Job Talk: Korean Culture

An example of this genre of film, popular in the 1950s in S. Korea

Today I encouraged my class to come down to a job talk for a new position opening up at my school, teaching Korean literature and culture.

Dr. Travis Workman,Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, UCLA. "Traces of the Postwar: Violence and Memory in South Korean Cinema." February 18, 4:00 p.m. 306 Folwell Hall.

Overall, the talk was chock full of interesting close readings but also what Ouyang Xiu would call "lofty and obscure" at times -- it's not that he was incomprehensible, but that he didn't do enough to hold the audience's attention. There weren't enough sticky spots, to use Yang Jiang's phrase. This was mainly a factor of his nervousness, though, I realize.

Actually I'm quite sympathetic, especially since it became clear over the course of the talk that he does have some genuine insights into the nature of the connection between family and domestic spaces on the one hand and the state and political allegory on the other hand. That in a nutshell is what I am working on as well.

Raw notes, for my own purposes only:


"Traces of the Postwar: Violence and Memory in South Korean Cinema"

I will show three clips or so in the middle.

The Korean war rarely appears in commercial melodramas. State violence <-> Film, narrative. Not necessarily war films, but rather post war melodrama. Not direct representation, but indirect. Spectral present in the post war condition. "The Hand of Destiny" 1954. Occlusion of violence, intimacy and personal ethics instead. Late 1950s, "Hell Flower," 1958. More complex historical consciousness. Experimental film: "Stray Bullet," 1961. (In)visibility of violence.

No peace treaty after 1953. so "post war" is a problematic term. Films, 1953-1961. Trauma and hope for family reunion a common theme in the cinema. The melodramatic form: Kim's characteristics..."Cinematic Reconciliation." Latter two films were working against the grain for the day. Aesthetic of romantic intimacy and familial belonging. (Violence and social conflict). Melodrama also a staple during J Colonial Period. 40s-50s directors were under Chosun, monitured by J Colonial Gov't. Chae Ying-yu (sp?) 1944, J propaganda film. 1946, "Hurrah, Freedom." Is his career somewhat ironic? Continuity between propaganda, commercial melodrama. cf. "Madame Freedom," etc. director____. "Children of the Sun" -- propaganda. Defense ministry work.

"The Hand of Destiny." A character's gradual break with communism and embrace individual ideals. Counterespionage agent. Romance turn away rom communism. Save her man from the N Korean commander. The romance between two spies gives aesth quality of J colonial films. Opposes N/S K identity. One capable of feeling, one is completely cold and calculating. And faceless. Scene. Face vs. Faceless. Faceless v. Romantic scenes.

The Hand of Destiny (Unmyeong-ui son) (1954)

Director : Han Hyeong-Mo
Production Company : Han Hyeong-Mo Production
Date of Theatrical Release : 1954-12-14
Running Time : 85 min.
Opening Theater : Sudo Theater
Genre : Anti-Communism

Romance converges with political allegory. cf. "Military Train," 1938. Not seeing the faces creates a paranoid effect. Vs. Camera gets intimate in romance scenes. Melodrama technique. Affective force. First onscreen kiss in K. cinema. The humanistic bond between two characters. Opposed to Communist ethos. K. McCarthyism. Manichean universe. It's a post war film from only two years after. The colonial relationship with the USA never appears. No national division. Gender, class relations. All this comes later.

"Hell Flower." Pays closer attention to the characters on the ground. Their personal decisions. Oppositional identities. Culture of US bases and black market around them. Domestic poverty. Econ conditions. Amer occupation. New subject positions. S = moral sentiment. N = ideology. A comedic tone to prostitution: Korean women prostitutes work near the bases. Gang can use the allure to steal goods. A gratuitous dance. A distraction. Satire of base culture. [Reference to a volume on this subject] After all it's still a melodrama. Innocence, experience, virtue, corruption, evil. Crazy plot: Sonia the object of anxieties about the tenuousness of memory. In contrast to Judy, Sonia's strategizing...prevents her from having shared history. impossible dream of escape. Life before doesn't bolster her. Visibility v. invisibility. Clip: "Even you give me an embarrassed look." Nostalgia redeemed at the end when Dong-shik invites Judy to come back to the countryside. Judy and her boo both die. DIsinterest with the past is a strategy for survival. Viewer is implicated in this problem of what can be said, what not. Judy's memory of violence is not visible. Film is flipped -- it can show, but it doesn't. Tension: screen and intuition. unvisualized. unsaid. nostalgia and narrative present. There is a momentary disruption.

"Stray Bullet," One of the best films from S. Korea. Very aware of the war going into the present. The problem of visibility. Knows its a film. Neo-realist attention to economic crises. Formal dimension of cinema's relationship to the past. Two scenes. 1. Self-reflexivity on commercial cinema. 2. Characters remember, but we don't see it. We see them dreaming, hallucinating. Waking dream space of a terrified mother. How to respond to the present, the visible? Quick cuts. Mediation. The war comes into the post war. His tooth -- upset. Get me out of here!

I read Hell Flower and Stray Bullet against commercial melodrama. Challenge perceptions.

Questions. They must have been familiar with film noir and American melodrama. Why Women? Women in 1950s, social conservatism, gendered anxiety about losing something from the past. Is Stray Bullet maybe not generically a melodrama? A comment on the difficulty of producing a memory that isn't melodramatic, perhaps? Is it invisible because their is a refusal to exploit the wound? Is it to resist the wound at that time? Address the question of how to articulate or represent war memory. Looking to not commercialize the war wound. It always seems to become sensationalized. Is cinema particularly the media where this can happen? The image, which need not use language. Privilege for exploring the problem of memory. And film noir -- shadow, black and white.

What are the limitations of a melodrama? The 1950s audience, more open and able to experience the war, has something which is not represented directly. If its political allegory, what limitations might it have? Benjamin on the Trauerspiel -- the limitations of the capacity to represent the allegory as a result of the history of the form. Absolutist states. Benjamin's interest is in figuring out these limitations. The melodrama traces to the colonial period. State/korea as family. Or as a kind of sentimental love relationship. (The Origin of German Tragic Drama) Resolutions have difficulty engaging with politics. Stray Bullet feels like a more political film.

Form allows you to fit into a censorship context, perhaps. Just as in the USA with noir. Able to critique our society beyond the Cold War.

The trace being part of the dream of the present.