Cinema under National Reconstruction

State Censorship and South Korea’s Cold War Film Culture

By Hye Seung Chung

Rutgers University Press

Cinema Under National Reconstruction calls for a revisionist understanding of state film censorship during successive Cold War military regimes in South Korea (1961-1988). Drawing upon primary documents from the Korean Film Archive’s digitized database and framing South Korean film censorship from a transnational perspective, Hye Seung Chung makes the case that, while political oppression/repression existed inside and outside the film industry during this period, film censorship was not simply a tool for authoritarian dictatorship. Through such case studies as Yu Hyun-mok’s The Stray Bullet (1961), Ha Kil-jong’s The March of the Fools (1975), and Yi Chang-ho’s Declaration of Fools (1983), the author defines censorship as a dialogical process of cultural negotiations wherein the state, the film industry, and the public fight out a battle over the definitions and functions of national cinema. In the context of Cold War Korea, one cannot fully understand or construct film history without reassessing censorship as a productive feedback system where both state regulators and filmmakers played active roles in shaping the new narrative or sentiment of the nation on the big screen.

Theoretically sophisticated and extensively researched, Hye Seung Chung’s Cinema under National Reconstruction reveals the ways in which multiple actors (the state, the film industry, the public) negotiate the definition of national cinema. A groundbreaking work that takes Korean film censorship studies to a new level. Theodore H. Hughes, author of Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea: Freedom's Frontier

Hye Seung Chung’s brilliant book deepens our understanding of cinema as a site of social and political contest. The product of impressive research in Korean and American archives, it offers a rare comparative perspective on censorship practices on both sides of the Pacific. Chung challenges conventional wisdom about the always-deleterious effects of censorship and profoundly revises our understanding of Korean filmmakers’ relationship to the state. Her analysis of government and industry records provides an important corrective to scholars’ reliance on the words and perspectives directors, who were often sidelined during the censorship process. A major contribution to postwar Korean film history.’
Christina Klein, author of Cold War Cosmopolitanism: Period Style in 1950s Korean Cinema

Hye Seung Chung is a professor of film and media studies at Colorado State University, Fort Collins. She is the author or coauthor of Movie Minorities: Transnational Rights Advocacy and South Korean Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2021), Hollywood Diplomacy: Film Regulation, Foreign Relations, and East Asian Representations (Rutgers University Press, 2020) and Movie Migrations: Transnational Genre Flows and South Korean Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2015).

NOTE ON TEXT
CHRONOLOGY
A LIST OF AGENCIES AND ACRONYMS
INTRODUCTION: Archival Revisionism and New Korean Film Historiography
CHAPTER 1: Fending off Darkness, Uplifting National Cinema: Korean Film Censorship and The Stray Bullet
CHAPTER 2: From Blackboard Jungle to The Teahouse of the August Moon: Censoring Hollywood in Postcolonial Korea
CHAPTER 3: Myths of Martyrs and Heroes in a Godless Land: Interagency Regulation of 1960s Anticommunist Films
CHAPTER 4: Cinematic Censorship as Sentimental Education: Indoctrinating Gaiety as National Emotion in Yushin-Era Youth Comedies
CHAPTER 5: Censors as Audiences and Vice Versa: Sex, Politics, and Labor in 1981
CHAPTER 6: Beyond Oral Histories and Trade Legends: A Bourdieusian-Foucauldian Deconstruction of Anti-Censorship Myths
EPILOGUE: Media Ratings, the End of Censorship?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX

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