s active participation in the production and consumption
of modern culture, discussed in further depth below, originated from the
gisaeng’s unique social position, which allowed her a great degree of mobility
across urban spaces unavailable to other women, whose mobility was still
severely restricted and controlled by the strong gender division of the Joseon
society’s patriarchal ideology. Although gisaeng were a remnant of the old
caste system, which was gradually being dissembled, her mobility was
33
Ahn Seong-Hee, 31.
228
socially acceptable thanks to this very class system. In terms of gender and
class, gisaeng functioned outside of the social class system and gender norms
of Joseon society. On sojourn from England, Isabella Bird Bishop, one of the
few women amongst western adventurers/travelers who visited turn-of-the-
century-Korea, wrote her travelogue Korea and Her Neighbors in which she
expressed her particular interests in the gender issue of Korean society.
Throughout her book, she commented on the diverse aspects of gender
politics and women’s lives and status in Korea. While her attentive
observation of gender problems is quite illuminating, it is also interesting to
see her often imperialist attitude and curious look towards these gender
issues. She seems to claim that women’s issues in the west were not bigger
problems than they were in Korea, a surprising conclusion considering the
strict gender divisions and repressed sexuality in Victorian ideology was no
less oppressive than the Confucian-based gender norms of Joseon society.
Even the term “new woman” was first coined in England in 1894,
34
only four
years before Bishop’s book was published.
One of the subjects that most intrigued Bishop during her visit to
Korea was the figure of gisaeng. She took particular notice of the gisaeng’s
mobility, “[T]heir training and non-secluded position place them, however,
34
Caroline Christensen Nelson, A New Woman Reader: Fiction, Articles and Dramas of the 1890s
(Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2001), ix.
229
outside of the reputable classes, and though in Japan geishas often become the
wives of nobles and even of statesmen, no Korean man would dream of
raising a gesang [gisaeng] to such a position.”
35
As Bishop points out, gisaeng’s
unique mobility or “non-secluded position,” which contrasted sharply with
other women’s seclusion within the private sphere, stemmed from her
position located outside of the official societal system. Bishop’s words indicate
that gisaeng’s social position in Joseon dynasty’s caste system was even below
the lowest caste, but that her class “immobility” ironically enabled her to
freely move across the gender-specific places. Thus while becoming gisaeng
stood for a great downfall in the class structure, the strict gender segregation
and roles did not apply to gisaeng in exchange. Above all, gisaeng’s expected
social function was to become a cultural—and to some degree sexual—
companion of the aristocratic males, which meant her presence in male-
dominant spaces from the royal palace to restaurants was not only socially
accepted but naturally assumed.
This paradoxical liberty in mobility rendered gisaeng ample
opportunities to explore modern urban spaces and take full pleasure in
modern cultures as her “breach” into the male-oriented public domains was
not socially critiqued, controlled, or restricted. Thanks to her customary
35
Isabella Bird Bishop, Korea and Her Neighbors: A Narrative of Travel, with an Account of the
Recent Vicissitudes and Present Position of the Country (London: John Murray, 1898), 166.
230
presence in male spaces, gisaeng enjoyed the privilege of surprisingly free
access to public spaces, including cultural institutions in modern Korean
society, which were still considered inappropriate for women since the
gender division from Joseon society was very much intact and alive. Gisaeng
were even seen as “taste-makers,” and thus once they appeared at certain
cultural events, their presence per se attracted people and gave those events
more credibility. For example, a newspaper report on the successful premier
screening of Loyal Vengeance (1919), a chain drama considered by many to be
the first Korean film in South Korea, specifically points out that two hundreds
gisaeng attended the premier.
36
Similarly, another newspaper report on an
upcoming exposition to be held in Seoul in 1929 notes that a group of gisaeng
from Pyongyang, a city known for its finest gisaeng, had already scheduled a
trip to the exposition, and that people were more intrigued by the exposition
due to this fact.
37
Society was not only generous toward gisaeng’s presence at
modern cultural spaces, it was often enthusiastic about it.
Gisaeng at movie theaters were also naturally accepted, while other
