Cinema under National Reconstruction

"Hye Seung Chung's provocative study sheds new light on the ways state censorship functioned—and malfunctioned—in Korea during the Cold War. She challenges the usual narrative—in which an oppressive, all-powerful censorship regime strangled artistic creativity in the Korean motion picture industry—and argues instead for a more nuanced understanding both of the apparatus of state censorship and the ways Korean filmmakers operated within and around it."

 — Thomas Doherty, author of Little Lindy Is Kidnapped: How the Media Covered the Crime of the Century

"Theoretically sophisticated and extensively researched, Hye Seung Chung’s Cinema under National Reconstruction reveals the ways in which multiple actors (the state, the film industry, the public) negotiate the definition of national cinema. A groundbreaking work that takes Korean film censorship studies to a new level."— Theodore H. Hughes, author of Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea: Freedom's Frontier

“Hye Seung Chung’s brilliant book deepens our understanding of cinema as a site of social and political contest. The product of impressive research in Korean and American archives, it offers a rare comparative perspective on censorship practices on both sides of the Pacific. Chung challenges conventional wisdom about the always-deleterious effects of censorship and profoundly revises our understanding of Korean filmmakers’ relationship to the state. Her analysis of government and industry records provides an important corrective to scholars’ reliance on the words and perspectives directors, who were often sidelined during the censorship process. A major contribution to postwar Korean film history.”

 — Christina Klein, author of Cold War Cosmopolitanism: Period Style in 1950s Korean Cinema