Centre as periphery: learned coloniality in colonial Korean filmmaking

Abstract

ABSTRACT In 1939, with the implementation of a new film law in Japan, Korean filmmakers in colonial Joseon Korea were seeing a preview of the regulation that their own industry would face come 1940. By examining the roundtable debates, editorials, and articles by Joseon film directors and producers at this time, we can observe not only the predicament of film workers, but also the predicament of producing films as a colony within an empire. In close-reading these film workers' writings on cinema across the empire, I triangulate the different positions of the colonial film industries and the film industry of the metropole, in terms of film control, production, and market. In doing so, I attempt to illuminate the way that colonial filmmakers in Korea understood the varied power dynamics of film production in the empire, and through their perspective, reconfigure conventional notions of power, colony, and representation.