female spectators were under the constant scrutiny of suspicious and
controlling male eyes. It was not until the late 1920s that movie theaters found
36
Maeil Sinbo, 29 October 1919.
37
Joseon Ilbo, 28 June 1929.
231
the strong patronage from women. Prior to the 1920s, women rarely went to
movies as the bequest of the so-called “The Law of the Avoidance between
Man and Woman” (Naeoibybeob) from Joseon society still influenced the
everyday gender politics of colonial Korea. This customary gender
segregation law was one of the core Confucian principles, which provided the
fundamental architecture of the cultural mores of the Joseon dynasty. The
word “nae” from “Naeoibeob” means the interior, and “oi” signifies the exterior,
and eventually “naeoi” came to mean “woman and man” or “wife and
husband.” Even today, this phrase is widely used in everyday Korean
vocabulary; “naeoi” denotes “man and wife” and a verb “naeoihada” means “to
intentionally avoid each other.” Naeoibeob concerned practices of gender
division and segregation, and according to this law, man and woman were
not allowed to share the same space unless they were immediate family
members, and women’s outdoor activities were subject to especially rigorous
control. The gender segregation even dictated the arrangement of domestic
spaces, informing the architecture of the private houses of the aristocrats to
whom the most severe gender segregation was practiced; the typical house of
an aristocrat was divided into two areas, anchae (the interior building) and
sarangchae (the exterior building), which were designed to “protect” women
from being seen by visitors as women were to stay only in anchae.
232
In this sense, it is not difficult to imagine the considerable social shock
administered when women began leaving their private domain to explore
urban public spaces. As discussed above, one of the main anxieties
surrounding the emergence of theater from the first decade of the twentieth
century throughout the 1930s was the co-presence of the opposite genders in
the same space. Due to the ceaseless censure against this social integration
and space-sharing between men and women, in 1915 movie theaters
introduced the women’s section, located on the second floor of the theaters,
38
which was very similar to racial segregation in American movie theaters. Yet
this gender segregation in the movie theaters did not subdue the social
criticism against women’s movie-going. Consequently, for quite a while
gisaeng were the only women who could go to movies without getting socially
stigmatized. In the late 1920s when women’s presence at movie theaters had
become more socially tolerated, society still looked at women spectators in a
negative light. In a report that interrogates the “dangers” and “vices” that
young female students might confront in city, a writer documents what he
observes in a movie theater, where this kind of danger most frequently ensues.
To examine the deviant conducts of young female students and modern boys,
38
Kim Tae-Su, Kotgachi pieo Maehokehara (Seoul: Hwansojari, 2005), 169.
233
the author goes to a movie theater, wherein he spots several groups of female
students and watches their behaviors closely:
As soon as I entered into a theater, I first looked at the women’s
section. I noticed two, three groups of women who had short bangs,
wore makeup, mingled with the bunch of gisaeng, and continually
glanced at the men’s section.
39
The author follows a group of female students and modern boys they
meet after screening and reports on their sexual “misconduct.” According to
this author, all of these began at the movie theater, and this claim is strikingly
similar to aforementioned Yi Pil-Wha’s petition to the emperor, in which he
critiqued the Hyeobyulsa Theater for providing the space where man and
woman blended together in a manner that endangered the moral standard of
the society. The real anxiety underlying in this report, which so negatively
depicts female spectators, is that the society and the state are no longer able to
control women’s sexuality. Modern woman’s sexuality is now “out of
control,” and this was further facilitated by the social phenomenon that
modern woman could go to the places where she was not traditionally
allowed to be present in the past. Not surprisingly, the movie theater was an
easy target for this kind of criticism because it was one of the main places to
39
SS, “Jeonyulhal Daeakmagul Yeohaksaeng Yuindan Tamsagi,” Byeolgeongon 2, no.3 (March
1927), 78.
234
which women regularly frequented. Importantly, it should be noted that in
the above quote the author does not pay any attention to gisaeng who sit right
next to modern girls, as if gisaeng’s movie patronage is not something worth
discussing in his report on the lewd sexual behavior of female spectators in a
