Political Moods

Front matter

TRAVIS WORKMAN

FILM MELODRAMA AND THE COLD WAR IN THE TWO KOREAS

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Introduction

PART I. NORTH KOREA 1. Mood and Montage in the Total Work of Art 2. Melodramatic Moods from Socialist Realism to Juche Realism

PART II. SOUTH KOREA 4. National Cinema and the Melancholy of Liberation 5. Realism and Melodrama in the Golden Age

6. Melodrama and Art Cinema Epilogue

Notes Bibliography Filmography Index vii

207 227 241

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES

. The cover of Chosón Film, December 1961 33

. Film stills from My Home Village (North Korea, 1949) 49 . A film still from My Home Village (North Korea, 1949) 51 . A film still from My Home Village (North Korea, 1949) 53

A photo spread from Chosón Film, May 1960 68

. A film still from The Newlyweds (North Korea, 1955) 71 . A film still from A Dangerous Moment (North Korea, 1958) 76 . A spread of photos and film stills from documentary films and The People of Sujónggol (1960), appearing in Chosón Film, August 1960 77

. A film still from Return to the Fatherland (North Korea, 1963) 81 . A film still from The Flower Girl (North Korea, 1972) 87

. A film still from The Tale of Hiingbu (North Korea, 1963) 97

. A film still from Rim Kkókjóng, Part I (North Korea, 1986) 102

. A film still from Pulgasari (North Korea, 1985) 107

. A film still from Hurrah! for Freedom (South Korea, 1946) 124

. A film still from Pilot An Changnam (South Korea, 1949) 132

. A film still from A Hometown in the Heart (South Korea, 1949) 136 . A film still from To the Last Day (South Korea, 1960) 152

. A film still from Bloodline (South Korea, 1963) 157

. A film still from The Hand of Destiny (South Korea, 1954) 165

. A film still from Piagol (South Korea, 1955) 172

. A film still from Aimless Bullet (South Korea, 1961) 183 vii viii

22. 23: 24. 25.

ILLUSTRATIONS

A film still from Homebound (South Korea, 1967) 184

A film still from The Empty Dream (South Korea, 1965) 191 A film still from Mist (South Korea, 1967) 196

A film still from The Housemaid (South Korea, 1960) 199

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is the result of many years of discussion, teaching, and collaboration with colleagues and students. I would like to thank the faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies for supporting my career and providing ideal conditions for conducting this research. I also appreciate the conversations and support provided by other colleagues at the University of Minnesota, including Juliette Cherbuliez, Lorenzo Fabbri, Michael Gallope, Meredith Gill, Maggie Hennefeld, Alice Lovejoy, Matthias Rothe, and Jennifer Row. Too many undergraduate students to name influenced this book with their comments and discussion in my Korean film courses, and I have been inspired by many excellent graduate students: Sejung Ahn, Nicolas Audet, Saena Ryu Dozier, Soo Hyun Jackelen, Insil Jeon, Eunice Kim, Kevin McKiernan, Jiyoon Pyeon, Tanner Rogers, Pawan Sharma, and Eunha Jeong Wood. I am especially grateful to Mina Ahn and Soyi Kim for doing excellent work as research assistants.

Thank you to the editor of the Global Korea series at UC Press, John Lie, for takingan interest in the book, and to the series workshop members Theodore Jun Yoo, Jinsoo An, and Jenny Gavacs for providing me detailed comments and suggestions that fundamentally restructured and improved it. Many colleagues in East Asian studies and other fields supported or influenced this project, knowingly or not, with their publications, conversations, and questions: Eyal Amiran, Brett de Bary, Michael Bourdaghs, Michelle Cho, Hyaeweol Choi, Vivian Choi, Steven Chung, Theodore Hughes, Kelly Jeong, Earl Jackson, Jr., Ken Kawashima, Charles Kim, Cheehyung Harrison Kim, Dong Hoon Kim, Immanuel Kim, John Namjun Kim, Soyoung Kim, Sunah Kim, Jin-kyung Lee, Sangjoon Lee, Tom Looser, Stuart

X ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The research for this book was supported by generous funding from the University of Minnesota, including the McKnight Land-Grant Professorship, the Imagine Fund, and the Talle Faculty Research Award. The Korea Foundation and the Academy of Korean Studies both provided conference grants that contributed to the research.

