Korean Cinema in Global Contexts: Post-Colonial Phantom, Blockbuster and Trans-Cinema 9789048553112

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Korean Cinema in Global Contexts

Critical Asian Cinemas Critical Asian Cinemas features book-length manuscripts that engage with films produced in Asia and by Asian auteurs. “Asia” refers here to the geographic and discursive sites located in East and Central Asia, as well as South and Southeast Asia. The books in this series emphasize the capacity of film to interrogate the cultures, politics, aesthetics, and histories of Asia by thinking cinema as an art capable of critique. Open to a wide variety of approaches and methods, the series features studies that utilize novel theoretical models toward the analysis of all genres and styles of Asian moving image practices, encompassing experimental film and video, the moving image in contemporary art, documentary, as well as popular genre cinemas. We welcome rigorous, original analyses from scholars working in any discipline. This timely series includes studies that critique the aesthetics and ontology of the cinema, but also the concept of Asia itself. They attempt to negotiate the place of Asian cinema in the world by tracing the distribution of films as cultural products but also as aesthetic objects that critically address the ostensible particularly of Asianness as a discursive formation. Series Editor Steve Choe, San Francisco State University, USA Editorial Board Jinsoo An, University of California, Berkeley, USA Jason Coe, Hong Kong University Corey Creekmur, University of Iowa, USA Chris Berry, King’s College, London Mayumo Inoue, Hitotsubashi University, Japan Jihoon Kim, Chung Ang University, South Korea Adam Knee, Lasalle College of the Arts, Singapore Jean Ma, Stanford University, USA

Korean Cinema in Global Contexts Postcolonial Phantom, Blockbuster, and Trans-Cinema

Soyoung Kim

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Ana Inn (public media art at K-pop square, Coex Mall, 2021) directed by Soyoung Kim (author of Korean Cinema in Global Contexts: Postcolonial Phantom, Blockbuster, Trans-Cinema). Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 914 7 e-isbn 978 90 4855 311 2 doi 10.5117/9789463729147 nur 670 © Soyoung Kim / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2022 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.



Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction

7 11

Part 1  From Pre-Cinematic Culture to Trans-Cinema 1. Cartography of Catastrophe: Precolonial Surveys, Postcolonial Vampires and the Plight of Korean Modernity

25

2. The State of Fantasy in Emergency: Fantasmatic Others in South Korean Film

43

3. Modernity in Suspense: The Logic of Fetishism in Korean Cinema 59 4. “Do Not Include Me in Your ‘Us’”: Peppermint Candy and the Politics of Difference

79

5. “Cine-mania” or Cinephilia: Film Festivals and the Identity Question

97

6. The Birth of the Local Feminist Sphere in the Global Era: Yeoseongjang and “Trans-Cinema”

113

Part 2  Korean Cinema in a Trans-Asia Framework 7. Inter-Asia Comparative Framework: Postcolonial Film Historiography in Taiwan and South Korea

137

8. Postcolonial Genre as Contact Zone: Hwalkuk and Action Cinema 159 9. Geopolitical Fantasy: Continental (Manchurian) Action Movies during the Cold War Era

175

10. Anagram of Inter-Asian Korean Film: The Case of My Sassy Girl

189

11. Comparative Film Studies: Detour, Demon of Comparison and Dislocative Fantasy

195

Index

211

Acknowledgements I would like to thank my teachers in cinema studies and f ilmmaking: Paul Willemen, Annette Michelson, Robert Sklar and Paul Sharits at two graduate schools in the United States. Their commitment to critical theory and practice is a profound source of inspiration and courage for me. I am particularly indebted to the late Paul Willemen for his visionary film theory. The students at the Korea National University of Arts in its founding years were cinephile comrades. Beginning in 1995 I taught the first class committed to Korean film history in South Korea using films from the Korean Film Archive. Watching the classics long banished into national amnesia during the military dictatorship, we were able to engage in discussion, speculation, and laughter. I hope this book reflects those moments of collective discovery. I would also like to thank all the students at the University of California, Irvine, the University of California, Berkeley, and Duke University who took the Korean cinema classes I taught there as a visiting professor. Their curiosity and enthusiasm turned the then famously unknown “national” cinema into effervescent discursive scenes of inquiry. At UC Irvine, in particular, I had the privilege of programming the postcolonial classics in a Korean cinema festival. It was a pleasure to conduct the first ever graduate seminar in Korean cinema with such engaged students. I am grateful to Choi Chungmoo, Linda Williams, Chris Berry and Leo Ching for inviting me to meet a group of wonderful colleagues and invigorating students. Participating in the editorial collective of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies journal has given me the opportunity to realize the significance of collaborative and comparative work for researching, referencing, and writing in the framework of local internationalism in an inter-Asia network. As a collective we have mused over special issues and gatherings in Hsinchu, Taipei, Bangalore, Singapore, Surabaya, Tokyo, Fukuoka, Seoul, and Dhaka. I am especially grateful to Chen Kuan-hsing. His commitment to the interAsia mode of knowledge production and social movement is exemplary. I feel privileged to have been part of this group: Chua Beng Huat, Meaghan Morris, Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Tejaswini Niranjana, Rob Wilson, Ding Naifei, Yoshimi Shunya, Audrey Yue, Fran Martin, and Earl Jackson Jr. I thank friends and colleagues who have joined the academic events of the Trans:Asia Screen Culture Institute, Korea National University of Arts, over two decades. I’d like to believe that it has been conducive to building a collegial trans-Asia platform for people in tune with the inter-Asian effort to establish a kinopolitics for Asian and trans-border cinema. I thank all the

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people involved as staff, presenters and participants over the last 20 years: Hema Ramachandran, Ayako Saito, Feii Lu, Zhang Lu, Koichi Iwabuchi, Park Ruslan, Stephen Teo, Madhusree Dutta, Ma Ran, Kang Jeongsu, Ahn Minhwa, Kwon Eunson, Park Jecheol, Jeong Seunghoon, Kim Sangmin, Nick Deocampo, Jeong Chungsil, Bae Juyeon, Hwang Miyojo, Victor Fan, Steven Lee, Song Lavrenti, Raju Zakir Houssein, Kim Haeyoung, David Scott Diffrient, Hye Seung Chung, Jinsoo An, Ha Seungwoo, Kang Jinseok, Kim Junyoung and Lee Byongwon. With the academic support of the colleagues, the Trans:Asia Screen Culture Institute published ten volumes of The Compendium of a History of Korean Cinema as well as two anthologies in Korean titled Trans:Asia Screen Culture and The Geopolitics of East-Asian Cinema. My thanks go to all the organizers, academic associations and institutions that have invited me over the years. The Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS, Bangalore, India), the National University of Singapore, National Chiao Tung University, National Central University, Napier University, City University of Dublin, the University of Nottingham Ningbo China, the University of London (Birkbeck, Goldsmiths, the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), King’s College London), the Asia Society (Mumbai), the University of Dhaka, UC Santa Cruz, New York University, Columbia University, California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), Northwestern University, Australian National University, Sydney University, Magic Lantern (Pesci, Hungary), Waseda University, Meiji Gakuin University, Gakshuin University, UC Berkeley, the Free University of Berlin, Chengchi University, Washington University, Akademie der Künste der Welt (Cologne, Germany), the Association for Southeast Asian Cinemas (ASEACC), the Association of Education, Boston University. I feel grateful for generous invitations from Laura Mulvey, Ekaterina Degot, Steven Lee, Kyoo Lee, Gaik Cheng Khoo, Olivia Khoo, Yongwoo Lee, Zhang Zhen and Yeon Jaehoon. I would also like to thank my brilliant editors, Steve Choe and Maryse Elliot, at Amsterdam University Press. I’d like to thank Earl Jackson Jr. and Chris Berry for their contribution to the Trans:Asia Screen Culture institute, Korea National University of Arts, as visiting professors. Their genuine friendship and intellectual brilliance have been vital parts of my life. My son, Junsoo, has now become my friend in understanding and caring for his working mother. Last, but not least, I thank my mother, Jeong Sangok, a poet and a wonderful gardener. I could recall a thousand tales we created together but there is one particular moment I remember vividly. After contracting a deadly respiratory disease in a movie theatre at the age of six, I was bedridden

Acknowledgements

9

in the hospital with a hole literally drilled into my throat to enable me to breathe. I saw people dying around me, but one day the snow fell. I asked my mother to take me outside. She pulled my wheelchair away from the eyes of the nurses. As we watched the white snow pile up on the tarnished red bricks of the hospital in Seoul, she told me about her trip to meet her father, who had left his home when it was under colonial rule in the early 1940s. She saw the corpses sprawled on the Manchurian plain ablaze with the surreal crimson sun from the train window. I dedicate this book to my mother, who co-directed that interflowing sequence of cinema, fever, the train, the snow and the sun. She is my light and so is cinema.

Introduction Keywords: trans-cinema, postcolonial archive, cine-mania, inter-Asia, trans-Asia screen culture, comparative film studies

With the benefit of hindsight, it strikes me as quizzical – how could I have set out to conceptualize “Korean cinema” in English, at a time when Korean cinema was still unknown in the Anglophone world? In between writing and editing more than thirteen books in Korean on the issues of gender, colonial modernity and cine-media, I also wrote essays in English, initially to dialogue with friends including the late Paul Willemen and Chris Berry, and then to contribute to Inter-Asia Cultural Studies and other journals. Produced over two decades, the essays collected here do not appear in the chronological order of their publication. Instead, they are organized thematically. This introduction offers a context to bring out the connections between the essays and also to outline the formation of the South Korean cinema culture that was triggered by the cultural turn after the people’s movement, which ushered in democracy at the end of the 1980s. When I returned to Seoul from New York to research my PhD thesis proposal in 1993, I was trying to conceptualize “colonial modernity” and its effects on Korean cinema during the Japanese colonial occupation (19101945). I searched for available films, but there were none in the Korean Film Archive. When I brought up my interest in Korean cinema for my PhD thesis, my advisor understandably told me that it would be impossible to write a thesis about an unknown cinema on which there was almost no scholarship in English. That was even before I confessed that there were no colonial period films available in the archive. However, in stark contrast to the empty shelves at the archive, Korean film culture, energized by an emerging cinephilia, was about to take off around 1995 with new filmrelated institutions, magazines and journals. I was asked to be involved with founding the School of Film and Multimedia at the Korea National University of Arts, where I set up a Cinema Studies Department. The Busan International Film Festival was launched in 1996. In 1996, I was involved as

Kim, S., Korean Cinema in Global Contexts: Postcolonial Phantom, Blockbuster, and Trans-Cinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463729147_intro

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a founding programme director for the Seoul International Women’s Film Festival and a founding co-programmer for the Jeonju International Film Festival. During this dynamic formation of film culture through various film festivals, I wrote a piece titled “‘Cine-mania’ or Cinephilia: Film Festivals and the Identity Question,” demonstrating the conjuncture of cinema, politics and economics in an emergent “cine-maniac” identity. I presented it at an international conference during the Gwangju Biennale in 1997, where internationally renowned scholars such as Meaghan Morris, Chen Kuan-hsing, Naoki Sakai, and Gayatri Spivak met various Korean academics and cultural practitioners for the first time. With the shift in mood from authoritarian regime to civil society and at the inception of the cultural turn, I was able to publish a series of books in Korean. They included Cinema: Blue Flower in the Land of Technology, a monograph on cinematic modernity and gender issues, as well as the anthologies Hollywood: Frankfurt (a translation) and Cine-Feminism: Reading Popular Cinema. While working on these books and building these institutions, I had the privilege of joining the editorial collectives of Traces: A Multilingual Journal of Cultural Theory and Translation and Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. This experience informed my research and writing for years to come. I was particularly inspired by the politics of translation theoretically accentuated in Traces and the construction of a decolonizing inter-Asian referencing system in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. “Modernity in Suspense: The Logic of Fetishism in Korean Cinema” was written for the first issue of Traces, under the theme of “Specters of the West and the Politics of Translation.” To examine local film in a situation at once peripheral and colonial but presently in a global capitalist state, I employed theoretical concepts that could illuminate a set of predicaments in a cinema and a culture that had been created in a manic mode of condensed capitalist development, not to mention seemingly semi-perpetual partition. One such concept is translation as cultural practice. The essay unfolds the translation of the word “fetish,” revealing its complexity through the layers of meaning attached to it in its translation into Korean. In 2000, I set up the Trans:Asia Screen Culture Institute at the Korea National University of Arts. “Trans” in the name points at criss-crossing and multilayered signifying processes of translation and transformation. In the process, “trans” transforms itself from being a prefix to becoming a noun and a verb. I chose the Sino-Korean term 역 (易) to communicate this multitude of meanings. “The Birth of the Local Feminist Sphere in the Global Era: Yeoseongjang and ‘Trans-Cinema’” was written with “trans-cinema” thrown into relief. This essay responds to a marked proliferation of different forms

Introduc tion

13

of feminist production in South Korea. Feminist websites provide a case of activism in the way that they are linked to both existing and newly formed feminist publishing houses, street protests, performances and women’s film festivals. I propose the use of the terms “yeoseongjang” (which I take to mean “women’s sphere”) and “trans-cinema” as a counterstrategy to the operations of legitimation, de-legitimation and exclusion that permeate the dominant discourses, institutional practices and habits of signification underlying the formation of canons and archives, cinematic and otherwise. In particular, “trans-cinema” articulates modes of cultural production as alternatives to the Korean blockbuster, often by reinhabiting the various digital communication devices most closely identif ied with the global capitalism essential to the blockbuster’s hegemony. After laying down the groundwork for the discipline of cinema studies in Korea during the formative period of the cultural turn, I was able to publish a book in Korean on colonial modernity and the horror cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, entitled Spectres of Modernity: The Fantastic Mode of Korean Cinema. Completing this book attuned my research to a more trans-Asian and inter-Asian mode of comparison, encouraged by my encounters at InterAsia Cultural Studies-related workshops and conferences. The four essays “Inter-Asia Comparative Framework: Postcolonial Film Historiography in Taiwan and South Korea,” “Postcolonial Genre as Contact Zone: Hwalkuk and Action Cinema,” “Geopolitical Fantasy: Continental (Manchurian) Action Movies during the Cold War Era,” and “Comparative Film Studies: Detour, Demon of Comparison and Dislocative Fantasy” use the emergent framework of comparative film studies to illuminate the unresolved site of the colonial cinema of Joseon (Korea) under Japanese rule. They accomplish this by mobilizing terms such as “detour and “dislocative fantasy,” departing from the usual mode of the demon of comparison to situate and conceptualize Korean cinema in inter-Asian, trans-Asian and transnational comparative film studies. Within this context, I would like to start this book here with the notion of gae (개 [開]), or “openness,” to illustrate the historical and epistemological conditions of early Korean cinematic culture, which were largely responding to this opening to Western modernity. What gae signified in relation to emerging modernity was the period of gae hang (opening the ports, 1876-1897) and the period of gae hwa (becoming open, or the time of enlightenment, 1897-1910). This opening to the world was a highly ambivalent process, to say the least. It sparked an immediate sense of emergency and crisis, mixed with the slightest bit of suspended hope. Hence, as is discussed in the first chapter of the book in relation to early cinematic culture, its

