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Korea
Organized Panel Session
While there is already a good amount of scholarship on the films produced in East Asia under the Japanese empire, there has not been as close an examination of the dramatic legal measures that were instituted to shape and mold the industries that produced those films. And while academic works often refer to the fact that the 1939 Japanese Film Law drew from 1934 Nazi Film Law, and that the South Korean Motion Picture Law under Park Chung-hee drew from the 1939 law, there has been little effort to directly examine these texts.
By examining the laws instituted to regulate cinema in these time periods, we can understand the role that the state envisioned for film, and the channels that they sought to utilize for these ends; furthermore, we can map a genealogy of film regulation in South Korea from the colonial era to the Cold War. In this paper, I will be comparing three major film laws of World War II and the Cold War: the 1934 Lichtspielgesetz, the 1939 Japanese Eigahō (and its Korean counterpart, the 1940 Chosen Eiga rei), and the 1962 South Korean Yŏnghwa Pŏp. Through these comparisons, I hope to illuminate how the Japanese law set itself apart from the Nazi example, and the continued shadow cast by these laws in Korean film history.
Keung Yoon Bae
Harvard University