영화적 사유와 타자성의 문화 정치학 ―『냉전의 시대, 유랑하는 타자들』에 대한 몇 가지 물음들―

Abstract

This paper critically examines the issues raised by Han Young-hyun’s “The Age of Cold War, Drifting Others” to reconsider the cultural-political implications surrounding Korean cinema during the Cold War era and to theoretically explore the political potential of film imagery. A series of discussions on the politics of imagination and representation in Korean cinema seek to extract common characteristics found in specific works or groups of works and to illuminate their cultural-political implications within the context of film history or cultural history. However, the problem lies in the ambiguity surrounding the issue of ‘thinking’ in these discussions, which deal with the ‘imagination of Korean cinema’ or the problem of ‘representation-image’, leaving behind the issue of what constitutes ‘cinematic thinking’. Discussions on the imagination found in Korean cinema, focusing on the agents of film production, fail to fully encompass the aesthetic-political issues unfolding through the complexity of the medium or the aesthetic-political issues mediated by film imagery. Han Young-hyun’s work also harbors such issues; the problem of alterity found in Korean cinema of the Cold War era is sometimes ambiguously analyzed as the imagination of the agents of film production or as the imagination of Korean society that made it possible, without clarifying what cinematic thinking entails. Based on these issues, this paper theoretically explores the politics of imagination and representation in Korean cinema, points out the irreconcilability between the dualism and contradiction inherent in Han’s discussions, and suggests the possibility of ‘emotional studies’ as a methodology for analyzing the ways in which power operates in the cultural sphere, by questioning the fundamental limitations of cultural studies, which have been retrospectively defined as constituting social identities.