movie theater. The contrast between the indifference to gisaeng and excessive
interest in other “general” female spectators clearly demonstrates that there
were two completely different standards for women’s film spectatorship.
Gisaeng’s involvement with film culture was not limited to fandom
since the freedom of movement not only allowed gisaeng to become the major
patron of movies, but also to get involved in various aspects of film culture.
Gisaeng’s role in early Korean film culture has been underrated in Korean film
history as she has been mainly relegated to anecdotes or footnotes concerning
her romantic relationships with filmmakers, actors, and byeonsa—only
highlighting her fandom. Gisaeng, however, were deeply engaged with the
early development of film culture on multiple levels. As gisaeng and theater
practices were mutually influential and grew together from the 1910s onward,
it was quite natural that gisaeng became an integral part of early film
exhibition. Early silent film screenings in Korea featured vaudeville-like
shows and circuses before and between screenings, and the gisaeng’s
performance was one of the most popular. This practice did not entirely
235
disappear in the 1920s when feature films became the norm in the film
business, as gisaeng performances were still employed as a popular
promotional event for movie exhibition.
FIGURE 27. The newspaper ad for the opening of the Gyeongseong High Entertainment
Movie Theater, Korea’s first movie theater, featuring gisaeng performance and Japanese
female dancers’ Electricity Dance as pre-screening shows. Electricity Dance was a new dance
genre combining a new technology (electricity); while dancing, a female dancer wore an over-
sized outfit with small glowing light-bulbs stitched on it. Hwangseong Sinmun, 20 February
1910.
Hannam Gwonbeon, one of the so-called Four Great Gwonbeon (Sadae
Gwonbeon) of the 1920s, along with Hanseong, Daejeong, and Joseon
Gwonbeon, leased and managed the Umigwan Theater in 1923 for an year,
40
indicating the close ties between gisaeng and theater business. In addition,
gisaeng participated in filmmaking as an actress. The earliest actresses starring
40
“Seong Dong-Ho,” Yi Young-ilui Hanguk Yeonghwareul uihan Jeungeonrok 5, ed. Korean Art
Institute (Seoul: Sodo, 2003), 39.
236
in films made in the 1910s were gisaeng who were cast because filmmakers
tried to take advantage of gisaeng’s established star persona, and also for the
practical reason that it was extremely difficult to find actresses since acting
was considered as a demeaning career, especially for women.
41
Gisaeng’s influence over the culture industry continued to grow, and
gwonbeon immediately became powerful cultural and economic institutions.
Finally, gwonbeon began to produce their own films in the mid-1920s.
As Korean films are so rare, people just go to Korean films anyway
and thus no Korean films lose money. As a result, there have been
quite number of Korean films produced lately. This time Path at the
Twilight, a film whose title already sounds so sweet, has been made by
Joseon Gwonbeon gisaeng’s hands. This film only features gisaeng, and
they say the production has been completed, and it will be released at
the Danseongsa Theater on September 16.
42
Before Path at the Twilight (Nakyangui Gil), which featured some of the most
popular gisaeng affiliated with Joseon Gwonbeon, such as Kim Ran-Ju, Yi Yeon-
41
Gisaeng’s involvement with film as actresses triggered by the strict social gender and class
structures displays a striking similarity to kalavantins in India, performing artists who
belonged to the lowest caste just like gisaeng. As acting and performing arts were widely
considered demeaning careers in India in a similar fashion to Korea, many kalavantins became
movie actresses and a few of them became the earliest stars of Indian cinema. For further
discussion of kalavantins, see Priya Jaikumar, Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of
Transition in Britain and India (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 97-98.
42
Maeil Sinbo, 3 July 1927.
237
Hyang, Kim Yeong-Wol, Kim Do-Hwa, and Yi Bong-Hee,
43
Joseon Gwonbeon
already produced two films in 1925, Love and Brothers (Aewa Hyeongje) and A
Maid and Destiny (Cheonyeonwa Unmyeong).
44
All these melodrama movies by
Joseon Gwonbeon were the chain dramas—hybrids between film and stage
drama— the perfect choice for a gisaeng film as it could incorporate live
gisaeng performances in film screenings. This strategic choice also caused a
problem, because gisaeng actresses who starred in these films were so popular
that they could not travel with the films to cities other than Seoul, and this
engendered a conflict between Joseon Gwonbeon and film promoters.
45
