1930년대 조선 영화문화의 변동과 조선인 영화상설관의 소멸 -단성사의 몰락 과저을 중심으로

Abstract

In 1939, Ishibashi Ryoske, an entrepreneur of Myeongchijoa theater, procured the business rights of Danseongsa theater and renamed it “Daeryuk Geugjang.”Concurrently, he transformed his newly procured theater into a “sister-theater” of Myeongchijae, which primarily exhibited Japanese films from Shochiku Studios and foreign films. This business development marks not only the end of Danseongsa’s 40 year history in film business, but also the closure of the last surviving “Korean” movie theater in Korea. This essay examines the implications of Danseongsa’s demise as the last surviving Korean movie theater by asking following questions: What factors and forces brought the end of the Korean movie theater at the end of 1930s? What is the historical significance of this demise? What specific cultural practices were made in and around this theater space? Danseongsa opened in 1918 as a movie theater but quickly became the business center of Korean film practices, encompassing all areas of production, distribution and exhibition. The theater has survived and thrived several phases of structural change and development in film industry, including the advent of distribution company in the late 1920s, and the spread of talkie film technologies in the 1930s. Yet, as the Japanese government made direct intervention into film industry in the mid 1930s, some fundamental reorganization of the industrial structure and commercial market ensued: the development which ultimately entailed detrimental consequences to Danseongsa. The downfall of Danseongsa in 1939 signals more than the formal closure of the Korean ethnic theater. It signifies the demise of particular ethnic cultural space where Koreans have actively involved in cultural activities and practices. The end of Danseongsa can also be understood, in a larger perspective, as an outcome of the intensified centralization of film industry and cultural homogenization of the late 1930s. During this period, the colonial Korea became increasingly and quickly integrated into the market of the Japanese empire, irrespective of its ethnic, linguistic, and cultural differences. As cultural production and consumption became concurrently homogenized, the colonial subject, which shifted between local differences and empirical interlocution, transformed into homogenized “mass/national subject” accordingly.