Parts of chapter 1 and chapter 4 are revised from “Narrating and Aestheticizing Liberation in Hurrah! for Freedom and My Home Village," Review of Korean Studies 18, no. 1 (June 2015), 77-102. A section of chapter 5 is revised from “Piagol (1955): Realism and Melodrama in the Anti-communist Film,’ in Rediscovering Korean Cinema (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), 105-17. I would like to thank the Korean Film Archive for their tireless effort to make digital versions of South Korean films, as well as edited volumes of the history of Korean film journalism, available to the public. Thank you also to the Korean Film Import and Export Corporation for making digital versions of North Korean films available, and to the Library of Congress for their digitization of the North Korean film journal Chosón Film.

All translations from Korean are my own unless otherwise stated. I have used the McCune-Reischauer system for the romanization of Korean words, except for some proper names that have a conventional English spelling.

Finally, thank you to Sugi, Philomena, and Imogen for their love and encouragement.

Introduction

One of the most powerful myths of the Cold War was that it was a moral struggle between good and evil. On the eve of the Korean War in 1950, US president Harry S. Truman spoke against “atheistic communism,” invoking a “final Armageddon foretold in the Bible—that struggle between good and evil, between life and death?! In early 1951, North Korean president Kim Il Sung spoke to the Democratic Youth League: “The US imperialists are crafty and insidious. . . . In order to secure profits in the aggressive war, the US robbers unhesitatingly commit any barbarities and evil acts. The enemy will not withdraw meekly”? The language of modern warfare is the language of melodrama— political enemies are more than competitors over territorial control; they are a force of evil that must be defeated in order to redeem the innocence, goodness, and sovereignty of the people? Considering the central cultural importance of cinema for mass representation and mobilization in the twentieth century, it is unsurprising that the film cultures of the two Koreas, caught for decades in one ofthe most violent hot wars of the Cold War era, employed melodrama for political purposes. However, studies of the film cultures of North Korea (Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea; DPRK; est. 1948) and South Korea (Republic of Korea; ROK; est. 1948) have often remained caught in a dichotomous perspective themselves, treating the two film industries as noncomparable with one another and two discrete examples of national cinema. One must recognize the social, political, and cultural specificities of North Korea and South Korea, but state socialist modernity and capitalist modernity both belong to a singular modernity defined by industrialization, the nation-state system, and mass culture.* The two Koreas provide an opportunity to explore the shared aspects of cinema and mass culture across the Cold War divide.

The analysis of melodrama enables comparison between the state socialist film culture of North Korea and the capitalist film culture of South Korea. As a global cinematic mode of representation, melodrama also allows one to situate them within global film history—including their connections with classical Hollywood,

Soviet socialist realism, Chinese revolutionary realism, Italian neorealism, the European New Waves, and the fascist cinema of the Japanese empire. These comparisons in turn allow for the interpretation of the historical dimension of the film cultures of the two Koreas that moves away from reading films as simple reflections of Cold War state ideologies and national cinema and toward a twofold concern with the history of film form and film conventions (the transnational history of the melodramatic mode) and its multivalent expressions of mass ideologies and historical experiences particular to the Korean twentieth century.

How simple the political language of the Cold War seems in comparison to the complexity of its cinema. The fascinating details of two films from opposite sides of the Cold War suffice to show this. In 1963, Chosón Film in North Korea released Return to the Fatherland (Choguk üro toraoda, dir. Min Chóng-sik), the story of a family from Kaesóng that is separated by the Korean War. The film shows Pang Wón-il's experiences of family separation, clandestine migration, and political awakening, before he becomes a hero of North Korean state building and economic reconstruction. The film begins with a framing scene: it is the opening ceremony for the Kaesóng Children's Palace in 1961, and Wónil, the architect of the palace, sits with his family outside the building and tells them his story. In the late 1940s, when most of Kaesóng belonged to South Korea, Wónil goes to Seoul with his eldest son, Ingil, to study architecture. When the Korean War breaks out in June 1950, he thinks about returning to Kaesóng, now occupied by North Korea. However, a friend working as a US and South Korean agent uses anticommunist propaganda to convince him to flee south instead. After the UN forces, the Korean Peoples Army, and the Chinese Peoples Army reached an armistice agreement in 1953, Kaesóng became part of North Korea, situated just eight kilometers from the demilitarized zone (DMZ). Stuck in South Korea after the end of the war, Wónil and Ingil struggle to survive in the impoverished and exploitative South Korean economy, suffering under the yoke of US occupation. When Ingil tries to scrounge food from a church, a white missionary priest commands his dog to attack and kill him. After avenging Ingil's death by killing the priest, Wónil escapes by boat to Japan. In Japan, he encounters resident Korean (zainichi) political groups affiliated with North Korea. He completes his ideological transformation to supporting North Korean socialism and he returns to Kaesóng through arepatriation program. After ten years of separation, Wónil reunites with his family, whom we have seen throughout the film adjusting to and eventually prospering within North Korean socialist society. Wónil uses his architectural skills and training to design the Kaesóng Children’s Palace, becoming a hero of the postwar reconstruction effort.

