At 10:23 PM (KST) on December 3, 2024, citing alleged DPRK infiltration in the National Assembly, now-impeached South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol declared emergency martial law. This was the first martial law declaration since 1979 and the sixteenth since South Korea’s founding in 1948. Each instance was triggered and followed by major upheavals that have defined Korea’s political history: the Jeju Uprising, the Korean War, the April Revolution, the May 16th Coup, Park Chung-hee’s self-coup in 1972, Park’s assassination in 1979, the subsequent power struggle that ushered in the Chun Doo-hwan regime, and the Gwangju Uprising. For many, martial law was the symbol of four decades of U.S.-backed military dictatorships and, as such, treated as the product of a bygone era that had finally come to an end with the country’s democratization in 1987. Although Yoon’s botched coup attempt lasted only six hours, it was a rude reminder for Koreans that the democracy that they had fought so hard for could be easily snatched away.

Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, martial law offered a convenient justification for state violence and the censorship of every aspect of public life: from news media and college campus politics to literature and cinema. The latter, in particular, had a tumultuous relationship with state-enforced censorship policy which was, until recently, singled out as the most devastating impediment to the evolution of Korea’s national cinema in the past century. However, a new study by film historian Song Areum paints a far more nuanced picture. While the existence of censorship was, in itself, a massive blow to creative freedom for Korean filmmakers, its execution was far from systematic. The reviewers were career bureaucrats, not film professionals, and actual decision-making processes were often shaped by personal biases and caprices. Furthermore, according to Song’s research, the government had a vested interest in the domestic film industry, seeing cinema as a means of acquiring foreign currency and building soft power. The board was willing to look past some degree of artistic and political transgression so long as it was deemed to make a given project potentially lucrative. The industry professionals were well aware of the censors’ double standards and often worked with and around these “restrictions.”

Song’s scholarship forces us to rethink the prevalent belief that the flourishing of Korean cinema in the 1990s was simply the direct result of the abolition of censorship. A more critical survey of South Korean film history reveals that as stifling as film censorship and martial law were, they also account for the national cinema’s unique formal characteristics and aesthetic idiosyncrasies. Because the censorship committee was clueless about film aesthetics, the notion that the cinematic form can be a political instrument was foreign to them. Unsurprisingly, the examiners obsessed over narrative content, on the lookout for graphic violence, “sexual perversion,” signs of communist sympathies and overt allusions to Japanese culture, while remaining incurious about what framing, lighting, camera movements, or editing techniques might have to say.

The history of film censorship in Korea dates back to the 1920s when the peninsula was under Japanese rule. For a fleeting moment in the interwar period between the fall of Imperial Japan and the Korean War, filmmakers technically had a creative freedom previously unthinkable, but the lack of production infrastructure and funding proved to be prohibitive obstacles. But then, in the American-occupied South, the national security bill passed under Rhee Syngman’s regime in 1948—predating the ratification of South Korea’s own penal code by five years—effectively meant a ban on any artworks that either espoused or were sympathetic to socialism. After the April Revolution of 1960, which overthrew Rhee’s dictatorship, another brief period of liberalization ensued, and it was during this time that Kim Ki-young’s The Housemaid (1960) and Yu Hyun-mok’s Aimless Bullet (1961) ushered in what is commonly referred to as the golden age of Korean cinema.

But alas, merely a month after Yu’s film was released, South Korea’s second dictator Park Chung-hee seized power and began his seventeen-year reign of terror. Park’s regime closely monitored domestic productions to ensure civil obedience and to drum up anti-communist sentiment. Now, filmmakers had to submit screenplays to the military-controlled board of censors for “pre-approval” before production, and final cuts had to be screened before distribution. In 1965, the Korean Central Intelligence Agency indicted Lee Man-hee, one of Korea’s greatest directors, for violating the so-called “anti-communist law.” The agency argued that Lee’s The Seven Female POW’s (1965) paints DPRK military personnel in a positive light and, therefore, glorifies communism. Lee eventually served a short jail sentence and became the first filmmaker to be imprisoned for the alleged crime of “red sympathy.”