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trajectory was predictably different from the notion of the public sphere (Öffentlichkeit), even though the 1897 general assembly of the people shares some characteristics with the public sphere. The modern public, public space, and the cinema formed in this Korean trajectory of openness had to come to terms with the contradictions within it. The fear and hope embedded in openness have haunted the historical sites of Korean culture and cinema from The Border (Kukkyung, 1922), purportedly the first “Korean” film set on the border, to The Yellow Sea (Hwanghae, 2010). The sense of crisis conjured up by the contradictions in gae (openness) is overlaid with the long political reign of a succession of states of emergency and the present kind of “entertainment republic” where the Korean wave rules. It might seem odd at first to see an overdetermined leap of this kind from state of emergency to “entertainment republic,” but critical inquiry into colonial and postcolonial Korean cinema requires an understanding of this seemingly incongruous trajectory. This book uses concepts like “state of emergency” and “modernity in suspense” to show how cinema both manifests and participates in constituting the genealogy and archaeological layers of these condensed images of politics and culture. The vibrant landscape of early cinematic culture elsewhere is well-elaborated in the works such as Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company (1991) by Charles Musser. But very few works are written on precolonial and non-Western cinema, where the “international” presence of imperial powers renders a remarkably asymmetrical topography of local cinematic cultures. The combined practice of speech and screen in the form of a film accompanied by a pyonsa narrator (also known in Japanese as a benshi) staggered onto the early modern scene, which was troubled by premodern Joseon in transition as well as Western and Japanese powers. The resulting asymmetry is the first layer of modernity in suspense, which is addressed in the first chapter and the first part of this book. With the primal scenes of early cinema illuminated, this book poses theoretical and historical inquiries into the cinematic culture known as Korean cinema, whose significant films from its founding moments are lost, even though the stories about them are abundant. These lost films – such as Arirang (1926) – have become urban legends and templates for the cinematic culture to come. In the process of writing these essays, I have seen the retrieval of a handful of colonial films, which also contributed to my thoughts about the idea of suspension. The situation compels one to think about how to theorize the postcolonial archive, in order to make a phantom cinema conceptually visible. Given the country’s complex encounter with modernity outlined above, writings on Korean cinema inevitably require

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critical frameworks that are attentive to loss, absence, ruptures, fragments, noises, traces and suspensions, which mark the perilous but surprisingly prosperous trajectory of Korean cinemas, including colonial cinema from 1910 to 1945, and the postcolonial cinema of South Korea from 1945 to the present. Part 1 of this book, “From Pre-Cinematic Culture to Trans-Cinema,” collects a series of essays that attend to this problem and how to understand it. I believe comparative film studies can offer us an ironic detour to theorize the colonial era film-with/out-films situation. Let us call this a comparative mode for an impoverished cinema of an impoverished archive. So far, two kinds of academic inquiries have been made that attempt to address the problem of the extreme paucity of films in the film archive, both driven by a quest for historiography and theorization. One is the quest for the origin of a pure Korean cinema. This approach has driven the first and second generation of film historians and critics. The second approach is exemplified by several current academic works, which have dealt largely with the propaganda films of the late 1930s and mid-1940s, with a heavy focus on censorship. They investigate the cinematic apparatus of the time. Some writings also focus on film and literature in the 1920s and 1930s, including an emphasis on the film novel, which was a genre of newspaper writing, and the influence of film techniques on literary expression, spectatorship and regulations. These essays are well researched and focused, but they are also seamlessly sutured, without acknowledging the postcolonial condition of knowledge production with almost no films in a highly fragmented and scattered archive. This suturing act might be the anxiety of academics towards the theory and historiography of their own subject – a “fantasmatic unity” produced by disavowal of missing reels and an insistence on an ultimate canon centring on Arirang (1926) as a phantom film. In lieu of the film, the literary texts about the film have predictably become favoured research objects. These works are still useful, but they also create an intriguing trajectory of film studies with/out films, because they fail to problematize this loss, either as a point of departure or as an intervention. Theorizing and historicizing “unseen” and “unmade” films (i.e., scripts), or the few leftover films from the colonial period, appears to encourage other forms of investment. This process is a restoration of film culture that relies on written texts: text-based epistemophilia displaces scopophilia by relying on the script, the synopsis and a small and inconsistent collection of retrieved films. This obviously poses a problem, because film theory needs to deal with the “indexical dimension of substances and forms of expression and content to see an articulation of socio-historical dynamics and aesthetic processes at work

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in textual operation,” as Paul Willemen puts it. Composing film theory without films is a daunting task, if not impossible. Even more demanding is conceiving a f ilm theory out of the colonial past, where “knowledge production is one of the major sites in which imperialism operates and exercises […] its power,” which affects the current condition of knowledge production (Chen Kuan-hsing 2010, 211). Therefore, theorizing Joseon film requires two modes of consciousness: attention to film theory with/out films and the postcolonial condition of knowledge production. In an uncanny way, the contemporary predicament of a hollow archive echoes the colonial one where lack of local film production was lamented. My writings are inspired by a sort of semiosis of fragments and guided by genealogy in looking at phantom films in an empty and even hollow archive. I have tried to make meaning out of the damaged afterlife of Korean cinema. I am interested in what is excluded from the canon, and what exceeds archival conservation. My focus includes not only films, but also their audiences, not only texts, but also contexts, and not only objects, but also events. Sometimes I have been tempted to write about historicizing film theory during the colonial period as a detective narrative. In a maze of lost films, one needs the eyes of a detective to find a lead in the hollow stacks of the colonial archive. The colonial film archive meanders through dark alleys infested with feverish people in search of a lost object; a phantom film, which easily lures us into another maze. As much as I am keenly aware of the forceful and coercive threads of the political and the economic in weaving a history of Korean cinemas, I also find it crucial to recognize a disjuncture and a gap of cultural and politico-economic history as well as the specificity of film history. To touch upon the layers of historical time and cinematic time, Korean Cinema in Global Contexts: Postcolonial Phantom, Blockbuster and Trans-Cinema looks at the transformation of South Korean cinema from national to transnational, from cottage industry to local blockbuster mode, and from celluloid-based cinema to digitally diversified trans-cinema. The film texts analysed in the first part of the book offer privileged access to a critical understanding of Korean modern and contemporary history. The f irst essay, “Cartography of Catastrophe: Precolonial Surveys, Postcolonial Vampires and the Plight of Korean Modernity,” looks across three centuries at the trajectory of the South Korean cinema from its contentious emergence in 1897 to its current global dissemination around 2011. The cinemas of the precolonial Great Han Empire (1897-1910) and the contemporary postcolonial Republic of Korea (1948-) are compared and the negotiations between the national and the transnational, which have

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run from the catastrophic to the cartographical as South Korea maintains a state of emergency, are also discussed. These historical pairings expose the uncanny resemblances and effervescent differences generating, in the words of Derrida (2002), “the enervating mobility preventing one from ever stopping,” leading to “a perpetual suspension, a suspension without rest.” The first chapter takes the readers into an unfolding across three centuries from pre-cinema to trans-cinema, from an American surveyor to the candlelight rallies against the Free Trade Agreement between Korean and America and from E. Burton Holmes’s visit to Joseon to a Korean priest’s imaginary journey to Africa in Park Chanwook’s Bakjwi (Thirst, 2009). To situate postcolonial South Korean cinema in its critical contexts, one of the crucial legal and political measures that should be taken into consideration is the long reign of the state of emergency from 1948 to 1991. The state of emergency was proclaimed nineteen times and the security status of martial law was proclaimed seven times. This highly mobilized state of emergency was made possible by the partition and the Cold War, as well as the promise to build a prosperous postcolonial capitalist and modern state out of an impoverished former colony. A state of emergency suspends law. It also suspends every moment of daily life. This suspension affects the legal and the political arena as well as cultural and daily life. During the period of capitalist modernization, this suspended mode was sustained by people’s aspirations mixed with terror, fear, anxiety and tension. It was also a process of torturous complicity arguably characterized as mass dictatorship. Because of colonization and partition, the Korean nation is always understood as something caught up in and, of course, divided by the forces of modernity and imperialism. It is seen as somehow in tension with modernity – both Western and Japanese modernity – and, consequently, modernity continues to be imagined as an unattainable yet somehow desirable state that always exists elsewhere. Non-synchronous synchronicity became the temporal logic before neoliberal globalization. The pressure of global synchronicity produced another layer in the form of the cultural and cinematic forms this book examines. And, in a larger context, this book is also an endeavour to work across culture and politics. For example, understanding how the golden age of South Korean cinema coincides with the state of emergency is a puzzle. The notion of the state of emergency is the critical thread which articulates the politico-economic with the cultural. After mapping from pre-cinema to trans-cinema and from precolonial to neoliberal globalization in “Cartography of Catastrophe: Precolonial Surveys, Postcolonial Vampires,” it is the second essay, “The State of Fantasy in Emergency: Fantasmatic

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Others in South Korean Film,” which continues to interrogate the dynamic of the state of fantasy and emergency enunciated through cinema. Looking at contemporary South Korean films, this essay relies on the conceptual double structure of the “state of fantasy” as articulated in cinema and the “state of emergency” in South Korea’s history to explore the engagement of those films with a set of global-local issues of corporeality and migration that arise in the age of cognitive capitalism. It is the emergency culture and politics that exploded in the Gwangju Uprising and the resultant massacre of civilians in 1980 which finds its way into Lee Chang-dong’s film Peppermint Candy (Bakasatang, 2000). The fourth essay in this collection, titled “‘Do Not Include Me in Your “Us”’: Peppermint Candy and the Politics of Difference,” analyses the film to understand the historical burdens borne by Korean society. I argue that the trauma played out in Peppermint Candy is an endemically male trauma, and the gendered trauma of Korean society rather than “general” trauma. This gendered trauma, which is displayed under the pretence of “progressive” political historiography, renders women’s traumas invisible and unpresentable in public discourse. The male-gendered trauma also blurs the classification of perpetrators and victims by making use of “homosocial” bonding as a platform for spectatorial identification. Considering the complex problematic of historical representation on film, both the critical positioning of historical materials as well as the modes of cinematic representation deployed is taken into consideration. If the critical engagements with the notions of catastrophe, state of emergency and suspension suggest trauma embedded in representational politics, another cinematic layer to be analysed is festival culture. The fifth essay, “‘Cine-mania’ or Cinephilia: Film Festivals and the Identity Question,” interrogates the conjuncture of cinema, politics and economy in an emergent identity position known as “cine-mania.” In the sixth essay, “The Birth of the Local Feminist Sphere in the Global Era: Yeoseongjang and ‘Trans-Cinema,’” I adopt and adapt “yeoseongjang” and “trans-cinema” as specific counterstrategies deployed within feminist cultural-political practices to reframe our understanding of Korean cinema history and intervene in that history. In the mid-to-late 1990s, Korean cinema began to gain world recognition on the international film festival circuit, and the intellectual challenge posed by this transformation animates the second conceptual framework addressed by the chapters in Part 2, “Korean Cinema in a Trans-Asia Framework.” World recognition was amplified by the emergent Korean wave of film, music and television dramas. In 2012, “Gangnam Style” became a ubiquitous marker

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for the Korean wave. Now that Korean cinema has become established as a global cinema that challenges and expands our understanding of the dialectics of national and transnational cinema, it is crucial to examine South Korean cinema with an attention to the intricate dis/continuities, ruptures and intermediations of various constituencies, layers and shifters in national, inter-Asian regional and transnational contexts. To address such foci in ways that can be meaningful both locally and cross-culturally, a comparative approach is taken in Part 2. Animated by the framework of comparative film studies, it interrogates an array of intricate historical connections between Korean cinema, Hong Kong action cinema and other East Asian cinemas as well as Hollywood. This part traces the trajectory of South Korean cinema from its contentious emergence in the peripheral Hermit Kingdom known as Joseon through two “golden ages” to its global dissemination. Korean cinema has been conditioned by and has responded to colonial modernity (1910-1945), Americanism, an authoritarian regime and globalization. Concomitantly, Korean cinematic articulation of gender, class and modernity is deeply affected by a highly condensed capitalist mode of production and reproduction. The perilous but surprisingly prosperous Korean cinema illuminates the traversal of historical crises and epistemic upheavals, including not only political upheavals like colonialism between 1910 and 1945, the Korean War, and the various authoritarian regimes, gae, the impact of the people’s movement in the 1980s and the significant turn to popular culture that provided the platform for the Korean wave and global Korean cinema. This book tries to go beyond a national cinema framework to see the emergence of a cinematic modern world from a once peripheral country. It departs from existing academic works in its attempt to touch upon the various layers of historical time. Over many years of gestation, the essays in this part of the book have developed a coherent critical and contemporary framework that addresses relevant historical questions. One issue – postcolonial film historiography – is dealt with the first essay in this section, “Inter-Asia Comparative Framework: Postcolonial Film Historiography in Taiwan and South Korea.” This essay lays a template for my turn to Asia, which finds its way into Part 2 not only as an area of interest but also in terms of the politics of affect and social geographic imagination. The arrival of “Asia” as a circuit of knowledge production in cultural studies, cinema studies and gender studies demand the critical framework of decolonization emphasized by the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies journal movement, and it also encourages a comparative mode of writing about East Asian cinemas.

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This essay analyses how postcolonial historiography is inscribed in cinema. Two representative films from Taiwan and South Korea, The Puppet Master by Hou Hsiao‐Hsien and Chwihwaseon by Im Kwon-taek, are compared, not only to understand the working of decolonization in cinema but also to understand the impact and effects of colonial history. The notion of postcolonial film-making as an alternative construction of the archive is evoked to locate film practice in the intersecting spaces of repository, historiography, cinematic representation and social memory. The two films are cited as instances of illuminating retrospection on fractured pasts; the almost‐invisible archive and the future are cinematically envisioned by suggesting a sustainable postcolonial episteme in the age of global spectatorship. In the eighth essay, “Postcolonial Genre as Contact Zone: Hwalkuk and Action Cinema,” I argue that shifting the focus from a doubled vision of Europe and Asia to that of Hong Kong and Korea aims to transform the grounds of comparison and contribute to inter-Asian cultural studies by taking a look at the Hong Kong connection in Korean action movies. The ninth essay, “Geopolitical Fantasy: Continental (Manchurian) Action Movies during the Cold War Era,” looks at Asianism in Korea’s “continental” action movies of the 1960s and 1970s. One of the first of these films was made by Jung Changhwa. Jung later worked with the Shaw Brothers in Hong Kong, where he made Five Fingers of Death, which went on to be a big hit in the United States and was later quoted by Quentin Tarantino in his Kill Bill (2003-2004). The nineth essay casts a wryly hopeful glance at pan-Asian hit My Sassy Girl, the first Korean wave movie of its kind, to open up a space of protofeminist discourse. The film’s strong appeal to young women in Asia suggests an inter-Asian anagram. The final essay in this collection, “Comparative Film Studies: Detour, Demon of Comparison and Dislocative Fantasy,” takes the framework of comparative film studies to illuminate the unresolved site of the colonial cinema of Joseon (Korea) under Japanese rule by mobilizing concepts such as detour and dislocative fantasy to depart from the usual demon of comparison. Overall, this book tries to mobilize a polysemic notion of Korean “national” cinema by exploring the intersection of theoretical and historical understandings of Korean cinema. Writing the book presented several challenges. It necessitated not only the analysis of the available films but also of the absence of those that have been lost. Furthermore, critical assessment could not be accomplished by locating Korean cinema within longstanding theoretical debates. Instead, a new theoretical framework needed to be

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developed. In writing about a troubling “national” cinema in trans-Asian and global contexts, what I have tried to keep in mind over the past fifteen years is the possibilities of “cinema otherwise” and the geopolitical “fantasy of elsewhere” that Korean cinema offers in its continual states of emergency. This work has been a search for a heterotopia where the wind blows to open up a breathing space against all the odds of colonial rule, authoritarian regimes, fascism, partition and the manic capitalist drive in a condensed mode. I can only hope that this book might engage its readers to envision it with me.

Bibliography Chen Kuan-hsing. 2010. Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization. Durham: Duke University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2002. Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971-2001. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Musser, Charles. 1991. Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Part 1 From Pre-Cinematic Culture to Trans-Cinema

1.

