Sino-Korean screen connections:
towards a history in fragments
By Chris Berry
King’s College London
Address: Department of Film Studies, King’s College London, Strand, London, WC2R 2LS
Tel: 0207 848 1158
Email: [email protected]
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Sino-Korean screen connections:
towards a history in fragments
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Abstract
How can we pursue the original drive of work on transnational cinema to combat
methodological and ideological nationalism, but without becoming complicit with
globalization and its ideology? This essay proposes researching Sino-Korean screen
connections. It opens up five directions, illustrating each with a particular example: 1)
revealing the occluded, illustrated by the role of Korean filmmakers in the Shanghai cinema
of the colonial era; 2) understanding the transnational as composed of what Anna Tsing calls
distinct ‘transnational projects’ that exceed globalization, such as the popularity of North
Korean films in the People’s Republic of China during the Cultural Revolution; 3) showing
that there is no ‘smooth space’ of global flows, contrasting the relative absence of South
Koreans in Chinese films with the much higher profile of Chinese in South Korean films; 4)
looking at transborder production cultures, using the little-known example of South Koreans
working in Hong Kong in the 1960s and 1970s; and, 5) researching exhibition and
distribution, such as the traces of the popularity of South Korean melodramas in Taiwan in
the 1960s. Taking these examples, the essays asks what kind of history of Sino-Korean film
connections can be written. It argues that the only possibility is a disjunctural history of
fragments. Precisely because modernity demands that history take up the form of a
teleological progress, disjuncture acts as a counter-history, revealing modernity’s violence.
Keywords: China, Korea, transnationalism, globalization, history, cinema
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Introduction
This essay returns to the question of transnational cinema – or what Kim Soyoung has
called ‘trans-cinema’ (Kim 2003). Initially, the transnational was often understood as
coterminous with globalization and marking the fading away of the nation-state and
nationalism. However, paradoxically, we now have more nation-states than ever before. It
might even be the case that instead of leading to the fading of the nation-state, globalization
and the economic, cultural and social changes produced by it are in fact generating these new
nation-states. In screen studies, we also seem to have a paradox. We have seen a tremendous
growth in studies of transnational cinema, and the founding of a journal called Transnational
Cinemas in 2010. At the same time, there seems to be more nationally focused screen studies
research than ever before, as exemplified by the founding of serials like the Journal of
Japanese and Korean Cinema in 2009 and the Journal of Chinese Cinemas in 2006. One
might speculate whether the reasons for this growing interest in the national and cinema are
institutional ones internal to the economics of academia as much as they are intellectual ones:
as enrolments in modern languages departments keep dropping, there is a continuous search
to find ways to attract more students or to re-house language academics into other
programmes. However, such speculation is outside the concerns of this article, which is more
interested in how the field of transnational cinema might develop.
In the face of the resilience of the nation-state and interest in the national, perhaps we
should not be surprised that work on the transnational has all too often failed to contest
nationalism and instead been hijacked by the national. Interest in transnational cinema
sometimes becomes little more than a celebration of or expression of anxiety about the
extension of national soft power. For example, the title of Euny Hong’s recent book, The
Birth of Korean Cool: How One Nation Is Conquering the World through Pop Culture, may
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be tongue in cheek, but its humour depends upon this tendency to harness transnational
practices to the celebration of neo-imperialist fantasies (Hong 2014). On the anxiety side of
the equation, the Chinese company Wanda (万达) buying up the AMC Theatre chain in the
USA to create ‘the world’s largest cinema conglomerate’ fanned the flames of online
excitement (Anon 2012), as did its more recent purchase of Legendary Entertainment for
US$3.5 billion (Breszki 2016).
How might we return to some of the original aims of transnational cinema studies and
avoid the slide back towards nationalism and its imperialist extensions? This essay focuses on
Sino-Korean film connections and their historiography as just such a counter-example. It
aims to discuss how we might map cinema from a transnational perspective that harnesses the
advantages of breaking out of conventional and taken for granted ‘methodological
nationalism’ (Chernilo 2006) and challenges nationalism itself, and without becoming
complicit with either a neo-imperialist nationalist logic or the ideology of global capitalism.
This essay proposes that using this Sino-Korean trans-cinema framework enables us
to see various directions in scholarly research that can be harnessed towards those goals.
First, there is the revelation of phenomena whose transnational dimensions are occluded
within a conventional national cinema perspective. To illustrate this, the essay gives the
example of Jin Yan (金焰), possibly China’s most important male star of the 1930s. What is
less well known and rarely investigated is that he was Korean. Second, as the Jin Yan
example already illustrates, trans-cinema predates and exceeds globalization, if the latter is
understood as the ideology and practice of contemporary global capitalism. Trans-cinema can
be better comprehended if we approach it as a collection of distinct transborder projects, each
with its own logic. To illustrate this, the import of North Korean films into China during the
Cultural Revolution decade (1966-1976) is considered as such a project. Third, rejecting the
equation of transnational cinema with the ideological fantasy of globalization also leads us to
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question the vision of a smooth and unbordered world for global capitalist operations and
opens up research on how trans-cinema operates in its own uneven manner structured by
configurations of power. This is illustrated by the contrast between the more frequent
depiction of Chinese and Chinese themes in recent South Korean cinema and the relative
rarity of depictions of South Koreans in Chinese cinema. Fourth, trans-cinema opens up
questions about transborder production practices as well as what is depicted in the films. This
is illustrated with the otherwise occluded and forgotten role of South Korean filmmakers in
the Hong Kong film industry in the 1960s and 1970s. Fifth, exhibition and distribution
practices also emerge as a necessary area of trans-cinema research. As well as the already
cited import of North Korean films into Cultural Revolution China, the essay illustrates this
with the little known import of South Korean films into Taiwan in the 1960s.
