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.

Anna Sokolow (1910–2000), an American Jewish choreographer known for her social statements, led the workers dance movement and performed as a soloist with Martha Graham. She imbued her dances Strange American Funeral (1935) and Case History No.— (1937) with proletarian ideology that spoke to 1930s working- and middle-class audiences aligned with values of revolutionary and modern dance. These choreographies spoke to a political atmosphere focused on social justice while they appealed to a broad dance-going public. Sokolow's Graham training engendered a modernist aesthetic in her choreography that led critics to consider her work universal instead of marked as coming from a working-class left-wing Jewish dancer. This article argues that while narratives about Sokolow's work downplay her Communist affiliations, these ideals played a critical role in her choreography and in her navigation of international Communist circles. As Sokolow's choreography reinforced her politics, so too did her affiliations support her dance work.