In the following year, he released the now-lost Late Autumn (1966), which is widely regarded as his magnum opus. The film follows Hye-rim, a model prisoner, on temporary parole during which she is enveloped in a passionate affair with a petty criminal on the run. Lee’s experience with incarceration was an obvious inspiration for the film’s plot and continued to figure in his subsequent projects. In Homebound (1967), the most emotionally potent of Lee’s melodramas, captivity manifests most prominently in the claustrophobic scenes shot inside the suburban house where Ji-yeon and her wheelchair-bound husband Dong-woo, a Korean War veteran-turned-novelist, lead a seemingly idyllic middle-class life. Every week, Ji-yeon hops on a Seoul-bound train to hand-deliver her husband’s manuscript to the editor of the newspaper that serializes his novel. Once in the capital, Lee opts for wider angle shots that give the heroine plenty of breathing room and take advantage of the urban vista. Her trips to the city offer temporary respites from the well-meaning but moody Dong-woo and their stale marriage. It is through this visual contrast that Lee critically examines the institution of marriage, the lingering impacts of the civil war in the domestic sphere, wounded masculinity, and, by extension, the country’s ruling military junta. It is clear he learned his lesson: to critique the men in uniforms, one has to bake the criticism into the cinematic form rather than expressing it directly in the story. Lee’s subversive mise-en-scène and architectural poetry in Homebound managed to fly under the board of censors’ radar.

The most abrasive instance of formalist critique of fascism in mainstream Korean cinema prior to democratization is found in Lee Jang-ho’s Declaration of the Fools (1983). A devastating satire about three social outcasts trying to survive under capitalism, it was made to look like a “broken” film in protest of the Chun Doo-hwan regime’s brutal crackdown on civil liberties and artistic freedom. Declaration of Fools proceeds according to a childlike logic, featuring voiceover narration by a child and crayon drawings peppered throughout. The film traverses freely back and forth between dream and reality, slapstick and despairing social realism, irreverence and sincerity. In an interview with Kim Hong-jun, director of the Korean Film Archive, Lee states that he took on the project as an act of career suicide, intent on leaving filmmaking behind with a film whose “brokenness” mirrors the impossibility of making an honest film during this time. Lee’s political indignation is most apparent in the film’s ending, in which Dong-cheol and Yook-deok, full of anger and despair after burying their sex worker friend Hye-young, march toward the National Assembly Building with their arms swinging in the air. But much to Lee’s astonishment, the censorship committee failed to notice his radical gestures and approved distribution. It went on to become the third biggest Korean movie of 1983, garnering an overwhelming amount of support from university students who saw the film’s subversive form as a critique of Chun.

Some filmmakers were unsatisfied with the surreptitious approach and gravitated toward the underground. Working outside of the system with no prospect of distribution allowed them to be more explicit in their political commentary. One of these underground artists was Han Ok-hi, an experimental filmmaker and one of the founding members of the avant-garde film collective Kaidu Club based out of Ewha Womans University. Her 1977 avant-garde short Untitled 77-A tackles the issue of censorship head-on. The film revolves around a young woman in a darkened editing studio, inspecting strips of celluloid film. The content of the celluloid appears on screen, and this sequence is intercut with various shots of snapping scissors. At first, this seems to signify an act of editing a film, but Han immediately introduces another layer to it. Now, each time the woman cuts the film strip, what we see are severed body parts made of clay dropping to the floor. In the film’s most visually striking moment, we see white paper punctured by the scissors, with red ink spilling out of the wound. Han equates film censorship with an act of mutilating a filmmaker’s body. In the case of Untitled 77-A, it is the artist censoring herself due to the stifling military dictatorship and patriarchy. It was not until 2021 that Han’s oeuvre saw the light of day as part of a special program devoted to independent women filmmakers at the Jeonju International Film Festival.

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With the abolition of the “pre-approval” review of screenplays in 1987, the military-controlled censorship committee was gradually dismantled and, in 1996, the Supreme Court ruled that the decades of censorship policies were unconstitutional. On paper, a subversive film like Untitled 77-A now looked like a relic of a bygone era. Previously taboo subjects like the Gwangju Massacre and the Jeju Uprising found their way into Korean cinema—A Petal (1993), Peppermint Candy (1999), May 18 (2007), Jiseul (2012), A Taxi Driver (2017), and 1987: When the Day Comes (2017)—most of which enjoyed sizable commercial success. At least on the surface, state censorship appeared to have been replaced by much less threatening producers and studio executives who would now decide which projects to fund and distribute. However, the market has its own internal logic that often stands at odds with artistry, and this privatized, capital-driven filtering system meant that stealth political commentary was still necessary for studio films.

Park Chan-wook’s Lady Vengeance (2005) provides an emblematic example of the challenge of working leftist politics into a film in post-democratization Korea. Just three years earlier, with Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), Park had learned the hard way that the market had no tolerance for a ferocious tale of class inequalities that culminates in ghastly violence. It only made back half of its budget during a three-week theatrical run. Thankfully, the financial disaster was offset the following year with the success of Oldboy (2003), which is equally gory and laden with incestuous desires, but the implication was clear: violence and sex sell as long as they are divorced from the critique of neoliberalism. The final film in Park’s so-called “Vengeance Trilogy” was his attempt to marry the political indignation of Mr. Vengeance with the more abstract aesthetic choices made in Oldboy.

