"Researching the Film Culture of Colonial Korea through Star Studies" & "Cut and Paste"

Please join us for the first Film and Media Studies Colloquium event of the fall season. Our program's series explores a wide variety of topics related to film and media research, production, and teaching. This event will feature two talks: "Researching the Film Culture of Colonial Korea through Star Studies" led by Andy Lee, PhD candidate, Film & Media Studies in the English Department. This talk introduces my current dissertation project, which reexamines the film history of colonial Korea through the concepts and methods of star studies. Despite only a dozen of the roughly 200 features made under Japanese rule surviving, film scholarship on colonial Korea has grown and expanded in recent decades, rebuilt through newspapers, magazines, and government records, and many works that came out mostly focus on policy, industry, and representation. Studying film stars helps us see another aspect of colonial film culture in relation to the competing meanings layered on stars and the societal contradictions they embodied, such as gender, nation, and colonial modernity. I also survey a brief history of film stars and celebrity culture in colonial Korea and close on one case study of Moon Ye-bong (1917-1999), a famous actress during the colonial period who became a renowned star in postwar North Korea but was disavowed in the South, further complicating the fractured nature of the historiography of Korean cinema. "Cut and Paste: Toward a Theory and Practice of Desktop Documentary" led by Charlotte Scurlock, PhD candidate, Film & Media Studies in the English Department. Life in the 2020s is mediated largely through interactive digital screens (computers, smartphones, tablets, et cetera), occupying increasing space in activities associated with labor and leisure, from the shift to remote work and education during the COVID-19 pandemic facilitated by Zoom Communications to the colloquialization of phrases like doomscrolling and screentime. In the midst of this screen