임권택 영화에서 '반공영화'와 '분단영화'

Abstract

There have been diverse discussions about the category of "anti-communist movies" in the film history of South Korea. In case of Piagol(1955), one of the greatest anti-communist movies, the Defense Department asked the filmmakers to delete or reedit certain scenes for the human description of North Korean partisans and made an issue about the nature of the movie as an anti-communist film. Others argued that the movie made efforts to depict North Korean partisans as a group of excessive cruelty and beastly madness, thus failing to present the reality of division between North and South Korea right and show the consciousness of overcoming the division. It was only when Nambugun(1990) was released that South Korean movies were able to depict North Korean partisans as fighters for their ideology instead of subhuman beings. In this context, the movies defined as war movies or anti-communist movies started to be called "movies about the division between North and South Korea" in the 1990s. War movies, anti-communist movies, and movies about the division between North and South Korea are, however, overlapping concepts that cannot be separated from each other completely. Their categorization has repeated in migration and crossing in the historical change process. The category of "anti-communist movies" was ambiguous even in the era when the anti-communist ideology was apparent. In the changing flows of the times, it was engaged with another category of "movies about the division between North and South Korea," which added more ambiguity to its boundary. The categories of these movies are ambiguous because their boundaries can be understood only in the "historical context" rather than fixed "letters." In this sense, Im Kwon-taek is a writer that has followed most closely this ambiguity and contraction in the history of South Korean cinema. The history of his movies is as uneven as that of South Korean movies after the Korean War. He has made so various movies for each period that people even say, "Im's movies represent the South Korean cinema as well as himself." Anti-communist movies are essential to his work because of his personal history including his experiences with the Korean War and his family containing a North Korean partisan. As "anti-communist movies" or "movies about the division between North and South Korea" had been discussed over many different periods in the history of South Korean cinema, this study set out to investigate how the ambiguity of their category and the difficult nature of their boundary was revealed in Im's works(especially Jjakko(1980) and The Taebaek Mountains(1994)). The ultimate goal of the study was to discover another gap in history that was not included in the public history written for the last 70 years of division between North and South Korea in the process.