Cine-Mobility: Twentieth-Century Transformations in Korea’s Film and Transportation

BOOK TALK

 

Cine-Mobility: Twentieth-Century Transformations in Korea’s Film and Transportation (Harvard University Press, 2022)  

 

In 1916, a group of Korean farmers and their children gathered to watch a film depicting the enthronement of the Japanese emperor. For this screening, a unit of the colonial government’s news agency brought a projector and generator by train to their remote rural town. Before the formation of commercial moviegoing culture for colonial audiences in rural Korean towns, many films were sent to such towns and villages as propaganda. The colonial authorities, as well as later South Korean postcolonial state authorities, saw film as the most effective medium for disseminating their political messages.

 

In Cine-Mobility, Han Sang Kim argues that the force of propaganda films in Korea was derived primarily not from their messages but from the new mobility of the viewing position. From the first film shot in Korea in 1901 through early internet screen cultures in late 1990s South Korea, Cine-Mobility explores the association between cinematic media and transportation mobility, not only in diverse and discrete forms such as railroads, motorways, automobiles, automation, and digital technologies, but also in connection with the newly established rules and restrictions and the new culture of mobility, including changes in gender dynamics, that accompanied it.  

 

Order your copy of the book at: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674267978    

 

HAN SANG KIM is an associate professor and chair in the Department of Sociology at Ajou University, Suwon, South Korea. His teaching interests include visual sociology, qualitative methods, and sociology of film and media. He has conducted research and written on the themes of film archives, ethics of photographic representation, post/colonial visual culture, and mobilities. His most recent book is Cine-Mobility: Twentieth-Century Transformations in Korea’s Film and Transportation (Harvard University Asia Center, 2022) that traces the association between cinematic visuality and modern transportation mobility in forming a modern subjectivity in twentieth century Korea. He has been concurrently working on his second book project based on his doctoral dissertation on U.S. film propaganda activities towards South Korea from 1945 through 1972, putting on a self-reflexive critique of information-oriented archival approaches to film materials and expanding the project onto a methodological exploration. He has published essays in The Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Korean Studies, Inter-Asian Cultural Studies, and several other journals in Korean. He was the inaugural programmer of the Cinematheque KOFA at the Korean Film Archive in Seoul and taught at UC San Diego, Boston University, and Rice University during his postdoctoral years.  

 

Organized by the Centre for the Study of Korea and co-sponsored by the Cinema Studies Institute and the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Toronto