In the same year, 1963, Bloodline (Hyólmaek, dir. Kim Su-yong) was released in South Korea. The film is similarly concerned both with families torn apart by colonialism and war and with national reconstruction. It depicts refugees from the North living in a shantytown on the mountain slopes outside Seoul. Based on a play by Kim Yóng-su, director Kim Su-yong uses the setting of a small group of houses to re-create a theatrical feel. The inclusion of three families also allows the film to make reference to multiple layers of colonial history. One family is displaced from Hamhüng province, and the mother tries to teach her daughter the singing style of that northern region. The father of another family worked as a miner in Hokkaido, part ofthe massive labor migration from colonial Korea to Japan in the last decade of the Japanese empire. His wife presumably died during the Korean War, "twelve years ago.” The eldest son of the third family has been studying in Japan, funded by his sister-in-law's factory labor prior to her fatal illness, but he quits school with the quixotic dream of becoming a novelist. Amidst these families’ struggles with economic hardship and displacement, a landowner comes to the village demanding payment for property rights, which he likely gained by colluding with Japanese and/or US colonialism. The film presents industrialization, modernization, and national reconstruction as the solution to these social ills—the son and daughter of two of the families run away and join a textile factory, and the story ends with their fathers coming to witness the modern space of the factory and to approve their marriage.

On the one hand, these two films produced on opposite sides of the Cold War divide are emblematic of the dominant national narratives that emerged in the two Koreas following the Korean War. In the aftermath ofthe destruction of the majority of urban infrastructure by US aerial bombardment, architects, engineers, and industrial workers became protagonists in the reconstruction of the urban spaces of North Korea, including monuments of the socialist state.? In South Korea, Park Chung Hee (Pak Chóng-hüi) had come to power in 1961 and intensified chaebol- and state-led development, beginning with light industries such as textiles. Paramount for this project were the formation of nuclear families and the national mobilization of an industrial working class, as represented in the final scenes of Bloodline. In this way, the two films fulfill many of our assumptions about Cold War cinemas expression of dominant political values and ideology in both socialist and capitalist states.

But there is much more to these films than the articulation of Cold War political ideologies. Although contemporary audiences might expect Return to the Fatherland to convey a simplistic national narrative of North Korean independence and patriotism, it is a very global and transnational film both stylistically and narratively, and not solely because it belongs culturally to socialist internationalism. As one would expect, the influence of Soviet and Chinese socialist realism is apparent, but the film also contains elements of expressionism, neorealism, Hollywood family dramas, film noir, espionage films, and the musical. Narratively speaking, it shows the complexity of transnational migration and political affiliation in Korea and East Asia in the 1940s and 1950s. The film engages with cultural styles and historical experiences beyond the borders of North Korea, but in ways not entirely determined by the national-international politics of the global communist movement. It uses the borderland of Kaesóng as a point of departure, representing urban migration, exile, and shifting sovereignties caused by war and clandestine migration to the former imperial center. The framing scenes showing the opening of the Children's Palace, as well as the frequent crosscuts to Wónil's thriving family in North Korea, both convey the ideological message that North Korean patriotism can and will resolve the psychological and social crises represented in the narrative. However, this patriotism is articulated within a pastiche of global cinema styles and a historical tracing of the transnational and translocal connections between Kaesóng, Seoul, the United States, Pusan, and Japan. For North Korean audiences and for the film as object of our analysis, the excesses of affect, meaning, and historical references appearing in such a harrowing story cannot be expected to remain neatly contained within the frame of patriotism.