Finally, how might the five examples given to illustrate the directions opened up by a
trans-cinema approach to Sino-Korean film connections be combined to become episodes in a
history of Sino-Korean film connections? This leads to a conclusion that could also be said to
open a sixth research direction enabled by a trans-cinema approach: trans-border cinema
historiography. However, when narrated together, these episodes cannot be strung together to
mimic a conventional national cinema ‘linear historical narrative describing the development
of a cinema within a particular national boundary whose unity and coherence seemed beyond
all doubt’, as Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto put it so eloquently (1991, 242). They do not produce a
cause-and-effect logic leading in a triumphal growth model of so-called progress to
expansion beyond the borders of the nation-state. Instead, their resistance to integration
reveals Sino-Korean film connections as a history of fragments, structured by disjuncture.
The essay concludes by arguing that to engage in such a disjunctural historiography is to
deconstruct modernity, including late modernity, not in the name of producing some new
grand narrative but in order to resist such impositions. A short epilogue offers some
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considerations on what changes in scholarly practice might be required to realize such a field
of research.
1. Revealing the Occluded
The most evident limitation of methodological nationalism is that it produces a kind
of tunnel vision, leaving us ‘unable to see border crossing interactions, interconnectedness
and intercommunication’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2009, 26). In much of the literature on
the topic, including the essay by Beck and Beck-Gernsheim that this quotation is drawn from,
methodological nationalism is framed as a problem revealed by the advent of globalization.
This approach understands globalization as a dimension of neoliberalism’s pursuit of reduced
state regulation. However, cinema was transnational long before neoliberalism became a
global orthodoxy. Indeed, as Sheldon Lu has pointed out in the introduction to his anthology
on transnational Chinese cinemas, national cinemas were produced out of what was initially a
transnational context of production and exhibition by the travelling Lumière cinématographe
operators at the end of the nineteenth century (1997, 3).
As an example of how an approach that understands Chinese cinemas through the
national rather than the transnational model occludes history, Lu refers to the dating of
Chinese cinema history. Conventional accounts place it as beginning with the production of
the first Chinese film in 1905. In contrast, he prefers to date it as beginning from 1896, the
year of the first film screening in China (1997, 2). Similarly, numerous Sino-Korean film
connections disappear from view when the scholar is operating with a model of cinema as
films produced by and for people of a particular nation-state.
For example, Jin Yan was one of China’s leading male film stars in the 1930s. He was
proclaimed as China’s Rudolph Valentino (Meyer 2009). Tall, handsome, and with a
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propensity to take his shirt off and sometimes even go skinny dipping on film (in Big Road
[a.k.a. The Highway, 大路, 1934], directed by Sun Yu [孙瑜]), he was hugely popular with
female audiences. His star image is encapsulated in the opening scenes of Wild Rose (野玫瑰), directed by Sun Yu in 1932. Jin plays the scion of a rich Shanghai family. His character
is also an artist. Wearing a dashing fedora hat, he tools out to the countryside in his
convertible car looking for a bucolic scene to paint. In the process, he comes across a village
girl whose nickname is Wild Cat, and they fall in love. The woman playing Wild Cat was
Wang Renmei (王人美). She was being launched in this movie, and the chemistry between
them helped to make her an overnight star. Later, they got married (Meyer 2014). When his
character returns to the city, he drives home to a splendid art deco mansion, where his friends
have thrown a cocktail party for him.
I first came across Jin Yan in the early 1980s, when I was beginning my studies of
Chinese cinema. At that time, he was simply mentioned as a leading Chinese film star of the
Shanghai Republican era. I do not remember anyone mentioning to me that he was ethnically
Korean and that his name was pronounced Kim Yom in Korean (김염). However, this fact is
not suppressed. For example, Jin’s status is confirmed by his appearance in the first volume
of the multi-volume book series of biographies of Chinese filmmakers. There, his biography
makes it clear that he was born Kim Duk-rin (김덕린; 金德麟) in 1910in the city known
today as Seoul, and that his father was a patriotic revolutionary who had to flee the Japanese
colonizers to Northeast China when Duk-rin was still an infant (Li Zhi 1982, p.161).
However, it was not discussed in academic circles or considered worthy of further research,
and it is in this sense that methodological nationalism has occluded Jin/Kim’s Sino-Korean
transnational status.
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The degree of occlusion became clear to me when I presented a keynote talk on this
topic at the Korean Screen Culture Conference at Sheffield Hallam University in June 2014.
Delegates had come from as far afield as the United States and South Korea. I showed a clip
from Wild Rose and after I had explained to the audience who the star was, I asked how many
of them recognised Jin Yan/Kim Yom or had ever heard of him. Only three or four out of
over forty people in the room had. We can speculate on the various reasons for this.
Jin/Kim’s acting career was confined to Chinese cinema. Although he played a Tibetan in
Eagles Brave the Storm (暴风中的雄鹰) directed by Wang Yi (王逸) in 1958, as far as I
know, he never played an ethnic Korean character or spoke Korean on screen. This would not
help to make him visible to scholars of Korean screen culture. Furthermore, he was a leftist,
loyal to the Chinese revolution. Doubtless, the South Korean government had little interest in
acknowledging him during the Cold War era. According Hye Seung Chung, it was only when
a Japanese biography was translated and published in South Korea in 1996 that he became
more visible to the Korean film cultural community (Chung 2013, 166).
However, Jin Yan/Kim Yom’s Shanghai stardom is only the most visible achievement
of a wider Korean cultural community in Shanghai, which included various filmmakers.