Gisaeng’s contribution to early cinema and modern culture in Korea
defies the general understandings of the relationship between women and
modern culture and cultural space. The discussions in cultural studies of the
female presence in modern cultural spaces center primarily on the figures of
new woman or modern girl. New woman’s engagement with modern culture
is typically linked to the activities of consumption and leisure as well as the
consumption spaces, as either a consumer at arcades and department stores or
as a spectator at a movie theater. Similarly female flanerie and the notion of
43
Maeil Sinbo, 23 July 1927.
44
Sidae Ilbo, 12 May 1925.
45
“Yi Pil-Wu,” Yi Young-ilui Hanguk Yeonghwareul uihan Jeungeonrok 3, ed. Korean Art
Institute (Seoul: Sodo, 2003), 205-208.
238
flaneuse (a female who performed flanerie) are related to either consumption or
prostitution—both in actual and allegorical senses—due to women’s limited
accessibility to male-dominant modern public space. Anne Friedberg points
out, “the female flaneur, the flaneuse, was not possible until she was free to
roam the city on her own. And this was equated with the privilege of
shopping on her own.”
46
In other words, the consumerist space functioned as
modern public sphere where women’s presence was socially tolerable to some
degree, and thus the empowerment of women was primarily associated with
the power in consumerist activities.
This kind of modern woman discourse ultimately limits woman’s
interaction with modern public space to the areas of consumerism and
potentially leaves out other activities of women in urban modernity, and their
other sorts of relations to urban culture. The modern-woman-as-a-consumer
discourse tends to leave uncovered women’s participation in the production
of modern culture, for it assumes that women’s public activity was inevitably
contained in the realm of consumption. In a similar line, many studies of new
woman are often tied to the upper and/or middle class, often marginalizing
women from the other classes. Although the original term “new woman” was
closely tied to the middle class women, the term was eventually contested
46
Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and
London: University of California Press, 1994), 36.
239
among various groups of women and thus its definition broadened. For
instance, in Korea, the term “new woman” entered into popular vocabulary
since the woman’s magazine, Sinyeoseong (New Woman), was published in
1923. When the term was first introduced, the new woman was defined as an
educated, enlightened, and middle class woman who devoted herself to
challenging the traditional gender roles. However, the term began to carry
multiple connotations as its initial definition was defied by many “new
women” themselves, who were disillusioned with the middle class family-
oriented new woman ideology toward the end of the decade. In particular,
Marxist feminism, which quickly became a powerful intellectual trend
beginning in 1924 when fourteen “new women” convene to form a socialist
feminism organization called Friendly Society of Joseon Women (Joseon
Dongwuhoi), defined the new woman in a completely different fashion.
According to Jeong Chil-Seong, a Marxist feminist who used to be a gisaeng,
the new woman is “a proletarian woman who possesses a class consciousness
and will to deny the unreasonable old system and create a new social
environment.”
47
47
Jeong Chil-Seong, “Sinnyeoseongiran Mueot,” Joseon Ilbo, 4 January 1926; and Park Yong-
Ok, “Sinnyeoseonge daehan Sahoijeok Suyonggua Bipan,” Sinnyeoseong, ed. Mun Ok-Pyo
(Seoul: Cheongnyeonsa, 2003), 71.
240
In this regard, “new woman” should not be defined as a universal
term with a singular definition. There were new kinds of women urban
workers such as dancers, singers, actresses, secretaries, waitresses, factory
workers, office clerks, and prostitutes, and their degree of accessibility to
modern public space varied according to their social, economic, and racial
background, and often their urban flanerie was even more limited than the
upper/middle class (white) women or the narrow sense of “new women.”
The link between modern woman’s mobility in urban space and consumerism
may be useful in discovering the woman’s flanerie and thus unsettling the
male-centered definition of flanerie, but it tends to obscure the differences
among the diverse groups of new women. And it is impossible to make sense
of gisaeng’s uniqueness in terms of her class position, gender politics, and her
flanerie with such a narrow understanding of new woman. Gisaeng, as an “in-
between” figure, suggests another possible form of “modern” womanhood
and female flanerie in relation to modern urban culture. Gisaeng were both
consumers and producers of modern culture; she was both a traditional
