Nontheatrical Film Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

After the Second World War, government-level public information agencies in the U.S., such as the U.S. Information Service (USIS), resided in allied nations, such as South Korea, to engage in long-term propaganda activities. This study focuses on the negotiation of identity of South Korean filmmakers and audiences in making and consuming cultural films, devoting particular attention to the role of the American ‘foreign’ authorities.
The idea of cultural film (Kulturfilm), which had been imported by the Japanese colonial rulers and was succeeded by the U.S. and ROK public information agencies, created a useful foundation for South Koreans’ perception of the Self in this context. It was a vaguely defined category of films mainly distributed by governmental-level agencies for educational and propaganda purposes. The category of cultural film included public information documentaries, occasional newsmagazine films, ethnographic films, and educational feature films. Cultural films were not only a means of publicizing governmental policies, but also a window through which to learn about the world with an ethnographic element. Under the name of cultural film, U.S. public information agencies imported American-made documentary films which depicted the American way of life and produced ‘localized films’ dealing with local issues by hiring Korean filmmakers.
For Koreans who were situated in the postcolonial state formation, the new conditions fostered through the emergence of the Cold War system were crucial to their identity formation. They were citizens of a newly built state, but their nation was divided between the Cold War Power blocs which defined South Koreans as citizens of the “Free World.” Cultural films created an interesting foundation for South Koreans’ perception of the Self in this context. As a window to learn the world, cultural films of U.S. public information agencies made a condition for the Self/Other opposition, as conventional ethnographic films usually did.
However, in the geopolitical and historical particularity of South Korea, those cultural films created a unique type of spectatorship that mediated the perceptions of the Self and the Other in an intricate web of different ethnographic gazes. Imported documentaries showed the American life as an idealized model of civilization, but there is little probability that Koreans fully identified themselves with Americans in these films. (Re)presentations of idealized American urban life were rather a means of entertainment to see the exotic Other. At the same time, locally made cultural films depicted South Koreans who constructed their lives and rehabilitated from social and personal damages. Despite the aim to facilitate self-recognition of Korean audiences as citizens of the “Free World,” such films also presented the complexity in identification since their self-recognition was organized by the foreign agencies like USIS-Korea. Thus, it is highly probable that the reception of those films was a process of intense negotiation to define the Self and the Other.
This outcome was partly an inevitable consequence of the localization project of U.S. public information activities; however, use of local manpower was not the only cause of such an uneven screen. The appearance of translated and modified ‘ideal citizens’ in P‘aldogangsan (1967), one of the representative films of NFPC also made under the profound impact of USIS, and an enthusiastic response from the Korean public to that film show how an original project on the cultural cold war could be transformed into a vernacular one in the more local context.
In the case of Korean filmmakers who were affiliated with U.S. public information agencies, the negotiation of identity appears more clearly. They were hired by the U.S. governmental agencies and served as messengers of the “Free World” screen, but, at the same time, they recognized themselves as builders of the nation. Further, they also regarded themselves as individual artists who did not merely deliver rhetoric of their hirers but also expressed their own artistic sensibility. These contested self-identities led the filmmakers to adopt certain compromising positions. As one can see in the distinction between the routes of the two symbolic documentarists, Robert Flaherty and John Grierson, government-sponsored documentary filmmaking would drive filmmakers to a crossroads between romanticism facilitating humanist impulse and enlightenment seeking social engineering. Similar inner conflict of USIS- and UNKRA-affiliated filmmakers was joined together with the geopolitical conditions of South Korea and concluded with unique auteurism in film making.
The routes of these alumni of the American film training camps indicate several different choices in the intense negotiations on identity: leaving the camp and devoting oneself to auteurism in filmmaking; leaving the camp and keeping auteurist impulse in mind, but giving it up in commercial filmmaking with deep skepticism; and remaining in the camp with auteurism in cultural film making. They also show double-sidedness of those Korean filmmakers who did receive benefits from U.S.-led agencies, as the successor and criticizer of the Western culture. They constantly had to seek compromises between the Griersonian missions and artistic self-realization and between nation-building and “Free World” bloc building, in an all too “expert” system created by a hegemonic foreign agency.