Many of these people moved between Seoul, Tokyo, and Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s,
looking for opportunities for education, fleeing political problems, or seeking financing for
new projects. Most were not only anti-colonial but also, like Jin Yan/Kim Yom, on the
political left. Most of them are less known in the Chinese literature than in Korean, and their
lives and activities in Shanghai require much more research. Indeed, my attention has been
drawn to them by Professor Kim Soyoung and her colleagues in Seoul, who have been
unearthing their history.
Among these mobile and transborder Korean filmmakers of the colonial era, perhaps
best known in the Chinese-speaking world, in so far as any of them are known, is Jeong Ji-tak
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(郑基铎 , 정기탁), whose name is pronounced Zheng Jiduo in Mandarin. A very brief entry
in the China Cinema Encyclopedia lists his appearance as an actor in eight films between
1928 and 1929, and credits five films to him as director in the same years. He is credited with
directing one more film in 1934 (Anon 1995, 1340). The gap was caused by his departure for
some years. The bombing of Shanghai by the Japanese in January of 1932 caused many in the
film industry to leave for a while, as depicted for example in the 1991 biopic by Stanley
Kwan (关锦鹏) on the life of Chinese film star Ruan Lingyu (阮玲玉), and probably
Jeong/Zheng was among them.
Ruan Lingyu also starred in Jeong/Zheng’s last Shanghai film, Goodbye, Shanghai
(再会吧，上海), which he wrote and directed for the Lianhua Film Company (联华影行公司) using the name Zheng Yunbo (郑云波), pronounced Jeong Un-pa in Korean (정운파)
(Zheng and Liu, 1981, 2531-2). This film was discovered and restored by the Korean Film
Archive, before being screened at Jeonju International Film Festival in 2010 (Giammarco,
2010). It is as Zheng Yunbo that he makes an appearance in the standard history of Chinese
cinema published in the Mao era, although his other name of Zheng Jiduo is also given.
There, not only Goodbye, Shanghai, but also his other film directed after his return to the
Shanghai, Escape (出路, 1933), which is not included in his China Cinema Encyclopedia
entry, are detailed. After censorship, this film was released as The Bright Road (光明之路).
However, whereas China Cinema Encyclopedia does acknowledge his Korean ethnicity, this
is not mentioned in the standard history, which focuses mostly on the synopses of the films
rather than discussion of the filmmakers (Cheng et.al. 1981, 270-271, 346-7). Both films are
class-conscious local narratives with no Korean content.
Among the Korean filmmakers active in Shanghai, Zheng/Jeong is probably the best
known in the Chinese-speaking world apart from Jin Yan/Kim Yom, simply because his
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career was the most heavily based in Shanghai. Regarding other figures who are well-known
in the Korean film cultural world as pioneers of Korean cinema, their time in Shanghai seems
to have been a less important part of their overall career. Furthermore, they do not appear in
the Chinese-language literature. They include Jeon Chang-geun (전창근) and Lee Gyeong-
son (이경손). The latter’s name is pronounced in Mandarin as Quan Changgen (全昌根), and
my Korean colleagues tell me he was also known as Jin Changgen (金昌根) and Qian
Changgen (钱昌根). He lived in Shanghai and was active in the film industry in the 1920s
and 30s. However, he is known in Korea for films he made after his return there, beginning in
the 1940s. According to the Korean Movie Database, his career as an actor extended as late
as 1969 (Anon, n.d.). However, it seems little is known about his early career in Shanghai,
and I have not found any published discussion in Chinese yet. Lee Gyeong-son’s name is
pronounced Li Qingsun in Mandarin (李庆孙). According to my Korean colleagues, he was a
pioneer of cinema in Korea in the 1920s. Lee spent three years in Shanghai from 1929 to
1932, before going into exile in Thailand in 1932, where he lived out his days.
In the discussion above on these various mobile Korean filmmakers of the colonial
era, a pattern that emerges clearly about the existing sources on them is the tendency to
prioritize their place in a particular national cinema history. Therefore, a trans-cinema
approach would not only make the invisible visible, as this essay has attempted to begin
doing. It would also need to try to rethink their work in its full transnational dimension. For
example, should the participation of Korean filmmakers in Shanghai films about the struggle
for social justice and anti-colonialism in China be seen simply as their participation in
Chinese cinema history and the so-called left-wing progressive film movement of the 1930s?
Or is it evidence that anti-colonial and class-conscious filmmaking in this period constituted a
transnational trend?
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2. Transnational Projects
As well as demonstrating how stepping outside the narrow confines of
methodological nationalism can reveal the occluded, the Shanghai activities of Korean
filmmakers during the colonial era counter the assumption that globalization and
transnational cinema are coterminous, because they predate globalization. Although some
scholars like to date globalization back as far as trading between the inhabitants of the Indus
valley and the Sumerians in the third century B.C. (Frank, 1993, 1998), it is more plausibly
understood as what Sassen calls a recent ‘epochal transformation’ (2006, 1). Roland
Robertson claims that ‘Globalization as a concept refers both to the compression of the world
and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole’. He goes on to note that
these processes have been proceeding . . . for many centuries, but the main focus of the
discussion on globalization is on relatively recent times’ (1992, 8). Robertson goes on to
acknowledge that the late 1980s marked the point when the discourse on globalization really
boomed. The implication of this is that it has proliferated along with neoliberalism since the
1980s and the era of Reagan in the United States and Thatcher in the United Kingdom.
Therefore, globalization is most convincingly understood as the international manifestation of
the neoliberal rollback of state regulation, including the regulation of trade and movement
across borders, and distinguished from imperialism, international trade, and other earlier
transborder manifestations.
