Journal of Korean Studies

When asked why Ongnyŏ, the tragic surrogate woman who has her baby taken away by the master yangban family in Ssibaji (Surrogate Woman, 1987), receives the silent treatment from the lady of the house toward the end of Ssibaji, Im Kwon-Taek (Yim Kwŏnt’aek) states,

if Ongnyŏ is simply a woman who gave birth to a child [and thereby served only the duty of a surrogate woman], a “thank you,” could have sufficed, but Ongnyŏ is also someone who threatened the marriage of a yangban family [by falling in love with the husband]. Calling Ongnyŏ a “bitch” however is also inappropriate for she is the birth mother of the boy who will be responsible for the chesa (ancestral worship rite) of the family. So I left it blank.¹

Silence and simplicity, as most Korean film critics would agree, are marked as the aesthetic form that best describes the style of Im Kwon-Taek.² The attributes of Im’s “national” or minjok cinema, as will later be distinguished from the “nation-less” or mugukchŏk characteristics of the postmodern genre filmmakers who are active today (i.e., Bong Joon-ho (Pong Chunho), Park Chan-wook (Pak Ch’anuk), and Kim Jee-woon (Kim Chiun), are also no exception as they entail a denial of words, and instead turn toward what I call a fatal intersection of time with space. And here within a sublime space is born, I argue, Im Kwon-Taek’s national subjectivity, which is constituted neither through a homogeneous nor an empty self, but what Michel Foucault has called a “crisis heterotopia,” that is achieved through the positioning of the foreign or the Japanese as the Other of the Other and the subsequent imagining of a national subject as a post-traumatic primogeniture or the privileged eldest son. What I like to insist in this essay is that the primary strategy of Im Kwon-Taek’s cinema that stretches over several decades is to relocate the remnants of the traditional system where the eldest son is often not only given the resources of material inheritance but also handed the impossible job of best negotiating his “crisis heterotopia,” where, for instance, according to Foucault, adolescent young men for the first time enter a violent crisis (i.e., boarding school, military service, or prison) or girls embark on a euphemistically termed “honeymoon trip” and experience their deflowering.³ For the case of refiguring modern Korean national identity, this “crisis heterotopia” is of course the colonial space where the male, most often the eldest son, encounters the colonial, foreign other, resists the changes that are demanded upon him, and thereby has to reconcile such dramatic manifestations as the “name change,” which is both privileged and forbidden for the eldest native son.

Toward the end of Chokpo, widely regarded as one of the first munye films (adaptations from quality literary materials) in the career of Im Kwon-Taek,⁴ there is a long-take that superimposes the face of the Japanese protagonist, Tani, onto the portrait of the deceased Korean—Sŏl. Behind the urn stands a framed photo of Sŏl, the landlord subject who has steadfastly refused to adhere to the demands of the Japanese to change his name, (played by actor [End Page 232] Chu Sŏnt’ae). Seen for the first time in Western attire, Sŏl is the victim of the brutal ch’angssi kaemyŏng (name change order) policy that demanded that all Koreans adopt a Japanese name during the late stage of colonial era. Superimposed onto his portrait is the face of young Tani (played by Ha Myŏngjung), a Japanese official who was ordered to carry out the mission of changing Sŏl’s name. Despite the protest of Sŏl’s relatives, Tani visits the site of Sŏl’s wake in order to pay his final respects.

As an example of the concept of an “astructural outside” or the “Other” of the Other, Rey Chow cites the female characters: the wet nurse, the high consorts, and the women in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (1987), who assume even more deviant and perverse positions than the feminized Chinese men, such as the puppet Emperor Pu Yi.⁵ What Chow argues is that in the colonial space that Bertolucci has constructed where the West, symbolized by the emperor’s Scottish tutor Johnston (played by Peter O’Toole), assumes the center, the space of an astructural outside is required in order to mitigate the feminized space occupied by Pu Yi and China. This concept is well suited for application to the works of Im Kwon-Taek because, even as early as 1978, the lens through which Im chooses to depict the theme of colonial identity, the politics of suffering and forgiveness, and the struggles of Korea to come up with post-colonial subjectivity seeks to not only simply oppose the colonized Self and the colonial Other, but also to create a self-reflexive, double structure that complicates the main subject and its represented medium (the objectification of the subject). Simply put, Im’s post-colonial fantasy is to place the Japanese liberal bureaucrat as the astructural Outside, an Other of the “Other,” which then forces the viewers to feel that the Korean man, though still retaining the position of the Other, is less marginalized than the Japanese. Though the Korean cannot be fully masculinized, the colonized Korean, through the mediation of the Japanese astructural outside, regains his agency—more central role than the victimized part that he had previously occupied.

