김기영 감독의 제국체험과 식민지적 무의식 －김기영 영화의 포스트－콜로니얼리티 연구－

Abstract

This paper examines the imperial experience of Kim Ki-young (1919-1998), a director known for making some of the most unique and “bizarre films” in Korean cinema, and how this experience is reflected in his films after liberation. In particular, it traces the traces of imperial cultural experience from the colonial period to the post-colonial period, and analyzes how this imperial cultural experience manifests itself in the characteristics of his films. However, this is not simply a case of tracing the past of an eccentric filmmaker to examine the particularities of his films. His experience is shared by many intellectuals who received colonial education, spent their youth under Japan, and later formed the cultural mainstream in Korea. Nevertheless, most cultural elites who experienced colonization after liberation often rewrote the colonial past as a grim history of Japanese domination and oppression from a nationalist perspective, or erased or concealed various colonial memories. On the other hand, Kim Ki-young’s recollections of the colonial period and his own youth were different from the interpretations of many elite nationalists. In addition, Kim Ki-young’s films had hybridity, mimicry, and affinity with Japanese cinema, and he did not show any particular antipathy to it. This is in line with the fact that, contrary to official nationalist discourse, Korean cultural circles engaged in cultural exchanges with Japan through smuggling and stowaways in order to keep up with Japanese culture. This phenomenon can also be seen as the result of a colonial unconsciousness that manifests itself in divisive attitudes towards Japan as an “empire” and “colonizer” despite its liberation. By tracing Kim Ki-young’s personal experience of empire and the points of contact with Japanese culture and cinema expressed in his films after liberation, this paper aims to examine the post-colonial phase of Korean cinema in terms of how Korea appropriated Japanese culture, which had been officially suppressed during the country’s transition to a nation-state, and thus created its own ‘uniqueness’. In particular, Kim Ki-young’s filmmaking method, which indirectly absorbed Japanese films through “textual” media such as magazines and screenplays while political and cultural exchanges were officially cut off after liberation, is identified as a shift from “text to image,” and I argue that the specificity of Korean post-colonial cinema can be found at this point.