Systematization of Film Censorship in Colonial Korea: Profiteering from Hollywood's First Golden Age, 1926-1936

Brian Yecies, University of Wollongong

Abstract

Between 1926 and 1936, cinema in colonial Korea was a vibrant business, involving the production of domestic films and the distribution and exhibition of American, British, Chinese, French, German, Italian, and Russian fi lms. During this decade, the fi rst golden age of American cinema in Korea, Hollywood fi lms overwhelmingly dominated the Korean market. Korea was an important territory that Hollywood used in its overall global expansion campaign. Amid this globalization operation, the Government-General of Korea’s fi lm censorship apparatus was a lucrative operation. It profi teered from the application of more than 6,700 American and 630 other countries’ feature and nonfeature fi lms, a vast majority of which were approved with minor, if any, censorship changes. The Government-General’s systematization of fi lm censorship policies was intended to obstruct Communist, revolutionary, and later, socialist themes rather than “Western” themes—at least until the late 1930s, when the Japanese Department of Home Affairs began banning the import of American fi lms and the Government-General intensifi ed the suppression of Korean culture.