Cinema has become a battleground upon which history is made—a major mass medium of the twentieth century dealing with history. The re-enactments of historical events in film straddle reality and fantasy, documentary and fiction, representation and performance, entertainment and education. This interdisciplinary book examines the relationship between film and history and the links between historical research and filmic (re-)presentations of history with special reference to South Korean cinema.
As with all national film industries, Korean cinema functions as a medium of inventing national history and identity, and also establishing their legitimacy—in both forgetting the past and remembering history. Korean films also play a part in forging cultural collective memory. Korea as a colonised and divided nation clearly adopted different approaches to the filmic depiction of history compared to colonial powers such as Western or Japanese cinema. The Colonial Period (1910–1945) and Korean War (1950–1953) draw particular attention as they have been major topics shaping the narrative of nation in North and South Korean films.
Exploring the changing modes, impacts and functions of screen images dealing with history in Korean cinema, this book will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Korean history, film, media and cultural studies.
1. Cinematic Battlefield of Memory, Imagination, and Narrative of the Past: A Preface to Korean Film and History
Hyunseon Lee
PART I: Issues, Positions, and Approaches to Historical Memory
2. Making Nations: Film Propaganda in Colonial Korea and Nazi Germany
Yong-Ku Cha
3. Could History Films be Rivals of Historians? Historical Criticism Through History Films in Korean Cinema
Hana Lee
4. Writing a History through Cinema: A Focus on Two “Comfort Women” Films
You-Shin Joo
PART II: Korean Cinema and the Colonial Period
5. “Become a Soldier”: Korean Women in Late Colonial Propaganda Films
Moonim Baek
6. Hyŏnhaet'an, Mon Amour: Colonial Memories and (In)visible Japan in 1960s South Korean Cinema
Hwajin Lee
7. Screening Collaboration: Rescuing Pro-Japanese Koreans from Colonial Illusions
Mark Capiro
PART III: How to Remember the Korean War, Its Origin and Aftermath
8. Haunting Returns to the (Diasporic) Filmscape: Transgenerational and Transnational Testimony in Reiterations of Dissent
Seunghei Clara Hong
9. Korean War Films: Generational Memory of North Korean Partisans, Soldiers, Brothers, and Women
Hyunseon Lee
10. Between Protector and Oppressor: Representation of the United States Forces Korea in Korean
Cinema
Chonghyun Choi
PART IV: Archiving Contact Zones
11. The Agonistics on the Borders in-between Two Koreas: The Politics of Cinematic Representations in Documentary Films on Borders since 2018
Woohyung Chon
12. Walk into a History with Kim Hong-joon. An Interview
Hong-Joon Kim and Seung-Ah Lee
Biography
Hyunseon Lee is a London-based film, media and cultural scholar. She is Privatdozentin at the Department of German (teaching in literature, culture and media) at Siegen University and Professorial Research Associate at the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, and Centre for Creative Industries, Media and Screen Studies, SOAS, University of London. She is also Professional Researcher of the Institute of Humanities at Yonsei University in Seoul. Her publications include books and articles on film, popular culture, gender, German literature and media aesthetics from a comparative intermedial perspective. Her recent book is Korean Film and Festivals: Global Transcultural Flows (Routledge, 2022), which she edited alone. She currently researches war, gender and memory with a focus on K-culture and Korean Peninsula cinema.