Although the ending of Bloodline advocates a different version of modernization and development, a capitalist one, it similarly works to reframe and recode the story's intricate social problems into a national narrative. However, the film is equally global and transnational in its style and narrative. In addition to Hollywood family dramas and neorealism, Kim Su-yongs shots and editing also echo the great directors of Japanese cinema, such as Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi. There are also multiple layers of transnational and translocal connections represented in the lives of the characters. The main characters are refugees from the North, yet they are portrayed sympathetically, without the type of blanket anticommunist suspicion one might expect of a South Korean film of the time. The legacies of the Japanese empire in South Korean society are confronted directly: one of the fathers was a migrant worker in Hokkaido and his position has hardly improved since his return; a son who once venerated Japanese education becomes a hopeless and impoverished writer. US occupation and the founding of the Republic of Korea have yet to lift these families out of poverty, and as refugees, migrants, and stateless people, they suffer under a corrupt and colonial system of private property. When the daughter rejects her mother and the regional traditions of Hamhiing and enters the factory with her future husband, the modern technology and industrialization of a developing South Korea appear as a resolution to the economic problems of the shantytown and the encumbrances of the cultural and historical past. However, as in Return to the Fatherland, the ending of the story remains ambivalent, because only two of the film's many characters represent the future of national development through industrial labor and nuclear families. In the transition to a nationalized society, it appears that many people who exist in the imaginary bloodlines of family and nation will be left behind.

The moral worldviews of Cold War Korean film melodramas are often founded on schematic ideas about the struggle between good and evil, which is part and parcel of Cold War ideology. On the other hand, they are not completely bound to these demands of Cold War national cinemas. How do we account for the interplay between dominant ideology and excesses of affect, meaning, and historical reflection in Cold War-era films of North Korea and South Korea? The concept of the melodramatic mode, the mode of excess, provides a means of interpreting this interplay.’ This book engages with analyses of the melodramatic mode in global film and cultural studies, while exploring the local narrative structures and historical experiences that spurred the transformation of traditions and conventions of film melodrama in the context of Cold War Korean film. The primary purpose is to engage comparatively with the concept of melodrama to challenge the dominant myths of Cold War film and cultural history in Korea.

Theodore Hughes identifies the main disavowals enabled by Cold War US occupation, anticommunism, and ethnonationalism in South Korea. Particularly before the 1990s, but even into the present, these disavowals included colonial-period proletarian literature works, the lingering effects of Japanese coloniality (including the mobilization and imperialization of Koreans during WWI), and North Korean cultural production.’ Meanwhile, in North Korea, until the 1980s there was also a disavowal and even purging of proletarian arts intellectuals and members of other colonial-period Marxist movements (e.g., Soviet and Yaran factions) that Kim Il Sung and the Korean Workers' Party perceived as threats to their power. The language and culture of North Korean state building tended to ignore criticisms of US occupation and the South Korean state in South Korean film and culture. This language and culture also disavowed the many continuities between the intellectual and cultural discourse of the Japanese empire and North Korean state formation, including the main national ideology since the late 1960s, juche thought (chuche sasang). A comparative history of film melodrama, including both films and film theory, provides a starting point for challenging some of these blind spots, because it can address how melodramatic mimesis enabled these disavowals but also engaged audiences through the recognition and representation of the psychosocial complexity of their everyday experiences of history.

Melodrama provides a means of comparison inclusive of North Korean cultural production and the lingering effects of Japanese coloniality. Although the culture, economy, and aesthetic of North Korean and South Korean cinema are often assumed to be polar opposites, they are comparable in their melodramatization of politics, history, memory, and the experience of the everyday? The Korean film industry during the era of the Japanese empire has mostly been studied separately from the Cold War North Korean and South Korean industries, but this book reveals the important continuities in ideas and practices of melodramatic filmmaking. These include leftist filmmaking of the proletarian arts, as well as the use of melodrama for the total mobilization of colonial Korea for Japan's war effort. Finally, it is often assumed that film melodramas simply gave emotional shape to political ideologies in the two Koreas; however, a closer examination of the moods, affects, and self-consciousness of their film melodramas reveals that in both industries the sentimental representation of mass experiences of modernity inevitably created and provoked affects in excess of the surface ideological message. Rather than assuming that differences reveal themselves by contrasting North Korea and South Korea, I find such differences in the tension between ideology and affect in melodrama.