Cartography of Catastrophe: Precolonial Surveys, Postcolonial Vampires and the Plight of Korean Modernity Abstract This chapter looks across three centuries at the trajectory of South Korean cinema from its contentious emergence in 1897 to its current global dissemination (as of 2011). The cinemas of the precolonial Great Han Empire (1897-1910) and the contemporary postcolonial Republic of Korea (1948-) are compared and the negotiations between the national and the transnational, which have run from the catastrophic to the cartographical as South Korea maintains a state of emergency, are discussed. Keywords: phantom cinema, cultural genocide, Park Chanwook’s Bakjwi (Thirst, 2009), cinephilia, topophilia

Two Trajectories of Phantom Cinema The demon of comparison between the Great Han Empire (1897-1910) and the contemporary postcolonial Republic of Korea (1948-) might sound anachronistic, but it entails encrypted fear, fascination, and the criticality of modernization and globalization. The uncanny pairing of the two periods unveils a perilous, but at times surprisingly prosperous, passage of a troubling “national” cinema, instanced both in precolonial and postcolonial Korea. This kind of historical pairing will expose the uncanny resemblance and effervescent differences in negotiation where “the enervating mobility prevent[s] one from ever stopping,” leading to “[t]he impossibility of stopping, […] a perpetual suspension, a suspension without rest” (Derrida 2002, 13). This research joins the studies on the relationship between the emergence of film and the broader culture of modernity by privileging the moment and

Kim, S., Korean Cinema in Global Contexts: Postcolonial Phantom, Blockbuster, and Trans-Cinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463729147_ch01

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the space of negotiation in precolonial Korea before the Japanese annexation. In doing so, it also draws attention to the intricate, formative connection among screen practices, speech and the public (manmin). I would also like to locate the practice of public speech in the problematic historiography of South Korean film, which has constructed early “national” film history on vanished, lost and rumoured films of colonial times. It has formed a phantom canon of a fantasmatic unity known as Arirang. According to Žižek, the phantom, the “object-impediment,” plays an ambiguous role of guaranteeing fantasmatic consistency (Žižek 2001, 128). The phantom object, the phantom Arirang, in fact, ensures fantasmatic consistency not only for postcolonial Korean society but for the two Koreas – South and North. It, however, exposes a hole, a rupture, and a discontinuity which encourages re-examining the episteme of cinema in Korea. Not dissimilar to the polemics concerning modernity innate or enforced, a historiography of national cinema in the postcolonial period often launches an archaeological task of searching for the native episteme, the historical a priori that grounds knowledge and its discourses and thus represents the condition of their possibility within a particular epoch. As a strategic apparatus, a notion of an episteme enables one to think that the historical a priori of the cinematic apparatus is not only to expand an understanding of cinema but also to comprehend the social apparatus that mobilizes cinema for certain ends. Methodological speculation on “phantom cinema” has been a driving force in film studies. It is a half-way disavowal of a loss. Here I would like to address a certain kind of canon formation, an issue with the postcolonial film archive in which the allegedly most crucial film – Arirang – is lost and invisible but still persists canonically in the various versions of Korean film history. I present this case not so much as a problem but as a problematic that could offer a way to think of the epistemic status of canon construction in a non-Western, postcolonial society. “South Korean cinema” functions as a comprehensive term that includes both postcolonial and colonial cinema. Colonial-period cinema, however, should be further distinguished as Joseon cinema. The first Joseon cinema production took the form of a kino-drama (yeonswaegeuk, a composite of a stage performance and a screening of a short film) under the title Uirijeong gutu (The Battle of Justice, Na Ungyu, 1919), a retaliation story of a modern boy of enlightenment against his step-mother. The Arirang legend began in 1926 around the release of the film Arirang. The film provoked the national sentiments of the colonized at the time and the reception of Arirang shook the whole nation.

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The titular song “Arirang” has become a kind of popular national anthem. Na Ungyu (1902-1937), who was both the director and the star of the film, emerged as the most renowned figure of colonial Joseon cinema. He became an icon of resistance to colonial violence. The film Arirang exceeded itself and was elevated to an extra-cinematic event. Although the f ilm itself cannot be found on the hollow shelves of the Korean Film Archive, the song “Arirang” and the film’s canonical status haunt the contemporary scenes of Korean cinema and culture. Arirang, based on Na Ungyu’s script, now lost, was created by Joseon Kinema, a f ilm company set up by the Japanese Yodo Torajō in 1924 that produced four films. Notwithstanding the fact that a Japanese production company produced Arirang, the film was perceived as something that viscerally penetrated the heart of the colonized. The actual loss of the film itself, vis-à-vis a sense of loss in the film, doubles its mythic status in the canon. Hence, it is often the case that writings on Joseon cinema begin and end with Arirang. It is praised as part of the canon both in South Korea and in North Korea. This response is unusual considering the powerful remnants of the Cold War mentality on the post-Cold War Korean Peninsula. Quite possibly Arirang may be the only modern text that is canonized in both Koreas. The Korean Film Archive did not possess any colonial period films until 1998. This is a bit extreme since two-thirds of the silent films for which we have records showing they existed have been lost. In his introduction to Lost Films of Asia, Nick Deocampo (2006) deplores this result as cultural genocide. The historiography of postcolonial film is built on the empty shelves of the archive during the Cold War. With scarce reference materials and a haunting historiography that was built on empty or hollow epistemic violence, one needs inspiration and imagination to reconstruct a past that would offer indexical and symbolic historical moments. Only very recently did the Korean Film Archive retrieve a couple of colonial period films. In 2007 it acquired Cheongchunui sipjaro (The Crossroads of Youth, 1934) and Mimong (Empty Dream, 1936), the oldest ones ever rediscovered, which are not that early considering that 1919 was the first year a kino-drama was performed. In the absence of colonial Joseon films in the archive, post-liberation film historians have been fixated on the quest for the origin of Joseon cinema. Their questions revolve around the search for the first film and its origin: When was the first film screening in Joseon? Which was the first Joseon cinema production? Was it Gukgyeong (State Border) or Wolhaui Maengse (Pledge under the Moon)? They construct countless accounts to capture a

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point of origin, the search becoming a compulsive and obsessive fixation on the first event. Precisely because this historiography is conditioned and driven by a mode of knowledge production of the colonial modern, it vehemently re-engages itself with the alleged Western notion of the origin and the archive. Derrida reminds us that the root of the word archive, the Greek arkhe, means both commencement and commandment. Whereas the shelves of the postcolonial archive are empty, the desire of the historian fills them with the quest for origin (Derrida 1998). An excessive illumination on a lost cinema via canonization evokes a vengeful phantom which flashes in the desperate optics of the deprived.1 Simply stated, a phantom is an apparition or spectre, but it also means an illustration, part of which is given a transparent effect so as to permit representation of details otherwise hidden from view, similar to that of the inner workings of a mechanical device. The employment of the term “phantom cinema” signifies the problematic status of the spectral canon in the postcolonial archive. This term also endeavours to suggest an alternative film historiography. The recently retrieved films have missing reels, noise, and physical damage. The propaganda film Jiwonbyeong (A Volunteer, 1941) has a sequence in which a character says goodbye and then immediately disappears into the void due to missing footage. This creates an instant critical distance and leads one to entertain the idea that the film is a farce rather than serious propaganda. In Jibeomneun cheonsa (The Angel without a Home, 1941) there is some interesting missing footage. In the first shot, a policeman asks a boy, “Is it true that you snatched these shoes?” The boy’s answer is part of the missing footage, and then we see a Japanese officer saying that he would punish the boy at the police station. A missing part of this kind unwittingly lays emphasis on the illogical brutality of the Japanese authorities. The missing reels, noises, dissonance and distantiation in propaganda films involuntarily reveal repression and subvert the “original” meaning.2 How should we think about a history of national cinema grounded in canonical film which is no longer available on the screen? Cinema was posed to the colonized as both the enlightenment and a predicament of modernity. So much was invested in cinema. Hence extra cinematic practice 1 I would like to thank Professor Earl Jackson Jr. for his suggestion on the notion of phantom. My template of terms is composed of invisible cinema/empty archive/hollow archive. 2 I would like to thank Park Minseok who pointed this out in a Korean cinema class for first-year students after listening to my lecture on the invisible cinema problematic.

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exceeds the cinema itself. Claiming and constructing a national cinema known as Joseon cinema during the colonial period was indeed a struggle for a semiotic sphere of nationhood – a promise of semiotic anarchy when sovereignty was suspended (I Yeongil 2006). The scenes of the Korean Peninsula from 1876 to 1910 present themselves as Urgeschichte, a prehistory of globalization in Korea. After the Treaty of Shimonoseki and independence from China, the Great Han Empire – the modern Korean monarchy – was founded in 1897. Despite its grandiose title, it has not been a favoured popular subject of national history due to a long chain of catastrophes in endured, including colonization, the Korean War and subsequent partition, and the neo-Cold War. After opening to Japan in 1876, Joseon sovereignty was constantly challenged by Japan, Russia and the United States. Notwithstanding the fact that Joseon sovereignty was questionable as a tributary state, it had maintained a relatively stable but stifling dynasty for over five centuries. China’s influence over Korea, however, waned after Japan’s victory in the First Sino-Japanese War (18941895). The Japanese officials’ brutal assassination of Empress Myeongseong and the burning of her body in the palace courtyard left indelibly traumatic scars on Koreans. At this time people were electrified and impassioned to construe, construct and disseminate the modern forms of media and participate in all kinds of public events that the newly independent nation could imagine. Tongnip sinmun (The independent) and Hwangseong sinmun (The imperial capital gazette) pioneered efforts to provide Korean-language publications. The Independence Club, meanwhile, organized a series of public forums called the General People’s Assembly (Manmin Kongdonghoe) where people were encouraged to deliver speeches and take part in discussions regardless of their class, caste or gender. It was during this incipient formation of a public that a cinematic culture emerged. Jo Huimun’s 1992 PhD dissertation on Korean film history entitled “Chochangg ihangugyeonghwasa yeongu (1896-1923)” (“Early Korean f ilm history [1896-1923]”) traces the f irst cinema introduced in Korea. The author writes that the American traveller, photographer, and film-maker E. Burton Holmes showed the first film to the court in 1898. Indeed, that was the time when he visited Korea as part of his world tour with a 60 mm motion picture camera. He and his staff shot images of the streets of Seoul and showed them to the imperial family before he later screened them during illustrated lectures, he delivered in tours all over the United States. The incorporation of Holmes into the primal scene of Korean film culture, or as the first film ever shown, is quite symptomatic

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not to mention counterfactual. The famous writer Sim Hun noted in 1929 that the first screening of a film in Korea happened in 1897 for the Japanese settlers in Seoul (Sim Hun 1929). Charles Musser demonstrates that Holmes’s travel lectures constituted the screen practice of early American cinema at the end of the nineteenth century. In the chapter entitled “Full-Length Programs: Fights, Passion Plays, and Travel,” the crucial destinations of his travels are mentioned, which include Hawaii, the Philippines and Japan (Musser 1994, 221-223). Early American cinema oftentimes constitutes a crucial component of any national cinema formation, but Jo Huimun’s historiography provokes a series of questions and complexities. The first is the problem of phantom, invisible and imaginary cinema at the hollow archive. The second is the influence of the continuous (post-)Cold War condition of South Korea, whose semi-sovereignty relied heavily on the United States. South Korean film historiography is deeply affected by the Cold War mentality and US dominance. Hence, South Korean f ilm scholars emphasize American influence and the entrepreneurial practices embedded in early cinema spectatorship, such as the promotion of trolley cars and cigarettes. Such American influences undeniably played a non-negligible role in a constellation of cinema, modernity and an Urform democracy, but they did not constitute an exclusive influence.

Topophilia and Cinephilia There is a term in Korean, gugyeong, which means “sightseeing,” “watching,” or “looking around.” With the coming of photography and the screen, the technology of seeing was subjected to the shift from gugyeong (looking) to screen practice and the practice of the administration of power and knowledge. It is a site where cinephilia and topophilia meet – the warehouse, new movie theatres and new department stores. As I read E. Burton Holmes’s illustrated travelogue published in 1901, I paused at his foreseeing Pusan as one of the termini of a future trans-Asiatic line surpassing Vladivostok and Port Arthur in proximity to the many travelled waterways of the Far Eastern seas (Holmes 1908). The trans-Asiatic railway would link Japan and Korea to the trans-Siberian line. The transAsiatic line was to be impaled by the imperialist imaginary of the American Pacific (Eperjesi 2004, 86-104). Holmes travelled from Beijing to Jemulpo on a steamer of the Nippon Yūsen Kaisha, the imperial mail line of Japan, with the motion camera that would provide the visual materials for his

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travelogue.3 Holmes took many still photos and moving pictures while in Korea. His photos include the Kwangmu emperor and the crown prince, the cities of Pusan and Chemulpo, a Japanese hotel, an American railway, Horace Allen’s summer villa, a suburban station and the station in Seoul, the Station Hotel and rice paddies. He also photographed people, including his translator, and a mixture of newly built, Western-style buildings and examples of old dynasty architecture. 4 Among the photographs Holmes took during his travels in Korea, there is one image that particularly draws attention. It is a surprisingly complicated photo and shies away from the usual takes on the rural and the emergent urban landscapes. One sees Korean men of all ages and different classes on both the left and right sides. In the back there is a crowd of people overlaid with trees, houses and a hill in the back. Also on the left side, there is a stretch of houses with a long wall. Despite the many objects in the photo, the photo seems highly condensed because of the level of intensity in the people’s gazes towards the object in front of them. The photo exudes “narrative compression,” or the impetus to define a “significant moment,” to establish a photographic shorthand by which an instance stands in for the entire event. It provides us with an “unstable mix of photographic cues – topographic, physiognomic, and narratological” (Pryzblyski 1995, 259). They are all gazing at something or a happening going on in front of them. There is also a Caucasian man who sticks out in his well-tailored suit and an instrument mounted on a tripod. This man also gazes in the same direction as the rest of the people, but his right eye is fixed on the view finder. The orchestration of gazes is well staged in this photo. What is it these people are so engaged in looking at? They are looking at Holmes and his staff. In his travelogue on Korea, Holmes foresees something close to an editing table or a computer. He wishes to reproduce the sensation he felt in the streets of Seoul for his readers. Could cinematograph pictures be projected on the pages of this book, or exhibited by means of some simple little instrument that could be operated on the library-table (and this now bids fair to be soon accomplished), 3 Holmes was the son of a Chicago banker and travelled with his family while in his teens. Holmes gave his f irst travel lecture at the Chicago Camera Club in 1891. Two years later he became a professional photographer/cinematographer. 4 For images, please review the Korea Times website. http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/ news/nation/2010/12/117/-77875.html.

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then one of our motion-pictures would at this juncture reproduce for the reader the sensations we enjoyed while dashing along the thoroughfares of Seoul on one of those swift trolleys, first toward the East Gate from the straw-roofed suburbs, the gate looming bigger and bigger, until at last we curve through a courtyard, and plunge into the tunnel-like arch from which we emerge to skim straight away up the main street of Seoul, scaring horses, and spreading dismay among the white-robed denizens of the Korean Capital. (Holmes 1908, 61-62)

The film is still available. It indeed conveys the sensations Holmes felt on the street. It also captures the curious gazes of people spotting the camera. After taking images of the streets of Seoul, Holmes showed them to the Korean imperial family, his first audience. Holmes gave a motion camera to the princess as a gift. Elsewhere, I argued the significance of this exchange as the logic of fetishism (see Chapter 3, this volume). At the time Holmes travelled Korea with his motion picture camera, Americans had established electricity in Korea (the Seoul Electric Co.) and trolley cars in Seoul.5 The ceremony marking the beginning of construction of the trolley car line was held in September 1898. The trolley ran for 8 kilometres, from the Great West Gate to Cheongnyangni. Horace Newton Allen, an astute businessman who helped build the trolley cars and the electricity infrastructure, was a key figure in developing the alliance between Korea and America. Having originally come to Korea as a Protestant missionary, Allen later became a trusted court doctor. He was a household name by the time he set up the first modern hospital, the founding institution of Yonsei University. Although Korea was profitable for him, he was deeply pessimistic about its future. He called Joseon the land of the “Cold Gray Calm of the Morning After” (Harrington 1980), a wicked parody of the well-known description of Korea as the “Land of the Morning Calm.” In addition to their activities with electricity and trolley cars,6 Henry Collbran and H.R. Bostwick from the Seoul Electric Co. also showed films to Korean audiences at a warehouse in Dongdaemun (later Dongdaemun Hwaldong Sajinso) in June 1903. They organized the screening as the first exhibitors. It was the first public screening after a series of screenings at 5 Seoul Electric Company was founded in 1898. The Kwangmu Emperor subsidized the construction and Collbran provided the expertise. Collbran took advantage of Korea’s lack of knowledge of international trade and made a profit by showing the films in the company’s warehouse, earning upwards of 100 won per day. 6 Seoul Electric Company changed its name to American Korean Electric Company after seeking an investment of 300,000 won+ from Empire Trust Company-USA.

