1960년대 한국 ‘입체영화’의 계보학: 장석준, 이용민과 3D 영화의 지역적 번역

Abstract

This paper historicizes the Korean stereoscopic cinema of the late 1960s, which emerged about ten years after the 3D boom in Hollywood, in its industrial, technical, and aesthetic contexts on the occasion of the recent screening of Lee Yong Min’s Devil and Beauty (1969) at Korean Film Archive’s “Celebrating the 100-year Anniversary of Korean Cinema” program. It illuminates the legacy of cinematographer Jang Seok-joon, who played a pioneering role in the development of stereoscopic cinema in Korean film industry with his self-devised ‘Panscope,’ a single-strip stereoscopic system composed of a single camera equipped with two lenses. The two 3D films produced with Jang’s Panscope, A Man of Great Strength: Im Ggyeok-jeong (1968, known as the first Korean 3D film) and Lady in Dream (1968, a 3D film to which stereo sound was also applied), gained commercial success. By contrast, Devil and Beauty, a film based on the more traditional anaglyph 3D that required two cameras for shooting and two projectors for exhibition, has remained almost forgotten before the recent KFA retrospective, as it was critically and commercially neglected due to the fact that it was labelled as ‘B horror movie’ and distributed into second-run theaters. This paper offers a genealogy of the 1960s Korean stereoscopic cinema, considering the ways in which the Hollywood 3D films of the 1950s were imported and exhibited locally from the early 1960s. In so doing, it aims to answer the question why stereoscopic cinema emerged in the late 1960s and disappeared in the mid-1970s, while also contextualizing its implications within the larger history of film technologies in Korean cinema. These tasks ultimately lead to the following three arguments: first, the industrial, technical, and generic attempts to develop the Korean stereoscopic cinema should be seen as responses to the crisis of Korean film industry in the late 1960s: that the state-driven, developmental model of Chungmooro film industry from the early 1960s was faced with its limitations; second, the Korean stereoscopic cinema can be seen as a local version of the ‘cinema of attractions’ in Tom Gunning’s sense, as it privileged 3D cinema’s two aesthetic effects, the intensified depth of field based on positive parallax, and the emergence effect created by negative parallax, in a similar way as the Hollywood film industry in the early 1950s, while also applying them to epic and horror films; finally, despite its similarity to the Hollywood 3D, the Korean stereoscopic cinema sought its specificities by translating the two aesthetic effects in Korean cinema’s local genres in which the remainders of colonialism and the powers of modernity dynamically negotiated with each other.