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A Study on “Censorship” in Context of Pornography－ Interactions between Censorship and Representation of “Obscenity” from Spring Dreams to Lady Ae—Ma—
Journal of Popular Narrative
2015, 21(3),
pp.95-145
DOI :10.18856/jpn.2015.21.3.003
Publisher : The Association of Popular Narrative
Research Area : Interdisciplinary Research
DOI :10.18856/jpn.2015.21.3.003
Publisher : The Association of Popular Narrative
Research Area : Interdisciplinary Research
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This study was conceived by a question about the interactions between the strict censorship system and the mass production of movies that stirred a obscenity controversy from the latter half of the 1960s to the early 1980s. Trying to answer this question, the present study paid attention to the dynamics between the texts called censorship documents and the representation structure of movies. Censorship documents themselves found and revealed the areas that were tabooed in the name of control and were on the premise of voyeuristic imaginations about the concerned scenes. In other words, requests to cut out the scenes of body exposure or intercourse seem to have been made bureaucratically mechanically on the surface, but the imagination, which reorganized only the concerned scenes in the context of “obscenity” regardless of the meaning structures of the entire movies, worked behind the requests. They were a pattern of fetishism, which overestimates certain body parts or scenes and gets obsessed with them, and followed the same line as the operational method of pornography in a voyeuristic fashion to look into them only. Such an operational method is usually put into practice in the process of communicating with the movies that make a request for censorship, which means that the viewpoints and dynamics are reflected in the film texts. Reflecting them, the movies are aware of the viewpoints and dynamics and make responses accordingly. What the censorship authority and film production companies put forward on the surface was always “ethics” and “art,” though. A third viewpoint that perceives according to such a cause also gets involved in interactions between representation in movies and censorship. Those three factors made up the dynamics of censorship and representation of sexuality and created a mechanism of coexistence between strict control and pornographic imagination. It was Lady Ae—Ma in the early 1980s that displayed such an imagination in the form of representation intensively. While promoting a conservative theme on the surface, the movie reveals a fetishistic pattern through pornographic representations filled with voyeurism and fetishism. Such representations became a classic in the “Lady—” series and worked as a convention in Korean sex movies for many years. In short, the convention of Korean sex movies called “eroticism movies” since the 1980s was the pattern of perversion and division stemmed from the political power’s retrogressive suppression of sex movies and discourses that emerged in the latter half of the 1960s.
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