female figure and a modern woman at the same time; she was an object of
(imperial) male sexual desire and gaze but also a possessor of power in
gender relations; she was a laborer in the emerging capitalist social system
but also an industrialist at the same time; she was still largely enchained by
241
the old class system, but this very class system allowed her to roam public
spaces without restraint as her assumed place in society was not the domestic
space. Her deep involvement with the film culture further proves gisaeng’s
unique social position in Korean society. She was the avid film aficionado but
did not just stay in the audience seat. Gisaeng performed pre-screening shows,
acted before the camera, produced and promoted the films, and managed
movie theaters. Some may say gisaeng were simply exploited by their male
employers who wished to capitalize on the growing popularity of film to
promote their gisaeng business, but they did not quietly follow what she was
told to do; they even went on strike when they were mistreated by their
employers.
48
She did not wear a short cut or high heels, but gisaeng were at
the forefront of the transformation of Korean society.
For the past few years, there has been a sudden spark of interest in
gisaeng in South Korea. Quite interestingly, the publication of a book on
gisaeng in 2002 by Kawamura Minato, a Japanese literary scholar, stimulated
Korean historians to mull over the significance of gisaeng in modern Korean
cultural history and realize the notable absence of scholarly attention to this
ignored cultural figure. Like Yi Mun-Yeol, a renowned conservative novelist
who prefaced Kawamura’s book, some raised a suspicion about the
48
For detailed reports on the strikes by gisaeng, see Maeil Sinbo, 9 October 1925; Jungoi Ilbo, 24
May 1927; Jungoi Ilbo, 25 July 1927; and Maeil Sinbo, 27 December 1927.
242
legitimacy of a former colonizer’s study of Korean culture and history
through gisaeng,
49
while others felt ashamed by the fact that their negligence
was enlightened by a Japanese scholar.
50
A series of scholarly publications on
gisaeng has been accompanied with a surge in productions of movies,
television dramas, and musicals telling the stories of historically famous
gisaeng.
Gisaeng, who were the only successors of female literary and art
tradition in Joseon society, are very attractive cultural item. Especially,
in terms of story telling, gisaeng could provide many amazing stories
and subjects, and also could appeal to the people outside [of Korea].
In near future, gisaeng will be among the nation’s representative
cultural brands.
51
Even before this suggestion was made by a gisaeng expert, the Korea Culture
and Content Agency (KCCA), a governmental cultural organization that
endeavors to export South Korean cultural products, already selected gisaeng
as one of the historical subjects which it planned to “rediscover” for the
purpose of cultural commodification in 2004. As a result, ironically gisaeng,
whose varied contributions to the early film culture in Korea have been
virtually forgotten, apart from her fandom, have suddenly become the media
49
Yi Mun-Yeol, “Chucheonui Geul,” Malhaneun Kot Gisaeng, 17.
50
Shin Hyeon-Gyu, Koteul jabgo (Seoul: Deokgyeong, 2005), 11.
51
Shin Hyeon-Gyu, Gisaeng Iyagi: Iljesidaeui Daejung Star (Seoul: Sallim, 2007), 90.
243
and culture industries’ trendy theme with which South Korea aspires to
resuscitate its struggling Korean Wave (hallyu) and boost up the exportation
of Korean culture. This new attention to gisaeng is not something to welcome,
as gisaeng’s “use-value” is still firmly tied to the nation’s well being. In fact,
the most frequently used phrase to describe gisaeng’s lives during colonial
period is “even gisaeng participated in the independence movements.”
Perhaps the recent fascination with gisaeng might provide an opportunity to
reevaluate the understudied and underappreciated historical and cultural
significance of gisaeng. For now, however, gisaeng’s arts, tragic romances,
hardships, and lavish lifestyles are being recalled from the past to serve for
the nation’s new national project of securing its position in the global
economy.
244
CONCLUSION
In October of 1936, the opening of a new six-story mega-sized theater
(including two underground floors), capable of holding 1,500 spectators,
made the film aficionados in Seoul lighthearted. The Japanese businessman
Ishibashi Yosuke initiated and invested in the project, and the theater was
designed by the Japanese architect Damata Gyoji, who worked in Korea and
already had designed the renovated buildings for Danseongsa (1935) and
Ōgonkan (1936). The Meijiza Theater, which served a multitude of purposes,
accomodating film screenings, stage plays, kabuki, and other performing arts,
