본문 바로가기
  • Home
Basic Search

Film Import Policy in the early Period of Park Jung-Hee's Regime

Junhyoung Cho 1

1한국영상자료원

Accredited

ABSTRACT

The film policy in Park Jung-Hee's regime is called 'Promoting Major-Company' policy. The essence of this policy was to expand and stabilize the business of big companies, which supposedly could meet the government standards on assets, facilities and equipments, manpower, and the production records, by providing them with exclusive rights for film productions and international trades. Being conceived in 1961 right after the 5․16 military coup, this policy was materialized through the notification of the Ministry of Education and the legislation of film laws. It afterwards continued its critical impact on Korean film industry until the early 1980's. What we have to consider about this policy is how it secured the seed money for the companies with poor capital capacities: the government tried to encourage the profit arising from foreign film distribution to be invested in local film production. This was practically put into action with a production-import integration policy, which limited the right to import foreign films to local film production companies. At that time buying foreign films costed less than producing local films, while it made more profit in most cases. The government tried to use this profit generating from foreign film distribution for local film production. Along this policy, the government also set a quota for foreign films and allocated it to the unified production-import companies. This was called 'Foreign Films Import Quota System.' Import rights for foreign films became the way to make profits and started to be traded under-the-table: production companies risked any possible measures, legal or illegal, to meet the government requirements for quota in order to acquire the import rights. This regretfully led the film industry to turn into perverted system and custom, which was one of the reasons that brought about the depression from 1970's to mid 1990's. In this thesis I will look into the meaning and importance of the film import policy under Park's military regime in 1960's. I go over the environmental background where the 'major-corporate-friendly' policy had to be based primarily on the film import policy, along with its impact on the film industry in general. In addition, I will take an in-depth look on how the film import policy was formed in the late 1950's post-war time and what conflicts and social issues film industry had to face. Furthermore, I will bring an detailed analysis about what kind of impact this policy had on the legislation and the revision of film laws in the 1960's. The last, I'd like to see how this policy was run that time and what general impacts it had. With a close look at these issues, I will try to reconstruct the system and custom of recent Korean film history and see how the goals and theories of modernizing Korea was activated in the film industry.

Statistics

  • 956 Viewed
  • 192 Downloaded

Tools

Issue List

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

Basic Search Advanced Search