Cultural censorship in defective democracy: the South Korean blacklist case

ABSTRACT

This paper attempts to understand the cultural censorship practiced in contemporary South Korea, a liberal democracy, where cultural quangos were established after political democratization, following the arm’s length model. I will focus on the analysis of cases from the film industry which has been central to the censorship debate historically in Korea because of its popular appeal. The establishment of arm’s length cultural organizations laid the foundation for freedom of cultural expression which had been seriously curtailed under military rule. However, recent revelations of cultural blacklist cases under the two previous administrations are baffling to understand since rampant political censorship was practiced through ostensibly autonomous cultural organizations. The paper examines the ways in which the state constructed a ‘system of ideological censorship’ by using not only cultural quangos but non-cultural state apparatuses. In so doing, the paper emphasizes the role of non-cultural policy state institutions in the operation of cultural policy and the effect of state systems on cultural organizations. I draw upon the concept of defective democracy to understand the socio-political condition where these cultural organizations exist.     

Digital not diversity? Changing Aboriginal media policy at the National Film Board of Canada

Using Canada’s National Film Board (NFB) as a case study, this paper highlights a paradigm shift in media policy away from supporting diverse content in favor of new digital formats. Historically the NFB has supported Aboriginal media production as a hallmark of the institution’s founding commitment to representing Canada’s people and culture. However, in recent years the institution has shifted its focus to digital technologies and interactive productions. This research is rooted in both a quantitative and qualitative examination of NFB official reports and related press coverage. The examination demonstrates a decrease in emphasis on Aboriginal production and an increase in attention to new technologies.     

殖民文化与伪满洲国的“娱民电影”

本文从日方导演与中方导演的电影制作这样两个角度,勾勒了东北沦陷时期的“满洲映画协会”拍摄、放映的“娱民电影”的整体轮廓;意在通过影片的具象特征揭示日本殖民者对东北人民的思想和文化方面殖民统治的实质,阐明“娱民电影”的主旨并不在于娱乐,而是奴化东北人民的典型的殖民化影片。     

Heritage Noire: truth,history, and colonial anxiety in The Blair Witch Project

When watching the film The Blair Witch Project we seem to be witnessing through its clumsy, apparently uncrafted footage the unmediated documentation of 'reality' as it occurs. This article argues that the carefully crafted deceit of The Blair Witch Project may be understood as part of a subversive 'public history' project that uses modern history's own scientific motifs and methodologies against itself and challenges its basic tenets. If positive myths of the past are structured into what we tend to call heritage, i.e. shared narratives affirming a positive sense of self and region or nation, then this paper argues that The Blair Witch Project takes the same notion and subverts it, giving its chosen audience a dark and unsettling sense of its own history.     

Empire,Repetition, and Reluctant Subjects: British Home Movies of Kenya, 1928–72

This article examines efforts by a range of British visitors to produce ‘home movies’ or amateur film of Kenya from 1928 to 1972, and attempts by both the British film-makers and Kenyans to navigate and influence this production. By bringing cine-cameras to Kenya to record images to be consumed back in the metropole by family and friends as ‘holiday films’, these British visitors laid bare what a number of historians have identified as the ‘imperial gaze’ that defined both colonial and post-colonial conceptions of Africa. Colonialism’s obsession with ordering and positioning bodies within a projected image of power and control made cinema the perfect vessel for such an exercise, while amateur film, with its often clumsy framing and highly personal interaction between the film-maker and the film subject, grants us unique insight into the sometimes coercive, transactional and forced efforts involved in projecting such an image. The amateur films that sit at the centre of this article, which were produced by British visitors to Kenya both before and after independence, offers us the opportunity to examine the wide range of behaviours of both the film-maker and the filmed which underpinned the production of repetitive imperial image-making in colonial and post-colonial Kenya.     

Too Soon for Post-Feminism: The Ongoing Life of Patriarchy in Neoliberal America

In this paper, I seek to bring “patriarchy” back into focus in ways that make sense to a twenty-first century American audience. In the first part of the paper, I discuss the ways in which “feminism” has fallen, or is being pushed, off the contemporary political agenda, leaving a political vacuum with respect to, among other things, patriarchy as a system of power. In the second part of the paper, I use a number of films as texts to show how patriarchy in this sense persists quite vigorously and often brutally in contemporary society, not only as a thing in itself, but also as a form of power that intersects with, and organizes, major institutions of twentieth- and twenty-first-century capitalism: the industrial production site, the military, and the corporation. Finally, I reflect on the films not only as cultural texts, but also as political interventions that at least partially counter the post-feminist tendencies discussed in the first part of the paper.     

影艺的政治:一九三0年代中期的中央电影检查委员会研究

Threatened by the thriving leftwing film industry, the Nationalist Party became more conservative. They set up the Central Film Censorship Committee as an important link in the system of film censorship, further tightening the control over film production. It was a substitute for the former Film Censorship Committee under the Ministries of Education and Interior. The committee achieved its original goals, but the result of its work did not fully conform to the party’s initial expectations. Translated by Zhou Weiwei from Lishi Yanjiu 历史研究 (Historical Research), 2006, (2): 62–78     

Life Is Beautiful : four riddles,three answers

Four riddles occur in the dialogue of Roberto Benigni's 1998 film, La vita è bella ( Life Is Beautiful ). Solutions to the first three are provided almost as soon as they are uttered, but a fourth riddle, spoken at the film's climax, remains unanswered. Exploring possible meanings of the fourth riddle illuminates the film's meaning. Although the riddles may seem to be relatively unimportant bantering between two of the major characters (Guido, the Italian Jew, and Captain Lessing, a German Nazi officer and physician), they are critical to the unfolding of the plot and significant in the portrayal of the two characters who employ them. Most importantly, they act as condensed expressions of the film's themes, complementing and giving deep texture to its narrative expression of the same ideas. Through the riddles and other folk and children's genres - such as game and folktale - La vita è bella asserts not only that art helps us survive, but that the humblest art is the daily weapon against the most formidable attacks on the human spirit.     

关于伪满洲国的文化监管法规

伪满洲国成立后,日本在中国东北推行奴化政策,不允许生产和传播任何威胁伪满“立国基础”的文化产品。这种文化控制是通过《出版法》与《电影片取缔规则》等一系列法规实施的。本文分析了这些法规制定的目的、实施的效果,特别是《出版法》的溯及既往条款、印刷所地点条款和《电影片取缔规则》的儿童保护条款,最终揭示了殖民主义政权的本质。