Split Screen Korea

Abstract

Split Screen offers an analysis of the career of Sin Sang-ok, arguably the most important Korean filmmaker of the postwar era. It also furnishes an examination of key aspects of modern Korea, from the politics of mass culture to the cultural effects of geopolitical division. The book pursues these dual aims through its eclectic methodology, combining close readings of a broad range of films with documentary research into the industrial and political conditions of film production and through engagement with a variety of theoretical literatures in both English in Korean. Split Screen’s core focus is on how Sin Sang-ok, whose career spanned the late colonial to the postwar periods in South Korea and through to adventures in North Korea and Hollywood, could sustain his visibility as a filmmaker in ostensibly conflicting cultural and political environments. The book demonstrates that neither Sin’s personal motivations nor his capacity for adaptation can adequately account for the ruptures in his career and, accordingly, looks to specific industrial filmmaking practices, locally produced cinematic discourses, and filmmaking forms in global circulation to understand how Sin’s films became intelligible in the heterogeneous time-spaces of their exhibition. Split Screen highlights a fundamental tendency within Sin Sang-ok’s cinematic practice: a complex and often vexing encounter between melodrama, spectacle and exploitation on the one hand and what I call the enlightenment filmmaking modality on the other. The book demonstrates that the politics, significance and visibility of Sin’s work are formed precisely within that encounter.