한국전쟁의 영화적 기원들 -1951년에 제작된 <이것이 한국이다!(This is Korea!)>, <삼천만의 꽃다발>, <철모(The Steel Helmet)>

Abstract

This article examines the Cold War rhetoric of the Korean War as ‘an international civil war’ through three feature films made in the United States and Korea during the Korean War in 1951. They are John Ford’s This is Korea!, Shin Kyung-gyun’s A Bouquet of Thirty Million People, and Samuel Fuller’s The Steel Helmet. Respectively being called as “the first color documentary dealing with the Korean War”, “the oldest Korean War feature film in existence,” and “the first Hollywood feature film about the Korean War,” they constitute cinematic origins of the Korean War. The use of the term “origin” here is critically intended for “deconstruction of the origin.” The questions at stake are “what kind of world was presented by the filmic representation of the Korean War?” and “what kind of origin did the cinematic rhetoric of the Korean War demand?” As many Cold War culture studies have discussed, the cinema was recognized as one of the most powerful “weapon of psychological warfare” capable of capturing “the mind and spirit of people.” By juxtaposing films made in the United States and Korea during the same time period when the “transpacific American hegemony”(Naoki Sakai) began to strengthen the global visual system, this article describes the global-local dynamics of the Cold War culture and argues for a critical perspective of understanding the Korean War through multiple eyes rather than a huge single eye (Cyclops’ mythical eyes). To do so, this article first examines how film media and industry connect the Korean War, psychological warfare, and Cold War rhetoric. Next, through the analysis of three films, it discusses the plural status of Korean War films in the formative period of the global Cold War. Finally, it pays attention to the peculiar ways that they construct the representations of war and at the same time disclose the chasm in Cold War anachronism. The article illuminates that the plural origins of the Korean War films imply the challenges to be solved in the practices of (re)presenting the war afterwards.