My reading strategy, in this essay, with regard to Im Kwon-Taek’s films, is to invoke Chow’s “astructural Outside” along with the previously mentioned Michel Foucault’s “heterotopia.” What is intriguing in this assembly is that the incubation of Im Kwon-Taek’s minjok identity requires an allegorization of both a foreign other and a healthy primogeniture who has recovered from an early adolescent crisis that had “contaminated” his national purity. In the seemingly trite funeral scene that features a typically framed portrait of the deceased is director Im Kwon-Taek’s yearning, despite the restraint he feels to maintain the emasculated subjectivity of the colonized Korean elite during the era of anti-communist, right-wing dictatorship, to reposition the anomalous doubling of the frame that is both a transparent surface (glass) for the Korean national elite and a mirror (an opaque reflective area) for the Japanese colonial bureaucrat, which I argue not only affirms the astructural Outside but also exemplifies the Foucauldian heterotopia. In 1978, Im draws a silent cinematic space which offered so much [End Page 233] pleasure and fed so many obsessions throughout the twentieth century as the very place for a history that does not seek to easily animate neat dual packages of national Self and foreign other, and instead punctures the self-conscious minjok identity that will soon become his trademark for the next three decades. Forsaking the convenience of poetic justice where evil and good are neatly sorted out, what remains in the end is the impossibility of distinguishing the dead from the living, the forgiven from the unforgivable,⁶ and the modern from the traditional (Sŏl wears hanbok throughout the entire film, with the only exception being the photo). These ambiguities impose a continuing engagement with the uncertainties of the post-colonial cinema of the past century. These remainders recall the vexed history in this thirty-second-long take. This moment is a configuration that calls at once for a total submission to the definite passage or finality of time (as the memorial photograph undeniably dictates to us) but also its denial (as the living’s homage will continually remind us).

In the portrait, the deceased Korean is wearing a suit. Actually, it is an uncanny photograph as Sŏl, for the first and only time in the film, is seen enduring a complete makeover in a Western suit. Is it only because he is now deceased that he can be seen in non-Korean clothing? His abandonment of his Korean surname and the adoption of a foreign name, which happens on his last night alive, can only be accepted when he has decided to commit suicide. In other words, the hybrid identity (a Korean adopting a Japanese name and wearing a Western suit) is an inevitability that claws at the viewers in a celestial place or a phantasmic space that, to me, configures a post-colonial cinematic screen where the young Im Kwon-Taek (only forty-two years old at the time) is attempting a career change from a mugukchŏk film director to a minjok film director.⁷ This phrase, which came up in an interview with Chŏng Sŏngil, is appropriately taken up by Kim Soyoung’s (Kim Soyŏng) insightful essay “Ch’wihwasŏn kwa Han’guk yŏnghwa sa” (Ch’wihwasŏn and Korean Film History).⁸ The use of the framed glass as a mirror, the uncanny Western garb of the deceased yangban, and a living Japanese colonial bureaucrat superimposed over a dead Korean in a post-colonial Korean film exert a sort of counteraction that carves up the heterotopia in which the mirror, as Foucault argues, provides the ultimate inverted experience. He writes,

[t]he mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality . . .⁹

Im’s silent commentary on the deceased emasculated Korean elite and the even more difficult circumstances faced by the living Japanese official (as soon he will [End Page 234] be removed from his post in the colonial government and be conscripted in the war in which he dreaded participating) through the use of the portrait of a dead Korean as a mirror for the Japanese is not only an exemplary figure of modernist mirroring, but also the departure point away from Im’s mugukchŏk cinema.

The mugukchŏk raised in the Im Kwon-Taek interview is different from the ways in which mugukchŏk values and ideas flow out of either Yon-sama (Pae Yongjun)’s popularity in Japan surrounding the television series Winter Sonata,¹⁰ or the hybrid genre that Bong Joon-ho, Park Chan-wook, and Kim Jee-woon have made popular during the first decade of the 2000s through their films such as the disaster/monster The Host (Koemul), directed by Bong Joon-ho in 2006, vampire thriller Thirst (Pakchwi), directed by Park Chan-wook in 2009, and the spaghetti Manchurian Western The Good, The Bad, The Weird (Choŭn nom, nappŭn nom, isanghan nom) directed by Kim Jee-Woon in 2008. If on one hand the mugukchŏk featured in Bae Yong-joon’s (Pae Yongjun) “soft masculinity” or these hybrid genre blockbusters is entrenched in transnationality or post-nationality, Im’s mugukchŏk, on the other hand, foregrounds the post-colonial lamentation behind the nation-less identity of some of his key films made during much of the 1960s and the early 1970s. His films such as One-eyed Mr. Park (Aekkunun Pak, 1970) and Eagle of the Wilderness (Hwangya ŭi toksuri, 1970) then were, as Im himself admits, copycat films of King Hu martial arts and Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns. Because many contemporary filmmakers are once again vying to produce their own mugukchŏk films, one can only perceive the analogies and perhaps the disanalogies that run between the two Golden Age periods of Korean cinema, that were inspired by the King Hu and Sergio Leone films, namely the films of the 1960s and the blockbuster auteur period of the past decade that again take the very same films of King Hu and Sergio Leone as primary reference points. The mugukchŏk in the Im Kwon-Taek’s account of his career during the 1960s connotes prenatal “nation-less,” steeped in melancholia, but the same mugukchŏk in the recent films of Park Chan-wook or Kim Jee-woon suggests the opposite: freedom gleaned from the post-national.

