Sino-Korean screen connections: towards a history in fragments

ABSTRACT

How can we pursue the original drive of work on transnational cinema to combat methodological and ideological nationalism, but without becoming complicit with globalization and its ideology? This essay proposes researching Sino-Korean screen connections. It opens up five directions, illustrating each with a particular example: (1) revealing the occluded, illustrated by the role of Korean filmmakers in the Shanghai cinema of the colonial era; (2) understanding the transnational as composed of what Anna Tsing calls distinct ‘transnational projects’ that exceed globalization, such as the popularity of North Korean films in the People's Republic of China during the Cultural Revolution; (3) showing that there is no ‘smooth space’ of global flows, contrasting the relative absence of South Koreans in Chinese films with the much higher profile of Chinese in South Korean films; (4) looking at transborder production cultures, using the little-known example of South Koreans working in Hong Kong in the 1960s and 1970s; and (5) researching exhibition and distribution, such as the traces of the popularity of South Korean melodramas in Taiwan in the 1960s. Taking these examples, the essay asks what kind of history of Sino-Korean film connections can be written. It argues that the only possibility is a disjunctural history of fragments. Precisely because modernity demands that history take up the form of a teleological progress, disjuncture acts as a counter-history, revealing modernity's violence.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• Korea
• transnationalism
• globalization
• history
• cinema

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Chris Berry

Chris Berry is a professor of film studies at King's College London. In the 1980s, he worked for China Film Import and Export Corporation in Beijing, and his academic research is grounded in work on Chinese cinema and other Chinese screen-based media, as well as neighboring countries. Primary publications include: (with Mary Farquhar) Cinema and the National: China on Screen (Columbia University Press and Hong Kong University Press, 2006); Postsocialist Cinema in Post-Mao China: the Cultural Revolution after the Cultural Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2004); (ed.) Chinese Cinema, 4 vols (London: Routledge, 2012); and (edited with Lu Xinyu and Lisa Rofel), The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010).