Sino-Korean screen connections:
towards a history in fragments
By Chris Berry
King’s College London
Address: Department of Film Studies, King’s College London, Strand, London, WC2R 2LS
Tel: 0207 848 1158
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Sino-Korean screen connections:
towards a history in fragments
Abstract
How can we pursue the original drive of work on transnational cinema to combat methodological and ideological nationalism, but without becoming complicit with globalization and its ideology? This essay proposes researching Sino-Korean screen connections. It opens up five directions, illustrating each with a particular example: 1) revealing the occluded, illustrated by the role of Korean filmmakers in the Shanghai cinema of the colonial era; 2) understanding the transnational as composed of what Anna Tsing calls distinct ‘transnational projects’ that exceed globalization, such as the popularity of North Korean films in the People’s Republic of China during the Cultural Revolution; 3) showing that there is no ‘smooth space’ of global flows, contrasting the relative absence of South Koreans in Chinese films with the much higher profile of Chinese in South Korean films; 4) looking at transborder production cultures, using the little-known example of South Koreans working in Hong Kong in the 1960s and 1970s; and, 5) researching exhibition and distribution, such as the traces of the popularity of South Korean melodramas in Taiwan in the 1960s. Taking these examples, the essays asks what kind of history of Sino-Korean film connections can be written. It argues that the only possibility is a disjunctural history of fragments. Precisely because modernity demands that history take up the form of a teleological progress, disjuncture acts as a counter-history, revealing modernity’s violence.
Keywords: China, Korea, transnationalism, globalization, history, cinema
Introduction
This essay returns to the question of transnational cinema – or what Kim Soyoung has called ‘trans-cinema’ (Kim 2003). Initially, the transnational was often understood as coterminous with globalization and marking the fading away of the nation-state and nationalism. However, paradoxically, we now have more nation-states than ever before. It might even be the case that instead of leading to the fading of the nation-state, globalization and the economic, cultural and social changes produced by it are in fact generating these new nation-states. In screen studies, we also seem to have a paradox. We have seen a tremendous growth in studies of transnational cinema, and the founding of a journal called Transnational Cinemas in 2010. At the same time, there seems to be more nationally focused screen studies research than ever before, as exemplified by the founding of serials like the Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinemain 2009 and the Journal of Chinese Cinemas in 2006. One might speculate whether the reasons for this growing interest in the national and cinema are institutional ones internal to the economics of academia as much as they are intellectual ones: as enrolments in modern languages departments keep dropping, there is a continuous search to find ways to attract more students or to re-house language academics into other programmes. However, such speculation is outside the concerns of this article, which is more interested in how the field of transnational cinema might develop.
In the face of the resilience of the nation-state and interest in the national, perhaps we should not be surprised that work on the transnational has all too often failed to contest nationalism and instead been hijacked by the national. Interest in transnational cinema sometimes becomes little more than a celebration of or expression of anxiety about the extension of national soft power. For example, the title of Euny Hong’s recent book,The Birth of Korean Cool: How One Nation Is Conquering the World through Pop Culture, may be tongue in cheek, but its humour depends upon this tendency to harness transnational practices to the celebration of neo-imperialist fantasies (Hong 2014). On the anxiety side of the equation, the Chinese company Wanda (万达) buying up the AMC Theatre chain in the USA to create ‘the world’s largest cinema conglomerate’ fanned the flames of online excitement (Anon 2012), as did its more recent purchase of Legendary Entertainment for US$3.5 billion (Breszki 2016).
How might we return to some of the original aims of transnational cinema studies and avoid the slide back towards nationalism and its imperialist extensions? This essay focuses onSino-Korean film connections and their historiographyas just such a counter-example. It aimsto discuss how we might map cinema from a transnational perspective that harnesses the advantages of breaking out of conventional and taken for granted ‘methodological nationalism’ (Chernilo 2006) and challenges nationalism itself,andwithout becoming complicit with either a neo-imperialist nationalist logic or the ideology of global capitalism.
This essay proposes that using this Sino-Korean trans-cinema framework enables us to see various directions in scholarly research that can be harnessed towards those goals. First, there is the revelation of phenomena whose transnational dimensions are occluded within a conventional national cinema perspective. To illustrate this, the essay gives the example of Jin Yan (金焰), possibly China’s most important male star of the 1930s. What is less well known and rarely investigated is that he was Korean. Second, as the Jin Yan example already illustrates, trans-cinema predates and exceeds globalization, if the latter is understood as the ideology and practice of contemporary global capitalism. Trans-cinema can be better comprehended if we approach it as a collection of distinct transborder projects, each with its own logic. To illustrate this, the import of North Korean films into China during the Cultural Revolution decade (1966-1976) is considered as such a project. Third, rejecting the equation of transnational cinema with the ideological fantasy of globalization also leads us to question the vision of a smooth and unbordered world for global capitalist operations and opens up research on how trans-cinema operates in its own uneven manner structured by configurations of power. This is illustrated by the contrast between the more frequent depiction of Chinese and Chinesethemes in recent South Korean cinemaand the relative rarity of depictions of South Koreans in Chinese cinema.Fourth, trans-cinema opens up questions about transborderproduction practices as well as what is depicted in the films. This is illustrated with the otherwise occluded and forgotten role of South Korean filmmakers in the Hong Kong film industry in the 1960s and 1970s. Fifth, exhibition and distribution practices also emerge as a necessary area of trans-cinema research. As well as the already cited import of North Korean films into Cultural Revolution China, the essay illustrates this with the little known import of South Korean films into Taiwan in the 1960s.
