Harvard East Asian Monographs. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2022. xv, 252 pp. (Tables, figures, B&W photos.) US$50.00, cloth. ISBN 9780674267978.
Han Sang Kim’s book offers a truly original contribution to Korean media studies by illuminating the unexplored genealogy of transportation-themed propaganda in twentieth-century modernizing Korea. As a visual sociologist, Kim traces how colonial/Cold War powers and state authorities used mass media representations of newly introduced transportation technologies to sustain self-governing systems. Impressively wide-ranging in its time frame and roster of cultural producers in South and North Korea, Japan, and the United States, Kim’s book seeks an all-encompassing formula of “cine-mobility,” defined here as a cinematographic modality of representing movement to construct “post/colonial modern subjectivity.” Cine-mobility creates “sensory infrastructure,” which provides virtual surroundings wherein viewers familiarize their bodily sensoria with the movement of cutting-edge transportation (3). The subject’s body is therein rendered manipulable, for the direction and pace of movement presented via cine-mobility is attuned to the capitalist envisioning of modernization. Accordingly, Kim argues that a series of virtual rides in twentieth-century Korea indeed marks the epitome of micro-level governance. Yet, Kim also points out that this very aspect of cine-mobility harboured a vector against its own disciplinary nature. The modality’s prioritization of indescribable bodily stimuli over straightforward pro-government messages left room for escape from the grand narrative of modernization. In this vein, Kim proposes the notion of “world-as-gesture” as a defining aesthetics of cine-mobility, building off of Martin Heidegger’s “world-as-picture” underlining the human subject’s capacity for grasping the perpetual fluidity of the world. Cine-mobility provided an epistemic frame, or “picture,” of the world in constant motion, allowing viewers to question the gap between the everlasting state of movement and its disciplinary counterpart (2–3). The book therefore speaks to the rising tide in media studies at large, by joining the viewpoint that what mass media mediates is less a concrete message than an encounter with a set of material conditions.
Consisting of three parts with two chapters each, the book maps transitional moments in the media culture of mobility in Korea, while remaining attentive to the self-disciplinary logic underlying different stages. The first two chapters grapple with the intertwinement of film and train, or the “train-cinema interface,” in the context of Korea under Japanese colonial rule in the early twentieth century. Using its railroad system bridging the “mainland” and the colonies, the Japanese Empire created the train-cinema interface to articulate the insurmountable hierarchy between the colonizer and colonized. Two remarkable cases Kim investigates are the 1916 travelling exhibition in colonial Korea that screened Emperor Taishō’s 1915 intercity trip to his enthronement ceremony, and the 1937 Japanese culture film Journey from Mainland to Chosŏn and Manchuria (Nai-Sen-Man shūyū no tabi), designed to promote locomotive tourism to colonial Korea and Manchuria. Via Takashi Fujitani, Kim compellingly reads them as the empire’s proclamation of “ocular domination,” foregrounding the roaming surveillant eye in the respective forms of virtual inspection and unilateral imposition of cultural identity on the colonized subject (33).
The second part investigates the rise of a new cine-mobility in “post-colonial” Korea, propped by popular imagery of automobiles during the Cold War. Here, Kim makes a stellar comparison between the “train-cinema interface” and “automobile-screen interface” in terms of their disciplinary logics; while the former foregrounded complete control over subjects en bloc, the latter connected car driving’s flexibility in deciding one’s destination and speed with the self-regulating system. The early stage of this new disciplinary interface centered on the “militarized mobility” represented by Jeeps, as authorities such as the US Army military government and Park Chung Hee’s military regime used the imagery of the Jeep to create a self-surveillance system by equating its maneuverability to the eye of the “roaming ruler” (82). Shifting its focus towards private vehicles in the 1970s, the media representation of automobility started to revolve around the alibi of freedom in pursuing individual happiness. The discourse of the nuclear family and construction of a nationwide expressway system were pivotal in fuelling “individual mobility” as an icon of middle-class life since the 1970s, even before the popularization of private car ownership in the 1980s. This virtual early access to automobility was attained through cinematographic aesthetics mimicking the driver as in The Road to Reunification (1970), emphasizing the sense of accelerating speed and freely travelling the nation by expressway. Kim points out that the “automobile-screen interface” in “post-colonial” Korea was fundamentally a repetition of mass control over movement found in the colonial period, for subjects were unknowingly fettered by the collective path for national progress, just as traffic flow was structured by state-built expressways.
The last two chapters grapple with the “transcendental” turn in cognitive mobility, when the speed and scale of movement prompted by the imagery of aviation (chapter 5) and automation (chapter 6) technologies exceeded humans’ cognizable range. The foregrounding of globalization and sense of “immediacy” were pivotal in yet another heteronomous structuring of subjectivity. The immediacy effect abolished the boundary between mobility and immobility, for both overseas correspondent television news produced since the 1970s and the spectacle of automation and data management as in the ATM usage-themed Millions in My Account (1995) in the 1980s and 1990s imagined instant intercontinental connections or processing of complex calculations. What maximized this transcendental mobility was television, which started to take over film’s stronghold as the primary medium in the 1970s. Chapter 5 brilliantly argues that the operating logic of satellite television boosted the sense of transglobal mobility for viewers. Compared to film’s audiences limited by screenings, satellite broadcasting easily covered national or even worldwide audiences by amplifying electromagnetic waves emitted from broadcasting stations. This “post-cine-mobility,” according to Kim, bridged the media cultures of automobility in the 1970s and automation in Korea in the 1980s and 1990s in developing a disciplinary system geared towards fostering the capacity for fully absorbing traffic/data flows designed by the Cold War powers and neoliberalism respectively.
Kim’s book brims with eye-opening readings of twentieth-century films and television shows related to the discursive and material milieu of modern transportation history in Korea; however, it is not without limitations. Its broad ambition to not only to probe cine-mobility’s disciplinary nature but also the “affective effects” that betray itself remain half-fulfilled; the book reads far more as robust research on the genealogy of mass media control, an already admirable exploit, than as a phenomenological analysis of the intrinsic duality in sensorial propaganda. For a book focusing on “physiologically stimulated” spectatorship (51), only a handful of primary sources concerning reception history are discussed. The book would also have benefitted from more thorough theoretical explication on concepts such as the sublime and tactility, as their physiological connotations remain undiscussed. Nevertheless, Kim’s book is a significant addition to the literature on the media culture of mass mobilization in Korea.
Harvard University, Cambridge