Narrating and Aestheticizing Liberation in Hurrah! for Freedom and My Home Village

This article examines two films that have become canonical representations of national liberation in South Korea and North Korea: Hurrah! for Freedom (Jayu manse, Choe In-kyu, 1946) and My Home Village (Nae gohyang, Kang Hongsik, 1949). Taking the liberation period (1945-1948) as a postcolonial moment before the complete entrenchment of the Cold War system and its attendant conflicts and ideologies, it analyzes how the films look to the recent past of Japanese colonialism and how they prefigure the dominant national narratives and aesthetic ideologies in each Korean nation-state, particularly in relation to national liberation. In addition to examining how each film represents the colonial period, the article also relates the narratives and visual conventions of the films to colonial period filmmaking, as well as to Hollywood and Soviet cinemas. It is organized into two sections. The first section discusses the narrative forms of the two films and the second discusses their aesthetic ideologies through an attention to the dynamics of interior and exterior, depictions of landscape, and the effects of close-ups

Liberation · Media studies · Sociology · Women's Liberation · Asian Culture and Media Studies · Gender Studies · Japanese History and Culture · Korean Peninsula Historical and Political Studies · Psychology

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