In addition to preceding globalization, the Shanghai activities of colonial era Korean
filmmakers appear to have been shaped by politics and not primarily motivated by the pursuit
of maximum profit that drives globalization and neoliberalism. Distinguishing between
globalization and the transnational in terms both of history and motivation is therefore
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fundamental, both for the development of research on transnational cinema that is not
complicit with the contemporary ideology of global capitalism and for understanding
transnational cinema phenomena such as these. I have written about this problem at greater
length elsewhere (Berry 2010). In that essay, I draw on Anna Tsing’s distinction between the
‘global’ and the ‘transnational’. She argues that globalization is the drive to produce a global
market rather than a series of national ones. She also notes that it combines with the
corresponding ideology of globalism, which imagines the market as a natural space
obstructed by, for example, the nation-state, and globalization itself as an unstoppable and
monolithic natural process. Against this, she proposes that we use ‘transnational’ to refer to
distinct, historically specific, and singular transborder projects. Globalization would be one
specific and very large project, but Tsing also points to NGOs working across borders against
transnational capitalism and globalization as another kind of transnational project that is not
part of globalization itself (2000).
Taking Tsing’s ‘transnational projects’ approach, we can begin to distinguish between
those episodes in the history of Sino-Korean film connections that are part of globalization
and those that are not. For example, CJ Entertainment’s expansion beyond the limited market
of South Korea into the Chinese-language film world would be a classic example of a
globalization-style transnational project. Its CGV movie theater business has been building
multiplexes in China, where it became one of the top ten movie theatre chains in 2014, both
in terms of market share and admissions (Lee, 2015). On the production side, as part of the
same strategy to become a regional and transnational corporation, CJ has also invested not
only in co-productions, but also in films set entirely in China, as well as other East and
Southeast Asian territories (Frater, 2014).
Another counter-example in addition to the activities of Korean filmmakers in
colonial-era Shanghai might be the popularity of North Korean films in the People’s Republic
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of China during the Cultural Revolution decade (1966-1976). Perhaps the most famous is the
colour wide-screen film, The Flower Girl (꽃파는 처녀, 1972). It is based on a play of the
same name, allegedly written by none other than Kim Il-sung (김일성) himself. Set during
the 1930s, the story of the sufferings of the ordinary people during the colonial era and the
activities of the anti-Japanese revolutionary guerrillas would have been easy for Chinese
audiences to grasp, as similar stories were a common part of the local repertoire. Translated
and dubbed into Mandarin in seven days at Changchun Film Studio, when the film was
released as The Flower Seller (卖花姑娘), it drew huge crowds and set box office records for
foreign films released in China (Clark 2008, 151).
Our general image of China during the Cultural Revolution is that it was closed off.
But in fact about half the films in circulation were foreign (Clark 2008, 151). They were not
from the West or from the Soviet bloc, both of which China regarded as enemies. Instead,
North Korean, North Vietnamese, Albanian, Romanian and Yugoslav films were most
common. When I did some research together with a colleague on memories of movie-going
in Cultural Revolution era Shanghai, our interviewees told us that the Yugoslav films were
the fighting films, because most of them were set in World War II; the Albanian films were
what they watched for the fashion; the Romanian films were the ‘kissing films’; and the
North Korean films were for weeping and singing. They were loved because of the music and
because they were so tragic (Pei and Zhang 2013). Furthermore, that love has turned into
nostalgia, as the films have been re-released on VCD and DVD in this century as part of the
fashion for ‘red classics’ (Cai 2013). Stage performances of The Flower Girl by visiting
troupes from North Korea have also been popular again in recent years (Luo 2008).
The question of audience reception of these works in China merits further
investigation. But, the significance of the original import phenomenon lies in its ability to
help us transform the study of Sino-Korean film connections and the larger question of trans-
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cinema into a field composed of diverse transnational projects, many of which are not part of
transnational capitalism. For, in this particular case, the North Korean-Chinese cinema
connection during the Cold War era was part of the larger imagination of a global proletarian
revolutionary movement not only separate from but oppositional to global capitalism in all its
forms. My point here is not to celebrate that movement, but to use it and other Sino-Korean
cinema transnational projects to resist the tendency to reduce the transnational to
globalization.
3. Uneven Flows
Distinguishing between the larger world of the transnational composed of singular
transnational projects and the ideology of globalization as a natural state impeded by state
regulation also helps to counter another common misunderstanding about globalization. This
is the idea that once the so-called ‘barriers’ to trade, migration, and other ‘flows’ are
removed, just like water, they will spread evenly across the globe. The ideological fantasy in
this globalist rhetoric is the commonly held vision of an idealized realm of capitalist
operation characterized as smooth space, ‘defined by uncoded flows, flexibility, continual
modulation, and tendential equalization’, as Hardt and Negri put it in Empire (2001, 327).
The rhetoric of ‘smooth space’ and ‘removal of barriers’ speaks a certain language of
‘freedom’, where freedom is understood to consist of the removal of power, and specifically
the power of the state. However, first, as nation-states have in fact proliferated, the power of
the nation-state, however modified by globalization, has not disappeared. And, second, the
removal or reduction of state power does not mean other forces do not operate and contest
with each other to produce new forms of unevenness and difference. The logic of capital
itself is not interested in all parts of the world evenly, but rather focuses its attention on those
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sites that promise the greatest accumulation of surplus wealth. CJ CGV is doubtless building
its multiplexes in China not simply to provide even access to cinema for the entire population
but rather to target those places it thinks will be most profitable.
