(Beyond) Cold War governmentality and anti-Japanese sentiments in Postwar South Korean and Japanese films: Co-produced Films Between Zainichi and Japanese as the possibility of alternative communalism

• In Event: From Resentment to Alternative Cooperation: Imagining the Intimate Other in Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese Cinema

Abstract

During the postwar period, exchanges between the film industries of Korea and Japan were officially prohibited. For this reason, Korean films made during this period have rarely been studied in relation to postwar Japanese films. However, postwar Korean and Japanese films could be seen as sharing and participating in a similar transformative process driven by the U.S. occupation’s cultural politics. In this context, films such as “liberation” (kwangbok) films, Idea Pictures, and USIS and CIE films conveyed the ideology of anti-Japanese militarism and American liberalism propagated by U.S. occupation’s film policies. At the same time, contemporaneous cinematic practices were employed in Japan and Korea to counter those policies. For example, Children in Crisis (Lee Hyung-pyo, 1954) and Children in the Classroom (Hani Susumu, 1955) expressed skepticism for the US occupation’s policies. Using direct cinema and cinema verité style, they avoided the promotional Griersonian documentary style preferred by the U.S. occupation. There was also the cinema verité film movement co-produced by Japanese Independent Production filmmakers (led by socialist film directors Kamei Humio and Arai Hideo) and zainichi filmmaker Kim Sun-myoung’s Tokyo Kino Productions. Two representative films of this movement, Children of the Base (1953) and Children of Korea (1954) deal with the oppression experienced by minorities within Japan and their resistance to both the U.S. occupation and the Japanese government. My paper explores the ways in which this film movement suggests the possibility of alternative “communalism,” beyond the liberal governmentality of the U.S. occupation, the vestiges of Japanese imperialism and postcolonial nationalism.

Author

• Minhwa Ahn, Korea National University of the Arts