was located in Meiji-machi (today’s Myeong-dong), the commercial center of
the Japanese residential area South Village, to which the Japanese popularly
referred as “Kinza of Korea.” It quickly became the landmark of one of the
busiest streets in Seoul. Meijiza remained as the biggest theater in Korea until
the end of Japanese occupation, and the legacy of Meijiza’s grand size and
elegant European style façade and interior were sustained even long after the
colonial period. Meijiza was renamed as Sigongsa in 1947 and brought under
the management of the city of Seoul. The theater survived the Korean War
(1950-1953), and after the war accommodated The National Theater of Korea
from 1957 until 1973, when The National Theater of Korea moved to its
245
current location in the Jangchung-dong area. After being used by private
companies for several decades, the government purchased the building in
2002 and announced its plans to renovate the building into Myeong-dong
National Theater.
1
FIGURE 28. The photos of Meijiza Theater. Joseongwa Geonchuk (December 1936, reprinted in
Issue Jindan 154, April 2004)
The construction and opening of Meijiza was an indicative event that
signaled a new current in the film cultures in Korea during the last decade of
Japanese colonial rule. Although the theater was located in the Japanese area,
in his interview with a Korean-language magazine, its owner Ishibashi states,
“we aim to appeal to all six hundred thousand residents in the great city of
Seoul, not just Japanese migrants.”
2
As a first step in this ambitious plan,
1
For further discussion of Meijiza, see Kim Jeong-Dong,” Saeot ibneun Myeong-dong
Guknib Geukjang.” (Issue Jindan 154, April 2004).
2
Samcheolli 8, no.6 (June 1936), 103.
246
Ishibashi announced that he already arranged the performance of Choi
Seung-Hee, a Korean dance artist who had attained fame across Asia, along
with Japanese kabuki and takaratsuka troupes, for the upcoming opening day
special event.
3
Finally, as Meijiza’s case exemplifies, Japanese movie theaters
began to actively attempt to reach Korean film patrons. Around the time
Meijiza opened, the Japanese and Koreans were no longer segregated at the
cinema. As of 1938, while Korean movie theaters were still dominated by
Korean spectators who accounted for eighty to ninety-percent of their total
patrons, such Japanese movie theaters as Meijiza, Wakakusa Gekijyo, and
Ōgonkan saw the half of their clients in Koreans.
4
In addition to this change
in film patronage, there were other noticeable changes in the mid-1930s. The
Japanese major film firms began to expand their theater chains into Korea,
establishing, purchasing, and managing theaters in Korea. Wakakusa Kekijyo
Theater (1935, Wakakusa-cho, today’s Cho-dong), another mammoth movie
theater, was directly established and managed by Toho company, a major
Japanese film studio. Meijiza was a member of Shochiku theater chain, and
other old Japanese movie theaters such as Kirakukan (Nikkatsu), Naniwa
(Toho and Sinko), Chuokan (Toho), and Keiryukan (Shochiku) became
3
Ibid.
4
Samcheolli 10, no. 5 (May 1938), 25.
247
members of Japanese film companies as well. Korean movie theaters also
underwent significant changes. Joseon Geukjang, one of the three major
Korean theaters from the 1920s, was completely destroyed by a fire in 1936,
and Danseongsa, the leading Korean theater, under new ownership changed
its name to Daeryuk Geukjang in 1939 and later became affiliated with
Shochiku (1941) after years’ of financial struggles. The overall state of Korean
movie theaters was similar to Danseongsa as they lost patronage from
Koreans to the upscale Japanese movie theaters. Most importantly, unlike the
previous decades, Japanese movie theaters began to screen “Korean” films,
the majority of whom were in fact co-produced works between Japanese and
Korean filmmakers. Accordingly, Korean newspapers had ads and reviews of
films screened at Japanese movie theaters. In the end the ethnically separated
film cultures and segregated film exhibition and film-viewing practices
disappeared. As for filmmaking, the collaborative efforts between Japanese
and Korean filmmakers became starkly visible; there was no need or attempt
to disguise those efforts. In fact, they were even encouraged by the empire.
These changes in the film scene in Korea during the last phase of
Japanese imperialism point to the crucial transformations in the very nature
of the Japanese Empire and Japanese colonial rule of Korea. Although these
transformations purport to be direct responses to the empire’s war efforts
248
during its final stage, they had gradually appeared from the second Sino-
Japanese war in 1931. Inevitably, the film cultures in Korea since the mid-
1930s were influenced by the changing nature of Japanese imperial rule. The
