Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introducing Joseon Cinema: the Question of Film History and the Film Culture of Colonial Korea
- 1 The Beginning: Towards a Mass Entertainment
- 2 Joseon Cinema, Cinematic Joseon: on Some Critical Questions of Joseon Cinema
- 3 Migrating with the Movies: Japanese Settler Film Culture
- 4 Colonial Film Spectatorship: Nationalist Enough?
- 5 Film Spectatorship and the Tensions of Modernity
- Conclusion: Integrating into the Imperial Cinema
- Notes
- Appendix
- Bibliography
- Index
Introducing Joseon Cinema: the Question of Film History and the Film Culture of Colonial Korea
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 January 2018
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introducing Joseon Cinema: the Question of Film History and the Film Culture of Colonial Korea
- 1 The Beginning: Towards a Mass Entertainment
- 2 Joseon Cinema, Cinematic Joseon: on Some Critical Questions of Joseon Cinema
- 3 Migrating with the Movies: Japanese Settler Film Culture
- 4 Colonial Film Spectatorship: Nationalist Enough?
- 5 Film Spectatorship and the Tensions of Modernity
- Conclusion: Integrating into the Imperial Cinema
- Notes
- Appendix
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
When approaching the film culture in Korea under Japanese colonial rule (1910–45), we are quickly led into a vast site of absences and voids which requires us patiently to carry out an archaeological unearthing and excavating of the remnants across historical, social and cultural terrains. The lack of actual celluloid images is generally seen as the primary form of absence that confronts scholars because only about a dozen feature films from the colonial period, along with a handful of propaganda films and newsreels produced by the authorities, remain, and no single commercial film produced prior to 1934 survives. Scholars consider the limited availability of ‘Korean’ films from this period as the major burden in their attempts to reconstruct colonial film history. As a Korean film historian recently noted, owing to this limitation few scholars have offered a comprehensive study of colonial film culture in Korea, leaving a most noticeable void in Korean film history. Yet, if we walk further into this concealed chapter of film history, we begin to wonder if the lack of available film texts can really be deemed the sole problem posed for efforts to understand colonial film culture. It is estimated that only about two hundred commercial films were made in the colonial period, accounting for, at best, 5 per cent of all the films screened at cinemas beginning in the early 1920s when local film production began; before the 1920s, all the films projected on to the silver screen in pre-colonial and colonial Korea were foreign imports. According to the film censorship record of the colonial government, for instance, of the 931 submissions the board censored during its first six months of activity between August 1926 and February 1927, 482 were American and European films, 441 were Japanese, and only eight films were locally produced.
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- Information
- Eclipsed CinemaThe Film Culture of Colonial Korea, pp. 1 - 12Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2017