THE MELODRAMATIC MODE AND KOREAN FILM

Melodrama is a mode of representation that uses pathos to provoke sympathy and through that sympathy to give emotional authenticity to a Manichaean moral world in which good and evil, innocence and experience, and virtue and iniquity struggle for dominance. There are many important studies that address melodrama in Korean film, spanning from early cinema to the South Korean Golden Age and into the contemporary period, and I draw on this canon of critical works throughout this book. Although not all these works focus specifically on melodrama, they analyze sentimentality and pathos in film in relation to issues of colonized nationalism, nation building, state mobilization, gender, ethics, violence, political economy, and other social and cultural issues. It would be impossible to summarize here the many and varied insights that scholars have made into Korean film and Korean society through the analysis of melodrama. However, to my knowledge, no work on Korean film melodrama has used the concept of melodrama in a comparative study of North Korea and South Korea. In order to develop a comparative approach that connects the Cold War film cultures of North Korea and South Korea through an aesthetic and social analysis of melodrama, it is necessary to delineate the general conceptual framework that I am using for my analysis.

The characteristics of the melodramatic mode have been established over the decades of films studies scholarship. These characteristics need to be clearly defined, but as many of these previous studies of Korean film have pointed out, they must also be modified, expanded, and sometimes critiqued as they are brought into conversation with the history of Korean film:

1. Melodrama is not an individual genre of film, but rather a ubiquitous and genre-crossing mode of representation in cinema."

2. The diegesis (or world) of a film melodrama is defined by a Manichaean struggle between evil external forces and the good “moral occult” The moral occult of a film melodrama often entails the defense of traditional values, but melodrama is not strictly religious and expresses a post-sacred, modern sensibility. In Cold War Korean film melodrama, the moral occult is explicitly political and creates a sense of popular belonging.”

3. In terms of narrative, melodramas stories center on the possibility of redeeming the moral innocence of the protagonists or returning to a "space of innocence,’ often through a gendered struggle between modernity and a traditional notion of home.”

INTRODUCTION y

4. In terms of temporality, melodrama occurs in a composite tense of simultaneous past, present, and future. The persistent sense of arriving too late conditions its narrative present and its articulation of possible futures."

5. Although dichotomous in its worldviews, melodrama depends on moments of counterpoint— good and evil appear equal or the film's narratives and affects call into question its own structuring ideology."

6. The referential illusion (Barthes) of the melodramatic mode depends on the translation of affect into emotion, particularly the provocation of sympathy for the suffering of characters (or pathos).'* As Linda Williams states, “Supposedly realist cinematic effects—whether of setting, action or narrative motivation— most often operate in the service of melodramatic affects? Y

7. As the Greek prefix melo- (music) suggests, melodrama is an embodied and multisensory mode of representation. It is a body mode provoking excessive affect.!?

Working through this list of the characteristics of melodrama, we can begin to reflect on the kinds of adaptation and translation that were required when North Korean and South Korean film and film theory took up the techniques and strategies of cinematic melodrama alongside local traditions of sentimental cultural forms.

The taxonomical, genre-based, and gendered categorization of melodrama prevalent in the mid-twentieth century should be replaced with a consideration of the modal quality of melodrama. Melodrama is not a single cinema genre with origins in the women’s film or tearjerker of the 1940s and 1950s.” Nor can it be relegated to the soap opera style of so many popular television serials. Rather, melodrama is a mode of representation taken up in various genres and media and is fundamental to narrative cinema. As Linda Williams and Ben Singer both have shown, melodrama has been the ubiquitous mode of sensational cinematic representation from very early in cinemas history.” North Korean and South Korean film melodramas are a significant part of global Cold War cultural history; however, tracing the transnational and translocal flows of the melodramatic mode to tell the story of this global/local connection requires reading melodrama and its characteristics not as taxonomical genre categories but as dynamic elements of a mode of imitation that is subject to iteration, translation, and transformation. Because melodrama is not a specific genre but a ubiquitous mode of representation in cinema, spanning various kinds of films and ideologies, it was able to become formative and effective on both sides of the Cold War divide in Korea. It could give visual form to anticommunist ideology in South Korea through mournful but humanist depictions of romantic love just as easily as it could portray, in North Korea, a partisan fighter's suffering under class domination and dedication to proletarian and anticolonial revolution. If melodrama is indeed a mode, one must consider its modularity in film history—how it coexists with a particular industry's film genres, its local theatrical and performative practices, its literary source texts, and its other modes (e.g., comedy and tragedy).

