Edinburgh Studies in East Asian Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; Oxford: Oxford University Press [distributor], 2018. xi, 292 pp. (B&W photos, illustrations.) US$39.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-4744-3754-7.
Dong Hoon Kim’s Eclipsed Cinema provides an exhaustive study of the film culture of colonial Korea. By film culture he means the entire practice of cinema: film production, distribution, censorship, exhibition, and spectatorship. Writing against the grain of nationalist film historiography, Kim seeks to capture the entirety of the cinema experience and not focus exclusively on Korean-produced films, which constituted perhaps only 5 percent of the films exhibited in the crucial middle period of colonial rule. This total approach leads him to posit a more complex picture of Korean identity formation and a transactional cultural politics within this most important area of popular culture.
The book is organized into five chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 trace the origins of film exhibition and production in Korea. Chapter 1 interrogates the beginning of cinema as a medium of mass entertainment. Cinema spectatorship was, for the most part, an elite phenomenon until the nineteen-teens in Korea. Kim anticipates the book’s main narrative by revealing how foreign productions, imported technology, and Japanese capital collaborated with Korean film pioneers to establish what would become the most popular entertainment medium during the colonial period. But according to Kim, perhaps the Japanese Government General itself made the most important advances in “selling” film as a medium to Korean audiences. Its motion picture section (the movie production unit) was by far the dominant filmmaker of the teens, churning out educational and propaganda films.
Policy changes in the aftermath of the March First Movement led to an expansion of Korean cultural production; with technical and exhibition space issues solved, the first Korean productions began to appear. Kim pays close attention to this phenomenon and parses the political and cultural impact of the most well-known (but not widely screened) Korean film, Arirang. Here he is in accord with nationalist film historiography as to Arirang’s importance in stimulating mass interest in the new native cinema as well as funneling local capital into creating more Korean-produced films. Kim argues that a multitude of influences shaped Korean film production. Censorship, desire to shape content to make it acceptable to broader audiences, Japanese technology, and initially Japanese cinematographers worked together to create the basis for film making in Korea. Korea had no Western-style tradition of theatres so venues were informal and often temporary at first.
By 1920 cinema was an established entertainment medium and that year witnessed its expansion as well as the beginning of Korean film productions. In chapter 2 Kim moves to an examination of film content, film criticism, and spectatorship. Here, in a wonderful analysis of the seminal Korean film Arirang, Kim discusses how audiences learned to accept and embrace Korean imagery as linked to nation and national identity. But success in creating a counter-hegemonic force turned out to be limiting when filmmakers such as Na Un-gyu tried to expand their work to other genres and subjects drawn from the Western film oeuvre. A key part of the argument is the heavy influence of Hollywood film on Korean spectators. While Japanese films were not interesting to Korean audiences, Hollywood productions were. The role of the Korean pyeonsa in explicating the narrative in silent films was crucial. Kim emphasizes how the pyeonsa evolved as an adaptation from the Japanese benji; this discussion is detailed and illustrative of how Kim portrays the culture of cinema in the colony as a construct of multiple source inputs.
Chapter 3 discusses settler cinema and its crucial role in shaping the Joseon film world. The large and relatively well-fixed Japanese population was a target market for Japanese filmmakers. Settler entrepreneurs helped to create the venues and connections with studios in the metropole that expanded the film market in the 1920s. The focus on the activities of the Japanese expatriate population in Korea is an important contribution of Kim’s study. Japanese resident tastes and interests were influential in the larger shaping of the colonial mass culture industry. Settlers had their own cinemas and theatres, and Kim views their activities in establishing cinema in Korea as additive, not oppressive. This led to the interesting phenomenon of a segregated film culture at large. The market was split between the demand of the large Japanese viewership and Korean spectators. With the lack of Korean productions, the Korean theatres relied extensively on Hollywood imports to attract audiences. The bifurcated structure of the colonial film market was an important aspect of Korean colonial cinema culture, and Kim rightly points to how the two markets influenced each other as time progressed.
Chapter 4 continues a more detailed exposition of Korean spectatorship, often recapitulating themes already introduced. To my mind the issues of censorship contained here were the most interesting. Initially Hollywood films suffered the brunt of the censors’ attention for their cultural and sexual content. Later, censors became more concerned with the possible nationalist implications of Korean productions, but in spite of increased surveillance after the mid-1930s, Kim posits that Korean audiences were already sophisticated in their consumption of film imagery and so finely attuned to the colonial context as to not be affected. Moreover, in the pre-talkie era, the Korean pyeonsa’s role in emphasizing nationalist themes drew the censors’ particular attention. Here the divergence in style between the Japanese benshi as neutral observer and descriptor of the narrative and the much more improvisational Korean pyeonsa was manifest.
Finally, Kim closes his study with an extended treatment of colonial film culture and its relationship to colonial modernity in chapter 5. He is trying here to find in colonial film culture a way to tease out the compound nature of the experience of modernity in the colony. It featured both qualities of liberation as well as exploitation. This is a fascinating chapter, but a chapter that feels much like an add-on and not necessary to the author’s overall goals.
Eclipsed Cinema is a marvelous achievement. It is very rich in empirical detail, theoretically sophisticated, and provides a wonderful balance to heretofore overly determined nationalist film historiography. It reads as a compelling narrative of the evolution of film in Korea, and also serves as a dense reference work for those interested in further study of this very important topic.
Michael Robinson
Indiana University, Bloomington, USA