With this understanding of the diversity of transnational projects in the larger sense,
and the unevenness of flows even within the smaller dimensions of globalization itself,
unevenness emerges as a third research direction to pursue as we try to open out the study of
transnational cinema beyond a celebration of either national power beyond the borders of the
nation-state or global capitalism. This direction can also be seen as part of the effort to avoid
what Higbee and Lim write about as the risk of ‘celebrating the supranational flow or
transnational exchange of peoples, images and cultures at the expense of the specific
historical, cultural or ideological context in which these exchanges take place’ (Higbee and
Lim 2010, 11-12). In this particular case, by focusing on Sino-Korean film connections, we
step outside the tunnel vision of methodological nationalism without neglecting the very real
role of state entities – the Republic of China, the People’s Republic of China, the British
colonial government in Hong Kong, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the
Republic of Korea, and the post-1997 government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative
Region (SAR)– as they cut across cultures, languages, and peoples.
Unevenness manifests itself not only in flows of films, money, and personnel across
borders, but also in flows of attention across borders. Of course, there is no even and
statistically fair attention to and representation of people from other nation-states in the films
produced and consumed in another. And in the case of the larger worlds of Chinese-language
and Korean-language cultures and their various territories and states, such differences are
multiplied. Although I have not conducted any systematic research on this topic, perhaps a
few initial observations on the representation of Koreans in Chinese cinemas and Chinese in
Korean cinemas might indicate some of the directions for further research that will bring out
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not only how the amount of representation is uneven and varies historically, but also how its
character changes.
As well as importing North Korean films during the Mao era (1949-1976), in various
films the People’s Republic celebrated its own role in what is known in English as The
Korean War. In China, it is called the War to Resist US Imperialism and Assist Korea (抗美援朝战争). Especially popular examples include Battle on Shangganling Mountain (上甘岭),
directed by Sha Meng (沙蒙) and Lin Shan (林杉) in 1956; Guards on the Railway (铁道卫士), directed by Fang Ying (方荧) in 1960; and Heroic Sons and Daughters (英雄儿女),
directed by Wu Zhaodi (武兆堤) in 1964. Even one of the notorious Cultural Revolution era
(1966-1976) model operas was set in the War to Resist US Imperialism and Assist Korea;
Raid on the White Tiger Regiment (奇袭白虎团), which was filmed in 1971 and directed
collectively.
However, since then, as an online commentator writing under a pen name has noted,
Chinese films set during the War to Resist US Imperialism and Assist Korea have become
rare. She or he proposes various reasons, including fear of stimulating the airing of
grievances felt by Chinese war veterans and their families; fear of provoking North Korea in
the light of changing assessments of the war; and fear of upsetting the Americans (Xiaoxiao
Keshuo, 2014). Whatever the answer, the rarity of representations of the War to Resist US
Imperialism and Assist Korea demonstrates how visibility or invisibility in the form of filmic
representation is produced as a process resulting from power relations. Here, power is
understood in the Foucauldian mode as a network of productive relations that shape the
world, rather than a tool possessed by one group to repress another (Fraser 1981). When the
relationship is of support between the People’s Republic of China and the Democratic
People’s Republic of Korea and directed against the United States and its allies, then it is not
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surprising that cooperation during the war should be represented as part of the promotion of
that relationship. But now that the priorities have changed along with the configuration of
relationships and players, it is equally unsurprising that its appearance is rarer.
What is also interesting to note in relation to unevenness is that the fading of
representations of the war has not been replaced by increased representations of South Korea
or South Koreans in Chinese cinema. Presumably, there must be some. Diplomatic relations
were normalized in 1992 (Kim 1994). Trading relations between the two countries are very
healthy, with China as South Korea’s largest trading partner (Choe 2014), and South Korea as
China’s fourth largest trading partner (Anon 2014), as reported in 2014. China is also a major
consumer of the various cultural products comprising the so-called Korean Wave (韓流) of
entertainment that has become popular across East and Southeast Asia in the new century
(Xiao, 2014). Yet, South Koreans do not appear often in China’s own television series or
films. Every time I have given the talk that laid the foundation for this paper to Chinese
audiences, I have asked them to help by providing cinema examples. So far, they have not
been able to provide any.
In contrast, while Chinese cultural products are not especially popular in South Korea,
my admittedly untested impression is that Chinese characters have become more and more
prevalent in South Korean screen cultures. If we remember the radically different sizes of the
countries, perhaps it is not so surprising that China looms larger in the South Korean
imagination than the other way round, but a lot more research would be needed to get a more
nuanced picture of why this might be. However, what can be hypothesized is that the image
of China has communicated an ever greater sense of threat in recent years.
At the beginning of the new century, the wealth gap between South Korea and China
remained huge. So, China appears as a symbol of a previous age in films from this period.
Sumi Kim analyses this representation in her discussion of two South Korean films about
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migrant brides, one of which is Failan (파이란), directed by Song Hae-sung (송해성) in
2001. This film follows the tragic story of a penniless Chinese woman who enters into a fake
marriage with an old Korean gangster in her efforts to stay in South Korea. Kim relates her
analysis of the film to South Korea’s rapid economic rise and the relatively recent real life
phenomenon of migrant brides. She argues that in both Failan and the other film she
examines, the depiction is an Orientalist one, in which the foreign woman comes to
symbolize a ‘pure woman savior of traditional values’ that the more modern South Korean
man misses but can never return to. This inaccessibility is sealed by her death (Kim 2009,
216).
