Tears in the Imperial Screen: Strait of Chosŏn (1943) as a Wartime Woman’s Film and the Construction of Colonial Korean Spectatorship

• In Event: Lines of Sight - Korean Act

Abstract

On the assumption that colonial Korea’s films during the wartime representatively registered a crack in imperial Japan’s national project, my presentation sheds light on the disconcertion working covertly in war-effort mobilization films made by colonial Koreans. My paper conducts a close reading of Strait of Chosŏn (kr. Chosŏn Haehyŏp; jp. Chōsen Kaikyō), a war propaganda film directed by a colonial Korean filmmaker Pak Ki-ch’ae in 1943. Made in Japanese to praise the virtues of volunteering of Koreans for the Japanese army, the film achieved huge box-office success when released in Korea unlike many other Korean films of the time. Through textual analysis, I argue the unprecedented popularity and success of the film was, among many other reasons, largely derived from the film’s deft visualization and modification of the original script written by a Japanese scriptwriter with clear political elements into a compelling melodrama that targeted the taste of Korean filmgoers, bending the propaganda form into a merely entertaining love story/war melodrama. Moreover, the film features the newly rising womanhood during wartime, displaying the women’s alliance and cooperation that help the female protagonist overcome wartime hardship and the problems of traditional family culture. In this way, I argue Strait of Chosŏn created a women’s space in the public sphere for the first time in Korean cinema and constructed Korean spectatorship as an agency oscillating between war-spectacle indulgence and subtle resistance.

Author

• Hyun Hee Park, University of Chicago