신화의 창출, 무법의 창출 -한국영화의 만주표상

Abstract

In the early 1960s, a series of action films emerged in the field of cinema in Korea. These films are set in Manchuria during the Japanese colonial period. The emergence of these films coincided with a coup d’état that was led by a military officer who began his military career in Manchuria. What is the significance of this coincidence?The works were referred to as ‘Manjumul(滿洲物, Manchuria-pieces),’ or ‘daeryukmul(大陸物, continent-pieces).’ The process that this category of films went through can be described in three steps: emergence, development, and obsolescence. In the short period of about 10 years, this category of films, which corresponded with the atmosphere of industrialization and modernization spurred on by the state in the 1960s, transformed from spectacular action works into a hybrid genre as B-movies that had a stable audience consisting of working class male urbanites and eventually disappeared at a rapid rate in the 1970s, making it a relatively abbreviated trend when compared to other trends. The transition this genre went through reflects the process through which the powerful national narrative was weakened. The central focus of this paper is the fact that ‘Manjumul’, as a ‘transnational’ genre, grew out of the genre of anticommunist war films. This viewpoint is dependent on an assumption that Manchuria-pieces came from the innate contradiction found in the process of formulating a political community in divided Korea―the cementing together of war and civil war. While the dilemma which Korean war films posited was based on the duplicity in the figure of the enemy, Manchuria-pieces were consisted of narratives that imagined the sphere of conflict from the external viewpoint of an outside colony. Unlike civil war films, Manchuria-pieces, as a genre that had no wrongdoing and no obligations, could support the genesis of the nation. However, this externality of Manchuria is the very thing that threatens its plot; although a sovereign nation intervenes in these narratives in the form of an ‘independence army’, this only suggests the existence of the nation. It is incontestable that the necessity of the images of war and the enemy, which are essential for constructing narratives of nationalism, encouraged the imagining of combat as taking place in the site of an external colony. Nevertheless, when taking into account the historical meaning of this sphere, Manchuria, we cannot help but encounter dilemmas such as the issues of all out war, competition between sovereign entities, and the affiliation of individuals and communities. Therefore, a resistance history has been constructed that defines the nation as eternal, with a prosperous paradigm of modernization being piled upon this structure. At this point, the Manchuria genre becomes useless and loses its significance. The imagination of the external transfers to the internal, making it no coincidence that gangster films emerged soon after the Manchuria genre died out.