Twelve years later, China is no longer the feminized object of sexual desire and pity
that might redeem the modern South Korea, but a masculinized and fully coeval threat in
Park Hoon-Jung’s (박훈정)’s 2013 film, New World (신세계). Reviewed under the title ‘In
South Korea, Gangsters in Good Suits’ in The New York Times, the film follows the standard
gangster movie device of using the underworld as a metaphor for the corporate world and
vice versa (Catsoulis, 2013). In a plot element that echoes The Godfather (Francis Ford
Coppola, 1972), a succession struggle breaks out. This seems to be between two Korean
branches of the ‘family’, until another ‘brother’ turns up – from Shanghai. More ruthless,
violent, and aggressive than the others, they seem to be no match for this ‘Chinese’ invader.
The brother from China is also accompanied by the most violent and dangerous thugs of all;
ethnic Koreans from the Yanbian (延边) Korean Autonomous Prefecture in the People’s
Republic of China, bordering on North Korea, known as Yonbyon in Korean (연변). The
fearsome reputation of the people from this diasporic liminal space inside China but
dominated by Koreans is also the foundation for the brutal film The Yellow Sea (황해).
Directed by Na Hong-jin (나홍진) in 2010, the film’s story of the desperate lengths that
19
people from Yanbian/Yonbyon will go to is also a paranoid vision, because it leads the
protagonist into an assassination attempt in South Korea.
Echoing Infernal Affairs (无间道, directed by Andrew Lau [刘伟强] and Alan Mak
[麦兆辉], 2002), one of the two local contenders in New World is in fact a police mole, who
has been undercover in the organisation for so long that his loyalties are no longer clear. He is
the one who ultimately wins out in the succession struggle. However, as the audience knows
but none of the other gangsters do, he is in fact ethnically Chinese. Notably, the Chinese
dimensions of this spectacularly anxious narrative are not mentioned in the New York Times
review or in any other reviews or interviews with director Park Hoon-Jung that I have seen so
far. But the message is clear – one way or the other, sometimes without you even knowing it,
the ‘new world’ is one where the guys from China are taking over. In this way, the
conventional generic conflation of gangster or corporate worlds gains an additional layer:
nation-state politics.
Two things are striking about the recent patterns of representation and attention
between South Korea and the People’s Republic of China delineated above. First, there is the
marked asymmetry, with the near invisibility of South Koreans in Chinese-produced texts
contrasting with the greater presence of Chinese (including ethnic Koreans from China) in
South Korean films. Second, although both countries have high levels of mutual economic
involvement and cooperation, and more cultural products are flowing from South Korea to
China than the other way round, it seems there is a much higher awareness of and interest in
China amongst South Koreans than vice versa. Apart from anything else, this highlights both
the autonomy of different types of simultaneous transborder connections – representation,
investment, imports, and so on – and the need to think about the relationship between
representation and material flows as a complex one rather than any kind of simple
20
‘reflection’. Without saying any more at this point, here I am drawn once again to the work of
Paul Willemen, who always emphasized this complex and anisomorphic relation.
4. Production Practices
The complex relationship between representation and material transborder
connections points to the final two types of potentially productive research into Sino-Korean
film connections that this essay proposes. As well as representation and imports and exports,
we can also attend to production practices and distribution and exhibition practices as
material transborder projects. Without need for further theoretical elaboration, these two
sections will be relatively brief.
In the case of production practices, the involvement of Korean filmmakers in 1920s
and 1930s Shanghai cinema already given above constitute an excellent example. They also
highlight how the trans-cinema dimensions of such activities can become invisible, and for
two reasons. First, the films that the Korean filmmakers made in Shanghai had no particular
Korean content. Second, when Korean names are given in Chinese characters, it is impossible
to know for sure the ethnicity of the filmmakers from the film credits alone. Unless publicity
highlights their ethnicity, audiences are unlikely to perceive them as Korean. (At this point, I
do not know if Chinese filmmakers have ever worked in either South or North Korean
cinema. But the same situation could easily apply in reverse, although some Chinese family
names are unknown among Koreans, making their ethnicity easier for Korean audiences to
spot.)
Similar to the example of colonial era Shanghai, although the popularity of Hong
Kong martial arts cinema in South Korea in the 1980s is legendary (Lee 2011), the role of
South Korean filmmakers in the Hong Kong cinema in the 1960s and 1970s has been little
21
noticed until recent years. In fact, Hong Kong companies also employed Japanese talent and
worked extensively with Japanese companies during the same period. In comparison with the
South Korean situation, this cooperation has always been more visible, at least partly because
Japanese names are more immediately identifiable as such. Whereas Korean and Chinese
names can be rendered in the same number of Chinese characters, most Japanese names
require four Chinese characters rather than three or two. Not only has Hong Kong-Japanese
cooperation in the 1960s and 1970s been more visible, but also it has been more researched.
Kinnia Yau Shuk-Ting (邱淑婷) has written a comprehensive history of the connections
between Hong Kong and Japanese cinema from the earliest days, which has been published
in both Chinese and English (Yau, 2006, 2010). Yau has also published a book of interviews
with major players in the Hong Kong-Japan cinema relationship (Yau, 2012).
More recently, attention to the role of South Korean filmmakers in Hong Kong has
been growing. Law Kar and Frank Bren briefly discuss the cooperation between Shaw
Brothers and South Korean producer and director Shin Sang-ok, as well as the employment
of various Korean filmmakers, including actors. The convention of dubbing meant inability to
speak Chinese was no obstacle (Law and Bren 2004, 221-223). The best-known example of a
director working in Hong Kong is Chung Chang-hwa/Cheng Chang-ho (정창화, 鄭昌和), the
director of Five Fingers of Death (天下第一拳), also known as King Boxer (1972). This film
regularly appears in the lists of best Hong Kong martial arts films, but few fans are aware that
the director of this most famous Hong Kong film is in fact Korean. Neither his written name
nor the content of the film has any evident Korean element. Law and Bren mention other
names, including Kim Soo-Yong; H.Y. Choi; Shin Young-kyun; Kim Sung-ho; Park Lo-Jak;
and Nankung Yuan, but precisely who they are, how their names are rendered in either
Chinese or Korean, and what they did in Hong Kong is not clear to me from Law and Bren’s
account or any other I have come across so far.
