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Public Performance Act and Theater Censorship in the Third Republic

  • The Journal of Korean drama and theatre
  • 2022, (75), pp.111-160
  • DOI : 10.17938/tjkdat.2022..75.111
  • Publisher : The Learned Society Of Korean Drama And Theatre
  • Research Area : Arts and Kinesiology > Other Arts and Kinesiology
  • Received : March 12, 2022
  • Accepted : April 4, 2022
  • Published : April 30, 2022

LEE, SEUNG-HEE 1

1성균관대학교 동아시아학술원

Accredited

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study is to reveal the censorship system of the Third Republic and its status, which has never been visualized but has been a constitutive force of Korean contemporary theater. To this end, I examine the progress of the Public Performance Act, starting with the first revision in 1963 that prepared the Third Republic, going through a series of censorship scandals that occurred in 1964~1965, and leading to the second revision in 1966~1967. In the first revision, the censorship authorities liquidated the strategic looseness of the enacted the Public Performance Act and revitalized the script-review to begin full-scale control over the performance (art). The censorship standards reflect the results of the time when the colonial censorship succeeded and replaced the trait with the Cold War censorship, but the time of the April Revolution was deleted here. The absence of “democracy” shows that Cold War nationalism was chosen as the ideological discipline of censorship. With the launch of the Third Republic, a time of convulsions surrounding the Korea-Japan agreement arrives, and the censorship authorities seek to neutralize the social capacity to challenge the government. The cultural version of the political offensive is the national censorship scandal, including Suchi(羞恥, shame) case. Through this, the criticality of representation related to the Anti-communist Regulations is specified. Furthermore, the government is launching a kind of campaign to reverse the regime crisis of the anti-government air that has intensified due to the Korea-Japan agreement issue and the national antipathy of the public. The second revision of the Public Performance Act is the result, and it seeks to shut down political discourse by expanding prior censorship. In other words, the legalization of Cold War censorship reveals that the key to censorship lies there. Although the institutional outlook for Cold War censorship was pessimistic, it cannot be said that this is necessarily the reality of theatrical history. The construction process of the Cold War censorship is also the time to make all of the visible as well as the invisible as a relational force with the constitutive force of theatrical history. In this sense, it is necessary to read the Third Republic as an era in which a quiet ripples began to arise at the same time as the establishment of the Cold War censorship.

Citation status

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

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.