Enterprises of the Feeble: The Makings of Cinema in Colonial Korea

In this dissertation, I examine the troubled unfolding of Korean cinema in the Japanese empire between the 1920s and the 1940s. I challenge the narratives of film history that those holding the perspectives of the empire have written by foregrounding the coloniality in creating cinema in East Asia. At the heart of colonial articulations of Korean cinema lie its industrial weakness, unappreciated aesthetics, and the filmic representations of feeble figures such as the disabled, wanderers, and orphans. Together, these constitute what I term “the feebleness of colonial cinema.” I investigate various projects through which filmmakers, business people, critics, and colonial bureaucrats have undertaken in order to come to terms with their cinema’s feebleness in colonial Korea. In so doing, I show the different ways in which colonial Korean cinema was defined, articulated, imagined, and created by different actors in this history. In Part I, “Change Corporatized,” I analyze one of the dominant ways in which the Korean film world wrestled with its own industrial and aesthetic problems: the “corporatization,” or kiŏphwa, of the film business in colonial Korea. Faced with the industrial constraints of insufficient resources and lagging technological development, Korean filmmakers sought external aid to form a more rational industry. The discourses and practices of Korean cinema’s corporatization were situated alongside changes in film policies that were enacted during the height of Japan’s colonial wars in Asia and the Pacific. Since the colonial government could provide the help that was necessary to turn the feeble cinema into a healthy film industry, filmmakers in Korea participated in the empire’s project of utilizing cinema as a cultural and ideological weapon for its warfare. Tracing the changing articulations of Korean cinema from the early debates about the relationship between cinema and Korean audiences to the establishment of state film corporations, I investigate the entanglement between corporatization and imperialization and show how Korean filmmakers’ wartime collaboration with Japanese imperialism was profoundly grounded in their visceral awareness of, and longing to overcome, cinema’s feebleness. However, Koreans’ colonial experiences during this period cannot be reduced to the sole acts of wartime collaboration. Colonial Korean cinema’s industrial and aesthetic feebleness, alongside the representation of the feeble, led to multiple projects that turned the studios into laboratories of the future. In Part II, “For a Feeble Cinema,” I reinscribe this feebleness as the manifestation of several different imaginations, despite the highly constrained era, by examining three sites of colonial cinema’s contestation and negotiation with the dominant force of corporatization: (1) The rearticulation of Koreanness through early collaborative filmmaking between Koreans and the Japanese; (2) the revaluation of feeble figures on screen not as an undesirable representation of the colonized, but rather as a strategy for promoting themes and aesthetics unique to Korean cinema for broader audiences in the empire; and (3) a theoretical imagining of a visionary cinema that embraces its own vulnerability as a creative energy. At times failing, these projects exemplified the varying ambitions of filmmakers, entrepreneurs, film theorists, and colonial bureaucrats toward colonial cinema. By examining what colonial Koreans failed to do in terms of what they attempted, I argue that Korean cinema’s feebleness paradoxically animated and enriched the political and aesthetic possibilities of colonial cinema.PHDAsian Languages & CulturesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146131/1/irhesohn_1.pd