Of course, sandwiched between these two mugukchŏk periods of the 1960s (prenatal, pre-national) and the 2000s (post-national) when Korean cinema enjoyed its sensational decades of commercial vibrancy, lies Im Kwon-Taek’s minjok cinema period that is tied to the vicissitudes of the dark periods of Korea’s modern history. Im Kwon-Taek inarguably became the most decorated film-maker during an era characterized by the military dictatorship and violence by reasserting Korean cultural heritage in the public consciousness that was carved out by the right-wing government’s kukch’aek (national policy). Im Kwon-Taek’s minjok identity, fomented during the height of the Yusin Policy of the 1970s, is, I argue, not impervious to many post-structuralist critiques of auteurism, but is instead the very central place where the auteurism is constructed and deconstructed for both its manifest and latent contradictions. In other words, Im’s cinematic access to the pure minjok aesthetics represented in Chokpo, Sŏp’yŏnje, and [End Page 235] Ch’wihwasŏn respectively by music (p’ansori), ceramics (Koryŏ-period pieces hailed by Soetsu Yanagi), and late Chosŏn paintings by Chang Sŭngŏp, seeks its preservation in the popular, representational medium of film, albeit the most prevalent form of arthouse filmmaking. Consequently, Im’s approach becomes the anchor point of various kinds of kukch’aek art that seeks the mediation point between pure national aesthetics, commercialism, and even right-wing promotion of tourism and cultural heritage, without provoking progressive social critique or the alternative proletarian imagination that dominated popular culture throughout the era of military dictatorship.

This essay focuses primarily on Chokpo but will also continually refer to two other texts, Sŏp’yŏnje and Ch’wihwasŏn, with the emphasis on the three male protagonists, Tani, Yubong, and Chang Sŭngŏp, respectively. To focus on masculinity is perhaps an unorthodox point of inquiry into Im’s oeuvre as his films tend to be governed by the search for the pristine repositories of Korean-ness, which I have argued elsewhere, tend to foreground the “communal village and victimized female subjects.”¹¹ Within this paradigm, of course, masculinity normally assumes the privileged aggressor position that threatens either the peace of the village or the woman’s sanctified body that so allegorize the mutilated landscape of the nation trampled by the feet of colonial soldiers and bureaucrats. However, in this essay, I am intrigued by the symbolic and physical deaths all three main characters suffer in these films, and how Im Kwon-Taek, through these quintessential male protagonists, seeks to redefine his masculine subjectivity by placing them in a “crisis heterotopia,” a colonial cinematic space where the colonized male encounters the colonial, foreign Other. I am inclined to probe how Im Kwon-Taek’s male characters ultimately find pleasure in continually acknowledging their emasculated status and then reauthorize themselves by further employing the Japanese as the “Other” of their Other.

As Soyoung Kim reminded us earlier, in a not dissimilar vein as the recasting of the Foucauldian crisis heterotopia in this essay, the post-colonial identity of Korean cinema in which Im Kwon-Taek plays a big part, is “set up in the pursuit of the untainted pre-colonial origin in a grave outcry against epistemic violence.”¹² An articulation of the point that the national subject cultivated by Im Kwon-Taek must be perceived as a relational term that constantly refers and defers to the presence of the national Other is also a primary objective of this essay. The earliest form of a national subject in a Im Kwon-Taek film, as prefaced above, is the Japanese character Tani from Im’s 1978 film Chokpo. Chokpo is an adaptation of the Japanese writer Kajiyama Toshiyuki’s short story “Zokufu,” set in the late colonial period when Japan urged Korea to abandon its own identity and instead adopt Japanese names, language, and values. I propose that the nascent form of Im Kwon-Taek’s nation-ness already had its transnational roots embedded not only in the complicated condition of naisen ittai, but also in the combined efforts by Japanese and Koreans to self-reflexively come to terms with their scarred pasts. The lamentation for the vanishing Korean identity is surely one of the [End Page 236] themes continually projected in Im’s work since the late 1970s—Sŏp’yŏnje and Ch’wiwasŏn being prime examples among many—but this melancholic minjok, I insist, must be registered as a fulfillment of the modest, averted, transnational gaze of the camera, in order for Im to create a new cinematic language for the post-traumatic nation. And it takes a Japanese character to fulfill the vision of an emasculated and yet fully recharged Korean masculinity.