Finally, how might the five examples given to illustrate the directions opened up by a trans-cinema approach to Sino-Korean film connections be combined to become episodes in a history of Sino-Korean film connections? This leads to a conclusion that could also be said to open a sixth research direction enabled by a trans-cinema approach: trans-border cinema historiography. However, when narrated together, these episodes cannot be strung together to mimic a conventional national cinema ‘linear historical narrative describing the development of a cinema within a particular national boundary whose unity and coherence seemed beyond all doubt’,as Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto put it so eloquently (1991, 242). They do not produce a cause-and-effect logic leading in a triumphal growth model of so-called progress to expansion beyond the borders of the nation-state. Instead, their resistance to integration reveals Sino-Korean film connections as a history of fragments, structured by disjuncture. The essay concludes by arguing that to engage in such a disjunctural historiography is to deconstruct modernity, including late modernity, not in the name of producing some new grand narrative but in order to resist such impositions.A short epilogue offers some considerations on what changes in scholarly practice might be required to realize such a field of research.
1. Revealing the Occluded
The most evident limitation of methodological nationalism is that it produces a kind of tunnel vision, leaving us ‘unable to see border crossing interactions, interconnectedness and intercommunication’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2009, 26). In much of the literature on the topic, including the essay by Beck and Beck-Gernsheim that this quotation is drawn from, methodological nationalism is framed as a problem revealed by the advent of globalization. This approach understands globalization as a dimension of neoliberalism’s pursuit of reduced state regulation. However, cinema was transnational long before neoliberalism became a global orthodoxy. Indeed, as Sheldon Lu has pointed out in the introduction to his anthology on transnational Chinese cinemas, national cinemas were produced out of what was initially a transnational context of production and exhibition by the travelling Lumière cinématographe operators at the end of the nineteenth century (1997, 3).
As an example of how an approach that understands Chinese cinemas through the national rather than the transnational model occludes history, Lu refers to the dating of Chinese cinema history. Conventional accounts place it as beginning with the production of the first Chinese film in 1905. In contrast, he prefers to date it as beginning from 1896, the year of the first film screening in China (1997, 2).Similarly, numerous Sino-Korean film connections disappear from view when the scholar is operating with a model of cinema as films produced by and for people of a particular nation-state.
For example, Jin Yan was one of China’s leading male film stars in the 1930s. He was proclaimed as China’s Rudolph Valentino (Meyer 2009). Tall, handsome, and with a propensity to take his shirt off and sometimes even go skinny dipping on film (inBig Road[a.k.a.The Highway,大路, 1934], directed by Sun Yu [孙瑜]), he was hugely popular with female audiences. His star image is encapsulated in the opening scenes of Wild Rose (野玫瑰), directed by Sun Yu in 1932. Jin plays the scion of a rich Shanghai family. His character is also an artist. Wearing a dashing fedora hat, he tools out to the countryside in his convertible car looking for a bucolic scene to paint. In the process, he comes across a village girl whose nickname is Wild Cat, and they fall in love. The woman playing Wild Cat was Wang Renmei (王人美). She was being launched in this movie, and the chemistry between them helped to make her an overnight star. Later, they got married (Meyer 2014). When his character returns to the city, he drives home to a splendid art deco mansion, where his friends have thrown a cocktail party for him.
I first came across Jin Yan in the early 1980s, when I was beginning my studies of Chinese cinema. At that time, he was simply mentioned as a leading Chinese film star of the Shanghai Republican era. I do not remember anyone mentioning to me that he was ethnically Korean and that his name was pronounced Kim Yom in Korean (김염). However, this fact is not suppressed. For example, Jin’s status is confirmed by his appearance in the first volume of the multi-volume book series of biographies of Chinese filmmakers. There, his biography makes it clear that he was born Kim Duk-rin (김덕린; 金德麟) in 1910in the city known today as Seoul, and that his father was a patriotic revolutionary who had to flee the Japanese colonizers to Northeast China when Duk-rin was still an infant (Li Zhi 1982, p.161). However, it was not discussed in academic circles or considered worthy of further research, and it is in this sense that methodological nationalism has occluded Jin/Kim’s Sino-Korean transnational status.
