한국전쟁이후 1960년대 비도시 지역 순회 영화 상영 - 국민국가 형성과 영화산업의 발전 -

Abstract

This work examines the itinerant film exhibition practices that involved tour in small towns where movie theaters did not exist, focusing on the north and south Chula province. The itinerant film exhibition has not received much scholarly attention in the field of film studies, but it warrants an in-depth study to address issues such as what made the flourishing of the itinerant film exhibition during the period from the post-Korean War to the 1960s, what roles the traveling exhibition played in order to develop the South Korean film industry, and what cinema-going meant to the public in the rural areas during that time. To problematize the film exhibition practices in the rural areas is to resuscitate the voices and experiences of the outer regions and interweave them into history. The events and practices are therefore re-told, recorded and imagined in order to recover the cultural landscapes in rural areas that were as historical as the metropolitan cultural practice was. By the mid 1950s the number of theaters in the whole country reached slightly over one hundred, which were mostly located in the cities. Few rural audiences had the experience of viewing films in the theater, and the itinerant film shows was the 한국전쟁이후 1960년대 비도시 지역 순회 영화 상영 303 important means available to them. The rural areas in the north and south Chula provinces witnessed the renaissance of the itinerant of film exhibition from the mid 1950s to the 1960s. The characteristic feature of the itinerant film exhibition practices is that the practices during the period were intensely interwoven with the socio-political circumstances based on the anti- Communism and the Cold War followed by the Korean War. And the flourishing of the itinerant film exhibition in the rural areas depended on the conditions of film markets such as the indirect film distribution by regions formed in the late 1950s in South Korea. In relation to the audience-ship, it is worth noting the ambivalent attitudes of the rural audiences toward the experience of film viewing by the itinerant film exhibition. To them the experience of cinema-going was a substitute for urban life which compensated them for living in underdeveloped regions. The communal gathering at the temporary tent-theaters offered a social arena in which different ages, gender and class were treated as equals, challenging the established social orders and norms. By the same token, the physical gathering made an effect to strengthen the solidarity of their communal membership among the rural residents, while the rural residents awakened the disparity between city and country. In other words, filmviewers in the rural areas continuously negotiated two contending social positions: one as agents of cultural desiring and consumption, and the other as subjects that constantly faced cultural marginalization within the rhetoric of nation-building based on urban culture and the discourse of the‘ modernization.’