Cold War Cosmopolitanism: Period Style in 1950s Korean Cinema

Abstract

Cold War Cosmopolitanism is a dedicated study of 1950s Korea through the figure of Han Hyung-mo (Han Hyŏngmo), an auteur at the center of South Korea’s “Golden Age” of cinema, who then was largely forgotten in the ensuing South Korean film history. Only a great commitment to the films at the heart of the book can produce such a focused and expansive work, and for this reason, the book will be a rewarding read and a useful open-access resource for courses on the period, world cinema, and gender.The driving argument of Christina Klein’s monograph is that South Korea’s entrance into the newly emerging Cold War network of “Free World”—as opposed to the Communist “Second World”—in the 1950s after the Korean War produced a distinctive cinematic aesthetic all of its own, which Klein refers to as “Cold War Cosmopolitan Style.” This style, Klein argues, is best encapsulated in the innovative filmography of the director Han Hyung-mo spanning the decade.Both period and style are of concern in this book and are very much enmeshed, as Klein demonstrates through both the organization of the book and its argumentation. The book is notable for its two-part organization, divided into the first part on “Period,” and the second part on “Style.” Klein provides a richly described material context of the post–Korean War South Korea, the cultural landscape of which was shaped by the US political, economic, and military support through cover institutions such as the Asia Foundation. Han’s films emerged amid a busy and complicated material culture of the US military’s Post Exchange goods, lifestyle, and military personnel; new gender dynamics and self-fashioning possibilities; and everyday violence of a liberated and occupied country in ruins from the Korean War. Capturing the ethos of his time, Han was able to offer South Korean women a cosmopolitan selfhood on screen that was powerful and attractive. Such “après-girl” womanhood served as a vessel for a US political agenda to more effectively propagate anticommunism and the notions of democracy and freedom that were central to Cold War liberalism. Klein carefully guides us to see how Han’s films engaged and exceeded the postwar anxiety about South Korean women’s place in the new nation as well as the world.Under the “Period” section of the book, chapters 1 through 3 map out the historical coordinates in which Han produced his films, identifying key institutions, sources of funds and technological innovations, women who shaped the postwar Korean educational and legal fields—such as Helen (Hwallan) Kim and Lee Tai-young (Yi T’aeyŏng)—and women’s print culture. Under the second half (“Style”), chapters 4 through 7 focus on different films by Han. We see here how Han deploys various stylistic components to craft distinct and historical narratives of postwar womanhood, such as intentional absenting of female suffering, dense set design, global sound design and choreography, dynamic cinematography, mise-en-scène involving consumer goods, and the use of visual spectacles to hold the viewers’ gaze. Klein’s insistence that style is a form of historical evidence must be taken seriously, as her reading against the grain of the gap between narrative closure and the female gaze in Han’s film Madame Freedom (1956) constitutes the book’s strongest and most exciting analysis. Han’s screen sirens showed women how to misbehave and revel in the pleasures of a new public culture without compulsory suffering.It is clear that in Klein’s book, cosmopolitan feminism was a major force in Han’s time, a phenomenon that enabled Han to produce new visualities at the same time as Han himself shaped cosmopolitanism of his day. What remains to be thought is whether and how it is so in the readers’ time. Therefore, a question that remains open-ended is: What sets Cold War cosmopolitan feminism apart from Cold War (neo)liberal feminism? Or perhaps, Cold War imperialist feminism? For instance, both key feminist/queer figures in the book—Helen (Hwallan) Kim and Lee Tai-young—sought to mobilize women for state war efforts, seeing the Pacific War and the Korean War as opportunities for women to raise their political, social, and economic status in South Korea. As Klein observes, this was not uncommon for elite women of the time, a fact that, in my view, begs the question of imperialist feminism as a site of classed ideological battleground.Tensions between the formulations of cosmopolitanism, globalization, and imperialism from the period after the fall of the Soviet Union and prior to 9/11—marked by a certain kind of optimism not unlike the one Klein attributes to Han—were made much more explicit after 9/11 out of a necessity in the readers’ world to better apprehend the present. As feminist and queer liberation has justified and continues to justify military occupations, the splinters within transnational gender and sexuality studies and American studies are not easily captured through a focus on cosmopolitan feminism.Without a doubt, the 1950s gendered and militarized terrain brought new opportunities as well as it closed others for South Korean women seeking new modes of being in the world. The cosmopolitan feminism that Han offered sought allyship with and integration into the “Free World” in a landscape where identification with revolutionary feminisms both from Japanese colonial period and North Korea, as well as global—but not cosmopolitan—sites was punishable. The unspeakable dilemma for South Korean women of this time is that the glass is half-full when the choice is between masculinist cultural nationalism and cosmopolitan feminism in the 1950s. However, the glass is half-empty when the choice is between cosmopolitan feminism or no feminism at all.