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various places, including a hotel. In Allen’s land of the “Cold Gray Calm of the Morning After,” the first public screening was written into the burgeoning and irresistible assemblies of empire: electricity, transportation, photography and cinema. Unlike the shadow puppet play found in China, Indonesia and Thailand, often conceived as a precursor to cinema, premodern Korea had hardly any screen practices. Here, screen practice concerned projected images such as the magic lantern and their audio complement. With the relative absence of screen practice, the screen raised in front of the warehouse created a way in which people could congregate in public and view the event happening in front of them. In this way, this public space stimulated a new practice of viewing. E. Burton Holmes’s visit to Korea in 1899 came one year after the General People’s Assembly submitted its Six Charter Articles (Heonuiyukjo) in 1898. On the surface the petition seemed to endorse absolute monarchism, but it was actually intended to limit the power of the monarchy. It contained the spirit of republicanism as it proposed that the monarch reign while actively deliberating with the people. Hence, one does not need to be a detective to surmise that the people in the photo of the congregated crowd could have taken part in the General People’s Assembly, said to have been attended by as many as 10,000 people from diverse social classes. The members of the lowest class were elected as representatives, and women and children also attended the assembly.

General People’s Assembly The physical setup of the screen itself seemed to involve practices other than just screening. Screen practice in this instance appeared to be synchronized with the general assembly of people who advocated republicanism. The leaders of the Independence Club and the newspaper Tongnip sinmun (The independent) tried to teach people how to speak in public. Seo Jaepil (aka Philip Jaisohn), a political activist and physician who founded Tongnip sinmun, and Yun Chiho, a prominent political activist and nationalist intellectual, saw public speaking as the means to raise people’s consciousness and help them achieve enlightenment. Seo Jaepil said he was inspired by Fukuzawa Yukichi: The public address is called a “speech” in English; it is a method to deliver one’s thought. In our country, there is no such a thing. […] In the West, they make speeches frequently. They make speeches in the parliament, at academic conferences, at companies, in citizens’ groups, at ceremonies,

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at the opening of shops, and even in small meetings of ten persons. They deliver speeches to people on what the meeting is about and what they think and what they feel. (Sin Jiyeong 2005, 15)

All classes of people were encouraged to participate in public speaking. People were led to believe that even members of the the lower classes should be respected as speakers (Sin Jiyeong 2005). The spectators, composed of all different classes, in front of the screen at the warehouse movie theatre, were not dissimilar to the composition of people attending the General People’s Assembly. Returning to the photograph by Holmes, the level of intensity of the people caught in the practice of looking ironically hints at a kind of curiosity, tension and anxiety, a vicissitude of energies that was inscribed in and embodied by the previous year’s assembly. One could witness an array of topographic, physiognomic and narratological cues simultaneously in negotiations with off-frame realities. The photo is encompassing and ambitious; he not only includes thirteen people but houses to the side, a crowd gathering and a hill in the background. The white man is measuring the distance in the foreground, while the American traveller is shooting 60 mm film of the background. It is indeed two distinctive gazes of imperial expansion. It is also a flash moment of negotiation between geographic knowledge and photographic capturing. Taking the foreigner surveying the landscape and E. Burton Holmes together, both in and off frame, we catch a little sign of techno-capitalist advances in the streets of Seoul. The caption tells us that the title of the photo is of an “American surveyor.” Where would this photo, acting like that of a signpost, take us to? The alleged photographer’s aptitude for topographic and physiognomic description allows us to receive a stable mix of photographic cues. The caption suggests an uncanny resemblance of the surveyor to the photographer, cinematographer Oscar Depue. Without a caption one might mistake the surveyor for a cinematographer provoking wonder in the onlookers. Indeed, a child on the far left and next to a soldier stares at the surveyor, unlike the rest of the people. The photograph offers an intricate template of geographical enquiry and cinematic moment which is in no way purely contingent or accidental. What the American surveyor sees is unknown to us. Presumably it is something to do with the future construction of electrical infrastructure or trolley lines, two of many projects Bostwick and Collbran completed over the coming years.7 One could also contend that this photo is highly staged. The issue 7 Henry Collbran and H.R. Bostwick from the Seoul Electric Co. were mostly interested in constructing a power plant, establishing an electricity and telephone company, and establishing

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with the arrangement, however, still stands. This uncanny image reveals two kinds of operations that are closely entangled in the moment where modern geography meets cinematography. The surveyor sees the cinematographer and vice versa. This image also encourages us to see other manifestations, such as cinema, geography and urban planning. The people’s curiosity to understand and to observe is closely linked to the increasing demand for social justice and political reform which culminated at the time in the General People’s Assembly and the visibility of women as contributors to Tongnip sinmun (Seo Huigyeong 1898).8 Seo Huigyeong argues that the 1898 General People’s Assembly was the founding moment of “democratic republicanism” which anticipated the March First Movement of 1919, and the establishment of a separate southern government (Namhan Dandok Jeongbu Surip) in 1948. Whereas the Six Charter Articles submitted by the assembly to the Gwangmu emperor embodied absolute monarchism in formality, it proposed that the monarch reign together with active deliberation with the people. This is the essential spirit of republicanism. The Gwangmu emperor, however, rejected it and promulgated the Constitution of the Great Han in August 1899, ending hopes for a “politics through deliberation” between the monarchy and the people and destroying any reasonable expectation of a social contract between them. Thereafter, Koreans lost their political aspirations for democratic republicanism promoted by the Independence Club and the General People’s Assembly. This result led to the Eulsa Protectorate Treaty between Korea and Japan. This moment, marked by the beginning of the appearance of the motion camera, was coeval with the people’s demand for democracy. At this time there were also strikes and protests that included the burning of trolley cars and the raiding of the Honda Shinnosuke photo studio run by a Japanese businessman. The national identity of Korea was in crisis; the nation was besieged by great imperial powers and also suffered under the corrupt Yi dynasty feudal system. On the eve of cinematic modernity, a critical intellectual noted this problem. On September 14, 1901, Hwangseong sinmun ran an article entitled “The Activity of Photography Exceeds the Activity of People.” The writer introduced moving pictures as “photos which are arranged so they move” mines. Construction of the trolley car that ran from Namdaemun to Hongneung began in 1898 and was completed in May 1899. The construction of the Tongdaemun power plant began in 1898 (O Jinseok 2007). 8 “Gwanmingongdonghoe saseol” reports six articles. It was issued by the association of Independence.

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and further explained that the moving pictures were composed of photos and cinematography. The two constituted hwalhwa, literally “moving pictures.” The photos were arranged and set into motion, allowing the photographed pictures to become the body while electricity animated the pictures. The writer also reported that audiences marvelled at this early cinema and were amazed by its peculiarities. What is of particular interest in this article is that the moment the local audience understood the way moving pictures worked, they wondered when it would be possible for Koreans to master the technology.9 The writer found this troubling and did not want people to be active only in moving pictures but also to be active in other ways. Even though the fate of the country was uncertain and it was threatened by foreign powers, the people were not active in resisting the dangers. The activity of the people in moving pictures (hwain) was more vital than that of real people (saengmin). Thus, in his allusion to the animated pictures, the author did not want the development of motion pictures but rather the development of the people’s engagement in society. His short essay was illuminating in its understanding of the politically charged field of signification that was laid down for moving pictures at the time. What was admired about moving pictures then was their ability to move, advance and endow people with a full vitality (hwal). “Vitality” was a word that was also used for moving pictures (hwaldongsajin). In contrast with the vitality and the lively people found in moving pictures, the author perceived Korea and its people to be lacking in energy. Noting that Korea was vulnerable to big powers such as Japan, Russia, Germany, America and Great Britain and recognizing the absence of vital power (hwalgi) among the Korean people, the author wished to transpose the vitality of moving pictures from actors to people so that they could become the agents of their own history. As American and Japanese surveyors kept themselves busy, geopolitical mapping was being aggressively redrawn in the region. Geographical discourse transforms a dispersed geographical area into an abstract unit. It was also the moment Korea was seen as a crucial Asian geopolitical strategic unit by various imperial powers. The Korean Peninsula became a strategic site for Russia and Japan when they started to shift their attention to the trans-Asiatic space. Korea, having the geographical description of a peninsula connecting Japan to the continent, was frequently evoked as Japan wanted control of Korea as part of its trans-Asiatic ambition (which was later declared as the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere). Russia wanted an ice-free port on the Korean Peninsula. Korea’s premodern geo-fixation to China (Beijing central) was radically challenged at this time. Geopolitics 9 Ibid.

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surpassed other aspects of political attention. There was a proliferation of critical issues at the border (Schmid 2002). It was in this context that Jang Jiyeon, the editor-in-chief of the Hwangseong sinmun, wrote the introduction for a text by Jeong Yakyong called An Investigation of Our Nation’s Territory (Abanggangyakgo). Jang Jiyeon emphasized the transformative notion of the state (kuk) argued by Jeong Yakyong, a Practical Learning scholar of the early nineteenth century. Kuk used to mean either a feudal territory or tributary of the Chinese Empire, but its meaning had changed to indicate a territory independent of China. “Three thousand li” or “eight provinces, rivers, and mountains” are terms that reflect this notion of state as being territorially independent. Thus, the issue of the borders separating Korea from China and Japan is one of the major topics in Jang Jiyeon’s columns. Syngman Rhee (Seungman I), a college student during the period of the Great Han Empire and the future first president of the Republic of Korea, was also acutely aware of the geopolitics of the modern nation-state in a system of sovereign states. He was keenly aware of the threats posed not only by Japan but also by Russia. He relied on America and went to meet Theodore Roosevelt on August 4, 1905, to ask for the independence of Korea, quoting the US’s Open Door Policy. What he did not know was that in the week before he met with Roosevelt, the Taft-Katsura Agreement had been signed, acknowledging Japan’s rule over Korea. After the United States yielded Korea to Japan, Rhee did not try to restore the monarchy but rather to establish the sovereignty of a modern nation-state. Choe Namseon, a renowned writer who founded the magazine Sonyeon (Youth), majored in geography in Japan and wrote poems such as “From the Ocean to the Boy,” yearning for an unmarked territory beyond nomos. His poems have been perceived as imaginary or fictional, yet also as protests against Japanese annexation. He is also well known for his map of Korea in the form of a tiger. Issues of border making, the founding of modern media such as newspapers and magazines, and instituting geography as a new discipline occupied important places in his work (Schmid 2002). Topophilia emerged at the borders – the Yalu River area as the space of ritual and Manchuria as an in/between space. This spatial consciousness of the border triggered his geographical imagination, which rapidly found its way into literary and cinematic representation.10 In a word, the desire of 10 Many writers noted the signif icance of geography in his poems (Gwon Jeonghwa 1990; Gwon Donghui 2004). His poems have been described as a geographical project. One of the most famous poems is “From the Ocean to the Boy” (I Jongho 2008).

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intellectuals to map out the nation was in competition with the imperial powers’ hegemonic struggles over the Korean Peninsula. Geographical knowledge and its production were thus the objects of intense intellectual activity in this period. From 1880 to 1910, foreigners wrote extensively on their travels in Korea. Fifty of these travelogues, including that of the geographer Isabella Bishop, have been translated into Korean. This encompassing awakening to modern geography and border issues on the Korean Peninsula acted as a passage into the capitalist modernity of the global system. The relationships among photography, cinematography and entrepreneurial practices are well researched. In his very intriguing construction of historical sequences Jo Huimun states that 25 years passed from E. Burton Holmes’s first showing of his film to the Korean court in 1899 to the first screening of the Korean film The State Border (Gukgyeong) at the Danseongsa Cinema in January 1923. He drastically short-circuits the first screening of the film by Holmes and the first production of The State Border. This claim is ushered in by a double articulation of the Cold War and the postcolonial condition. What this short circuit indicates first is a formation of national film historiography during the Cold War and all the aforementioned anxieties related to the “phantom” cinema phenomenon. Therefore, the disproportionate reference to American influence becomes a constituency of an Ursprung (origin), the primal scenes of Korean cinematic culture. The pursuit for and identification of the very first Korean (Joseon) film has been one of the most contested areas in Korean film studies. In the debates, the film The State Border has become a “problem.” This lost film deals with the happenings at Andong (modern-day Dandong) on the border between Korea and China on the Yalu River. According to the newspaper, it seems that the film was publicized and screened but was removed from the theatre after the first day of screening. It is not clear what provoked this, but it is not terribly difficult to guess that this film touched upon the territorial, racial and historical aspects of the border disputes. Whereas the entrepreneurial practice of exchange between the admission ticket to the film screening and tobacco is well-discussed,11 there is little debate about the relationship between an emergent sphere like the General People’s Assembly, the practice of public speaking and the politically charged atmosphere. The General People’s Assembly provided a training ground for public speaking, a modern form of communication. Therefore, we see a 11 Theatre admission fees were much more expensive than those for the makeshift screening in the warehouse, a mere 10 Jeon – equivalent to the price of a bowl of beef meat soup (seollongtang).

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constellation of speech and screen practice that transformed the practices of viewing, which involved relationships of power, where one negotiates social relationships and meanings. In this context, the role of the film narrator (Korean: byeonsa, Japanese: benshi) during the 1910s might be rethought as more of an enlightened lecturer who reinvented the tradition of the storyteller and the performer after completing the entire process of speech-discussion practices. During the Great Han Empire unruly struggles were being waged among the imperial powers and the annexation of the Korean Peninsula was soon to come. The instability brought by the General People’s Assembly and their speeches and discussions were thus to some extent cartographic and, moreover, a means to disseminate the constituents of a future democracy. The Cold War-clouded vision of the film historian, however, overlooked the relationship between the screen and speech practices of the time.

Criticality and Care Labour By evoking the vision of a trans-Asiatic railway line, which points at the turbulent catastrophic trajectory of the first phase of globalization in Korea, I would like to relate the quizzical path suggested in the recent film Thirst (2009), directed by Park Chanwook. The film begins with the strange journey of a Catholic priest, played by Song Gangho from Korea, to Africa, where he is infected by a vampire virus. The film marks the contemporary age with a series of world crises, including the predicament of the capitalist system and global warming while a sense of criticality is covered by speedy, spectacular and spectral representation (Wilson 2003). Vampires in Thirst, motherhood in Mother (2009), directed by Bong Junho, and domestic labour in The Housemaid (2010), directed by Yim Sangsu, display intriguing forms of care labour which ironically surface as compelling agency within the catastrophic age of neoliberalism where emotion, care and affect lay claim to the happiness industry. In the neoliberal globalized world, women and female characters are imposed upon to provide various types of care labour. The task of critics is to contextualize the seemingly personal and private despair and the sense of dead-ended-ness in the larger structure and to bring a sense of diagnostic understanding of the future of cinema and society. In 2008, there was an impressive protest initially organized by teenagers against the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between the Republic of Korea and the United States. Their concerns included the prospect of importation of

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beef thought to have been infected with mad cow disease. The people congregated in Gwanghwamun Square, which had been used as a site of the General People’s Assembly, along with the Jong-ro area. Some called this candlelight protest a new General People’s Assembly.12 We, the offspring of manmin, are in the dark holding a candle in front of a gigantic LG or Samsung LED screen while the independent webcast “afreeca.com” runs at a full speed.

