Beyond the National Hero: Na Un-gyu, Masculinity, and the Imperial Gaze in Colonial Korean Cinema
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演講簡介：
This paper re-evaluates the historical persona of Na Un-gyu—director, writer, and star of Arirang (1926), the foundational text of Korean national cinema—by situating his on-screen masculinity within the transnational context of colonial-era American film imports. In colonial Seoul, where Hollywood cinema dominated local screens, Na's star persona was heavily informed by imported foreign strongmen and Douglas Fairbanks. Examining his films and film-novels, this study traces how Na constructed a non-heteronormative "helper-protector" figure defined by relational autonomy and physical intervention. By juxtaposing Na's emphasis on male camaraderie and physical confrontation with Fairbanks's athletic screen presence, the paper demonstrates how Na articulated an alternative, non-patriarchal masculinity bound to the closed temporal reality of colonial Korea. Finally, it analyzes the archival reception of this persona within Japanese imperial discourse—spanning colonial stereotypes of the "malcontent Korean" (futei senjin) to leftist allegorical readings of resistance—arguing that even sympathetic imperial perceptions remained fundamentally ethnographic, fixing the colonized subject within an asymmetrical historical gaze.
講者簡介
Moonim Baek is a professor of Korean film and literature at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. She is the author of five books, including Im Hwa's Cinema (2015) and Female Ghosts in Korean Horror Films (2008), and the co-editor of several volumes, including the Kinema: Film-Novels and Scenario of Colonial Korea series (2024–2025) and Theorizing Colonial Cinema (2022), which received the SCMS Best Edited Collection Award.
This paper re-evaluates the historical persona of Na Un-gyu—director, writer, and star of Arirang (1926), the foundational text of Korean national cinema—by situating his on-screen masculinity within the transnational context of colonial-era American film imports. In colonial Seoul, where Hollywood cinema dominated local screens, Na's star persona was heavily informed by imported foreign strongmen and Douglas Fairbanks. Examining his films and film-novels, this study traces how Na constructed a non-heteronormative "helper-protector" figure defined by relational autonomy and physical intervention. By juxtaposing Na's emphasis on male camaraderie and physical confrontation with Fairbanks's athletic screen presence, the paper demonstrates how Na articulated an alternative, non-patriarchal masculinity bound to the closed temporal reality of colonial Korea. Finally, it analyzes the archival reception of this persona within Japanese imperial discourse—spanning colonial stereotypes of the "malcontent Korean" (futei senjin) to leftist allegorical readings of resistance—arguing that even sympathetic imperial perceptions remained fundamentally ethnographic, fixing the colonized subject within an asymmetrical historical gaze.
講者簡介
Moonim Baek is a professor of Korean film and literature at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. She is the author of five books, including Im Hwa's Cinema (2015) and Female Ghosts in Korean Horror Films (2008), and the co-editor of several volumes, including the Kinema: Film-Novels and Scenario of Colonial Korea series (2024–2025) and Theorizing Colonial Cinema (2022), which received the SCMS Best Edited Collection Award.