KJCKorea
Journal Central

This paper studies on how race, nation, and state are represented and internalized in movies. <Trace of the Yi Dynasty> and <A Genealogical Table>, the novels written by Kajiyama Tosiyuki, involved an imperialistic point of view on a colony, even though the writer viewed Korean culture from a friendly standpoint. Speakers in his novels recognized Korean history and customs as exotic things that were adequate to being recorded in ethnography books. When Sang-Ok Shin filmed <Trace of the Yi Dynasty>, he added a nationalistic spirit, which did not exist in its original work, to his film. Nevertheless, he was not free from an imperialistic standpoint on a colony at all. Filming <A Genealogical Table>, Kwon-Taek Im described a Korean landscape picturesquely in his film. However, his uncritical acceptance of Yanagi Muneyosi's aesthetics on Korea has resulted in a danger of Orientalism. By treating Korean women, past, manners, and customs as the mysterious, both Sang-Ok Shin and Kwon-Taek Im brought about an inner-colonialization. Meanwhile, <Go> and <Kazoku Cinema>, which were filmed from the novels written by Kanasiro Kazuki and Mi-Ri You respectively, are free from a national narrative. Yukisado Isao, a film director of <Go>, argued that the image of 'race, nation and state' was not absolute but relative in his film <Go>. Cheol-Su Park, a film director of <Kazoku Cinema>, focused on the formal experiment of 'cinema' rather than on the narrative of 'family' in his film <Kazoku Cinema>. This film made spectators deeply think about the meaning of 'family' through the formal experiment of 'cinema.'

race, state, nation, imperialistic anthropology, ethnography