Chokpo, which is translated as either The Genealogy or The Clan Records, is a rare post-colonial Korean production for having adapted a Japanese literary work: Kajiyama Toshiyuki’s short story “Zokufu,” (the Japanese pronunciation of the Korean word, chokpo), which was published in Japan in 1961. Set in 1941–2, Tani, a young liberal Japanese bureaucrat, is dispatched to Suwon to mount pressure on Sŏl, a wealthy local landlord, who insists on retaining his Korean family name. Though Sŏl is a collaborator, who has donated a large sum of money to the Japanese Army and has helped the war efforts in other ways, he refuses to follow the name change order. Tani becomes smitten by both Sŏl’s long and illustrious family history and his beautiful daughter, Oksun, but his superiors are not so easily impressed. Various strategies concocted by Tani’s superior to convert Sŏl, which include torturing Sŏl’s prospective son-in-law and ruining Oksun’s marriage opportunity, fail. However, when Sŏl’s grandchildren are banned from their school for not having changed their names, Sŏl finally capitulates, accepts a new Japanese family name Kusakabe and kills himself. Self-inflicted violence is the only form of violent protest the old patriarch can mount against the indestructible colonial machine. After failing to convert Sŏl, Tani is fired from his job and is drafted. Sŏl commits suicide not because of the guilt of collaborating with the Japanese for its war efforts, but because of the guilt of failing to protect his ancestor’s surname, which had authenticated the clan records or genealogy (chokpo) and authorized the official primogeniture tenure system of his land in Suwon for the past several centuries.

Long before the liberalization policies of 1998 opened the floodgate of Japanese cultural content into Korea and co-production projects between Korea and Japan, Kajiyama Toshiyuki’s stories were the first Japanese literary properties to be considered legitimate co-production adaptation materials. Chokpo was actually the second Korean film adapted from Kajiyama’s literary oeuvre. The first film, Yijo chanyŏng (J. Richo zan’ei; Faded Shadow of the Yi Dynasty), was adapted into a screenplay by a veteran Japanese writer Matsuyama Kenjo and directed by Shin Sang-ok (Sin Sangok) in 1967. Because Kajiyama had built a reputation as one of the best-selling novelists in Japan during the 1960s, this work had already been dramatized in a Japanese-television mini-series. Shin Sang-ok’s film Faded Shadow of the Yi Dynasty released in South Korea in 1967 and also released in Japan the subsequent year, benefited from the reconciliatory gestures accorded by the diplomatic normalization between South Korea and Japan in 1965. Kajiyama was born in Korea in 1930, returned to Japan immediately [End Page 237] following Korea’s liberation in 1945, and actually visited Korea in 1965 on a trip that was highly publicized by the Korean media at the time. Kajiyama became a symbol of the thawing mood between the two countries.

Faded Shadow of Yi Dynasty, like many of Kajiyama’s stories about Korea, follows a “politically correct” trajectory that exposes both the intolerance of Japanese discrimination against Koreans and the impossibility of any effective counter to such systematic injustices.¹³ The young liberal Japanese artist, Noguchi, through whom the story is told, is the central character and he, like Tani, remains sympathetic to Korea’s wrath under the oppressive Japanese colonial rule, but is incapable of doing much beyond the withdrawal of his “subversive” art work from public display as a form of protest. Set in Seoul in the early 1940s, Noguchi falls in love with an extraordinary young Korean woman, Yŏngsun, who dances in the colonial capital’s pleasure quarter. “I believe that tonight I have seen a hidden and unknown Korea for the first time. Both the dance and the music convey a loneliness and a beauty that appeal to my heart,” confesses Noguchi after watching Yŏngsun’s performance for the first time. Despite the fact that this young dancer, Yŏngsun, is a kisaeng, she, as a dancer who stubbornly performs only traditional court dance shows for her patrons, refuses to either drink or sleep with her clients. When Noguchi shows her his painting of her dance, titled The Remembered Shadow of Yi Dynasty, she becomes so deeply impressed with Noguchi that (in Shin Sang-ok’s film version at least) she falls in love with him. But on the day she is ready to grant him his wish of marrying her, she finds out that Noguchi’s father was captain of a garrison that violently clashed with protesters during the March First mansei movement. Her father was among the victims on that fateful day twenty years prior. Angrily, she leaves him, never to appear again physically in the story. Meanwhile, Noguchi’s painting of Yŏngsun receives a special prize and is exhibited at the Fine Arts Museum of Korea. However, the title of his painting, The Remembered Shadow of Yi Dynasty, gets him into trouble with the authorities who cannot approve its title for it can easily be interpreted as a nostalgic reference for the lost Chosŏn Dynasty.

