Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. 262 pp. (Figures.) US$75.00, cloth, ISBN 978-0-8166-9133-3; US$25.00, paper, ISBN 978-0-8166-9134-0.
Shin Sang-ok’s (1926–2006) incredible career might have been rejected as “too improbable” by the executive types had someone pitched a screenplay detailing the events of his life. As one of the most commercially successful Golden Age producer-directors, Shin was responsible for such landmark films as Hellflower (1958), Romance Papa (1960), Sŏng Ch’unhyang (1960) and Red Muffler (1964). In 1978, Shin was allegedly kidnapped by the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il, just as his glory days as the head of Shin Films were winding down in South Korea. After making a series of high-profile films such as the musical Oh My Love (1984) and the monster film Pulgasari (1985) in the North, Shin “defected back” to the South, wherein he struggled but largely failed to re-establish himself as a relevant film artist.
I am going to “cut to the chase” and state that Steven Chung’s monograph on the entire career span of Shin Sang-ok, the businessman-auteur par excellence, is one of the best English-language books on Korean cinema I have read: it is also one of the most ambitious, perhaps deceptively so. Shin’s oeuvre, in Chung’s view, can neither be reduced to products of the “culture industry,” the contents and forms of which are over-determined by the structure and dynamics of global capitalism, nor to simplistic representations of the hegemonic ideologies, be they North Korea’s particular brand of communism or the Park Chung-hee regime’s aggressive developmentalism.
Chung’s innovative interpretive stance is anchored on the primacy he gives to the “enlightenment” (kyemong) mode of cultural expression, as opposed to the conventional narratives of Korean cultural history centred on the rise and fall of (nationalist and/or socialist) realism. Despite the persistently derogatory and dismissive treatment doled out to the works in enlightenment mode by Korean (in particular left-wing) critics, the author proceeds to characterize the enlightenment cinema as the “basic vernacular” of postwar Korean cinema, conveying “the predicament of a cinema caught between an intensely politicized cultural field and the need to remain publicly visible through commercial success or state sponsorship” (27). Realigning cultural expressions of colonial modernity, North Korean (nationalist) socialism and South Korean capitalist developmentalism into a single continuum, Chung shows how Shin Sang-ok masterfully practiced filmmaking in this mode. He was able to create the works of massive and enduring popularity, that also articulated social responsibility and political meaning through the heightened legibility of its “themes,” embodied in the melodramatically suffering figures of women.
Interspersed with the analysis of the modalities and mechanics of Shin’s work are provocative yet nuanced dissections of the select motion pictures. Chung, for instance, discusses Shin’s paradoxical yet brilliant manipulation of the realist style and form to foreground the fantasy of “refined” femininity and sexuality in the star personality of Ch’oe Ŭn-hŭi, in Hellflower (73–81): He also shows what appears to be explicitly pro-Park Chung-hee-regime didacticism found in the exemplary “enlightenment” film Rice is complicated by Shin’s own orchestration of “melodrama of development” that partakes of the visual imagery even redolent of socialist realism, as seen in the movie’s mass pan shots and labour montage (141–157). More intriguingly, Chung analyzes how Shin expanded upon Kim Jong-il’s mandate for “nonmimetic measurement of affective timing” in the dictator’s Juche film theory—“[the] strength of the emotions must be built up and there has to be a motive for their coming to a head,” as Kim memorably puts it (171–172)—yet managed to subvert the ideological imperatives of socialist realism, the results of which were welcomed by the Northern movie-goers as “movies that were really like movies”(185–203). By no means resistant to or critical of the dominant ideologies, Shin’s most notable works nonetheless manage to exceed the bounds of the ideological and create moments of “excess,” “surplus,” or even “superfluousness,” that nonetheless endowed them with vitality, beauty, and an affective power of their own: therein lies, Chung argues, their most significant cinematic raison d’être as well as their enduring appeal.
The “cultural history” component of Chung’s research is so well done that it actually raises many interesting new questions that we might not have come up with, had it not been for his suggestions. For instance, what about the question of plagiarism of the Japanese cinema? Shin was no exception among the early postwar Korean cultural producers in terms of the close attention he paid to the works of his Japanese contemporaries: couldn’t Cruel Stories of Yi Dynasty Women, to name just one example, be explicitly modelled after a similarly themed Japanese work, for instance, Imai Tadashi’s Bushido: The Cruel Code of the Samurai (Bushidō zangoku monogatari, 1963)? He does not really advance a convincing explanation about why Shin was unable to make meaningful films after 1986 either. This is a pertinent question in that the director-producer was alive and well throughout South Korea’s transition into the so-called New Korean Cinema: what structural and historical factors (aside from personal reasons) prevented Shin from producing a “Hollywood-style blockbuster” like the comedian-auteur-con artist Shim Hyung-rae’s D-War (2007)?
Finally, while I find Chung’s juggling of various theoretical and social-scientific concepts and heuristic terms very impressive, there are a few questionable usages, such as his choice to translate the terms kŏgukjŏk (“nationwide,” with a strong connotation of state-directed mobilization) and kojŭng (an act of making sure historical details are “authentic” or “accurate”) as “national-political” and “historical materiality,” respectively. I would hesitate to take the author to task for these rather minor questions and problems, as Chung’s effort to bring together rich textual analyses of individual cinematic works and the detail-attentive cultural history of postwar Korea into a coherent project is more Herculean than it might appear to a casual reader.
Written in clear, jargon-free prose and gently persuasive and accommodating in its engagement with the existing scholarship, Steven Chung’s Split Screen mounts a compelling case for re-examination and re-evaluation of the commercial Korean films produced between 1953 and 1979, which he aptly calls “a rich, irreducibly cinematic testament to the complexities of Korean modernity” (212). Chung throws a gauntlet of challenge to any ambitious scholar of the Golden Age Korean cinema to outdo his impressive research, with the likes of Yu Hyŏn-mok, Yi Man-hŭi [Lee Man-hee] [The same director better known for the name inside parenthesis], Kim Ki-yŏng and other contemporaries of Shin Sang-ok. The book is a must-read for any serious student of Korean cinema and strongly recommended to any general reader interested in the modern history of Korea as expressed through its mass media.
Kyu Hyun Kim
University of California, Davis, USA
pp. 723-725