Bibliography Deocampo, Nick. 2006. Lost Films of Asia. Manila: Anvil Manila. Derrida, Jacques. 1998. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2002. Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971-2001. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Eperjesi, John. 2004. The Imperialist Imaginary. Hanover: Dartmouth College Press. Gwon Donghui. 2004. “Choe Namseon ui chiri sasang kwa Sonyeonjiui jirigyoyukjeong gachi.” Hangukjirihwangyeonggyoyukakoe 12(2): 219-228. Gwon Jeonghwa. 1990. “Choe Namseon ui Chogijeosureseo natananeun jirijeong gwansim.” Eungyongjiri 13. Harrington, Fred Harvey. 1980. God, Mammon, and the Japanese. New York: Arno Press. Holmes, E. Burton. 1908. Burton Holmes Travelogues, Volume 10: Seoul, Capital of Korea; Japan, the Country; Japan, the Cities. New York: McClure. Hwangseong sinmun. 1901. “Sajinhwaldongseongui saenginhwaldong” [“The activity of photography exceeds the activity of people”]. Hwangseong sinmun [The imperial capital gazette], September 14. I Jongho. 2008. “Choenamseonui jirihakjeong gihoek gwa pyosang.” Sang Heohakbo 22 (February): 275-303. Illouz, Eva. 2007. Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press. I Yeongil. 2006. Hangugyeonghwajeonsa [Korean film history]. Seoul: Sodo. Jo Huimun. 1992. “Chochangg ihangugyeonghwasa yeongu (1896-1923)” [“Early Korean film history (1896-1923)”]. PhD thesis, Chungang Taehakkyo. 12 The following blogs on Naver.com discuss the similarity between the 2008 candlelight vigils and the General People’s Assembly: http://blog.naver.com/dunhil67?Re direct=​ Log&logNo=110031909520; http://blog.naver.com/mapd3692?Redirect=Log&l ogNo=90032376244; http://blog.naver.com/velato?Redirect=Log&logNo=70032319568 (all accessed November 2, 2010).

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Musser, Charles. 1994. The Emergence of Cinema: The America Screen to 1907. Los Angeles: University of California Press. O Jinseok. 2007. “1894-1904-Nyeon Hanseongjeongihoesaui seollipgwa gyeongyeong byeondong” [“The establishment of the Seoul Electric Co. and its management shift from 1894 to 1904”]. Tongbang hakji 139 (September): 175-239. Pryzblyski, Jeannene M. 1995. “Moving Pictures: Photography, Narrative, and the Paris Commune of 1871.” In Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, ed. Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz, 253-279. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schmid, Andre. 2002. Korea between Empires, 1895-1919. New York: Columbia University Press. Seo Huigyeong. 1898. “Daehanmingung geongung heonbeop.” Tongnip sinmun [The indepdendent], November 1. Seo Huigyeong. 2006. “Daehanmingug geongukeonbeobui yeoksajeong giwon (1898-1919): Manmin kongdonghoe, 3.1 undong, Daehanmingugimsijeongbu heonbeop ‘Minjugonghwa jeongche insigeul jungsimeuro” [“The historical origins of the founding constitution of the Republic of Korea, 1898-1919: Understandings of ‘democratic republic’ in the General People’s Assembly, the March First movement, and the constitution of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea”]. Hangukjeongchihakoebo (December): 139-163. Sim Hun. 1929. “Joseonyeonghwa jeonggwan.” Joseon ilbo, January 1. Sin Jiyeong. 2005. “Yeonseol, toroniraneun jedoui yuipgwa gamgagui byeonhwa” [“The importation of the ‘speech/discussion’ system and the transformation of sensibility”]. Hangukgeundaemunhagyeongu 6(1): 9-41. Sin Yongha. 1996. Dongnipyeopoeyeongu [Studies on the Independence Club]. Seoul: Ilchogak. Tongnip sinmun. 1898. “Kwanmin kongdonghoe sasil” [“The facts of the General Assembly of officials and people”]. Tongnip sinmun [The independent], November 1. Wilson, Rob. 2003. “Globalization, Spectral Aesthetics and the Global Soul: Tracking Some ‘Uncanny’ Paths to Trans-Pacific Globalization.” Comparative American Studies 1(1): 35-51. Žižek, Slavoj. 2001. Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York: Routledge.

2.

The State of Fantasy in Emergency: Fantasmatic Others in South Korean Film Abstract Looking at contemporary South Korean f ilms, the essay relies on the conceptual double structure of the “state of fantasy” as articulated in cinema and the “state of emergency” in South Korea’s history to explore the engagement of those films with a set of global-local issues of corporeality and migration that arise in the age of cognitive capitalism. Keywords: Park Chan Wook, Bakjwi (Thirst, 2009), Bong Jun Ho in Madeo (Mother, 2009), Im Sang Soo in Hanyeo (The Housemaid, 2010). state of fantasy in emergency, affective state, golden age of Korean cinema

It is now commonly argued that South Korea entered the neoliberal global order with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) crisis in 1997. This financial crisis brought with it a profound sense of fear, panic and anxiety. However, crisis and emergency are not exceptional states in South Korea, one of the last post-Cold War zones driven by an export economy. A state of emergency was proclaimed many times during the authoritarian regime of Park Chung Hee (1961-1980) and this remained a norm of modern statehood after the end of that regime. Ironically, the first golden age of Korean cinema after the Korean War overlaps with a period in which the state of emergency was proclaimed no less than three times: in 1960, 1961 and 1964. Subsequently, the state of emergency proclaimed in 1972 was followed under Yushin (the Revitalizing Reforms System, 1973-1979) by the issuing of the fourth revised film law, which introduced censorship of such severity that it rang the death knell of the national cinema of the time. Working intimately within the state of emergency as a mode of public fantasy (Jackson 2005), South Korean films of this period – such as Lee

Kim, S., Korean Cinema in Global Contexts: Postcolonial Phantom, Blockbuster, and Trans-Cinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463729147_ch02

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Man-hui’s Geomeun meori (Black Hair, 1964) and Hyuil (Holiday, 1967) – generated a particular cinematic strategy of appearing nihilistic yet also potentially critical of the legal and political crises imposed by the state of emergency. Today, a lingering legacy of the emergency mode is the way in which the rapid organization of capital, labour, technology and information materializes itself as condensed modernity in the South Korean context. In the decade since I laughed hard at the government slogan, “We were latecomers to industrialization, but we can move ahead in the information age,” high-speed internet has become a symbol of South Korea. Now KT (Korea Telecom) has a series of TV commercials that turn in a self-parodying style on the short temperedness of Koreans as consumer-catalysts for the fast connection. While the political and legal states of emergency have now been lifted, an affective state of emergency continues to be mobilized intensely in South Korea as a way of processing the new phase of capitalism that we are facing today; a postmodern “cognitive capitalism” (Hardt and Negri 2004; Boutang 2007) characterized by its installation across a highly virtualized network society (Cho Jung Hwan 2011). A composite state of urgency and criticality operating at a vertiginous pace drives South Korean society into a condition of perpetual dromology or “logic of speed” in Virilio’s (1977, 47) terms.1 Recently this condition has produced a distinct “state of fantasy” (Rose 1996) that imbues the Korean mode of blockbuster cinema as well as, more widely, the Korean wave – within which K-pop is known for its dynamic group song-and-dance acts for both girl and boy bands. The Korean wave has brought an unprecedented global and regional recognition to popular Korean culture. Following the IMF crisis, with its attendant panic and suspicion about the global regulation of financial power and capital, South Korea experienced the transnational success of a Korean popular culture hitherto considered esoteric. This surprising shift from the status of an impenetrable (hopelessly local) cultural formation to that of a “wave” in regional and global circulation begs for a range of analysis which is beyond the scope of this essay. However, this shift appears to have begun with an experience of shock and with absorption of “otherness” that worked in at least two registers. One of these involved the invasion of a threatening Other demanding, in the name of globalization, transparency in the flow of capital and its organization under the gaze of the IMF. The other was the increasing presence of migrant workers in South Korea. So, on the one hand, there was the gaze of the Other empowered by global 1 Derived from the Greek drómos (a racecourse), dromology for Virilio is the science of – or, as in my usage here – the logic of speed.

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capital, while, on the other hand, there was Asian migrant labour (along with female marriage migrants) requiring a politics of empowerment (Benhabib 1986)2 and creating a shift from an allegedly homogeneous nation to a “multicultural” one. The Korean wave, including its strong K-pop component, is at least in part an aggressive response to and a constituent of a newly multicultural, globalized nation (Chua Beng Huat and Iwabuchi 2008; Mori 2006). “I’m gonna make history” is a line from “The Boys,” a Girls’ Generation song that continues: “History will be written anew and the world is noticing us.” This representative K-pop group incorporates the gaze of the global other in their formation of identity. Reciprocally, the Korean wave claims to be located in a multitude of regions across the globe. It can be found, heard and watched not only on the streets of Bangkok and Tokyo, but also on YouTube, on fan sites and in Korean wave tourism. It desires to be global and ubiquitous. A peculiar assemblage of K-Pop, K-drama and Korean movies, the Korean wave is a phenomenon of a post-authoritarian society reaching out to regional and global audiences in the age of neoliberalism. At once an offspring of a militarized society which enables a socially recognized training in “drilling” for both girl and boy groups from a very early age, and a harbinger of a civil and democratic society to come, Korean wave is a complex and historically hybrid cultural form. Many local academics have pointed to the residual authoritarian regime of fascist characteristics in the fabric of everyday life in South Korea today (Kim Eunshil 2000), a regime involving the inscription of fascism in “us” (Im Jihyun 2000) and working through individuals rather than being implemented by an authoritarian leader alone. This inscription is consistent with Agamben’s argument that: modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system. Since then, the voluntary creation of a permanent state of emergency (though perhaps not declared in the technical sense) has become one of the essential practices of contemporary states, including so-called democratic ones. (Agamben 2005, 2) 2 Benhabib suggests a shift from the politics of the subject to a politics of empowerment in late capitalist society.

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However, whereas Agamben elaborates the work of Carl Schmitt (2006) and Walter Benjamin (1968a, 1968b) on the Weimar Republic (in essays written in 1922 and 1942, respectively) to describe a matrix of the modern state, I want to emphasize with Jacqueline Rose (1996, 14) those “states of fantasy” that allow us to acknowledge both modern statehood as “a more than external matter” in our world (since “fantasy has been where statehood takes hold and binds its subjects”) and fantasy’s capacity to let statehood “slip just a little”; as she concludes, “there is something coerced and coercive, but also wild and unpredictable, about it” (Rose 1996, 15). In this context it is possible to situate Korean blockbuster cinema in relation to the double states of emergency and fantasy at work in the nation today. Articulating the state of emergency with the state of fantasy might make it possible to see the linkages and the tensions between the political and the cultural; indeed, to look at the double articulation of the state of emergency with that of fantasy in South Korean cinema is to produce a cartography of catastrophe. As part of an ongoing project to work this template through a history of Korean cinema, this essay looks at instances of the Korean blockbuster mode which attempt not only to offer a critical analysis of a society that is changing excessively rapidly but also to offer “room for play,” performance and taking a “gamble” (Hansen 2004) with cinema; in short, a fantasmatic space. In what follows I discuss how issues around the precarious affective labour provided by mothers and domestic helpers are dealt with by such renowned directors as Park Chan Wook in Bakjwi (Thirst, 2009), Bong Jun Ho in Madeo (Mother, 2009) and Im Sang Soo in Hanyeo (The Housemaid, 2010). These have been followed by a formidable new director, Na Hong Jin, whose debut work, Chugyeogja (The Chaser), appeared in 2008. This cluster of f ilms seems to suggest the social emergence of a new set of problems about gendered and emotional labour, the volatile corporeality of the female body and, as I shall argue, the miraculous corporeality of the male body receiving and returning extreme violence. For example, Na’s Hwanghae (The Yellow Sea, 2010) portrays a migrant’s super-cognitive mapping of a global city like Seoul by following the survivor circuits (Sassen 2002) of a Korean-Chinese man who is a hired killer. Signif icant works in this vein have also been produced by the independent sector despite the depletion of film-making subsidies by the reactionary government of Lee Myung-bak. Independent films in particular have inscribed North Korean refugees and Bangladeshi migrant labour into the radical platform of representational politics in South Korea as critical discourse increasingly pays attention to them.

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The Fantasmatic Other Hwanghae is particularly interesting in an age preoccupied globally with immigrants, refugees and diaspora wherein “a spectre haunts the world and it is the spectre of migration” (Hardt and Negri 2001, 213). In the South Korean context there are increasing numbers of migrants, particularly those from the Korean diaspora in China and refugees from North Korea. Hwanghae shows a hit man, Kunam (played by a talented Ha Jeong Woo), following an illegal trail of migrant workers coming from Yanbian, an autonomous prefecture in Jilin Province in Northeast China, above the border with North Korea, mostly inhabited by a Korean-Chinese diaspora. A temporary migrant, Kunam, is pursued by the triple threat of a South Korean gang, a Yanbian gang and the South Korean police. Meanwhile, in a low-budget independent film directed by Kim Ki-Duk, Phungsangae (Phungsan Dog, 2010), we find a protagonist who belongs neither to North Korea nor to South Korea. He does not identify his nationality but deliberately chooses to function as a fast delivery person who runs across the DMZ to reach Pyungyang (the capital city of North Korea) from Seoul and vice versa. As a result, he is pursued by agents of both North and South Korea for threatening the National Security Law. Films like Hwanghae and Phungsangae unveil the people who are deprived of citizenship. A popular film such as Ajussi (The Man from Nowhere, 2010) also deals with a former North Korean spy who is now a refugee, although this film treats this element more as a generic component. The emergence of a male protagonist who figures, in Agamben’s (1998) terms, not as a bios (a citizen, a “qualified life” incorporated in to the political body) but as a homo sacer or a “set-apart man” epitomizing zoe (bare life) is most viscerally displayed in Hwanghae. Kunam’s cognitive skill is severely tested by travelling from China to Korea and then finding a way out from Korea to China without any guidance. His neurons are wrecked by the tripartite pressure of the South Korean police, the Chinese Korean gang and the South Korean gang; his muscles, energy and blood are all drained, reducing him to bare bones. The power and the violence to which he is subjected undo the body as if it were never meant to feel pain; body and brain are completely expended. Displaying a thoroughly carnivorous expropriation of cognitive ability and bodily power from its male protagonist, the film provides an allegory for the ways in which the regime of neoliberalism mobilizes both cognitive skills and physical power. Kunam’s body is segregated from his mind and reconstructed as the raw material which is subject to violence. His body is also a producer of violence and power. A film of this kind, however, has the

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potential to evoke a constellation of violence (Gewalt), which paradigmatically generates a signifying chain of power, force, vitality, authority and the state as it is conceptualized in Walter Benjamin’s 1921 essay, “Critique of Violence” (Benjamin 1978). A little cinematic genealogy of the kind of violence captured in this film would trace back through a film like Soo (2007) by the Japanese-Korean director Sai Yoichi. Unlike some other action films, where control of the body prevails through the orchestration of bodily movement, both Hwanghae and Soo envisage the body enduring to the last drop of blood it must bleed. They display a miraculous male body to be represented first and to be destroyed at last by obeying the “realistic” principle of human bodily anatomy. The sound design of these films aims to achieve a hyper-realism attentive to the detailed fracturing of the bones and to flesh undergoing total disintegration. What is quite remarkable in the process of extreme ordeal that Kunam undergoes is the skill of cognitive mapping over the city of Seoul and the rest of South Korea that he displays by “mapping” on sight places of which he had no previous knowledge.3 If love at first sight is a formula for a romance plot, the survivor’s mapping at first sight seems to work for the action-thriller of cognitive capitalism. 4

Thirst: “I’d Rather Be a Vampire Than a Maid” If Phungsangae privileges running across the DMZ while Hwanghae highlights the Yellow Sea as a space of deadly crossing for the Chinese-Korean Kunam, a connection can be made from these films to the quizzical trajectory suggested in another that was made in the second phase of globalization after the IMF crisis: Thirst by Park Chanwook. This film begins with the strange journey undertaken by a Catholic priest, Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho), from Korea to Africa, where he is infected by a vampire virus as a result of a failed medical experiment. Given that our age is marked and constituted by a series of crises in the world capitalist system and by global warming, it is unremarkable that a sense of crisis should be covered by speedy and 3 This would be the consistent with the arguments made by Boutang (2007), Hardt and Negri (2004), Virno (2004) and others that post-Fordist capitalism has moved beyond the exploitation of workers’ labour-power alone and is now also extracting a surplus from general intellect. 4 In Hollywood action cinema the Bourne Identity series intensively mobilizes the cognitive mapping capacities of the protagonist (Jason Bourne) played by Matt Damon. Bourne could find any place wherever he was. However, he tends to draw more on techno-cognitive mapping. His oblique counterpart Kunam (Ha Jeong Woo) in The Yellow Sea uses only his brain to map.