While this short story only reveals a meek ending where Noguchi chooses to withdraw his painting of Yŏngsun from the national competition rather than have its controversial title “Faded Shadow of Yi Dynasty” censured and changed, in the Korean film, Shin Sang-ok radically alters the ending of Faded Shadow of Yi Dynasty, by having Noguchi and his Korean friend Tongho spectacularly escape from the military train transporting them to the war front and risk their lives to protest Japan’s unjust war effort. However, when (in the film) Yŏngsun refuses to accept Noguchi’s apology for his father’s actions and his marriage proposal, the dismayed and confused Japanese intellectual, in a sobering and inspiring ending, commits suicide by pulling the trigger of a pistol aimed at his head. Needless to say, the Korean woman’s rejection of the Japanese man’s apology and the subsequent radical action of the Japanese in this Korean film surmise a fantastic projection of the Japanese other that intends to both mollify the angry Koreans [End Page 238] at the time over Park Chung Hee’s decision to normalize Korea’s diplomatic relationship with Japan without being offered an apology and prod them to accept its government’s decision.

Im Kwon-Taek’s adaptation of another Kajiyama’s story, which was released eleven years after Shin Sang-ok’s Faded Shadow of Yi Dynasty, remains for the most part faithful to the original story. It is perhaps not coincidental that the film widely known as the first art film of Im Kwon-Taek, the father figure of Korean national cinema, is actually an adaptation of a Japanese short story, and the only film in Im’s filmography that actively thematizes an inter-ethnic relationship—one that suggests the impossibility of both perfect inter-ethnic harmony and ethnic purity. Tani, both a Japanese artist and an imperial bureaucrat, is an intruder, but one who has been traumatized by his double identity as a sympathetic intellectual and a bureaucrat who has to follow the brutish orders of the fascist empire. The crisis of the intruder in Chokpo also assembles the terms of Sŏl’s national patriarchal subjectivity, that is split between material collaboration with the Japanese war efforts on one hand and on another the quasi-spiritual resistance that refuses the name change order. It is through the relationship between the Korean Sŏl and the Japanese Tani that the multiple forms, not only of colonial Korea but also post-colonial Korea, engulfed in neo-colonialism during the intense industrialization of the Park Chung Hee era, are subjectified. Unable to muster a peaceful reconciliation with their supreme authority, Sŏl and Tani realize that both Korea and Japan are doomed. The film resorts to two deaths—one symbolic and another physical. When Tani, who has been exempted from the draft by working for the Government-General of Korea, finds himself unemployed when his mission to convert a Korean name into a Japanese one results in failure, he is immediately conscripted into the army that he abhors.

Because Chokpo was one of the first of many Im Kwon-Taek’s films to win a local prize at the Grand Bell Awards, it could be argued that the original story, which was nominated in Japan for the prestigious Naoki Prize, gained critical acclaim from both Japanese and Koreans. But, is it possible for a film made just thirty-three years after Korea’s liberation from Japan to be perfectly acceptable to both Korean and Japanese critics? By refusing to stray far from the original story, Chungmoo Choi argues in her essay “The Politics of Gender, Aestheticism, and Cultural Nationalism in Spyonje [sic] and The Genealogy” in Im Kwon-Taek: The Making of a Korean National Cinema, that in Im’s film “the gender code of orientalism is activated” through Tani’s gaze. Choi writes, “As Edward Said pointed out in Orientalism, when analogous nostalgic desire and attitude in metropolitan Europe was directed toward the colonies, they constructed the aesthetic of the colonized. . . . The lines of the feminized landscape are fully laid bare to the gaze of Tani, the quintessential aesthete.”¹⁴ In other words, Choi suggests that the gaze of Tani cannot be neutral and can only be perceived as one that is impregnated with colonial desires. In this essay, my question is first, whether or not there is another way to consider this “colonial gaze” of Tani, the draft [End Page 239] dodger, than the one conventionally critiqued as the amalgamation of the colonial subject? As argued previously, might Im Kwon-Taek’s national cinema possibly carve out a position for Tani, that is not simply a subject but an “astructural outside”—whose very function is to shore up Sŏl’s masculinity? Tani does indeed “other-ize” Ok-sun and the Korean landscape, but he also effectively occupies a feminine space that is reserved for the Other of the Other that is bereft of masculine authority and perverts the hegemonic hierarchical position between the colonizer and the colonized.

Mark E. Caprio argues in his recent study of Japanese assimilation policies in colonial Korea that the “colonizer-colonized relationship as one of victim versus victimizer often neglects the important role that the subjugated people played in influencing the direction of their fate.”¹⁵ Needless to say, a few Koreans during this period openly rebelled against the brutal Japanese policies and made an effort to preserve Korea as a nation of “pure race,” which extended into the inauguration and the establishment of the North Korean regime built around Chuch’e ideology, while many others chose to remain silent and responded to the assimilation policy with a conflicted view. Most of the films recovered from the colonial period over the latter half of the first decade of the 2000s such as Yi Pyŏngil’s Spring of Korean Peninsula (Pando ŭi pom, 1941) and Ch’oe In’gyu’s Angels on the Streets (Chip ŏmnŭn ch’ŏnsa, 1941) also reflect the moral ambiguities of Koreans during the colonial wartime.¹⁶ The cinematic national subject of Im Kwon-Taek can be traced ironically (or perhaps not surprisingly) to the complicated nature of naisen ittai and the combined effort by Japanese and Koreans to self-reflexively come to terms with their traumatized and scarred pasts. His effort to screen subjects that are half-Korean and half-Japanese remind us of the actual films made by Koreans during this time and predate the recovery of the colonial-era films because Im Kwon-Taek (b. 1936) may be the last surviving, active filmmaker in Korea who was born and raised during the assimilation era when the Japanese forced Koreans to speak Japanese.

