ABSTRACT:

Regimes Within Regimes: Fashion and Film Cultures in the Korean 1950s
Steven Chung (Princeton University)

Shortly after the war, magazines like Women, Arirang, Brilliance and International Film, whose pages were saturated with celebrity images and the latest consumer goods, began to eclipse the literary, religious, and political journals that had theretofore dominated the publishing world. Hollywood stars, some of whom, like Marilyn Monroe, had visited Korea to perform at military bases in the 1950s, were featured on covers and photo spreads alongside domestic actors and singers like Kim Chimi and the Kim Sisters. In films like Madame Freedom (1956), Pure Love Chronicles (1957), and The Beautiful Temptress (1958), the luster of western fashions and lifestyles commanded the eye's attention more forcefully than the moralizing narratives that accompanied them. As in many other parts of the world, the postwar era in Korea heralded the resurgence of mass cultural forms in which visuality and American commodities predominated.

The 1950s in South Korea is often described as a period of economic stagnation, political corruption and cultural mimicry. This accords with both the official view projected by the Park Chung Hee administration that the decade capped a centuries long history of peninsular decline and enervation and the more critical perception that the period was defined by "Americanization" and the flow of popular music and film out of American military installations. These perceptions are further bolstered by the hard facts of a nation that, at the heart of the Cold War, depended substantially on foreign economic aid, and, in the aftermath of colonial rule, could not draw on unbroken traditions on which to ground national identity and culture. But this characterization also brackets off the 1950s (properly, 1953-1961) from the cultural production of the colonial period, abetting a homogenized view of culture under colonial rule, and differentiates those years from the ostensibly robust developmentalism and martial strength of the Park regime, colluding with the latter's historical revisionism. The decade's popular culture, therein, is easily overlooked or dismissed as anomalous or transitional, an inconsequential or lamentable stage in the progress towards the more authentically native and genuinely modern cultural practices of the 1960s and thereafter.

Close attention to the alluring images that saturated the era's magazines and the diverse sounds recorded in the decade's albums suggests that the fashion, music, and film of the 1950s was in fact more heterogeneous, cosmopolitan and contradictory than can be contained in reductive framings of cultural influence and progression. After decades of colonization, and following a catastrophic war, South Korea was poised by the mid-1950s for an escape – from ideology, from Asia, from reality. Popular culture did not provide that escape, but rather symbolized it in multiplicit, multidirectional ways. Its reproduction of Hollywood imagery and sound was not only the repressive effect of the American cultural machine, nor was it only a venue of escape, distraction and pacification. Rather, the self-conscious identification with America also contained the radical fantasy of transformation and difference, the desire to realize a new socio-cultural identity. Simultaneously, the sophisticated luster of cinematic imagery in this period reached back to the refinement of the colonial period; the young artists active in the late 1950s turned back nostalgically to the urbanity and style of their youth, projecting that memory onto the screen in the form of the slickest, most refined, and technically accomplished images and sounds possible. The modern fantasy of 1950s Korean popular culture was therein a palimpsest of Japan and America, old and new, East and West – one which could condition the imagination of a new Korean modernity.

Steven Chung teaches Korean and East Asian film and literature in the East Asian Studies department at Princeton University. He has published work on North Korean cinema and is currently finishing his book entitled, The Split Screen: Sin Sang-ok and Postwar Korean Film Cultures.