This thesis considers women's spectator the movie viewing
experience in Korean film history from the mid 50's to the early 60's.
The important characteristics in 50's Korean films were Korean film
promotion policy, increasing number of Korean film pro...
This thesis considers women's spectator the movie viewing
experience in Korean film history from the mid 50's to the early 60's.
The important characteristics in 50's Korean films were Korean film
promotion policy, increasing number of Korean film productions,
expanding the number of theaters and the feedback from the audience.
In addition to these policies, melodrama and historical films were very
popular film genres. These phenomena brought women out to see the
movies. This thesis will reconstruct a certain period of Korean film
history in the experience and memory of women as spectator.
Reconstructing Korean film in the aspect of the system, in the aspect
of argument and women spectator's movie viewing experience through
their memory. It is very challenging to male-oriented and text-centered
film history. It also expands the depth of Korean film history written
from women's point of view. In evoking women spectator's movie going experience, this thesis
pays attention to the women as audience. It is important to view
audience in a social and historical context to explain a film as a
cultural product and the relationship between the audience interpreting
film as text and as a defining social, economic and historical factor.
This thesis consists of two parts. One is trying to write an
alternative history as a challenge of dominant history writing while
considering discussion on women as spectator in the view of history
and feminism. At the same time examining characteristics of women's
memory, oral and historical meaning.
The other consists of case studies of women spectator movie
viewing experience from this period. From these studies, first I can
trace meaning, role and influence on woman as spectator from memory.
Second I observe women's choice and taste from mass media and
decoding trends in foreign films, genres and actress.
Maybe women in the 50's and the 60's formed recognition and
subjectivity through identifying with one of the actresses in understanding
conscious, unconscious thoughts and emotion, recognition about
themselves and the relationship between themselves and the world. I
examine why women don't just see the movie but view the movie
theaters, and the theater cultural atmosphere in terms of women's
position and situation.
I interviewed women audiences in the age group of 60 years olds
and those over 70 who lived in the Seoul area and were eager to
reveal pleasant memories of past movies. While interviewing, I listened to this age group having conversation with friends or sisters about
movie viewing experience. So I drew information from the position of
respondent even though I had a questionnaire.
It was a period of another possibility not only for the Korean film
history but also for the formation of women's subjectivity. I try to
reveal how women possess modernity, experience the public sphere and
capitalize on women's life experience with mass culture. The purposes
of this thesis is to examine the composition of audiences with the same
viewing experience.
It's especially important to challenge absence of audience in feminist
film criticism because it challenges the notion that women audiences
are passive. So this study recognizes factors forming women's memory
in a certain period of time, analyzing convention and visualizing
women's experience while revealing special memory related to viewing
film.
It's in the period of the 1950's, that women's lives became more
generalized. They are the first generation to learn equality by experience
and have a clear self-image as rough as that was. This
consciousness affected their choice of movie viewing. The new viewer
refused to see their destiny portrayed in tear bomb Korean movies in
theaters. The American movies provided spectacles, stimulated the
desire of consuming and became a place of escape from every day
routine life. However, these are all for an audience of educated middle
class women. Many Korean women enjoyed the Korean movies because
of the inconvenience of subtitle in imported films. The movie theater was a place for education as well as entertainment and leisure because
of high rate of illiteracy. The description of Seoul in movies affected
image-making in Seoul for many women and helped women from the
province to adapt Seoul more readily.
Women spectators are resistent in that they want to escape from
subordinate and oppressed positions and seek their pleasure with
viewing movies. But they were not brave enough to achieve in there
same effect in reality. Women who were consistently controlled and had
interfered with by the schools and family imagined the theater as a
dream place. Using public sphere as private, women spectators obtain a
sense of belonging, dreamed romantic love and witnessed those feelings
destroyed in the real world. They felt miserable as women but continue
to live on newly empowered.