UC Santa Cruz

This dissertation examines how joint U.S.-South Korean state documentary projects shaped the South Korean national imaginary throughout the first two decades of the U.S.-backed authoritarian rule in South Korea, and also how such collaborations shaped U.S. perceptions about South Korea. By focusing on the diplomatic use of films by U.S. and South Korean government agencies from the division of Korea in 1945 to the eve of Park Chung Hee’s military dictatorship in 1961, it considers how Cold War state-sponsored film operations performed “intelligence” in multivalent ways. On the one hand, the films and film training program I examine served an intelligence function with regard to U.S. geostrategic aims in East Asia, shaping not just knowledge about South Korea to U.S. audiences, but also South Korea’s sense of itself. On the other hand, they enacted what documentary theorist Jonathan Kahana has called “intelligence work” by simultaneously reenacting and rendering visible stories of everyday experience in South Korea through film as a way of communicating abstract knowledge about Korean people, which in turn acted as a force that shaped their everyday experience. Attending to the essential work of interlingual and intercultural translation in the bilateral delivery of such “intelligence,” I explore the aesthetic strategies and geopolitical discourse informing the statist mode of filmmaking that was fueled by and endorsed U.S. involvement in South Korean development. By examining how documentary films became a joint state-sponsored enterprise, my research revises the historiography of South Korean documentary film and media to account for its transnational and highly ideological Cold War formation.In terms of research methodology, this dissertation joins a growing body of film scholarship that draws on the generative potential of archival absence. It offers the groundwork for a model of practice-led research that responds to the problem of absent or missing documentation and specifically to the curious ephemeralization of Cold War propaganda. It does so by speculatively reconstructing the nonextant subjects the extent of making out the contours of their contents, so as to facilitate a different angle of analysis on their operative function as cultural products of Cold War geostrategy.