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spectacular representation in popular cinema. However, the vampires in Thirst and, as we shall see, the figures of motherhood in Mother and domestic labour in Housemaid display intriguing forms of “caring labour” which ironically surface as compelling modes of agency within the catastrophic age of neoliberalism where emotion, care and affect are claimed by the happiness industry (Illouz 2007). Thirst presents itself as a genre film drawing its inspiration from vampire narratives. Vampirism in both literature and film has lent itself to presenting various issues, including sexuality, race and class, in symptomatic and diagnostic ways. Thirst most obviously deals with repression and an excessive manifestation of sexuality in a Catholic priest and his relationship with a young woman whose seriously ill husband is a friend of the priest; once infected with the vampire virus, the priest returns to Korea and develops a voracious lust for blood and sex. Now, vampire stories can easily offer film-makers global recognition. Hence, it is not difficult to speculate that a film like Thirst might simply foreground their West-centred global appeal; if there is no neat binary between the local and the global (as the common term “trans-local” may suggest), nevertheless the generic appropriation of “excessive” and “voracious” figures would appear to fall short of addressing any local issues. These days, the strategies employed by Asian and other non-Hollywood cinemas (and by contemporary South Korean cinema, in particular) in order to mesh the global with the local spectatorship are often remote from the “usual suspect” approaches of orientalism or selforientalization. Bluntly put, it can be argued that recent films attempt rather to touch upon a transnational limit experience. One could well call this “Asia extreme,” as the film distributor Tartan famously put it.5 Seen individually in this light, Thirst appears to be a f ilm entirely without any explicit indexical references to the dire problems, entrenched or emergent, of the South Korean locality. It appears almost to be a film borrowing its hell from elsewhere as if the hell we have here were not enough to deal with; seemingly, it offers itself as a generic vampire film 5 As the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) explains, “Tartan Films, established in 1984, was a UK-based film distributor. Founder Hamish McAlpine is credited with creating the term ‘Asia Extreme’ and making films under this genre accessible to the masses. It also owned the US-based Tartan USA and Tartan Video. It was notable for distributing East Asian films, especially those in the horror and thriller genres, under the brand Tartan Asia Extreme. Between 1992-2003 Tartan Films operated under the name Metro-Tartan Distribution before reverting back to Tartan Films. More recently, it gained a reputation for releasing horror films of other origins, under its Tartan Terror brand. Such films include Battle Royale, The Whispering Corridors trilogy, A Tale of Two Sisters, The Last Horror Movie and Oldboy.”

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making little effort to elaborate a cultural translation. Like the narrative image of the film itself, this reading draws the viewer’s attention to the male protagonist played by Song Gang Ho, one of the most respected actors in Korea. Seen from the priest’s perspective, the film does indeed present itself as a story about a religious kind of sexual repression based on a sub-imperial kind of desire. However, if we shift the critical focus from the priest to Tae-ju (Kim Ok-bin), the young housewife with whom he falls in love, the film presents a different and much less “generic” picture. In order to grasp the difference this makes in the South Korean context, it is necessary also to shift away from the vampire genre and images of repression towards a more detailed historical account of the local f ilm context in which Thirst appeared. Some years ago, I argued at length that the discourse of globalization had transformed the gender politics of South Korean cinema.6 Under the pressure of the threatening IMF crisis, local women were pushed out of the representational realm and replaced there with others, including Chinese, Swiss-Korean and North Korean women. In hindsight, however, this displacement of South Korean women by non-Korean women marks only the first phase of the impact of globalization when South Korea became exposed to a powerful global gaze and in turn began to mimic this gaze with its desire to be a player in Asia. The dynamics of anxiety and desire then took unexpected forms as these exploded into film blockbusters in the Korean mode. Paralleling the rise of the local popular culture known as the “Korean wave” then hitting other parts of Asia, I argued, blockbusters adopted a strategy of multinationalizing their female characters (Kim Soyoung 2003, 16). Significant examples were Shiri (1999), featuring a North Korean woman, Lee Bang-hee (played by Kim Yunjin, best known in the West for her role in the TV series Lost), as an espionage agent with the code name “Hydra”; J.S.A: Joint Security Area (2000) with a Swiss-Korean inspector, Sophie Chang (Lee Youngae, now known for Jewel in the Palace), trying to solve a murder in the JSA; and Failan (2001), with Hong Kong’s Cecilia Cheung playing a Chinese migrant worker in Korea. Furthermore, the mainland Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi (who played one of the heroines in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 2000), portrayed a Ming princess in Musa (The Warrior, 2001), while the heroine of Pichonmu (2001) was depicted as a Mongolian. It is important to reiterate that such characterizations of women were unprecedented. From the mid-1950s on, South Korean films sustained themselves largely by treating women characters as tropes of traumas about modernity and the 6 The following paragraphs draw substantially on Kim (2003, 16-18).

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postcolonial condition; examples of this range from Ja-yu bu-in (Madame Freedom, 1956) and Miwodo tashihanbon (Bitter but Once Again, 1968) to Sopyonjae (1993) and Kkoch-ip (A Petal, 1996). When the blockbusters did give South Korean women central roles, these were usually associated with monsters, as in Toemarok (The Soul Guardians, 1998) or with gangsters, as in Jopong manura (My Wife Is a Gangster, 2001) or Shinlaui dalbam (Kick the Moon, 2001). However limited these roles may have been for South Korean women, the disappearance of the latter from many high-profile films at this time and their displacement by these new “multinational” characters was especially problematic in circumstances where the identity of a fraternal collective was being reconstituted around notions of global citizenship. At the representational level, global citizenship then appeared to exclude South Korean women. The films mentioned above revealed a nationalism that was newly forming in conjunction with globalization; predictably, the vanishing of South Korean women characters from the cinema was offset by a new consolidation of homosocial bonding among men. When Chinese migrant female labour was invoked in Failan (2001), the character bore the archetypal role of an innocent and sacrificing woman that appeared both in this film and in the literature of the 1970s era of condensed industrialization. The presumed virtue, now allegedly lost, of South Korean women of the recent past is projected in Failan upon a woman from a less globalized sector. As South Korean women disappeared, then, other women were summoned to serve the purposes of nostalgia. Relegating local women to invisibility, these blockbusters mobilized the dominant males groups – such as the army, the Korean Central Intelligence Agency and organized gangsters – to foreground homosocial relations. Recognizable to male members in the group, these relationships simply became opaque to the female characters – a situation exemplif ied by the bemusement of Sophie Chang in J.S.A: Joint Security Area as she tries to unravel the mystery around the murders of South Korean and North Korean soldiers at the North Korea camp located in the DMZ. The situation becomes impenetrable to Sophie. Her investigator’s “look” is constantly denied agency, presumably because the murder and its concealment are provoked, sustained and empowered by a brotherhood based on ethnic nationalism that transcends the different ideologies along the Cold War lines that Sophie, in desperation, tries to connect to this situation via her deceased father, who had served in the Korean War but had defected to Switzerland after being detained in a POW camp. However, the brotherhood of nationalism is not destined to find a secure space of its own under the global gaze that demands transparency. This sense of the impossibility

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of reconstructing a nationalist male space must be both a cause and a consequence of the endless remaking of blockbusters, among other reasons. The disappearance of local women thus constituted both the structuring absence and a symptom in a new globalized national discourse, as the orchestration of transparency and impenetrability, bitterly resounding in the global and the national arena, increasingly staged an orchestra without women players – a retreat of gender politics. When local women came back to the screen around 2008, during the second stage of the Korean blockbuster’s development, they returned as a housemaid, a mother and a vampire, as I have suggested above. The young housewife (played by Kim Ok Bin) in Thirst is no better than a housemaid. She takes care of her mentally and physically ill husband and helps her mother-in-law with her hanbok (traditional Korean clothes) shop, which is ironically named “Happiness Hanbokjeom” (traditional Korean clothes store). In the beginning she somewhat reluctantly provides affective labour as a survival strategy but eventually she transforms into a vampire who needs the blood of others. As Eva Illouz has noted in Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (2007), capitalist culture has fostered an intensely emotional culture in the workplace, in the family and in our relationship to ourselves. She argues that economic relations have become deeply emotional, on the one hand, while close, intimate relationships have become increasingly defined, on the other hand, by economic and political models of bargaining, exchange and equity. This dual process by which emotional and economic relationships come to define and shape each other is called “emotional capitalism.” In this emotional capitalism, the affective labour mobilized is often the feminized labour provided by migrant workers. It follows that the representation of female caring labour is a contested site where the forces of neoliberalizing globalization stage a mise en scène of the cold intimacies of emotional capitalism. If we shift the template of analysis from emotional capitalism in general to affective labour in particular, it could be argued that the latter can still provide an instance of and a potential for subversion and autonomous constitution, as Hardt and Negri (2004) suggest. Affective labour forms part of the “immaterial labor” that produces an immaterial good, such as service, knowledge or communication (Hardt and Negri 2004, 286-291). The young woman in Thirst was adopted as a stepdaughter by a widow and was later set up to be married to her stepmother’s son. When she turns into a vampire, she declares, “I’d rather become a vampire than a housemaid,” echoing in dissonance with the “Cyborg Manifesto” (Haraway 1991). The vampire f igure in Thirst has a hidden fang as an imaginary prosthesis in lieu of a cybernetic one. Her

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fang, the bio-power of hopelessly “anachronistic” and “obscure” origin such as Africa, betrays her ill-f itting subjectivity in the informational economy that South Korea represents. Her shifting positionality – from care labourer and hanbok maker to a vampire infected by an African virus transmitted by a priest – eventually involves a refusal of gendered labour as she goes beyond the control of the priest. In a way, her vampirism is a kind of feminized migrancy to the non-human. Vampirism is evoked in Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897) to express the horrors of a persisting premodern order which should be dead but manages to survive during the night of broad Enlightenment days. The location of the count’s castle, Transylvania, alludes to the seductive and dangerous East. In this coupling, the premodern and the East find each other locked in the bloody embrace of the modern West. Here, I evoke the figure of the vampire rather than that of the ghost for the following reasons. First, in literary representation vampires are cultural products that betray the presence of the premodern as this is constructed in modernity: “[A]s parasites, they stretch back through folklore to the beginnings of recorded history, but they began their significant literary life in 1816, with the self-creations of Byron” (Auerbach 1997, 240). Second, vampirism also connotes one’s voluntary submission to an irresistible erotic power capable of sustaining the continuous vampiric survival of the historico-geopolitical pairing of “premodern” and “modern”; as a trope of gender politics, vampirism is manifested thus in feminist and queer theory. Third, what is intriguing is a mutation of the meaning of vampirism in non-Western contexts. When vampirism is conjured in the cultural production of the non-West – in South Korean cinema, for instance – it takes on a different dynamic configuration, the signification of which is at least threefold, a spiral form. Vampirism connotes “the West” when it is employed in South Korean film, thus also “modern,” but at the same time it connotes the “premodern” as the vampirism motif yields a fearful bricolage by blending itself with local premodern horror materials. The bloodsucking/feeding motif in South Korean horror film is only an apparent appropriation of the Hollywood horror genre convention. The local representation transforms via translation a female hybrid “ghost with vampiric power” into a more threatening and complex being than the “traditional” one who exerts her influence over the living through a supernatural agency. In a film entitled Sarinma (A Devilish Murder, 1965), the enhanced power of the vampiric ghost precisely implies the possession of knowledge of modern socio-cultural machinery – Western painting, the significance of the nuclear family and above all the sexuality of a “vamp”

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(femme fatale). The vampire heroine haunts two male characters with modern capabilities: an entrepreneur and a medical doctor. In spite of her modern qualities, she also embodies the “traditional” structure of feminine feeling known as han – a word that means “unresolved grief, repentance and resentment,” but which is often claimed to be untranslatable, that is to say, eccentrically “Korean.” Given these composite characteristics and her unusual status of undead, she is distinct from other representations of women characters in South Korean f ilm. (It is usually believed that an unsettled han begets ghosts; in South Korean horror f ilms, female ghosts predominate with very few male ghosts appearing.) However, in A Devilish Murder her knowledge of the modern is overpowered by such an agent of residual force as a Buddhist monk – which in turn helps the modern nuclear family of the entrepreneur patriarch rush back to the track of modernization with the female vampire banished back to hell. Her destruction brings forth a happy reunion of the “good” and “pure” old with the regenerated new. However, the representation of a female vampire opens up a site where the usual pairing of premodern/modern with East/West and feminine/ masculine (with positive values attached to the second term) is suspended. To describe this one might employ the expression, “reverse vampirism,” by which I mean the living feed off the dead, not the other way around. The vampire in Thirst takes this path and develops immense power and speed. She, the vampire, attains an invisible fang as her prosthesis. Park’s previous film, Saibogeujiman gwaenchana (I’m a Cyborg, but That’s OK, 2006) also imagines a fantasmatic prosthesis. This film deals with the fantasy of becoming a cyborg of a mentally ill young man, Park Il-soon (Rain), and a girl, Cha Young-goon (Lim Soojeong). They are able to develop intimacy once they recognize their cyborg identities. As the provision of intimacy increasingly becomes part of the accumulation of emotional capital, with public sectors dominated by the corporate sector, the melodramatic sites of the private and the public where the problematic conundrums of gender, class and race were played out are now displaced by the sites of extreme horror. Since the surface of the film Thirst is so intensely coded, the film gains greater legibility when it is seen together with Mother (2009) and Im Sangsoo’s remake of The Housemaid (2010). In the remake, the housemaid is never perceived as a critical threat. In the earlier Housemaid (Kim Kiyoung, 1960), the housemaid tried to commit a double suicide with her master who got her pregnant – and this infuriated not only male spectators but female spectators who were married women. In the 2010 remake, the only way that

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the housemaid can make her statement about her enforced abortion is to commit suicide in front of the ultra-wealthy family. In Mother, the mother character (played by renowned TV actress Kim Haeja, long associated with dedicated mother roles) has to provide all the care and protection for her son which the state fails to offer. Her motherhood ends up exonerating her son, who is guilty of murder. When she sees a man in the prison who is mistaken for a killer instead of her son, she delivers a poignant line, “Don’t you have a mother?” Women and female characters are imposed upon to provide various forms of caring labour under neoliberal globalization when the state fails to provide social care. The task of the critic, then, is to contextualize the seemingly personal and private despair and the sense of impasse in the larger structure and bring a sense of diagnostic understanding to imagining a future for cinema and society. If the films discussed above deal with gendered “immaterial labor,” with caring labour and with a fantasy of becoming something else other than a woman, the care labourer Taeju in Thirst chooses to become a vampire and turns her boring domestic labour into a carnivorous play, a vampirism game in which the body opens to the full range of cannibalistic jouissance. As a vampire she refuses the tedium of caring labour and instead takes up the play, the game, the performance, the gamble (that is, the Spiel) of vampirism. Regarding this kind of play or Spiel in f ilm representation in its cinematic specificity, Miriam Hansen reopens Walter Benjamin’s famous 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (Benjamin 1968a), rereading it from the perspective of Spiel understood in its multiple German meanings as “play,” “game,” “performance” and “gamble,” stressing in the process Benjamin’s theory of cinema as a “play form of second nature” (Hansen 2004, 6). Before the release of Thirst in 2009, a candlelight vigil was held for a hundred days in South Korea starting in May 2008. It was a rally against the upcoming Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between South Korea and the United States, with a particular focus on the beef trade, given the popular anxiety about mad cow disease at the time. It started with a high school girls’ initiative and then spread to the young housewives and college students and then to the rest of the people. Unlike the people’s movement on the street in the 1980s and 1990s, the candlelight rally was marked by turning the political slogans – “No FTA” and “MB out” (initials referring to President Myung Bak Lee) into play and performance. One could note a momentary suspension of the “state of emergency” mode and its related form of resistance in that candlelight rally – which rather claimed biopolitical sovereignty in a playful mood.

