1950년대 한국영화에 나타난 ‘미국적 가치’에 대한 양가성 －한형모 프로덕션의 영화를 중심으로－

Abstract

This paper considers how liberal democracy, an American value, was represented via film, which is one of the most important mess media of 1950s in Korea, focusing on woman’s films produced by Han Hyung-mo Production. On the one hand Han’s 50s films provide westernized life style and description of sexuality as a part of the spectacle never shown in Korean film before, but on the other they show ambivalent attitude: returning to the old tradition as a reaction against the shock of liberal democracy and westernization. His films overtly display the envy about the affluence and modernity of America, and dissimulate latent anxiety about the breakdown of traditional order by returning the modern woman back into patriarchal system. But at the instant that she is disposed for the location, primitive being, his protagonist should also return to the role of a premodern represser paradoxically and building a new subject who pursues the harmony between tradition with modernity remains as a problem that has yet to be fully solved. Such ambivalence can be easily underestimated as a limit or a contradiction of Han’s films, nevertheless, it can be a crucial clue to explain the dynamism/division of popular culture in the 1950s from the context of selective acceptance of American culture.