Split screen Korea : Shin Sang-ok and postwar cinema

272 Pages·2014·13.918 MB·English

by  Chung, Steven, Sin, Sang-ok

split screen korea
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SPLIT SCREEN KOREA
Shin Sang- ok and Postwar Cinema
Steven Chung
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges financial assistance provided
for the publication of this book from Princeton University’s University Committee on
Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences.
A different version of chapter 2 was published as “Regimes within Regimes: Film and
Fashion Cultures in the Korean 1950s,” in The Korean Pop u lar Culture Reader, ed. Young-
min Choe and Kyung Hyun Kim (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013). Different
versions of chapter 4, which appeared in Korean, were published as “Melodrama, Style,
and the Scene of Development: Shin Sang- ok’s Rice and Evergreen” (“Mellodŭrama,
sŭtail, kŭrigo kaebaljuŭi ŭi changmyŏn: Sin Sang- ok ŭi Ssal kwa Sangnoksu”), in Korean
Cinema and Democracy (Yŏnghwa wa minjujuŭi), ed. The Korean Media Research
Group (Seoul: Sonin Press, 2011), 265– 303, and as “Mass Melodrama and the Spectacle
of Development: Shin Sang- ok’s 1960s ‘Enlightenment Films’ (“Taejung mellodŭrama wa
kaebaljuŭi ŭi sŭpekt’akŭl: Sin Sang-o k ŭi 1960 nyŏndae kyemong yŏnghwa”), Memory and
Vision (Kiŏk kwa chŏnmang), no. 25 (Winter 2011): 217– 50. A different version of chapter
5 appeared as “Split Screen: Sin Sang-o k in North Korea,” in North Korea: Toward a Better
Understanding, ed. Sonia Ryang (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2009), 85–1 08.
Copyright 2014 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy-
ing, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520
http:// www .upress .umn .edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Chung, Steven.
Split screen Korea : Shin Sang-ok and postwar cinema / Steven Chung.
Includes bibliographical references, filmography, and index.
ISBN 978-0-8166-9133-3 (hc : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8166-9134-0 (pb : alk. paper)
1. Sin, Sang-ok, 1926–2006—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Korea (South)—
In motion pictures. I. Title.
PN1998.3.S538C48 2013
791.430233’092—dc23
2013028408
Printed in the United States of America on acid-f ree paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-o pportunity educator and employer.
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
for my father, ju- ho chung
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CONTENTS
Introduction: Visible Ruptures, Invisible Borders 1
1 The Century’s Illuminations T he Enlightenment Mode in
Korean Cinema 21
2 Regimes within Regimes F ilm and Fashion in the Korean 1950s 47
3 Authorship and the Location of Cinema I n the Region of Shin Films 83
4 Melodrama and the Scene of Development 1 29
5 “It’s All Fake” S hin Sang- ok’s North Korean Revisions 159
Conclusion: Postdevelopment Pictures 2 05
Ack nowl edgm ents     213
Notes     215
Shin Sang-o k Filmography     237
Bibliography     241
Index     253
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INTRODUCTION
Visible Ruptures, Invisible Borders
Focus
Amid a life saturated with the production of images and exposure within
them, one photograph stands out as an exceptionally illuminating window
onto Shin Sang- ok’s work and its place in twentieth- century Korea (Figure 1).1
The picture was taken in the summer of 1984 and Shin, at fifty- eight, is
arguably in his prime as a maker of films. He is pictured manipulating the
camera, betraying the lust for control of a director who, despite having
retained the ser vice of a small army of technicians, had always had little
confidence in the skill or professionalism of his employees. His figure is
highlighted in the frame, not only by the way the sun glows on his shirt and
bounces off his graying hair, but because of the personal style he con-
sciously crafts on set h ere, as he had since his earliest days in the film indus-
try and as he would to his last years at work on a final epic. The half- bouffant
as well as the silk scarf that is hidden here, but that he would always wear in
public, bespeak the posturing of an artist and a mogul at odds not so much
with the moral or pol iti cal consensus of his day but with the cultural and
aesthetic limitations of a society apparently not yet fully caught up with the
best of the world. But it is the complex relationship between his figure and
everything e lse in the frame that epitomizes Shin’s career. He is at once
aloof, isolated in the dyad between his camera and his cinematic object, but
also deeply embedded in his milieu, an integral part of the mass of person-
nel, monitors, and spectators that gaze at the work in progress. As much as
the imprint it leaves of Shin’s directorial style, it is the scene that this crowd
makes, arrayed against the tangle of lumber and pressed along the artifi-
cially snow- covered tracks, together with the import of their attention to
the cinematic pro cess under Shin’s control, that makes this image a com-
pelling artifact for a history of film on the Korean peninsula.
.
1