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Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Auerbach, Nina. 1997. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Benhabib, Seyla. 1986. Critique, Norm, and Utopia. New York: Columbia University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1968a. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, 217-252. New York: Schocken Books. Benjamin, Walter. 1968b. “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” In Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, 253-264. New York: Schocken Books. Benjamin, Walter. 1978. “Critique of Violence.” In Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings ed. Peter Demetz, 277-300. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Boutang, Yann Moulier. 2007. Le capitalisme cognitif: La nouvelle grande transformation. Paris: Éditions Amsterdam. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35(2): 197-222. Cho Jung Hwan. 2011. Injijabonjueui (Cognitive Capitalism: The Great Shift of the Modern World and the Reconstitution of Social Life). Seoul: Galmuri. Chua Beng Huat and Koichi Iwabuchi, eds. 2008. East Asian Pop Culture: Analysing the Korean Wave. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Hansen, Miriam. 2004. “Room-for-Play: Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema.” October 109: 3-45. Haraway, Donna. 1991. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149-181. New York; Routledge. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2001. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin. Illouz, Eva. 2007. Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Im Jihyun, ed. 2000. Urianui Fascism [Fascism inside us]. Seoul: Dangdae Pipyung. Jackson, Earl, Jr. 2005. “Fantasies that Matter: The Counter-Histories of Bertha Pappenheim and Ito Noe.” Paper presented at the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies biannual conference, Korea National University of Arts, Seoul, July 22-24.

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Kim Eunshil. 2000. “Korean Modernization Project and the Logic of Patriarchy.” In Urianui Fascism [Fascism inside us], ed. Im Jihyun, 105-131. Seoul: Dangdae Pipyung. Kim Soyoung. 2003. “The Birth of the Local Feminist Sphere in the Global Era: ‘Trans-Cinema’ and Yosongjang.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 4(1): 10-24. Kim Soyoung, ed. 2006. Trans-Asian Screen Culture. Seoul: Hyunshil Munhwa Yeon Gu. Rose, Jacqueline. 1996. States of Fantasy. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sassen, Saskia. 2002. “Global Cities and Survival Circuits.” In Global Woman, ed. Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russel Hochschild, 254-274. New York: Henry Holt & Co. Schmitt, Carl. 2006. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. by George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Virno, Paolo. 2004. A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, trans. by Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito and Andrea Casson. New York: Semiotext(e).

3.

Modernity in Suspense: The Logic of Fetishism in Korean Cinema Abstract To examine local film in a situation at once peripheral and colonial but presently in a global capitalist state, I employed theoretical concepts such as translation as a cultural practice that could illuminate a set of predicaments in a cinema and a culture of a manic mode of condensed capitalist development, not to mention seemingly semi-perpetual partition. The essay unfolds the translation of the word “fetish,” revealing its complexity through the layers of meaning attached to it in its vicissitude of translation into Korean. Keywords: translation as cultural practice, IMF crisis

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) stalks South Korea as I write. The problem, as always it seems, is foreign debt and unemployment. The president of the IMF speaks, from an interview room, words full of reason and reasonableness, telling the national television audience about layoffs. Yet an image – or rather, a series of them – disturbs the rationality of his address: the oversized American dollars that are papered over the walls of the room. The US dollar speaks a language of magic as well as reason. And although it is the gold charms which Korean citizens sell to bail out the country that apparently play out the traditional role of fetish, the very size and number of the American dollars also recalls the role of fetish, demanding a kind of passionate submission to them. This is what the shifts in exchange rate also seem to have done: confronted with the stability of the American currency’s value, South Korea can only adopt an attitude of passionate submission. The highly touted role announced for South Korea, as a new and active member of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), is ultimately only a passive one – finally not globalizing but globalized.

Kim, S., Korean Cinema in Global Contexts: Postcolonial Phantom, Blockbuster, and Trans-Cinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463729147_ch03

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In the imaginary of South Koreans, the triumph of finance capital over industrial capital (signalled by the IMF) is understood against the familiar backdrop of imperialism and colonialism. It is even expected that the most “advanced” mode – as announced by the global order – should triumph. As finance capital appears to triumph, the recurrent image is that of the late nineteenth century, when imperialist forces took control of the Joseon dynasty that reigned on the Korean Peninsula. Despite its anachronistic nature, this image comes to mind because, in the national imaginary, it marks the advent of modernity. It demarcates the division between the premodern (Joseon) and the modern (Korea). Yet it is not easy to speak of modernity together with the Korean nation in this way. This nation is always understood as something seized or rigged, and of course divided, by the forces of modernity, of modern imperialism. The Korean nation is seen as somehow in tension with modernity – Western modernity – and consequently, modernity continues to be imagined as an unattainable yet somehow desirable state that always exists elsewhere. So it is that the spectacle of the IMF with its monstrous dollars can so easily displace the scene of human suffering in South Korea. Confronted with this unprecedented crisis in all its complexity, I confess that I do not have a conceptual framework for dealing with the present situation. Yet the question of modernity recurs, and I feel compelled to work through it. I work with the cinema of South Korea, particularly that of the postcolonial period (elsewhere understood as the end of the Asia-Pacific or of the Second World War). In this context, I am interested in films that deal strategically with the forces of colonialism and modernization. I am especially interested in films with something like ghosts or ghostly qualities, films in which modernity appears not so much as a terrible threat but as a source of enchantment and puzzlement, a kind of siren’s song that beckons us into uncharted seas. In such films the logic of the fetish comes to the fore, as a kind of passionate submission that disturbs many of the familiar oppositions that suspend Korea between the premodern and the modern, thus suggesting new ways of thinking about Korean cinema and Korean modernity or, I would venture to say, cinema in Korea and modernity in Korea. I use the idea of the fetish to link some rather disparate observations. It serves as a tentative point of departure for drawing connections between the binary divisions set up by capitalism and colonialism as well as in cinematic narratives of a Korean modernity haunted by premodern spectres. It is significant that the idea of the fetish emerges in a colonial context: specifically, exchanges between Europeans and West Africans,

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in which Africans surrendered their gold to obtain trivial objects from the West. Thus, the colonized, apparently unaware of modern values, were cast in the role of fetishists. Yet Marx reminds us that capital too has the qualities of a fetish, and there are magical tales about capitalism, tales that continue to divide that West from the rest and the modern from the others. If we adopt the position constructed for the other of the West (the one who is allegedly entranced by the West’s trivial but strangely compelling commodities), however, then we find a different story. For the colonized, the advent of modern capitalism is supposed to be in the form of magic or witchcraft, and general malediction apparently affords no resistance or relief. This story of the colonized is one that we seldom hear and at the same time we hear too much of the tale of colonial people’s impassioned and tortured submission to the West. If something rings false about this story, it is the supposition that the colonized remain in a state of purity with respect to the fetish, in a sort of one-way relationship, a generalized “experience of the colonized.” In fact, composite modes abound. The layers attached to the translation of the term “fetish” into Korean attest, in a facetious way, to complexity. There are chumul, mulshin and oyonmul. Chumul, which designates shamanistic objects, conjures up an aura of the premodern. Yet it is already a mediated premodernity: the term first appeared during Japanese colonial rule in Korea, with the introduction of anthropology. Mulshin is the term closest in meaning to “commodity”; it could be used in the context of something like Lukácsian reification, for instance. Finally, oyonmul came with the translation of concepts from psychoanalysis into Korean, with the works of Freud and Lacan, to designate the object of desire or a love object. The existence of such complexity in translation inspires me to say, at the outset, that fetishism always involves something other than a simple binary division such as that given in our common stories about the West and the rest. There is more to modernity than a neat bifurcation of cultures and experiences. The logic of the fetish, with its layers of cultural specificity, affords a way to explore this complexity and to challenge the inevitability of modern binarism, such as modern versus premodern or modern versus traditional.1 1 Apter and Pietz (1993) also deals with this issue and informs my exploration of the three sites of controversy related to fetishism as a cultural discourse in the West: the historical construction of gendered identities, the social life of capital, and the ideologies lived in visual culture.

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Early Cinema and Korea In Fetishism and Curiosity (1996), Laura Mulvey links the cinematic illusion to the logic of the fetish. “The cinematic illusion,” she writes, has continued to flourish on pleasure in belief, or rather, on the human mind’s ability and desire to “know” and to “suspend disbelief” simultaneously. From this perspective, the cinema accuses the rational world, once again, of a credulity that belongs to the origin of the term “fetishism.” (Mulvey 1996, 7)

Her stance elucidates some of the exchanges that accompany the introduction of cinema into Korea – exchanges that combine belief and disbelief, and which suggest a fetishistic desire for truth and for fantasy. E. Burton Holmes, an American traveller who published volumes based on his voyages, visited Korea in 1899. He brought with him a small portable machine for the projection of moving pictures, which captured the fancy of the city of Seoul (see Cho Hi-mun 1993). Needless to say, that cinema came so quickly to Korea reminds us that the invention and dissemination of cinema was coeval with the peak of imperialism. In the mad scramble for the globe, the imperial powers – Japan, Russia, Germany and the United States – forced Korea (or rather, Joseon) to open its ports to them. Holmes’s apparatus caught the interest of the imperial family; the young prince was apparently so delighted with it that he wished to keep it. After a few days, however, he returned the borrowed device to Holmes and his company, along with a box of gifts containing precious green silks and fans. When Holmes and company accepted an invitation to the royal palace, their guide and translator, Park Kiho, worried that the prince intended to take the apparatus. Holmes, however, wrapped it and presented it to the prince, and in return his company received a wealth of silks as well as two scroll paintings and silver. And another surprise awaited them: a court dance performance by royal courtesans, a performance that impressed the world traveller as much as moving pictures had impressed the royal family. In this early exchange, in which a court performance crosses paths with a cinematic apparatus, is there not an anticipation of a general pattern of exchanges and interactions between traditional and modern modes? A pattern of exchange in which both the traditional and modern are drawn into the realm of commodities? It comes as no surprise, then, that the era of silent films in Korea came to be characterized by the omnipresence of courtesans, as both performers and spectators (Kim Soyoung 1996, 102-123).

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Courtesans became professional actors because respectable women refused to appear in movies. And in one of the earliest Korean films, The Story of Chunhyang (Chunhyangchon, 1923), the renowned courtesan Hanryong played the lead.2 One had only to close the cycle of exchanges that occurred between Holmes and the royal family to arrive at moving pictures with courtesan performers. Such a closing of the cycle of exchanges was precipitated by the prior fusion of commodities and films. In the 1900s, for instance, the EnglishAmerican Tobacco Company and the English-American Electric Company began to show films in order to promote their respective products, tobacco and the streetcar. Ten box labels from Old Gold tobacco or twenty from Drumhead tobacco afforded one admission to a screening. Thus began the double enchantment or double bind of spectator as consumer. And thus began colonial modernity in Korea: modern in its modes of exchange yet with colonizing modes of production. But then, one might say that all modernity is colonial in this sense of its modes of production and it is only a matter of degree. Because Japan annexed Korea into its empire in 1910 and ruled it until 1945, the early silent cinema in Korea was subject to Japanese colonialism, at once dependent on the Japanese empire and in some respects resistant to it. As Japanese policy in Korea shifted from military occupation and exploitation to the so-called “cultural policy” of the late 1910s and 1920s, cinema in Korea became associated with a wave of prosperity and began to lend its services directly to money matters. One film from this period, Wolha’s Pledge (Wolhaui Maengse, 1923), was basically a propaganda film produced by the Postal Service Department to encourage saving. The heroine of the film, Wolha, pays her husband’s gambling debts out of her savings account, and the film concludes with her determination to save more money for future crises. This presentation of wifely virtues – saving to pay a husband’s gambling debts – may strike us as odd now, even for a propaganda film, yet we should recall that this was a time of transition, and in its eccentric way this film expresses the vacillation between different value systems. Robert J. Foster discusses a similar situation in his account of how the Australian Reserve Bank developed a programme to encourage the natives of New Guinea to put their money in Australian banks, a strategy calculated to generate capital to finance territorial development. With commissioned films and pamphlets designed to produce a fetishization of money, the 2

On the relationship between Korean cinema and women spectators, see Kim Soyoung (1998).

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bank enforced a certain paradigm for the modern individual. “Money’s fetishization,” writes Foster, “facilitates projecting the image of a progressive, self-disciplined individual, an image that returns us to the sort of moral education implied in the Reserve Bank’s program” (Foster 1998, 68-69). In these examples, we see a rapid and uncanny convergence of spectator, consumer and the saving account, the emergence of a certain kind of modern identity for which cinematic experience provides a locus. Moreover, these examples serve as a reminder that modern identity always implies a process like colonization, with the emergence of new kinds of economic unevenness around f igures like wives and natives. This highlights the idea that modern forms of unevenness and colonial relations themselves are never entirely outside the nation; and as they divide the nation, they also give it cohesiveness. Thus, the residual, so-called premodern forces of society are not necessarily forms of resistance; they may even be part of modernity itself. It is not surprising then that, with the advent of locally produced films in Korea, spectators and film-makers participated in modes of representation that hovered between the all-too-familiar and the novel. Something like “kino-drama,” which suggests novelty, becomes in Korean yonswaekuk or “linked drama.” This is to say, it was a hybrid form, combining the screening of a short film with the theatrical performance of a shinpa drama. Shinpa (or “the new school”) of theatre derived from the Japanese shinpa theatre, which had itself emerged in the late nineteenth century in response to European theatre as a movement against the supposedly outmoded traditional kabuki theatre, aiming to present contemporary dramas in a Westernized or modern style (an instance which again serves as a reminder of the intersection of modern hybridity and colonial unevenness). Kino-drama brought stories like that of The Revenge of Justice (Uirichok Kuto, 1919), in which the eldest son fights his stepmother to restore order in the family, that is, stories of the most traditional kind in a novel medium. In this way, kino-drama adjusted the expectations of spectators familiar with theatrical performance with the mechanically reproduced images of cinema. Its effect was not unlike that of the nickelodeon as discussed by Miriam Hansen, as an accidental effect of overlapping types of public sphere, of “nonsynchronous” layers of cultural organization. This non-synchrony seems to characterize both the cinema’s parasitic relationship to existing cultural traditions, and within the emerging institution, the uneven development of modes of production, distribution, and exhibition. (Hansen 1991, 93)

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Her description is an apt one for the effect of kino-drama in Korea, although the “parasitic relationship” might wrongly suggest that the uneven relationship goes in one direction that only the new media feed on the “host” of traditional media. On the contrary, the unevenness brings with it a kind of commensualism, in which benefits are mutually accrued despite the asymmetry of the relationship. In Korea, the non-synchrony layers that accompany cinema clearly implicate the colonial relationship between Japan and Korea, within the interplay of shimpa and shinpa. Which might lead one might ask whether the nickelodeon is not implicated in colonial unevenness as well. With the first full-length feature film, Frontier of the Nation (Kukgyong, 1923), with the proliferation of local productions and movie theatres, kinodrama began gradually to give way to new forms of cinematic expression and reception. Yet spectators still treated the medium as a source of wonder, and one often read in histories of national cinema that audiences continued to find the cinematic machinery more interesting than the moving images themselves. Projectionists encouraged spectators to believe that there was a miniature world inside the projector and if the film broke, they recited a magical incantation over the projector, “Suri suri masuri” (that is, “Abracadabra”). But then, the histories of early cinema in Japan often insist on the “primitive” character of spectators, emphasizing their fascination with the machinery, avoiding the fact that similar relations existed within Europe and North America. It is as if histories of non-Western national cinema inevitably strive to re-enchant the arrival of the Western, by positing non-Western natives whose credulity leads them to fetishize rather than to master technology. One need only recall, however, Mulvey’s take on the fetish – that it involves a desire for belief, or a suspension of disbelief – to ask who the fetishist in this scenario is. William Pietz argues that “fetish” is a word coined in response to an unprecedented situation, in which there are relations between “cultures so radically different as to be mutually incomprehensible” (Pietz 1993, 138). It is true that the arrival of cinema in Korea presented a form of non-synchrony, one far more radical than existed in Europe or North America, and as a result, it is arguable that Koreans tended to fetishize the cinematic apparatus more than did Westerners. Thus, cinema could serve to cover over the gaps in the industrial infrastructure of an “underdeveloped” society. Still, in this respect, the Korean difference is not in kind but in degree in the magnitude of intensity on the new global continuum. And as cinema “magically” interpellated spectators into industrial culture, those intellectuals who resisted it also turned to cinema, to effect decolonization predicated

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upon faith in Marxism, nationalism and the Enlightenment. One kind of fetish (the “traditional” chumul) encountered another kind (the modern commodity fetish mulshin), constructing a modern field of contestation between colonizing and decolonizing forces, a field that became visible in early cinema and has continued into postcolonial cinema in Korea. It has been argued that the postcolonial period in South Korea has never achieved a true decolonization (Choi Chungmoo 1997). Of course, this can be explained in terms of continuity between the colonial and postcolonial periods. Yet another question arises, of whether the nation, usually the rallying point for decolonization, is not also the site for the return of the West. This is the spectre that haunts cinema in Korea, as national cinema.

