Cinema Under National Reconstruction: State Censorship and South Korea’s Cold War Film Culture

Cinema Under National Reconstruction calls for a revisionist understanding of state film censorship during successive Cold War military regimes in South Korea (1961-1988). Drawing upon primary documents from the Korean Film Archive’s digitized database and framing South Korean film censorship from a transnational perspective, Hye Seung Chung makes the case that, while political oppression/repression existed inside and outside the film industry during this period, film censorship was not simply a tool for authoritarian dictatorship. Through such case studies as Yu Hyun-mok’s The Stray Bullet (1961), Ha Kil-jong’s The March of the Fools (1975), and Yi Chang-ho’s Declaration of Fools (1983), the author defines censorship as a dialogical process of cultural negotiations wherein the state, the film industry, and the public fight out a battle over the definitions and functions of national cinema. In the context of Cold War Korea, one cannot fully understand or construct film history without reassessing censorship as a productive feedback system where both state regulators and filmmakers played active roles in shaping the new narrative or sentiment of the nation on the big screen.

Hye Seung Chung is a professor of film and media studies at Colorado State University, Fort Collins. She is the author or coauthor of Movie Minorities: Transnational Rights Advocacy and South Korean Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2021), Hollywood Diplomacy: Film Regulation, Foreign Relations, and East Asian Representations (Rutgers University Press, 2020) and Movie Migrations: Transnational Genre Flows and South Korean Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2015).