The lamentation of the vanishing Korean identity is one of the themes continually projected in Im’s works since the late 1970s—of course Sŏp’yŏnje (1993) being the prime example among many. But this to me is not the only theme that is pulsating in Chokpo; the film invokes the inevitable co-declivity of both Japan and Korea (a pun on co-prosperity), should they fail to recognize each other as equal partners. And Chokpo ultimately finds pleasure in continually slipping past the authoring of the masculine subject. Not once does the film engage in criticism of Sŏl’s donation of an astounding 100,000 bushels of rice to the Japanese Army or the active recruitment of his tenant farmers as forced war laborers. During the war, would not it have been more detrimental to the Japanese war effort had Sŏl refused to donate such a large amount of rice and not volunteered labor to the army rather than simply not changing his name into Japanese? However, this is a step neither Kajiyama nor Im Kwon-Taek takes; for such criticism could essentialize the masculinist nationalist position of Park Chung Hee or the [End Page 240] socialist critique of colonial-era nationalists by Kim Il-Sung (Kim Ilsŏng). Plotting a scheme to undermine the Japanese Empire cannot be flaccid Sŏl’s agenda and his single aim to personally defend his and his family’s honor is only instantiated through his chokpo. His choice to die rather than to mount any meaningful resistance sidesteps the Korean nationalist discourse, but this is precisely what becomes the foundation of the concept of “astructural Outside” that nullifies the Japanese colonial gaze and consequently shores up Korean national identity, however much he has been beaten down.

Though it is almost impossible to read Sŏl’s refusal to change his name as an act of anti-colonial resistance, I suggest that it is misguided to read it as an obsequious act that simply authenticates the position of the landlord in a primogeniture tenant system. Though Sŏl’s action ultimately assents to the supreme power of foreign invaders and military rulers, it also has the potential to disrupt the traditional power dynamics that regulate the division between the colonizer and the colonized. After all, Tani does change because of Sŏl. And yet another question remains: Does Im Kwon-Taek, in one of the first post-liberation collaborative efforts between Japan and Korea, simply overemphasize the essence of han, which has always had the irksome potential to unearth and even invent the self-orientalizing traits of suffering and acceptance for Koreans, and thereby complicitly serve the colonial rule and order?

It is not only through the Japanese that the emasculated minjok artist seeks to re-store his disenfranchised identity, but also through children. Not only are some of Im’s films heavily concerned with Korea’s sterility or barrenness through cinematic depictions of the sometimes deceptive body of the female (Ssibaji being the prime example) and the wasted semen of the “guiding light” of Korean traditional aesthetics, Chang Sŭngŏp, but also with the early Freudian traumas that these children have unnecessarily suffered. In Ch’wihwasŏn’s crucial climatic scene, Chan Sŭng-ŏp, the court painter, is forcibly pulled away by the king’s men during an act of coitus while Im Kwon-Taek’s camera closes in on his semen dripping onto the exterior of the woman accentuating its uselessness and Chang’s failure to produce a male heir. In all three films, Chokpo, Sŏp’yŏnje, and Ch’wihwasŏn, the male child figures prominently because Im, the good nationalist that he is, is preoccupied with the survival of the male primogeniture. Coining the phrase “primitivizing ‘China’” as one dominant means by which both May Fourth writers and post-Mao fifth generation filmmakers engage with the modern masses, Rey Chow testifies that children, along with women, are the subjects that “continue to fascinate modern Chinese intellectuals.”¹⁷ In Chokpo, Sŏl finally decides to change his name, not for his own sake, but for the sake of his grandchildren, who now are subjects of victimization by both the Japanese discriminatory educational system and the recalcitrant nationalist that he unconsciously and momentarily has found himself to be. Since the discriminatory Governor-General’s office will not recant its unjust policies toward the children, he realizes that the only way his grandchildren can halt their march toward [End Page 241] total alienation and return to school, is to recognize that the threat of losing their place in school is the direct result of their having become dependent on their grandfather’s otherness. By choosing to commit suicide, he not only others the Japanese bureaucrat Tani, but he earns respect by ending the public humiliation his children suffer. This completes his return to the national Self.