Freeze! In the final scene of many South Korean films, it is the freeze-frame that draws the narrative to a close. Images unwind, and then, Freeze! This is such a standard form of cinematic address that it has become natural for local spectators; and as such, it seems to present, quite directly, a cinematic articulation of a general structure of feeling.3 It is hard not to interpret the ubiquity of the freeze-frame in terms of a sense of entrapment, immobility and eternal suspension, which the experience of spectators who live with the history of colonization, partition and an intensive concentration of industrial capitalist development. It seems plausible that the freeze-frame somehow renders this experience with all its violence and suspense. Then, too, it recalls Walter Benjamin’s account of the crystallized image, or the dialectical image at a standstill – a moment in which the past awaits the flash. “Thinking,” he writes, “involves not only the flow of thoughts but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad” (Benjamin 1968b, 262-263). Indeed, the frozen surface of the image betrays a tension reminiscent of the “petrified unrest” that Benjamin detects in a series of dialectical images. This petrified unrest offers the possibility for allegory, for a violent wresting of the image from its everyday fluidity, which would serve to prevent new structures of experience from being monumentalized under outmoded aesthetics. In this respect, the unresolved crises in Korean cinema are not 3 Paul Willemen, in his lectures in the School of Film and Media at the Korean National University of Arts in 1997, called attention to this form of cinematic address.

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so much impasses as possibilities that open into a future, not a denial of modernity but an attempt to crack it open. Is the ubiquitous freeze-frame not a petrified yet restrive desire for a new society? Or is it simply an expression of nostalgia, or of a feat of entrapment, an atavistic attachment to an outmoded past? The Man with Three Coffins (Nageuneneun gireseodo swiji anneunda, 1987) is a road movie, popular in Korea, which ends with a freeze-frame. In it, national partition hinders the mobility of protagonists, making it impossible for them to reach their destination across the DMZ (demilitarized zone). In his account of road movies, Kyunghyun Kim calls attention to how the female body becomes a nodal point in this film, serving as the locus for fantasizing the past (Kim Kyung Hyun 1998, 24-25). The old man in The Man with Three Coffins gazes at a faded, treasured photo of his wife, which image dissolves into that of the young nurse who attends him. It is rather like Deleuze’s account of the fetish, which in distinction from the symbol, he calls “a frozen, arrested, two-dimensional image, a photograph to which one returns repeatedly to exorcise the dangerous consequences of movement, the harmful discoveries that result from exploration; it represents the last point at which it was still possible to believe” (Deleuze 1989, 31). And in a general way, it would seem that the freeze-frame has something of the fetish about it, in that it tends to turn the action back towards the past, in effect, to live in the past. And yet the apparent blockage is not necessarily a return to an idealized past, nor to the image of a unif ied and utopian nation. For instance, in La Vie en Rose (Changmipit Insaeng, 1993), the adventures of two gangsters end with a freeze-frame that shuts down the film in 1988, the time of the Seoul Olympics, touted as marking the coming of age of South Korea, or indeed its absorption into the global order. Kyunghyun Kim notes the overwhelming sense of immobility in this film. The premise of the film’s genre – on the road in search of something – remains unfulfilled, and the characters often find themselves caught between the communist North and the capitalist South. The merest indication of transgression of the North-South boundary seems, by some strange logic, to demand the death of the heroes. This leads Kim to argue that movement in the road movie does not simply return to the notion of a pure national identity. The ironic twist that brings the search to its non-conclusion “produces a multiple cultural signification of the nation’s history,” to quote Kim’s turn of phrase. He concludes: “The road movies allow this discursive effect without offering an alternative that seeks to resolve the threatening and ambivalent qualities that are attached with the discourse of the nation” (Kim Kyung Hyun 1998, 30).

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If we return to the frozen image with this national and historical ambivalence in mind, it is easier to see how such freeze-frames might operate like allegory in the Benjaminian sense. “Whereas in the symbol destruction is idealized and the transfigured face of nature is fleetingly revealed in the light of redemption,” Benjamin writes elsewhere, “in allegory the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape” (Benjamin 2003, 166).4 More than a nostalgic return to a tradition or an idealized experience of the nation, the freeze-frame, in a moment that resembles Benjamin’s “flash,” breaks into allegory and confronts the spectator with a history that opens into the future. Rolf Tiedemann sums up the significance of allegory in a way that illuminates the freeze-frame: The gaze, which exorcized images from objects blasted loose from time, is the Gorgon gaze at the “facies hippocratica of history,” the “petrified primordial landscape” of myth. […] But in that mystical moment when Past and Present enter “lightening-like” into a constellation – when the true image of the past “flashes” into the “now of recognizability” – that image becomes a dialectically changing image, as it presents itself from the messianic perspective, or (in materialistic terms) the perspective of the revolution. (Tiedemann 1988, 287-288)

It is not in the freeze-frame itself, however, but rather in the unsettling films of Kim Kiyoung that the allegorical possibilities presented in the freeze-frame are actualized.

Kim Kiyoung Choi Chungmoo, in her discussion of postcolonial South Korea, evokes Antonio Gramsci’s notion of an interregnum, an in-between time in which a variety of morbid symptoms come to the surface – and in which one is caught between the already-over and the not-yet-arrived. Interregnum rather appropriately describes the start of the film-making career of Kim Kiyoung. Kim Kiyoung began his career with an anti-communist propaganda film, Box of Death (Jugeumui sangja, 1955), funded by a film unit set up by the United States military during the Korean War. By that time, American forces occupied the southern half of the newly partitioned Korean Peninsula, bringing a kind of neocolonial rule in the wake of the Japanese colonial 4

Special thanks to Walter Lew for bringing this to my attention.

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rule. From that time, throughout the 31 films he made before his death in 1998, Kim excelled in the production of morbid and grotesque images. Indeed, in view of the time span of his career and the overabundance of uncanny imagery, it is tempting to characterize him as the “interregnum” film-maker par excellence. In his celebrated Housemaid trilogy, consisting of The Housemaid (Hanyo, 1961), The Woman of Fire (Hwa Nyeo, 1971) and The Insect Woman (Chungnyeo, 1972), Kim explores the double bind of modernity through the confrontation of two rather stereotyped figures: a lower-class femme fatale who works her charms in order to seduce and threaten the authority of a man with bourgeois ambitions and pretensions. The woman from the underclass – typically either a maid or a prostitute – is associated with the irrational, the institutional and the biological, while the man belongs to an emergent middle class that surrounds itself with Western commodities, as Chris Berry remarks when he calls attention to the prevalence of modern appliances in the Western-style houses in The Housemaid and The Insect Woman (Berry 1998). Thus, by seducing her master, the woman disturbs the tidy emergence of the middle class, with the result that there emerges a kind of allegorical confrontation between the traditional and the modern, in these figures in a seduction. Yet what would be a romance quickly becomes a source of terror, and Kim’s use of the conventions of the horror genre allows him to explore the tensions between the forces of the traditional and the modern. Where does the horror come from? And how to stop it? As if to tease us with answers to such questions, Kim frequently weaves an investigation into his films (as in The Insect Woman and The Woman of Fire), offering a thread of rational interrogation, a touch of the thriller. A male figure of authority – a detective, a reporter, a doctor investigates the double suicides, and the response tends to confirm biological explanations – for instance, the clash between the male instinct for sexual consummation and the female instinct for reproduction (overdetermined by the animalistic overtones of his titles). A moral warning ensues, delivered so readily and so archly that it fails to convince. The male authority strives to reduce the complexities and dynamics of these histories to an essentializing discourse on biology, yet his explications fail to resolve the tensions or to heal the wounds that run through the text – wounds which simply will not go away. They haunt these films because they go far beyond the cinematic text, echoing the conflicts born of the period and intensified modernization. Women from poor rural areas suffered doubly in the postcolonial “recovery,” exploited by the forces of advanced capitalism as well as the patriarchal

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authority of village life. In Kim Kiyoung’s films, such women return as seductresses with uncontrollable powers. They return to haunt the scene of modernization, a scene they have never really left despite attempts to forget or conceal their miserable conditions. Kim’s preference for the term hanyo – used for “housemaid” – evokes a female figure already obsolete at the time of the films; the hanyo had already given way to the singmo, who tended to the kitchen. Without skills to survive modernization, she cannot even lay claim to enough technical ability to play the role of chef. Instead, she calls on her allegedly biological instincts as a woman, relying on these to assure her social mobility. Men in Kim’s films are presented with a range of options, passing the bar exam or marrying a rich girl as in The Coachman (Ma Bu, 1961) or Mr. Park (Bak Seobang, 1960), respectively. Women, in contrast, depend solely on their supposedly dangerous instinct for reproduction, evidently to move up in society. Yet, in a manner at once eerie and perfectly appropriate, the menace of these remnants only emerges in contemporary settings, as if the force of the premodern could only be configured and conceptualized within the framework of modernity. With such an obvious conflation of premodern monstrosity and modern commodity, a question arises about the way in which Kim’s films use women to mobilize the dreaded instinct that, in his view, characterizes the human condition. Where does this leave women? Do they stand in opposition to modernity, at once as relics of the past and as reminders of the evil that lurks in humanity? Or is it merely that they are doubly erased in Kim’s films, victims both of modernity and of tradition? Recently, Paul Willemen has taken up the question of modernization in South Korea and its cinema. He notes a complex blockage, historically and culturally specif ic to South Korea, remarking that “both the way back to tradition and the way forward to modernity are blocked, as both directions appear to open onto anti-modern, absolutist and corrupting social organizations” (Willemen 2002, 175). Killer Butterfly (Sarinnabireul jjonneun yeoja, 1978), an amalgam of science fiction, horror and thriller, presents three episodes in the life of a history student. In the second of its “historical” explorations, a 2,000-year-old skeleton comes to life as a beautiful young woman who seduces the history student. The film ostensibly explains these events in scientific terms, but the overall effect is a radical collapse of differentiation between ancient and modern. Regardless of era, women and men are caught in manic cycles of patriarchal oppression and female hysteria. If one adopts linear, scientific criteria for modernity (in the manner of modernization theory), then there is nowhere to go – as Willemen suggests, all is corruption; and maybe this is an exercise in

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anti-modern sentiment. Yet in this film as in others by Kim Kiyoung, the horrific blockage of linear histories challenges us to rethink the terms of modernity. In The Housemaid, the forces of modernization prevent the upward mobility of the maid. The Sunny Trail (Yangsando, 1955), however, presents the story of a peasant girl in the Joseon era, showing the caste system as equally hostile to social mobility. Although the woman has a loyal lover from the same caste, she is forced to marry an aristocrat to save her father, and her beloved kills himself when he hears of it. Death awaits her, too. The mother of her dead lover kills her in order to conduct a wedding ceremony with a dead bride and groom, to ensure that their spirits will finally entwine. The women in Kim’s modern movies fare somewhat better, although the logic of these films is much the same. The working-class women in the Housemaid trilogy and in Carnivore (Yuk Sikdongmul, 1984) drag their masters into hell with them. With their nightmarish, gothic confrontations between the working class and the upper-middle class, such movies anticipate the social confrontations that only emerged, and were publicity addressed, some 20 or 30 years later. To return to the question of the blockage of linear histories in Kim’s cinema, I can’t help feeling that, among the many reasons for this are practical issues of distribution and circulation that also inform these texts. For instance, the Korean Motion Picture Promotion Company, set up by the government, has done little to promote Korean films overseas. While the South Korean film industry has produced some 200 films (or more) each year over the past 50 years, the market remains domestic. Alternatively, one might frame an argument about the “Korean cultural constellation” itself, as Paul Willemen does. Surely the problem is overdetermined. In any case, in addressing the question of how films can break into the international art-house circuit, Chris Berry suggests that Kim Kiyoung shows promise. “They satisfy the demand for an auteur and are stylistically distinctive, differentiating them from other films already circulating through the arthouse and festival circuit” (Berry 1998, 46). Nevertheless, they have yet to attract international attention. I think, however, that they deserve such attention precisely because they deal with issues so fundamental to cinema and modernity, mobilizing fetishism as a way to stage the blockage of linear progression and a breakthrough into an alternative modernity. Yet to write of films that really have not been shown very much outside South Korea puts me in a strange enunciative position – that of introducing and promoting another unknown cinema, which is always envisioned as a national cinema. As I address questions of modernity and fetishism in cinema, the spectre

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of modernity haunts my words, guides my observations and projects the modern nation onto an international sense. Laura Mulvey explains that both Freud and Marx use the concept of fetishism in an attempt to explain a refusal, or blockage, of the mind, or a phobic inability of the psyche, to understand a symbolic system of value, one within the social and the other within the psychoanalytic sphere. (Mulvey 1996, 2)

Almost inevitably, as one moves between the psychic and social registers of fetishism in cinema, one arrives at national culture – as I have done, albeit somewhat reluctantly – which in turn leads one to conclude that it is the impossible tensions of Korean culture which are translated into (and from) Kim’s movies. Yet this ineluctable turn to national culture and national cinema is complicated by fetishism, with its psychosocial blockage and passionate submission. If Kim’s films prove to be a breakthrough locally and internationally, they might not only provide different ways of reading modernity in South Korea but also strategic ways of addressing it. The popularity of his films with his contemporaries in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as with young spectators in the late 1990s, suggests that his approach to unresolved social confrontations has remained relevant for audiences throughout the postcolonial period. Still, Kim’s vision is far removed from the concerns of South Korea’s postcolonial intellectual film-makers and critics, who have sought to construct nationalism by way of realism – as is the case with Yu Hyeonmok’s films such as Stray Bullet (O Baltan, 1961). As a result, despite (or because of) his popularity at the box office, prior to the mid-1990s, most critics and film-makers dismissed Kim’s work as ahistorical, artificial and sexually excessive. Ironically, the same qualities are currently attracting attention, locally and internationally. At the Berlin Film Festival, for instance, Erica Gregor likened him to Fassbinder or Sirk.5 The comparison is apt in a certain respect, for the films cited thus far exhibit a tendency to lavish attention on the erotic possibilities of American commodity culture – to fetishize it, as it were. Yet the logic of fetishization is such that it goes beyond lavish attention, becoming a spectacle of excess, investing things with life, purpose and authority over the viewer – thus always on the verge of de-fetishizing the same objects. 5 Commentary from the discussion session following the screening of Carnivore at the Kim Kiyoung retrospective at the Second Pusan International Film Festival