Lady Vengeance is ostensibly a story about a woman’s revenge on a cartoonishly evil man who has killed several children for petty financial gains. However, a closer look at its characters’ names unveils a complex political tapestry. In his essay “Sympathy for Lady Vengeance and Historical Allegory,” film scholar Han Sang-eon proposes that we decipher the Chinese characters that make up the name of the film’s heroine. Geum-ja (금자) consists of the characters 金 (gold) and 子 (child, son). In Japanese, the characters read as Kaneko, like Japanese anarchist Kaneko Fumiko, who was executed for plotting to assassinate the members of the Japanese Imperial Army in 1926. In English, they can be read as Goldman, as in revolutionary anarchist Emma Goldman. Han also points out that Park Yi-jeong, the name of Geum-ja’s most loyal accomplice, is a pseudonym adopted by Park Hun-young, a deputy leader of the Workers’ Party of South Korea who waged a guerrilla struggle against the U.S. military and its Korean fascist lackeys. The political subtext of the two women whose names represent anarchism and communism murdering English teacher Han-sang becomes almost too on the nose. With the linguistic puzzle and historical context laid out before our eyes, the film is no longer revenge noir, but a historical allegory commemorating the political martyrs of the Korean radical left.

In terms of domestic box office gross, Lady Vengeance ended up being the most lucrative installment in the trilogy. But the fact that its allegorical subtext went woefully unnoticed invites the question of whether or not Park could have been more direct with his political conviction. The answer is rather complicated. Earlier in 2005, it was made clear that the history of martial law and censorship could no longer be discussed in the past tense. Im Sang-soo’s The President’s Last Bang (2005), a jet-black comedy that satirizes the assassination of Park Chung-hee and its chaotic aftermath, faced a legal challenge instigated by Park’s children Park Ji-man and Park Geun-hye, the latter of whom would become president herself in 2014. Citing its irreverent depiction of South Korea’s longest-reigning dictator, Park’s children requested an immediate injunction against the film. The court denied their injunction request but ruled that the archival footage of the Busan-Masan Uprising and Park’s state funeral, which respectively open and conclude it, be removed on the grounds that they may give viewers the false impression that the film is a docudrama, not a work of fiction.

Park Chung-hee’s death remains a sacred political tragedy among Korean conservatives and liberals. The latter always pad their criticism of the dictator with cowardly acknowledgment of the country’s economic growth under his rule. What was most “offensive” about The President’s Last Bang for them likely had to do with how the film demystifies Park the great patriarch, and presents him as a pathetic old man who pillaged Korea for his personal enrichment. It is worth noting that in his youth, Park swore a blood oath to secure admission to a Japanese military academy as a colonial subject. His U.S.-backed coup in 1961 was, in effect, a return of Japanese imperialism to the peninsula. No wonder most of Park’s dialogue in the film is delivered in Japanese.

In the film’s climactic assassination scene, Kim Jae-gyu, the director of the South Korean CIA, shoots the president twice. Im takes great care in filming the two gunshots in different camera setups. When the first bullet hits Park’s chest, the camera stays at eye level and this moment carries a deadpan tone. When Kim presses his revolver against Park’s temple to finish the job—pointedly, he addresses the wounded president by his Japanese name Takagi Masao before pulling the trigger—Im goes for a low-angle shot, looking up at the soon-to-be-dead president. Here, he looks more like a damaged statue on the verge of demolition than a human being. The first bullet kills Park the mortal as a matter of historical fact. The second bullet, on the other hand, engages a political fiction in which Park’s mythology ceases to exist. Of course, the myth persists today, and Im paid a hefty price for daring to imagine otherwise.

Still, it must be emphasized that Im’s subversive mise-en-scène, as mentioned above, was left untouched by the court order. As was the case in the pre-democratization era, the object of censorship had more to do with content than form. It would be foolish to argue that The President’s Last Bang bears aesthetic similarities to Homebound, Declaration of Fools, and Untitled 77-A. However, they are united by the fact that their distinct formal qualities developed in opposition to South Korea’s long history of martial law and censorship. The military made Korea’s national cinema, but they did not make it how they pleased; these filmmakers could not make their films how they pleased, but their “compromised” films pushed Korean cinema forward. While they do not necessarily form a cohesive tradition of political filmmaking, we can surely draw a constellation with them. After the most recent martial law proclamation, this constellation seems more luminous than usual—or has the sky just gotten darker?

But it is there, and I hope it will grow larger.

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