International Journal of Korean History (Feb 2019)
The History of the Military Film Industry - From the inception of military films to the ROK Army Motion Picture Production Center (1948–1979) -
Abstract
This paper examines the history of the ROK Army Motion Picture Production Center (AMPPC), which played a significant role in the Korean film industry from the 1950s to the 1970s. Around this time, the AMPPC was an official film production institute alongside the National Film Production Center, and produced newsreels and culture films as well as fiction films. Starting with the documentary An Assault on Justice, the first film on the Korean War, and the National Defense Series, the AMPPC produced educational short films and many feature-length films. It was a large-scale film production company that produced an average of over 100 films a year until the 1970s. In addition, the military film industry provided workspace for Korean film industry professional and took care of postproduction for commercial films at a time when the film industry was considered nearly impossible. It was also an active producer that recorded significant progress in the Korean film history through technical experiments at a time when the infrastructure for the film industry had collapsed. In addition, many Korean film industry professionals were affiliated with or closely related to the center. Not only directors but also people in photography, editing, and screenwriting worked in both the mainstream film industry and the AMPPC. Moreover, military films also had a certain impact on anti-Communist films and anti-Communist television programs in its early years. Various military films produced from the 1950s to the 1970s, including the anti-Communist films produced in the military since 1948 and the first war documentary An Assault of Justice, were utilized in anti-Communist films for theaters but also television news, drama series, and documentaries, becoming archetypes for each derivative program format. In sum, the AMPPC during this time was closely related to the Korean film industry as well as the television industry in terms of quantity and quality, providing the human resources and physical basis. It is also important to imbue significance into the “militaristic” utilization of military films. Above all, the military films’ most important role in its history since the founding of the government of the Republic of Korea was its utilization as part of the Korean government’s psychological warfare waged against its people between the 1950s and 1970s under the Cold War regime. The role of military films as propaganda warfare, which became much more explicit with the outbreak of the Korean War, became strengthened through the installation of the AMPPC in 1963, dispatch of Korean soldiers for the Vietnam War and the improvement of the film production environment in 1965. Particularly with the sending of Korean troops to Vietnam, it became important for the government to produce and screen military films as propaganda for Korea’s unjustified participation in the war. In the 1970s, the AMPPC, which had to continue the Cold War by continuously placing significance on the Vietnam War throughout and even after the war, was able to produce over 130 films in various genres and lengths every year. This paper is significant in that it systematically organizes the history of the military film industry, which had not been properly explained in the past, and that it discusses the military film industry as a means to examine the overall structure of the film industry and its vibrant activities at the time. This discussion has been performed as a basis for the analysis of specific military films. I hope to delve further into the significance and the role of military films as a tool of propaganda warfare through textual analysis in future studies.
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