In Split Screen Korea: Shin Sang-ok and Postwar Cinema, Steven Chung offers a critical assessment of the radical transformation of Korean film culture in the latter half of the twentieth century, amidst a dynamic, turbulent political landscape. Chung focuses on the nationhood of the newly divided Koreas and looks at postwar cinema through the lens of director Shin Sang-ok's life and filmography. Shin, a commercially successful mainstream director, is one of the most influential yet academically and critically overlooked figures in Korean film history. Born in 1926, in the northern part of the Korean peninsula during the Japanese colonial period, Shin enjoyed two heydays: once in the 1960s in South Korea and again in the 1980s during his forced stay in North Korea. He escaped from North Korea in 1986 to produce films in Hollywood and South Korea until his passing in 2006.
Chung examines a number of Shin's films in the book and chronologically surveys his thematic preoccupations and cinematic techniques. Chung provides a succinct look at the various modes of reflection on postwar modernity and cinema in Shin's oeuvre—and in Korean cinema at large—and extrapolates theoretical frameworks for the complicated relationship between politics and art.
The introduction outlines the genealogy of Shin's filmmaking career, which was shaped by the newly emerging Cold War world order and the subsequent power struggle that played out in the Korean peninsula. The main body of Spilt Screen Korea presents a critical analysis of “enlightenment films” or “melodramatic development films” Shin produced both in North and South Korea, and addresses the films' ideological complexities and ambiguous meanings in the apposite social and historical contexts.
The first chapter traces the roots of “kyemong,” or the notion of enlightenment in Korean cinema, back to the literary traditions of Chosŏn's yangban status group and Japanese colonial rule. Based on historical accounts, Chung discusses the enlightenment modality in the films produced by Shin in the 1950s and the early 1960s.
Chapter 2 discusses the symbiotic relationship between the fashion and film industries, with detailed observations on trends that appeared in women's fashion magazines from the 1950s and in Shin's films from the same period. Chung argues that the female readers and audiences were mostly middle-class, middle-aged women. The film industry visualized women's repressed, escapist, modern fantasies, which were heavily influenced by the influx of American commodities and styles.
Chapter 3 investigates the comprehensive history of Shin Film from its rise in the late 1950s to its demise in the mid-1970s.
Chapter 4 is a close textual analysis of Evergreen (1961) and Rice (1962), which—though they are undoubtedly representative of Shin's “enlightenment films”—cannot truly be considered key pieces in Shin's canon.
Informed by theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, chapter 5 examines the ideological portability of Western popular culture in North Korean film practices. According to Chung, the films Shin produced in North Korea introduced a new type of film to the citizens of socialist North Korea. He argues that in the films Shin produced both in the North and in the South, Shin articulates ideological ambivalence and authorial ambitions that actually belie the explicit political and economic controls of an authoritarian state.
The book's conclusion then delves into Shin's filmmaking career in Hollywood and South Korea after his escape from North Korea and contends with the complexities of enlightenment modality in Korean national cinema.
Spilt Screen Korea is an important contribution to the existing scholarship of Korean film history. Chung provides an exemplary research model, combining thorough textual analysis and contextual discussion of the sociohistorical meanings embedded in the film texts. Informed by the writings of Fredric James, Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, Adorno, and others, the book explores the political dynamics between filmmakers' authorial freedom and a developmentalist state's interventionist regulation of the film industry, in both the capitalist South and the socialist North. Chung argues that the transnational attributes of Shin's filmmaking career can give a clearer picture of Korean modernity, and artfully demonstrates “how an interrogation of his work can condition a reevaluation of how politics and art are constituted in postwar Korea” (p. 15).
That said, the main body of the book sometimes veers away from answering the theoretically dense questions so thoughtfully posed at the outset. For example, chapter 2 skews toward an in-depth study of the fashion industry rather than simply juxtaposing it as a backdrop to contextualize Shin's work. Further, chapter 1 proposes that enlightenment, as “the antithesis of the modern subjectivities and democratic social forms” (p. 22), lies at the core of contemporary filmmaking, but the rest of the chapters do not sufficiently discuss how enlightenment modality has continued to influence contemporary Korean film culture beyond the 1960s. In a sense, the focused discussion of the political dimensions of Shin's works produced in the 1950s and early 1960s tends not to convince the reader that the significance of the most influential commercial filmmaker of these decades reached to the 1970s.
Notwithstanding, Split Screen Korea provides a valuable, nuanced theoretical framework for the study of postwar Korean cinema, an area that has lacked in English-language research to date. Furthermore, Chung's study of Shin Sang-ok can generate new research interests in films and directors of the pre-democratization era to give balance to the current trend in Korean film studies that largely focus on contemporary films and directors, and the so-called art-house filmmakers of the 1960s, such as Kim Ki-yŏng or Yu Hyŏn-mok. Diversifying research interests thusly to include different genres and periods can bridge the gap between the Korean cinema that simply constitutes a form of cultural expression for mainstream audiences, and the Korean cinema that is serious subject matter for scholars and critics.
