“군인이 되세요”: 식민지 말기 선전 극영화의 조선 여성들

Abstract

After the implemention of the volunteer system, mass media portrayed Korean men who became Japanese soldiers as fully masculinized subjects who had shed their colonial, effeminate condition, which was rhetoric to convince female family members like mothers, wives, and girlfriends. This paper analyzes the narrative and rhetorical strategies of these propaganda feature films, especially when they deal with the climactic moments of Korean men's decision to become the Emperor's soldiers and of Korean women's passive but sensitive reactions to their volunteering. From the late 1930's, the Japanese colonial government began taking into account the social influence of the cinema in the colonial Korea where other entertainment industries had a very small impact on the colonized. The control system was established and regulation of film production as well as distribution energized cinema as effective propaganda for war mobilization. Volunteering was one of the most prevalent topics in propaganda films which targeted housewives and seniors as well as the younger generations whose mobilization was the most important resource for the colonizer. I focus here on to whom these films were addressed and what kind of rhetoric was applied to mobilize the spectators. Employing strong melodramatic conventions to affect female spectators, these films communicated with them both through an articulated symbolic system and through unarticulated, incorporeal codes. Volunteer [Jiweonbyeong] (dir. An Seok-yeong, 1940) describes the masculinization of a Korean volunteer and the ambiguity in his mother and lover's reaction, which weakens the legitimacy of war. Straits of Joseon [Joseon haehyeob] (dir. Bak Gi-chae, 1943) which emphasizes the intense pain of the wife who is left behind as her husband leaves for the war, and connects the emotions of the viewer to a judgment of morality. While the Bildungsroman of colonized males can be seen in such films as Portraits of Youth [Jeolmeun moseub] (dir. Toyota Shiro, 1943) and Mr. Soldier [Byeongjeongnim] (dir. Bang Han-jun, 1944) describes their masculinization within the Emperor's troops as harmonious and natural, films utilizing melodramatic styles usually problematize Korean males who leave their families and lovers to serve in the colonizer's army. These films specifically depict the split of Korean females into articulated language and unarticulated visual image, into body and voice, which seems to hinder the masculinization of Korean men with its disturbing power. I call this an ironic effect of propaganda films in the late colonial period because it was produced by the human voice of Korean females which had always been in discord with its content in Korean film history.