22
Given these tantalizing clues, an archaeological project is needed to understand
precisely which of the various filmmakers employed in Hong Kong in the 1960s and 1970s
were South Korean. If access can be gained to studio papers and personal memoirs, it might
be possible to get a better understanding of what economic, political, cultural, and other
factors motivated this particular strain of cooperation. Hyung-Sook Lee suggests that for
South Korean filmmakers, there were particular reasons to cooperate with Hong Kong at this
time. In the era when they had to produce a certain number of their own films in order to gain
a government quota to import one foreign film, they were motivated to find outside partners
to help meet their domestic production targets. Socialist China and North Korea were not
available, and Japanese cultural products remained banned in South Korea after the colonial
era. This made Hong Kong the most apt partner (2006, 64).
This and other possible configurations of power driving this particular relationship
need much more research if we are to understand the Hong Kong-South Korean production
culture of this period properly. What other episodes of cooperation have there been? Has the
emphasis been on co-productions, or has less visible employment of individuals working off-
screen been more common? Why? What motivated both the companies and individuals
involved? What about other territories, and transnational projects not driven by commercial
profit? For example, have the People’s Republic of China and the Democratic People’s
Republic of Korea cooperated in film production? If not, why not, given that they would
seem to have been natural partners during the height of the Cold War era? We have barely
begun to scratch the surface of the research into transborder film production projects, and
building a more complete picture of the full range and variety of such projects is crucial to
understanding the complexity of Sino-Korean film connections.
5. Distribution and Exhibition
23
At the same time as cooperating to make films together, it seems that Shin Sang-ok
and the Shaw Brothers also distributed and exhibited some of each other’s films. The final
area for further research that needs to be developed if we are to get a fuller picture of Sino-
Korean film connections is distribution and exhibition. Some episodes are well-known, such
as the popularity of North Korean films in the China during the Cultural Revolution cited at
the beginning of this essay. More interesting, perhaps, is the potential for archival research to
uncover unknown film export projects.
Until recently, it was assumed that there were very few screen connections between
South Korea and Taiwan, with the exception of the recent popularity of Korean popular
culture in general as part of the Korean Wave phenomenon. However, recently, Professor
Kim Soyoung of the Korean National University of Film and Arts stumbled across a long-lost
1965 film directed by Kim Soo-Yong in the Taipei Film Archive. Sorrow Even Up in Heaven
(저 하늘에도 슬픔이) is also known as Sad Story of Self-Supporting Child in English. But it
was labelled as Devotion for the Parents (秋霜寸草心) in the Taipei archive. The film has
since been restored (Tae 2015).
In the press coverage generated by the rediscovery of Kim Soo-yong’s film, it is
pointed out that most Korean films released into Chinese-language markets were dubbed, but
fortunately this copy was subtitled, making it possible to recover the original Korean-
language soundtrack. Furthermore, this film was mistakenly catalogued in the Taipei archive
as a local film (Tae, 2015). However, this is not the only lost Korean film recovered in
Taiwan. Shin Sang-ok’s Bound by Chastity Rules (열녀문) from 1962 was discovered in the
same archive in 2005, restored, and screened at various festivals, including Cannes (Lee,
2007). The discovery of these two 1960s South Korean melodramas in Taipei opens up not
24
only the question of what else is in that archive and how it got there, but also the possibility
that South Korean melodrama films had a period of popularity in Taiwan at the time.
No doubt, similar archival searches – or serendipities – may uncover other prints of
(South or North) Korean films in various other archives, or Chinese-language films in (South
or North) Korean archives. Such discoveries would reveal the physical traces of other
transborder exhibition episodes. What is notable about the possible popularity of 1960s South
Korean melodramas in Taiwan for the argument advanced in this essay is that, like the
anisomorphic patterns of representation discussed above, as far as we know to date,
Taiwanese films where not popular in South Korea at the same time. Also, unlike the
situation in Hong Kong, there was not much production cooperation that we know of yet
between Taiwanese and South Korean film production companies. So, just as we wonder
about why there is frequent representation of Chinese in contemporary South Korean films
but not vice versa, so we must ask why Taiwanese audiences were given the opportunity to
see and apparently enjoyed South Korean films in the early 1960s, but not vice versa. As
these differences emerge, so too does the question of why the various connections and flows
followed these different directions and patterns.
Conclusion: Towards a History in Fragments
The various research directions I have outlined above are possibilities for the future.
My point in outlining them has been two-fold. First, I have demonstrated the range of cinema
practices occluded by methodological nationalism, including the tendency in transnational
cinema research to fall back into a national cinema perspective whereby the transnational is
an extension of the national. Second, I have re-emphasized an approach to the transnational
that understands it to include but also exceed the drive to maximum profit characterizing the
25
post-1980s neoliberalist project of globalisation, and also to include ‘transnational projects’
that run into completely other directions. Amongst those are many that pre-date globalization,
and this takes us back to the question of historiography.
