[The Good, The Bad, The Weird] Kimchi-western genre + Conference

It was the time when Korea was still under Japanese colonial rule. Under such circumstances, Korea rapidly modernized and adopted western culture in various ways. Set in 1930s Manchuria, home to those who have fled their Japanese-occupied homeland, “The Good, the Bad, the Weird” portrays how Korean culture started to become influenced by American culture, and it also contains a subtext about its struggle for independence in the face of Japanese occupation.  In the film, three Korean men fatefully meet each other on a train that takes off carrying a map to buried treasure that can save the country. Do-won is the good, a bounty hunter who tracks down any criminal with rewards on their heads; the bad, Chang-yi is the leader of a group of tough-as-nails bandits; and the weird, Tae-goo is just a train robber. Ever since Tae-goo unwittingly swipes the treasure map, the three engage in a chase across Manchuria. Changyi wants to snatch the map from Taegoo; Dowon wants to collect bounty on Changyi, and Tae-goo also wants the treasure. In this escalating battle for the map, there are a lot of action scenes accompanied by busy camera movements. For example, trackingshots are added to follow the gunfighters as they escape from the exploding doorways. As the film was inspired by Leone’s 1966 The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, a fable of the American West shot in Spain by an Italian, the director Kim emulates Leone by using a wide-screen format and an ever-mobile camera to create a huge sense of space and motion. He also used a Spanish-style score throughout the movie. However, editing and camera techniques recalled Hong Kong action movies. This way, Kim created so-called Kimchi-western genre by mixing both eastern and western styles. Moreover, although it does not seem that Kim externally showed the struggle for independence in the face of Japanese occupation, there was a hidden meaning in his message. The treasure that “could save the Japanese Empire” in the film was actually Manchurian oil that could have helped Japan’s fuel development during the period.

Friday's conference about  

Imperial Sovereignty and Colonial Violence:

During the conference on Friday, our guest lecturer, Max Ward, talked about the infamous Japanese peace preservation law and how its interpretation across the Japanese colonies reveals the constitutive contradictions at the core of Japan’s prewar empire. The Peace Preservation Law was established in 1925 with the purpose of suppressing the growing left wing, communist and anarchist movements in Japan. It was created to forbid conspiracy against the kokutai (national essence) of Japan. However, legislators struggled to clearly define the categories signifying the objects of preservation and thus what exactly constituted a threat against them. As the law expanded into an extensive system of surveillance and unlimited detention in the mid-1930s, legal legislators continued to change the substantive meaning of these categories and the law’s ultimate objectives. Here, Max talked more about how the central category identifying the Peace Preservation Law’s object of preservation, the Kokutai, was left undetermined, Later in the period, the term Kokutai was shifted from designating an object of ideological protection against dangerous foreign thought, to a mechanism for the production of national subjects in the state’s later tenkô policy. Through this conference, it was interesting to see how kokutai was conceptualized in radically different ways.