근대성과 여자 귀신

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Concurrently, the cinematic specificity of early Korean films is related not only to the issue of modernity in general but also, and more specifically, to the condition of colonial modernity from which it emerged. The aura of incantation, or the milieu of the fantastic, which was a frequent element of film presentation, was both a fascination for the colonial modernity as well as an incantatory desire to get rid of the evil characters associated with modernity.
Put differently, the colonial audiences transformed the psychological and social fetish of cinema, which had been brought in by colonial modernity, into a ritualized fetish of the pre-modern times. They also performed a quasi exorcism to eliminate capitalist fetishism with recourse to the pre-capitalist incantation practice. Considering this pre-history of Korean cinema, the films of fantasy, including horror films, emerge as a significant genre to succeed the incantatory viewing environment, on the one hand, and to incorporate its theme into film text, on the other.
Studying the fantastic mode of film thus means an examination of the forces that exhume the pre-modern, which has always been deeply ingrained in the modern and contemporary. It is an inquiry into the working of what Ernst Block called non-synchronous synchronicity.
If we frame this inquiry in terms of vision and visuality, horror films thematize the question of looking in modern times through its inherently visual, i.e., cinematic, nature, for film after all visualizes that which is not visible through trick photography and other image representations (e.g., paintings) or tools, (e.g., mirror).
Most Korean horror films that feature female monsters or ghosts, or Kim Kiyongs films where the femme fatale dominates, borrow a sexual motif, combined with a desire for upward social mobility. These texts then pose the questions on female sexuality constructed principally through the language of male fantasy. The critical moment of patriarchal ideology in the fantasy of male desire is also the moment when the marginalized and abject Other returns with a vengeance. Even though the weapons of their vengeance may lose their energy, their power cuts through the heart of the patriarchy like a lightening bolt. The established normalcy and boundary undergo damage and instabiliry. Thus, the films of fantasy mode open the liminal space for the politics of representation in which the margin and unconscious interact with the center and conscious in hysterical and subversive manner.
My last inquiry concerns the relationship between the historical circumstances that brought forth the emergence of the fantastic films and the structure of fantasy. The burgeoning years of the genre, i.e., the late 90s, when the popularity of fantasy literature expanded its horizon to cinema, and the mid 60s, when horror and science fiction films were regularly made, are also the times when film industry attempted many trials and errors. If the former was the time when postcolonial/postmodern discourse expanded in the context of globalization, the latter was the period when the state-led modernization, combined with American modernization, took a definite shape. The relationship of these two periods needs further examination.