In an effort to insist on the sacredness of primogeniture, Im’s films also invoke the classic Freudian anxiety over the child’s potential to suffer from life-long, wolf-man-like symptoms for having witnessed the “primal scene” where parental coitus has taken place. This primal scene produces potentially deviant male heirs, again reaffirming the space and time of colonial Korea as a site of crisis heterotopia. The primal scene where a child witnesses his parents having sex therefore results in a trauma prevalent in Sŏp’yŏnje when earlier in the film the child Tongho witnesses his mother having sex with his eventual stepfather, Yubong. This scene punts Tongho from a trauma-free upbringing onto a treacherous itinerary filled with oedipal suspense. Ch’wihwasŏn also features such “primal scenes” when first a young girl witnesses her kisaeng mother having sex with Chang Sŭngŏp, and then later when Chang Sŭngŏp finds his girlfriend Chinhong lying naked in bed with one of his friends. This troubles Chang to the point of not only leaving Chinhong, probably the woman who loved him the most, but also leaving him without a male heir other than the child urchins he has continually adopted as apprentices. This, for Im Kwon-Taek, de-legitimates, mutates, and obviates any kind of lineage spawned by the last heralded painter of Chosŏn aesthetics who sought independence from the foreign painting style that influenced other Korean painters of his time. As the leaders of the Tonghak rebellion are taken away by the authorities, Kaimura, the Japanese newspaper reporter who wants to buy a painting from Chang, tells him, “night is falling on the Chosŏn Dynasty, and your painting is the last flicker of life in this dying country.”

That perhaps the most important line of the film comes from the Japanese reporter not only affirms the process by which the colonizer loses the dominant position as the Self and emerges as the Other of the Other, but also the fantasy of Im Kwon-Taek, who insists that something pure about minjok, has all but died. The myth of a pure race may live on somewhere in the Korean peninsula, but ironically not in South Korea. That all three films feature not only the deaths of the protagonists, Sŏl, Yubong, and Chang Sŭngŏp, but also probe the legacies and the mythologies of their lives is perhaps not a coincidence. In a film that is entirely built around flashbacks, the entry point to the mind screen of Chang Sŭngŏp’s biopic Ch’wihwasŏn is not dissimilar from the scene earlier introduced when Tani pays a visit to the dead Korean, Sŏl. If the framed portrait of the deceased Korean serves as a mirror and Im’s heterotopia, as I have argued above, this particular scene in Ch’wihwasŏn also realizes the multiple overdeterminations of the Korean national Self and the Japanese disenfranchised Other that ameliorates the eviscerated Korean artist who exists like a “flicker” in the night. Not only does [End Page 242] the presence of the liberal Japanese intellectual fascinated by Chang’s oeuvre resituate the already cornered Korean painter, but it also allows him to embark on a trip down memory lane and prompts him to remember his past. “How has a man with a common background like yourself achieved such great fame with art?” is the question posed by Kaimura that enables Chang to relocate his past, his history, and ultimately the story about his legacy that Im Kwon-Taek wanted to tell, that cannot salvage the national art, but rather self-reflexively dramatizes the impossibility of resuscitating it. And if there is even a remote possibility of reviving or simulating that dream, cinema is perhaps the only medium that could come close.

This essay aims not to argue that charitable colonizers like Tani or Kaimura, who are in the business of “white men saving brown women from other brown men or white men”¹⁸ can completely free themselves from post-colonial critiques. And yet, it is possible to trace Im Kwon-Taek’s well-known depictions of a feminized Korea from one of the earliest collaborative efforts between Japan and Korea as the fomenting of his “crisis heterotopia.” This mode also pulls Tani away from the naturalized colonial subject-position and uncomfortably places him in the middle of nowhere or an atemporal historical space where both colonial and post-colonial discourses prevail. This yields a result that does satisfy the kukch’aek of the anti-Communist, right-wing government that desperately seeks to nullify the insurgent, socialist interpretation of history that emphasizes the subjectivity of the angry proletarian Korean while at the same time posturing the frail identity of de-masculinized Korea as the epicenter of the Other that potentially could be repositioned as the Self.

Sŏp’yŏnje is one Korean film that perhaps does not lack critical responses either in Korean or in English,¹⁹ and yet the emphasis on the primogeniture has not been sufficiently analyzed. Contrasted against the barren and infertile Korean landscape that is often spotlighted by Im are the human subjects of his films who are bitter and outcast, yet boast bodies that are capable of reproducing children. Sŏp’yŏnje features a well-known story about an aging p’ansori musician, Yubong, whose overzealous ambitions to protect the national art against foreign cultures such as jazz during the era of modernization translates into an act that blinds his daughter, for he believes that such disability could further cultivate her han as a singer. Not unlike Sŏ’s patriarchy that is carved out of half-collaboration and half-resistance, Sŏp’yŏnje’s patriarch Yubong’s subjectivity is split between his refusal to believe that p’ansori is dead and his eventual acceptance of his own death without having given birth to the true male heir of his national art. Not only does Yubong lack a birth child of his own, but neither of his adopted children are capable of protecting the purity of the national art.²⁰ Tongho, the male, may possess the right attitude (anger, resentment, and most importantly han), but lacks musical talent, Songhwa may possess the musical talent, but lacks the attitude needed for her p’ansori to achieve the sublime state. Though Songhwa does represent the pristine spiritual domain of a struggling national culture, as [End Page 243] clearly stated by Yubong, she lacks the han for her voice to truly perfect the aesthetics of p’ansori. In rethinking all three main characters—Yubong, his adopted daughter and protégée Songhwa, and his adopted son Tongho—one recognizes that, though dispirited, they are all capable of reproducing children. Tongho is a character fraught with contradictions for even though he may be a supporting character, he also serves as the anchor through which his father’s legacy can be knotted. He is a post-traumatic primogeniture, who is scarred and yet displays no urge to retaliate or get even. Is it because he has left the career of p’ansori, in which only hardship and grief await? Though his search for his father and sister takes place putatively during one of the darkest periods of the 1970s when the military dictatorship was at its height, Tongho is not bound by a perverse or grotesque element like the female ghost Worhyang in the 1967 Public Cemetery of Worha (Wŏrha ŭi kongdong myoji) or the finger-missing, black-gloved gunman, Park Changi, in the The Good, The Bad, The Weird (2008) that so long defined Korean cinema’s colonial or post-colonial identification.

