APRIL 30, 2015
.jpg "ㄷ(0).jpg") |
Hyangjin Lee,Professor, College of Intercultural Communication,
Rikkyo University; Kim Koo Visiting Professor in the Department
of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University
“A Genealogy of Anti-Communist Film in South Korea:
Representing and Imagining Cold War”
Faculty host: Si Nae Park Bio:
Hyangjin Lee is a Professor at the College of Intercultural
Communication at Rikkyo University in Tokyo, where she teaches
courses on Korean and Japanese cinema and cultural studies.
She received both her B.A. and M.A. in Sociology from Yonsei
University, where she also completed her doctoral coursework.
Lee completed her dissertation, a comparative study of North and
South Korean film, at the University of Leeds in the UK, and earned
her Ph.D. in Communication Studies there in 1998.
Professor Lee taught at the School of East Asian Studies at the
University of Sheffield from 1991 to 2008. In addition to her extensive teaching experience, she has served as the Director of the UK Korean Film Festival (2000-2006), and is currently a member of the editorial boards of New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film and Korea Culture Studies. Since 2013, she has organized the annual Transnational Cinema Symposium in Japan, focusing on East Asia. The 2015 Transnational Cinema Symposium will be held in the UK and Korea with the theme of war memories narrated by women’s voices. |
Her monograph Contemporary Korean Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics (Manchester University
Press, 2001) is the first book on Korean national cinema written in English, and it has been revised and
published in various languages including an extended edition in Spanish in 2012. Lee’s latest book, Sociology
of Korean Wave: Fandom, Family and Multiculturalism (Iwanami, 2008), explores the popularity of Korean
television dramas and their stars among Japanese consumers of entertainment, and its implications for
transnational cultural exchange. More recently, she has contributed chapters to volumes on Korean and
Asian Film, focusing on representations of war, death, and family in Korean cinema. Her new book, North,
South, and Japanese-Korean Cinemas: From the National to the Post-National will be published by Misuzu
Sobo in 2015.
In the fall of 2014, Lee taught East Asian Film and Media Studies 121, “Korean Cinema and
Transnationality,” a conference course that examines how film reflects and influences power dynamics and
inequalities as they pertain to gender, sexuality, class, race, and ethnicity in both national and transnational
contexts. Abstract:
This paper will consider the generic features of anti-Communist drama in South Korea from
a perspective of historical development and thematic configurations. The anti-Communist film forms
a major genre in South Korea. In order to evaluate the historical legacy of the Cold War in the identity
politics of South Korean national cinema, the paper will discuss the oppressive film policy in the predemocratization
era and include a textual analysis of three films that deal with the war and national
division, namely The Marines Never Returned (Lee Man-hui, 1963), Rainy Days (Yu Hyun-mok, 1979)
and Spring in My Hometown (Lee Kwang-mok, 1998). The national division of Korea in 1945 was a
settlement of the Allies at the end of the Second World War. The Korean War (1950-1953) materialized
the ideological confrontation between the communist North and the capitalist South into vivid memories
of massacre by the opposing forces and created unforgettable hatred between them. Anti-Americanism
and anti-Communism became the state ideologies of the North and the South since then. Park Jung Hee’s
government (1961-1979), in particular, fully exploited the propaganda role of anti-Communist film to
justify the ideological legitimacy of its military regime. Unsurprisingly, anti-Communism was the utmost
means to suppress the people’s desire toward to a democratic society. In this sense, the appearance of antiwar
and unification dramas that defy the authority of anti-Communism and imply anti-Americanism
in the 90s can be seen as an indicator of the radical social and cultural changes in South Korea after the
democratization movement of the mid 1980s. This paper will deal with this democratic transformation
of South Korea, by discussing the historical legacy of anti-Communist drama.
 |
 |
|