The degree of occlusion became clear to me when I presented a keynote talk on this topic at the Korean Screen Culture Conference at Sheffield Hallam University in June 2014. Delegates had come from as far afield as the United States and South Korea. I showed a clip from Wild Rose and after I had explained to the audience who the star was, I asked how many of them recognised Jin Yan/Kim Yom or had ever heard of him. Only three or four out of over forty people in the room had. We can speculate on the various reasons for this. Jin/Kim’s acting career was confined to Chinese cinema. Although he played a Tibetan in Eagles Brave the Storm (暴风中的雄鹰) directed by Wang Yi (王逸) in 1958, as far as I know, he never played an ethnic Korean character or spoke Korean on screen. This would not help to make him visible to scholars of Korean screen culture. Furthermore, he was a leftist, loyal to the Chinese revolution. Doubtless, the South Korean government had little interest in acknowledging him during the Cold War era. According HyeSeung Chung, it was only when a Japanese biography was translated and published in South Korea in 1996 that he became more visible to the Korean film cultural community (Chung 2013, 166).
However, Jin Yan/Kim Yom’s Shanghai stardom is only the most visible achievement of a wider Korean cultural community in Shanghai, which included various filmmakers. Many of these people moved between Seoul, Tokyo, and Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s, looking for opportunities for education, fleeing political problems, or seeking financing for new projects. Most were not only anti-colonial but also, like Jin Yan/Kim Yom, on the political left.Most of them are less known in the Chinese literature than in Korean, and their lives and activities in Shanghai require much more research. Indeed, my attention has been drawn to them by Professor Kim Soyoung and her colleagues in Seoul, who have been unearthing their history.
Among these mobile and transborder Korean filmmakers of the colonial era, perhaps best known in the Chinese-speaking world, in so far as any of them are known, is Jeong Ji-tak (郑基铎,정기탁), whose name is pronounced Zheng Jiduo in Mandarin. A very brief entry in the China Cinema Encyclopedia lists his appearance as an actor in eight films between 1928 and 1929, and credits five films to him as director in the same years. He is credited with directing one more film in 1934 (Anon 1995, 1340). The gap was caused by his departure for some years. The bombing of Shanghai by the Japanese in January of 1932 caused many in the film industry to leave for a while, as depicted for example in the 1991 biopic by Stanley Kwan (关锦鹏) on the life of Chinese film star RuanLingyu (阮玲玉), and probably Jeong/Zheng was among them.
RuanLingyualso starred in Jeong/Zheng’s last Shanghai film, Goodbye, Shanghai (再会吧，上海), which he wrote and directed for the Lianhua Film Company (联华影行公司) using the name Zheng Yunbo (郑云波), pronounced Jeong Un-pa in Korean (정운파) (Zheng and Liu, 1981, 2531-2). This film was discovered and restored by the Korean Film Archive, before being screened at Jeonju International Film Festival in 2010 (Giammarco, 2010). It is as Zheng Yunbo that he makes an appearance in the standard history of Chinese cinema published in the Mao era, although his other name of Zheng Jiduo is also given. There, not only Goodbye, Shanghai, but also his other film directed after his return to the Shanghai, Escape (出路, 1933), which is not included in his China Cinema Encyclopediaentry, are detailed. After censorship, this film was released as The Bright Road (光明之路). However, whereas China Cinema Encyclopedia does acknowledge his Korean ethnicity, this is not mentioned in the standard history, which focuses mostly on the synopses of the films rather than discussion of the filmmakers (Cheng et.al. 1981, 270-271, 346-7). Both films are class-conscious local narratives with no Korean content.
Among the Korean filmmakers active in Shanghai, Zheng/Jeong is probably the best known in the Chinese-speaking world apart from Jin Yan/Kim Yom, simply because his career was the most heavily based in Shanghai. Regarding other figures who are well-known in the Korean film cultural world as pioneers of Korean cinema, their time in Shanghai seems to have been a less important part of their overall career. Furthermore, they do not appear in the Chinese-language literature. They include Jeon Chang-geun (전창근) and Lee Gyeong-son (이경손). The latter’s name is pronounced in Mandarin as QuanChanggen (全昌根), and my Korean colleagues tell me he was also known as JinChanggen (金昌根) and Qian Changgen (钱昌根). He lived in Shanghai and was active in the film industry in the 1920s and 30s. However, he is known in Korea for films he made after his return there, beginning in the 1940s. According to the Korean Movie Database, his career as an actor extended as late as 1969 (Anon, n.d.). However, it seems little is known about his early career in Shanghai, and I have not found any published discussion in Chinese yet. Lee Gyeong-son’s name is pronounced Li Qingsun in Mandarin (李庆孙). According to my Korean colleagues, he was apioneer of cinema in Korea in the 1920s. Lee spent three years in Shanghai from 1929 to 1932, before going into exile in Thailand in 1932, where he lived out his days.
In the discussion above on these various mobile Korean filmmakers of the colonial era, a pattern that emerges clearly about the existing sources on them is the tendency to prioritize their place in a particular national cinema history. Therefore, a trans-cinema approach would not only make the invisible visible, as this essay has attempted to begin doing. It would also need to try to rethink their work in its full transnational dimension. For example, should the participation of Korean filmmakers in Shanghai films about the struggle for social justice and anti-colonialism in China be seen simply as their participation in Chinese cinema history and the so-called left-wing progressive film movement of the 1930s? Or is it evidence that anti-colonial and class-conscious filmmaking in this period constituted a transnational trend?