silent film era in Korea ended in the mid-1930s as the local film industry
began to produce its own talkies, and the conversion to sound in Korea
coincided more or less with the emergence of coercive policies of the
Governor-General which eventually banned the use of the Korean language,
publication of Korean cultural products, and the importation of American
products, and forced Koreans to change their names into Japanese style under
the newly implemented family registration system (hojeok/koseki, 1939).
Japanese imperialism began to even more aggressively and thoroughly turn
Koreans into imperial subjects. The situation became worse as both Japan and
Korea stepped into the torrent of the World War Two. In the 1940s, the film
culture in Korea underwent yet another transformation. In 1942, the Office of
the Governor-General closed down all the distribution companies in Korea,
launching Joseon Film Distribution Company (Ch ōsen Eiga Haikyusha) to
distribute all films (May 1). Soon all the film production companies were also
closed down, and Joseon Film Production Corporation (Ch ōsen Eiga Seichiku
Kabushiki Gaisha), which was established in September 1942, becoming the
sole production company in Korea. With the establishment of these two state-
249
own film companies, the entire film business in Korea became under the
direct control of the Office of the Governor-General,
5
and the entire film
culture became built on the empire’s propagandist needs. As a result, whether
or not they complied with Japanese imperialism, Korean filmmakers were
forced and obligated to be the associates of the empire’s propaganda machine
if they wished to stay in the film business.
These changes in the film cultures in Korea beginning in the mid-
1930s were associated with the shifts in imperial politics and modifications in
the definition of “Japanese-ness” and “Korean-ness,” which once again
complicates the boundaries of Japanese and Korean national cinemas as well
as the course East Asian film history took. This is the very reason why
“Eclipsed Cinemas” stops here. Too often the colonial film history of Korea is
seen as the monolithic chunk, discounting the differences and variations
throughout almost four-decades of colonial occupation. However, along with
the radically altered practices in production, distribution, exhibition, film
technologies and aesthetics, the new political and social climate, different
imperial policies and politics, and the changing notions of nation or nations
must be considered when approaching to the film cultures in colonial Korea
during the last decade of Japanese colonial rule. Although I focus on the first
5
“Ch ōsen Eiga Seichiku Kabushiki Gaisha Gaiky ō” and “Ch ōsen Eiga Haikyusha Gaiky ō,”
Eiga Junpo (11 July 1943), 35-38.
250
half of colonial film history of Korea, with “Eclipsed Cinemas” I have tried to
lay a foundation for the further studies of this equally critical period for
Korean and Japanese film histories. The explorations of the cinema’s
convoluted relation to Korea’s colonial modernity and Japanese imperialism
and the discursive formations of national and regional film histories and
historiographies, the theoretical backbones of “Eclipsed Cinemas,” can be
foundational for subsequent interrogations of this period. Yet it is my belief
that it also requires different theoretical and historiographical frameworks to
adequately envisage the alterations in the film culture of this period and their
historical, cultural, and social implications, and for this reason the story of
those drastic changes deserves its own extensive study.
251
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Asset Metadata

Creator Kim, Dong Hoon (author)

Core Title Eclipsed cinemas: colonial modernity and film cultures in Korea under Japanese colonial rule

School School of Cinema-Television

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television (Critical Studies)

Publication Date 07/11/2008

Defense Date 05/21/2008

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

Tag History,Imperialism,Japan,Korea,Motion picture industry,Motion pictures,nationalism,OAI-PMH Harvest

Place Name Korea (countries)

Language English

Advisor James, David E. (committee chair), Jaikumar, Priya (committee member), Lippit, Akira Mizuta (committee member)

Creator Email donghkim@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m1337

Unique identifier UC1300539

Identifier etd-Kim-20080711 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-191405 (legacy record id),usctheses-m1337 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Kim-20080711.pdf

Dmrecord 191405

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Kim, Dong Hoon

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 cisadmin@lib.usc.edu