Archive in the State of Emergency: Realizing Film Preservation in cold war South Korea

Abstract

This article examines South Korea’s formation of a film archive in the 1970s and 1980s. Founded as a governmental institution, the Korean Film Preservation Center (KFPC) was not intended to be a nationally representative archive for Korean films but rather to facilitate cultural diplomacy by becoming a member of FIAF, a global network of film archives. However, KFPC faced obstacles to joining FIAF, not only because of the regime’s myopic approach to archives, but also because of the cold war bifurcation between East and West and between developed and developing countries. In addition to the political dispute over South Korea’s FIAF membership instigated by North Korea, the process was troubled by the ‘developmental frame’ used by international organizations such as UNESCO and its links to the making of the ‘Third World’. FIAF, reflecting UNESCO’s attention to preservation in postcolonial countries, increasingly prioritized these nations’ film preservation capacity in an effort to help them catch up with the ‘advanced’ Western archives. By historicizing the developmental frame and geopolitical conflict in this example of the South Korean film archive, this essay provides one plausible vantage point from which to understand the cold war system and its impact on the local/global cultural scene.