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Censorship, Propaganda, and the Cinematic Multiple Agent:Im Kwon-taek’s “Suspicious” Anti-Communist Films, Jagko (1980) and Abengo Airborne Corps (1982)

  • The Journal of Korean drama and theatre
  • 2026, (88), pp.301~338
  • DOI : 10.17938/tjkdat.2026..88.301
  • Publisher : The Learned Society Of Korean Drama And Theatre
  • Research Area : Arts and Kinesiology > Other Arts and Kinesiology
  • Received : April 7, 2026
  • Accepted : May 5, 2026
  • Published : May 31, 2026

Jaehoon Jeong 1

1연세대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

A close analysis of Im Kwon-taek’s early 1980s films Jagko (1980) and Abengo Airborne Corps (1982) — both officially classified as “anti-communist films” in their time — reveals that these films in fact produce signification that is complex and multilayered, and that does not readily conform to the label of “anti-communist film.” When read in tandem, with careful attention to the revisions and transformations that occur at the intersection of filmmaking and the censorship apparatus, a close relationship between the two films comes into view: Abengo Airborne Corps directly repudiates the heterodox view of the Korean War that Jagko had attempted to articulate. Reading these films alongside contemporaneous censorship documents, this paper examines how an open-ended oscillation, circulation, and superimposition of signification — one that admits of no definitive endpoint — comes to emerge. In doing so, it adds new layers of context to the existing critical discourse that seeks to move beyond the prevailing binary and periodizing auteur narrative — one that frames the period around 1980 as a moment of rupture, in which Im Kwon-taek shed his identity as a director of cheap genre films and state-commissioned films (including anti-communist films) and was finally reborn as an auteur-director — arguing that, at the juncture of the early 1980s, both Im Kwon-taek’s desire as a director and the meaning of his film texts were undecidable, contradictorily layered, and irreducibly complex. Against this context, the paper argues that Jagko and Abengo Airborne Corps can be characterized neither simply as “anti-communist films” nor as “anti-anti-communist films” resisting anti-communist propaganda — but rather, speaking figuratively, as a “cinematic double agent,” or more precisely, as a “multiple agent” whose true allegiance remains unknowable. The paper further pursues an understanding of auteurship that does not presuppose the director as the last instance in which the meaning of a film text is determined, arguing that inbon(ism) — the concept Im Kwon-taek habitually presents as the core meaning of his films, which posits the human being as the essential ground of all value, or humanism understood accordingly — is a kind of empty signifier, metaphorically a “code name” assigned to a multiple agent who belongs to no ideology, and that it is into this ideological void that nationalism emerges as an infiltrating ideology.

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