조선-만주 관광 문화영화와 ‘동아신질서’의 극장 경험

Cinematic Experience of ‘New Order in East Asia’: Japanese Imperial Propaganda Films on Joseon-Manchuria Tourism

In late 1930s, while the Japanese Empire declared for the 'New Order in East Asia' which was a geopolitical point of view uniting Colonial Korea (Joseon), Manchuria and China under the Japanese imperial umbrella, there also emerged a considerable quantity of propaganda films corresponding to that idea. Several governmental agencies and transportation companies made plans for and invested in making promotional films dealing with tourism around these regions. This article examines one of such films named Tokyo-Peking: through Tyosen and Manchoukuo (1939), which I discovered from the Toho Stella Company's Nichiei Archive and could get an offer to use in this research. Tokyo-Peking is composed of three chapters describing three regions of Joseon (“Tyosen”), Manchuria (“Manchoukuo”) and North China. Each chapter shows different local identity of each specific region, but three of them constitute a bigger superordinate regional image of East Asia, which finally resolves itself into the portrait of the Japanese Empire. The mechanism of this synthesis is situated in that of the locomotive. Cartographic overview of railway travelers' map as the animated opening logo of each chapter shows the visual logic of calculable 'World', and the journey-like formality made up of start-move-arrive motions forms a new sense of place which leaves out and forecloses in-between places. Places remain only as split pieces of stereotypical localities, and their oriental images are combined to the diversity of the modern nation-state by juxtaposing them with the spectacles of industrial modernization. This composition shows, in one sense, the counter geopolitical images against the West, but, at the same time, it completes the future images of the modernized nation-state. And the cinematic experience of this sort of tourist propaganda films could be disciplinary moments producing the pseudo-imperialistic subjectivity. However, we should also consider the potentialities of the cinema which could be a sphere of negotiation between presenters and audiences. For instance, there are some moments of reverse gaze in tourist films, and indecipherable scenes of aboriginal subjects murmuring or unfastening non-languages. They are testifying the moments of transito which erode the assumption of singular cause-and- effect relationship between propagandists and the propagandized.