The limited way that many directors and critics, such as Yu Hyun-mok (Yu Hyón-mok) and Yi Yong-il in South Korea, criticized the genre of mellodiirama in the 1950s and 1960s does not detract from the fact that they employed and advocated an artistic version of the melodramatic mode in their filmmaking and film criticism.” South Korean directors such as Yu, Kim Su-yong, and Lee Man-hee (Yi Man-hüi) combined melodrama with avant-garde experimentation, while vanguard directors in North Korea, such as Kang Hong-sik and Choe Ik-kyu, employed the melodramatic mode in the construction of total works of art (chonghap yesul) that would contribute politically and ideologically to the North Korean revolution. The flexibility of the melodramatic mode in terms of both genre and political ideology, as well as its pervasiveness throughout the history of Korean film, makes it a useful entry point into this comparative study. Locating and deepening the analysis of points of comparison are paramount, considering how Cold War politics disallowed such comparisons and how state-centered national narratives have often forced cultural analyses to adhere to the paradigm of national cinema rather than to historical interconnections across the DMZ.

One reason that the melodramatic mode was able to cross genre boundaries and national cinema boundaries so effectively was its resonance with the modern ethos of suspicion about the surface of meaning. Melodrama is one popular and moralistic version of the hermeneutics of suspicion.? Expressing a post-sacred, modern sensibility, melodrama does not fully regress to traditional religious systems. It rather imagines popular secular identities such as the nation. Nonetheless, it does so through a moral questioning and suspicion of the surface of reality reminiscent of theology. Peter Brooks calls the agent of this questioning the moral occult, or "the domain of operative spiritual values which is both indicated within and masked by the surface of reality"? In addition to being a horrifically violent and hot war, particularly in the Global South, the Cold War was also a war over the spiritual values of humanity, or what Lyndon Johnson called "the hearts and minds" of the Vietnamese people, echoing a French colonial official. When an anticommunist film employs the melodramatic mode to expose communists as an inhuman threat to liberalism or a communist film uses it to expose the evil of class enemies, they both do so to unmask the moral truths that are only partially visible on the surface of reality. Such political uses of melodrama, which amount to more than propaganda, articulate a diegesis (or world) structured by a political conflict between the truth of the moral occult as the domain of operative spiritual values and a false external reality associated with the enemy.” This amounts to the melodramatization of the political and the politicization of melodrama.

The melodramatization of the political seeks to ground politics in spiritual values, but melodrama is not a metaphysical archaicism; it entails a modern translation of the sacred. Brooks writes,

The moral occult is not a metaphysical system; it is rather the repository of the fragmentary and desacralized remnants of sacred myth. It bears comparison to unconscious mind, for it is a sphere of being where most basic desires and interdictions lie, a realm which in quotidian existence may appear closed off from us, but which we must accede to since it is the realm of meaning and value. The melodramatic mode in large measure exists to locate and to articulate the moral occult.”

A history of the melodramatic mode in Cold War Korean film must take account ofthe local cultural forms and historical experiences that make up the "remnants of sacred myths" that appear in fragmentary, desacralized, and translated form in film melodrama. However, the codes and references that appear in Korean film melodramas emerged out of a very modern collision of past, present, and future. Because the myths and experiences of the past appear in fragmented and refracted form within the melodramatic mode, the comparison between the moral occult and the unconscious mind are only partially apt. According to the psychoanalytic understanding, the unconscious is not the realm of meaning and value but rather a mostly invisible strata of repressed desires, drives, and affects. Although the concept of the moral occult remains extremely useful, particularly in interpreting the political logics of Cold War Korean film melodramas, in these films we are not seeing a fully manifested unconscious mind. Rather, we are exposed to excesses of affect that the moral worldview of the film is compelled to contain within conventional and even formulaic narrative and discursive framings. Furthermore, Korean film melodramas are often post-psychoanalytic and therefore refer self-consciously to the mechanisms of the psyche as understood by psychoanalysis, such as repression, displacement, and transference. The films analyzed in the following chapters do not manifest unconscious myth through the moral occult. Instead, they give symbolic meaning to real historical experiences specific to the Korean cinema audience, but always with affective excesses that escape the moral occult that forms the political and spiritual world of the film. Rather than being a direct manifestation of the unconscious mind, the moral occult is the arena of play between visibility and invisibility, consciousness and the unconscious, ideology and excess.