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. 2 1 I want to begin with what might be called a diachronic para-history of periods of filmmaking in Korea that both describes and exceeds the bounds of Shin Sang-ok’s career. I do so partly because the following chapters in this book treat Shin’s work in synchronic stages, mapping it against a range of contemporaneous discourses and events. While this serves one of the book’s overall aims, the assemblage of a history of postwar Korean film cultures , it also works against one of its core insights, that crucial continuities in form and thought survive otherwise radical transformations in social organization and political ideology. But I also take the long view in this chapter to argue with critical traditions that parallel the temporal duration of this study. One of these, sketched in the introduction, is the “nationalist realist” thesis that posits the primacy of an anticolonial, prodemocratic tendency in Korean cinema that is mediated via an ostensibly ethical realist modality. The other, more diffuse and in some ways more crucial, is a set of criteria for what constitutes the aesthetic value of film as well as its politics. These, I argue, depend on a limited concept of modernism and mass culture that de facto function as a set of criteria for what constitutes aesthetic value in film. I am not at all interested in salvaging the political salience or aesthetic legitimacy of what I call here the enlightenment modality; rather, I see in that knot of formal and discursive practices an important mechanism with which to rethink the meaning of ideology, form, and development in twentieth-century Korean cinema. Enlightenment Revisited In the history of Korean cinema, “enlightenment” (kyemong) has not only been cast as a future aspiration or a characterization of the present, but 1 T H E C E N T U R Y ’ S I L L U M I N AT I O N S The Enlightenment Mode in Korean Cinema 22 . t h e c e n t u r y ’ s I l l u m I n a t I o n s has just as often been figured as a remnant of the past. In virtually every period of major cultural transformation, critics and filmmakers alike have declared the obsolescence of enlightenment thought and style. Yi P’il-u, who is widely seen as Korea’s first film impresario, was steadfast in the early 1920s in calling for the new “entertainment” medium to replace the “outmoded forms of the nineteenth century.”1 In a complex and troubling turn away from his commitment to socialist thought, Im Hwa, perhaps the leading cultural critic of the 1930s, pointed to the end of the age of “enlightenment idealism” and announced the dawn of “cultural industrialization” that ensued with the expansion of Japanese imperial power.2 In the mid1950s , following the war and in the midst of increased American cultural influence, there was nearly unanimous agreement among critics that the world had changed and that the old forms of cultural instruction were no longer relevant.3 The same sort of rhetoric flooded newspapers and magazines in the 1980s, when the modicum of wealth and security built under the developmentalist projects of the Park Chung Hee administration and the apparent victory of the capitalist South over the socialist North seemed to negate the utility of ideological and instrumentalized cultural forms. The logic of this disavowal and assurance is twofold. It stems first from the link made between enlightenment and the premodern. Critics throughout the twentieth century continually tied the basic idea of kyemong to the moralistic literary culture of the defunct Chosŏn yangban class. Enlightenment, therein, was the antithesis of the modern subjectivities and democratic social forms that apparently lay at the core of contemporary filmmaking. It is rooted, second, in the more sophisticated idea that while enlightenment was in fact eminently modern in its utopian ideological objectives, it was now retrograde and inappropriate to the political calm that had ostensibly settled on the nation. The enlightenment film was therein an artifact of more troubling times and its overcoming signaled the arrival of a genuinely cosmopolitan Korean society. I want to argue in this chapter, however, that no such overcoming ever occurred, and rather that these moments of rhetorical disavowal only articulated shifts in the continued predominance of enlightenment thought in the discourses and practices of Korean cinema. Certainly, periods of acute political mobilization witnessed the agitation of interests that intensified the...

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