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. 1 2 9 Complicit Images The political and generic heterogeneity of Shin Sang-ok’s films should be unsurprising when we take into consideration that he was initiated into filmmaking in the tumultuous years of liberation from nearly a half-decade of colonial rule, shot his first films in the throes of a horrific and nearly total war, built his industry-leading studio within the sphere of a militarized developmentalist state, and closed the most productive years of his career precariously straddling the dangerous antimonies of the Cold War. Indeed the resourcefulness reflected in his career finds uncanny resonance with that of the icons of the postwar age of “heroic entrepreneurialism,” figures like Chŏng Chu-yŏng, who built Hyundai into one of the nation’s most powerful conglomerates through early ventures in an unlikely range of industries and through multifarious collusion with government interests. But filmmaking was not a straightforward kiŏp, notwithstanding the clumsy efforts of the state to make it one, and, plainly, the politics that conditioned its operations and the politics to which it gave expression were often circuitous and unpredictable. In this sense it is perhaps not surprising that the filmmaker to whom Shin himself referred most often was not a celebrated contemporary like Kurosawa Akira or Douglas Sirk but, rather, William Wyler. Easily one of the most commercially and critically successful American directors (though largely disregarded in more recent film criticism), Wyler set a model for Shin in the generic range of his work (which included westerns, historical epics, and fast-paced comedies) and the reputed perfectionism he applied to his films (which earned him the nickname “90take Wyler”). Perhaps the more striking parallel, however, which Shin seems not to have stressed, was Wyler’s ability to make films that were eminently 4 M E L O D R A M A A N D T H E S C E N E O F D E V E L O P M E N T 130 . m e l o d r a m a a n d t h e s c e n e o f d e v e l o p m e n t legible in the diverse historical moments of the prewar years as well as the heady first decades of American hegemony—a consistent visibility that was amply underwritten by the still robust Hollywood studio system. However, the most telling correspondence of Shin’s career in my mind is with Mizoguchi Kenji, a filmmaker whose geographic and historical proximity to postwar Korean cinema nevertheless did little to significantly register his work with Shin or any of his contemporaries. I do not mean to suggest an analogy on a formal level, not least because it might be considered a minor heresy—plainly, Shin would not bring his cinema to match the rigor and subtlety of Mizoguchi’s work. Rather, the two filmmakers share similarly heterogeneous filmographies (and, to be sure, the specific points of overlap are uncanny—on the women’s melodramas, folk horror tales, historical epics, etc.) that were, further, similarly conditioned by the wild swings in the social and political history in which their careers were embedded . Additionally, and despite the fact that Mizoguchi’s career opportunism is perhaps rightly overlooked in the close attention paid to his films, both were eminently entrepreneurial, ready to compromise on the political fidelity of their work if such adjustments meant that they could enjoy making more and better films. For these icons of East Asian filmmaking, the cinema was a religion whose pious and prolific practice came through the dual blessings of the state and market. For Shin, as it was for Mizoguchi, the complex overlap between these forces in the early years of postwar developmentalism bequeathed enough freedom to produce films that could signify not solely through the esoteric language of art cinema, but via the mechanisms of affect and the borrowed forms of ideologically opposed cinemas. In a brief but compelling essay, leading Korean film critic Kim So-yŏng argued that Shin Sang-ok’s films are characterized not by stylistic or thematic uniformity, but rather by “mutually contradictory and discontinuous itinerancy.”1 This itinerancy and the heterogeneous identities, religious confusions, and sociopolitical instabilities that animate the diverse body of Shin’s work, she suggests, are reflective of the tumult of the 1960s in which, borrowing Marx’s phrase, “all that is solid melt[ed] into air.” For Kim, Shin’s film world is...

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