To conclude this essay, therefore let us return to the question of how we might put
together the information about Sino-Korean film connections together and narrate it as a
history. Here I want to point to something missing in both my earlier writing about the
transnational and maybe also in Kim Soyoung’s writing about ‘trans-cinema’. Thinking back
again to my earlier writing on the transnational, it approaches the transnational in a
synchronic rather than a diachronic mode. Or, to put it another way, it approaches it as
something in the present and not as something to be studied as a history. Kim So-young’s
‘trans-cinema’ is not only about transnationalism but also about the idea of trans-mediality in
the digital age, and so it is also very contemporary in focus. But the risk of this emphasis on
the contemporary is to reinforce the mistaken conflation of the transnational with
globalization that this essay has been arguing against throughout. By considering Sino-
Korean screen connections as a history, and one that precedes globalization, perhaps this adds
another way to intervene and look beyond the national but at the same time resist globalist
ideology.
First, the term ‘Sino-Korean screen connections’ could be taken to imply two players,
so to speak. These would be China and Korea, which we might imagine as collective
subjectivities. But the various episodes mentioned in this essay alone already reveal that,
throughout the history of the cinema, there has been no way to imagine these collective
subjectivities as coherent and single entities. We have to talk about other kinds of entity.
Most commonly, these are nation-states that claim but do not correspond to cultures,
ethnicities, and territories in any kind of transparent or self-evident way. And if we play
closer attention, we realise that, even when China was putatively unified (except for Hong
26
Kong, Macao, and the foreign concessions!) prior to the 1949 Communist Revolution, it was
internally divided. In the 1920s, the nominal rule of the KMT Nationalist government faced a
reality of internal division amongst so-called ‘warlords’ as well as periodic fighting with the
Communists. In the 1930s, the Japanese invasion split the country. Shanghai itself was
divided between areas controlled by the Chinese municipal government and foreign
‘concessions’ where foreign laws applied. The idea of the nation-state as a natural or given
and coherent entity isomorphic with ethnicity is undermined by the way all the individual
transnational projects constituting Sino-Korean film connections are more specific than a
binary composed of ‘China’ and ‘Korea’.
Second, there are no or very minimal linear connections between the episodes
mentioned in the essay. The episode of Korean exiles in Shanghai during the Japanese
colonial era and their participation in Shanghai cinema is a short history of its own. There are
ways to trace the lineage of Republican Shanghai cinema to Taiwan and Hong Kong with
migration of individuals and companies, as well as to the cinema of the People’s Republic,
which nationalized those companies that remained. But there is no Korean link running
through this lineage to articulate what happened in Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s to later
episodes of Sino-Korean film connection. Similarly, there is no link between the popularity
of Korean melodramas in Taiwan in the 1960s and the popularity of Korean TV dramas in
Taiwan today. The hiring of Korean filmmakers into Hong Kong was a distinct episode in its
own right to. The result is a series of episodes, connecting across borders in different ways
each time. This is a history in fragments, structured by disjuncture. Although some might see
it as tragic, it also reveals the forced, violent and contingent quality of modernity in its
various forms.
What sort of historiography is this? It stands as a counter-history to conventional
accounts of modernity, characterized by the replacement of monarchies and empires by
27
nation-states (Anderson 1983). Prasenjit Duara has detailed the way in which these nation-
states have linked modernity to a particular understanding of time in Rescuing History from
the Nation (1995). This understanding constructs as natural a vision of linear progress in
which the nation-as-people is coterminous with the nation-as-state, combining to form
national peoples who are narrated as the protagonists of this linear progress. All other
accounts of time are invalidated by the adoption of this approach, such as the cyclical vision
of dynastic history, understood as a natural and organic process in contrast to the humanistic
understanding of linear modern history as propelled by national peoples (Wang 2001).
However, by looking at the history of Sino-Korean screen connections from the perspective
transnational projects, in addition to alternatives before modernity, a very different picture of
modernity itself emerges. Elsewhere, together with Mary Farquhar, I have written about
modes of writing modern history in the cinema that challenge the unified model of the nation-
state-as-people by emphasizing the difference in perspective between the state and the
ordinary citizen (‘historiology’), and also challenge linear progress by haunting the present
with unsettled business from the past (‘haunted time’) (Berry and Farquhar, 2006: 17-46).
Perhaps this disjunctural history of fragments can be understood as a third mode of modern
counter-history, operating in the Foucauldian mode of archaeology and genealogy (Fraser,
1981), in so far as it uncovers the conditions that have produced certain ways of knowing the
world as well as the practices that result from them and also proposes different ways of
understanding that history. Such a disjunctural history is constituted within modernity by
demonstrating how the violence of modernity is itself what disables and prevents linearity
and smooth progression. By insisting on disjuncture and not trying to smooth over the gaps
and create false unities, such disjunctural histories of transnational connections can work to
displace the concept of national cinema within film studies, not by a new triumphant
emphasis on present globalization, but by a transnational cinema field that examines the
28
transnational as multiple, diverse, and often contesting projects that cut across other
historical projects aiming to build national cinemas and reveal the latter as always already
fractured and permeated.
Epilogue
The beginning of this essay promised an epilogue about the practical implications of
going on to do the kind of research advocated in this essay. To effectively carry out research
of this nature requires us to think beyond the usual humanities practice of individual research.
No doubt, individual researchers will continue to work on particular aspects of the larger
situation outlined here – on individual transnational projects that are part of the larger picture
of Sino-Korean screen connections. However, it is difficult, maybe impossible, to imagine
that one individual can have the skills, time, and resources to research across North Korea,
South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the People’s Republic of China, and beyond. To anyone
reading this essay attentively, it will be clear that, while I might be able to conduct research
using English and Chinese, my Korean is too rudimentary for that purpose, and I have relied
upon work published in other languages or information supplied to me by Korean colleagues.
If we really want to conduct more rigorous and thorough transnational cinema research,
maybe it is time for us to start thinking and working a bit more like scientists, with their large
projects in which teams of researchers and doctoral students work together, each taking on a
smaller part of the larger project.
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