Tongho, a middle-aged man with a wife, a child, and a secure job in a pharmaceutical company (judging from a telephone conversation between him and his benevolent boss back in Seoul), represents not only an able body, but also a successful agent in the patrilinear genealogy of the post-colonial, minjok cinematic figuration Im Kwon-Taek seeks. Tongho may lack talent in music and therefore provides no relief in his father’s wish to defend and perfect p’ansori, and yet, he has survived poverty and braved himself past his traumatic past in achieving a middle-class status. This far removes him from the colonial era’s trope of impairment and grants him a healthy post-colonial, minjok identity at the end of the story. By so doing, Im has freed himself from the maimed tropes or vestiges of colonial-era disfigurations.

As Kyeong-Hee Choi explained in her study on the colonial-era, “physically anomalous characters” prominently populate the stories of modern Korean literature of the colonial era (1910–45).²¹ For instance, in the feminist writer Kang Kyŏngae’s “Underground Village” (Chihach’on) from the 1930s, the main character Ch’ilsŏng is an adolescent youth who suffers paralysis and therefore cannot move his body with any ease. In “Underground Village,” Ch’ilsŏng’s paralysis, writer Kang insists, is due to the lack of resources in the family which lacks the presence of a father. The inability to afford medical care most likely is the cause of Ch’ilsŏng’s disability. In contrast, Songhwa’s blindness is caused by neither her congenital condition nor lack of financial resources; the virility of her father Yubong, which exceeds even the modern legal parameters, is the root cause of her disability. Despite the blindness of Songhwa, Sŏpy’ŏnje is less affected by the trope of disability. Not only has the minjok masculinity recovered from the physical impairment, but it has also overcompensated for its long-lasting limpness by exerting violence and causing disability himself. It is no longer the brutal colonial policy, but a recharged, masculine native man who becomes culpable for Korea’s trope of disability. Furthermore, Songhwa may be blind, but unlike [End Page 244] Ch’ilsŏng who could not find a suitable partner to whom he could wed and have children, she has produced a child. In Sŏp’yŏnje’s controversial final scene, two women, Songhwa and her adolescent daughter, are seen walking toward the camera. Sŏp’yŏnje offers a qualitatively different ending from those of colonial-era Korean literature where the male hero typically returns home only to witness more horrors at home (e.g., Kang Kyongae’s “Underground Village” and Hyŏn Chin’gŏn’s “A Lucky Day” [Unsu choŭn nal]).

Korean cinema currently enjoys the limelight both in its own national territory and in the overseas market, but much attention has been placed on light commercial films. One of the key moments is underscored by Im’s statement: “between then (the Golden Age) and now, nothing has changed with the way popular films play to the gallery of the public’s shallow taste.”²² Herein lies the very essence of the dilemma that plagues Korean cinema, one that is marked by a rift between the resurgence of the domestic films in an era of multiplex theaters and the impossibility of Korean film scholars including myself to provide a poignant reason behind this commercial resurgence. New film movements inspired by specific philosophical, political, and artistic impulses welcome intellectual intervention. A strictly commercial movie detests it. A study of Im’s minjok cinema reminds us that the best form of cinema is perhaps one that acknowledges that cinema can do little more than represent, in the motion picture medium, the cultural forms of music, painting, craftsmanship, poetry, and dance that have spoken truths about a particular group of people living somewhere and someplace on this planet. Anything else is a crass spectacle that has everything to do with money and very little to do with art or the intellectual fiber of that particular community, region, or nation. This is perhaps the very reason why during the current era where the triumph of neoliberalism and late capitalism in South Korea has been total and mugukchŏk and transnationalism have once again become the buzzwords of the day. Whether or not these words can help scholars intellectualize the commercial films better than the millions of public consumers tweeting their commentaries on them remains to be seen.