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Vicarious Politics: Violence and the Colonial Period in Contemporary South Korean Film
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
Abstract
This article examines four recent South Korean action drama films dealing with the Japanese colonial period and the Korean nationalist resistance movement in particular – Chung Chiu's Modern Boy (2008), Ch'ae Tong-hun's Assassination (2015), Kim Chi-un's The Age of Shadows (2016), and Hŏ Chin-ho's The Last Princess (2016). It explores the ways in which these films valorize armed anti-colonial resistance through a spectacular form of violence detached from real everyday politics during the colonial period and which hermetically seals such past political involvement from any corresponding activity in the present. The result of this, I will argue, is the repression not only of the memory of mass political mobilization under Japanese rule, but of the 1980s-era minjung or “people's” movement as well, having significant implications for how contemporary social movements may be imagined and represented.
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References
Notes
1 See for example, “South Korea lawmakers pass contentious anti-terror bill after record filibuster ends,” The Japan Times, March 03, 2016.
2 Azadeh Farahmand, ‘Perspectives on Recent (International Acclaim for) Iranian Cinema’; Richard Tapper (ed.) - The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation and Identity, 86-108. See p. 99 in particular for Farahmand's definition of “political escapism.”
3 Carter J. Eckert, Park Chung Hee and Modern Korea: The Roots of Militarism 1866-1945. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016.
4 Jin-kyung Lee, Service Economies: Militarism, Sex Work, and Migrant Labor in South Korea. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
5 Janet Poole, When the Future Disappears: The Modernist Imagination in Late Colonial Korea, New York: Columbia University Press, 2014, p. 2.
6 By “ambivalent position,” I mean to draw attention to how the South Korean government is, for example, wedged between mediating popular protest against Japan over the “comfort women” (wianbu) issue and pushing through unpopular treaties at the behest of Japan and the US, forcing it to downplay its own criticism of Japan for the latter's colonial legacy. A similar balancing act is performed vis a vis the US, whose ongoing military presence in the country is facilitated by the South Korean government but unpopular among many citizens.
7 Travis Workman, “Sŏ In-sik's Communism and the East Asian Community (1937-1940),” positions: east asia cultures critique 21.1 (2013): 133-160. See especially pp. 151-154.
8 I credit this observation to Han Sang Kim and Andy Sanggyu Lee, respectively, and thank them both for edifying conversations about these and related films.
9 I thank Gowoon Noh for pointing this fact out to me.
10 Ken C. Kawashima, The Proletarian Gamble: Korean Workers in Interwar Japan, Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. See especially ch. 5, “The Obscene, Violent Supplement of State Power: Korean Welfare and Class Warfare in Interwar Japan.”
11 An English translation of this story can be found in Kuroshima Denji, A Flock of Swirling Crows and Other Proletarian Writings (trans. Zeljko “Jake” Cipris), Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2005.
12 Kobayashi's term is translated and introduced by Samuel Perry, in Recasting Red Culture in Proletarian Japan: Childhood, Korea, and the Historical Avant-Garde. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2014, p. 5. The Korean pronunciation of this term is tayangsŏng (多樣性). I am inspired here as well by Asad Haider's defense of multi-racial unity in the context of the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement, antiblack state violence, and Afro-pessimist theory in the United States, which resonates with Kobayashi's parallel concept from almost a century before. See Haider, “Unity: Amiri Baraka and the Black Lives Matter Movements,” Lana Turner Journal 8 (2016)
13 Baek Moon Im, Im Hwa ŭi yŏnghwa (Im Hwa's Cinema), Seoul: Somyŏng Ch'ulp'an, 2015; Samuel Perry, Recasting Red Culture in Proletarian Japan; and Nayoung Aimee Kwon, Intimate Empire: Collaboration and Colonial Modernity in Korea and Japan. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.
14 See chapter 1 of Baek Moon Im's Im Hwa ŭi yŏnghwa (Im Hwa's Cinema), “P'urollaet'aria yŏnghwa wa chongjokji (ethnography) sai aesŏ” (Between proletarian film and ethnography).
15 Allen Feldman, “From Desert Storm to Rodney King via ex-Yugoslavia: On Cultural Anaesthesia,” in Seremetakis, C N. The Senses Still: Perception and Memory As Material Culture in Modernity. Boulder: Westview Press, 1994.
16 Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, London: Verso, 1989, p. 34. Italics in original.
17 Theodore H. Hughes, Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea: Freedom's Frontier. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.
18 John Lie, K-pop: Popular Music, Cultural Amnesia, and Economic Innovation in South Korea. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015.
19 Namhee Lee, The Making of Minjung: Democracy and the Politics of Representation in South Korea. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007.
20 Nam Eun-ju, “After Choi Sun-sil scandal, blacklisted movies coming into the light,” Hankyoreh English Edition, 18 December 2016
21 Sohl Lee, Being Political Popular: South Korean Art at the Intersection of Popular Culture and Democracy, 1980-2010. Seoul: Hyunsil Pub, 2012, p. 45.
22 Jinsoo An, “War as Business in South Korea's Manchurian Action Films,” positions: east asia cultures critique 23.4 (2015): 785-806.
23 Alan Scherstuhl,“The Tyranny of Pew-Pew: How Fun Fantasy Violence Became Inescapable,” The Village Voice, 23 April 2015
24 Kyung Hyun Kim, Virtual Hallyu: Korean Cinema of the Global Era, Durham: Duke University Press, 2011, p. 79.