Split Screen Korea: Shin Sang-ok and Postwar Cinema

2 Regimes within Regimes: Film and Fashion in the Korean 1950s

. 4 7 Exposition The topos of Im Ŭng-sik’s iconic 1956 photograph “Early Summer, Midopa” is apparently clear: the weight of traditional Korean cultural practice is giving way to the lightness of Western lifestyle (Figure 2). The keenness of what Roland Barthes called the photo’s punctum—that is, the deeply affective register of an image—is driven home by the seeming distress that passes on the face of the woman in the foreground: she is nearest to us, but in the burgeoning consumer culture epitomized in the scene’s Western goods stores (Midopa was at the time Seoul’s largest department store), she has already faded. The ascendant icon now is the almost ethereal figure of the lady of leisure, protected from the sun by her parasol, embedded in the newly scrubbed city streets (the way the patterned dresses echo the street’s tiling). “Early Summer” seems to present us with an emblem of “Americanization ,” a compressed rendering of the classic tropes, replete with gender and class antagonisms, of cultural imperialism. But in fact the image’s semantic coordinates are far from obvious. The intrusion of Western clothing, so often embodied (but rarely so artfully) in precisely this juxtaposition of women’s figures, is of course a ceaselessly deployed sign of cultural loss and transformation . As such, on those terms alone the scene is difficult to date—that is, until we look with some care at the clothes themselves and see not simply the generic yangjang–hanbok dichotomy, but rather the bold floral prints and flared lines of the young women’s dresses. To even an amateur student of fashion flows, these styles follow lines of adoption from American fashions of the 1950s, and therein to the vast apparatus of postwar occupation and Cold War containment. The image’s studium, Barthes’s complementary term for the sociocultural import of pictures, is not defined without this 2 R E G I M E S W I T H I N R E G I M E S Film and Fashion in the Korean 1950s 48 . r e g I m e s W I t h I n r e g I m e s sense of clothing’s timeliness; in this respect the clothing’s historicity is itself the photo’s studium. But this historicity is not the photograph’s critical subject. Rather, it is the woman in the foreground, in particular her clothes, that begs a closer look. For, of course, her hanbok is not some timeless “traditional” vestment but rather the subject of tremendous social, cultural, and political investment , regulation, and even caprice. One can think of course of the radical changes mandated in the 1894 Kabo Reforms, that frantic attempt to mark out a bulwark of Korean modernity, staked in part on a more enlightened system of dress. But more germane here is the way hanbok were charged with heterogeneous interest and meaning throughout the postwar era. The foregrounded woman’s “early summer” dress is translucent and light, likely stitched of newly developed nylon, and the chŏgori short; its line is economic and its ornamentation almost nonexistent: an irreducible product of modern capital and its demand for efficiency. In the winter the outfit would appropriate another new material, velvet, to extravagant effect. The woman is therefore not as behind, and the young women not as far in the vanguard, as the photo might suggest at first blush. The image, characteristic Figure 2. “Early Summer, Midopa.” Photograph by Im Ŭng-sik (1956), courtesy of EuroCreon. r e g I m e s W I t h I n r e g I m e s . 49 of a core cultural discourse of the 1950s, Americanization, is thus rather more complex and points to the multiple “systems” at play in the period. And here, it is fashion, in its traverse and ephemeral detail as much as its contingent materiality, that is the prompt for a more careful and flexible cultural history. One of my aims in this chapter is to read Shin Sang-ok’s work through the dominant codes of image production in film, fashion, and print that so acutely expressed the layered ontologies and trajectories that belie the discourse of Americanization in 1950s South Korea. I am prompted first by the period’s critical though often undertheorized position in conceptualizing political transformation in modern Korea. In the overt simplifications of thinking culture...