"Melodrama, Ideology, and Counterpoint in Cold War Korean Film"
Abstract:
How can we begin to establish a comparative methodology for the study of Korean cinema on both sides of the Cold War divide? This talk discusses the shared tradition of melodrama in North Korean and South Korean cinemas, focusing on the 1950s and 1960s. In films of these decades, embodied emotion is used rhetorically to reinforce dominant ideas about national politics, history, and culture. When the suffering bodies of melodrama characters are used to provoke a sentimental response (e.g. patriotism), emotion performs the rhetorical function of pathos. However, in both North and South Korean cinemas, the embodied emotions of melodrama often exceed the frames of Cold War and nation-state politics through various examples of what melodrama theorist Thomas Elsaesser referred to “cinematic counterpoint.” This talk will examine both the ideological dimension of Cold War Korean film melodrama and the ways that counterpoint is employed in its spaces, narratives, acting, and music.
Bio:
Travis Workman is assistant professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Minnesota. His research and teaching interests include humanism in the Japanese empire, film melodrama, Cold War aesthetics, and North Korea.
