Colonial Sublime: Infrastructure, Landscape, and Traveling Cinemas in Korea, 1898-1926

Abstract

This dissertation examines the link between Korea’s technological modernity and its earliest cinematic history through the aesthetic lens of the sublime. Cinema was introduced to Korea in conjunction with the expansion of infrastructures under a direct and indirect system of colonial rule. And it immediately served as a technique and technology of national and imperial governance, as a way of forging new political subjects during a tumultuous time of social change. Focusing on primitive representations of film technology, the aesthetic conventions of travel film genres, preliminary forms of state-policy films, chain drama’s production of national landscapes, and the influence of colonial urbanism on the building of cinematic networks, this dissertation reconstructs the contested beginning of motion-picture technology in Korea during which the Korean experience of modernity was shaped and defined in negotiation with nation-building and globalization. In doing so, my approach takes a distinct perspective with recourse to the aesthetics of the colonial sublime. In the first place, as an aesthetic category in origin that refers to the subject’s emotions of shock and terror, the sublime is a useful concept to understand the formation of the strangely masochistic spectatorship of early cinema for which sensation and astonishment were so central. With the modification of the adjective “colonial,” however, the colonial sublime has also lent itself well to an examination of the aestheticization of colonial politics and the colonial politics of aesthetics. By bringing together early cinema studies and studies on colonial modernity in Korea, I show that cinema as visual technology — along with other infrastructural projects — has been constantly aestheticized as a spectacle in the development of cinematic culture in Korea.