냉전체제와 내셔널 시네마의 혼종적 원천

Cold War and the Hybrid Ursprung of South Korean National Cinema: On 'Boxes of Death' and Kim Ki-Young's USIS Public Information Films

As is generally discussed, issues of “Korean cinema” as the national cinema have provoked controversies in diverse aspects. This concept remains an object hardly to define or draw boundary amid diverse controversies. In this article, I examine this indefinability of Korean national cinema by dwelling upon specific objects from the period of reconstruction after the Korean War. I give attention to the specific time in which the dimension of the state-building and the nation-building became combined, and to the fact that there existed long-lasting heterogeneity and hybridity in this process. Kim Ki-Young's films show how such characters appear on the sphere of the cinema. His public information films are under the legacy of American war films. Both of his two short documentaries I am a Truck (1954) and Diary of Three Sailors(1955) show unique presentation styles originated from the WWII films made by the US Army. However they also contain self-conscious moments when the director refuses to be identified as mere a successor of American documentaries. There are not only the processes of translation, adaptation and mimicry, but also obviously self-conscious expressions in order to overcome the one-sided reception. Kim’s first commercial film Boxes of Death(1955) also contains certain aspects that those are showing. This film, which is an anti-communist thriller, shows much influence from the Hollywood, while it also shows a connection with the tradition from the others, mainly European auteurism and the legacy of Japanese colony. However the most important point is that there is standing presence of America and the USIS in the identity of Kim Ki-Young and his film. This film is a product of the Liberty Production which was a local branch of the US Information Agency, and this fact was significant among discourses in Korean cinema at that time. Seen in this light, Kim Ki-Young, as well as many other film makers at that time, was placed in a highly complicated status. External agencies like the USIS continuously intervened in the lives of Korean film makers for bloc-building, and those film makers also actively engaged with these agencies to learn and use their rich resources. The hybridity in the process of the subject formation in Korean national cinema was one characteristic in common to many film makers at that time.