초록/요약

Chung Chang-Wha is one of the leading Korean filmmakers in the 1950s to the 1960s. After a successful career in Korea, he was recruited to the Hong Kong film industry, and contributed significantly to the development of Hong Kong genre cinema in the 1970s. He is a filmmaker who was interested in making spectacular genre films, and one of his Korean films Sunset on the Sarbin River (1965) displays his unique transnational imagination within the frame of war film. This film is set in Burman (currently Myanmar) during the Pacific War period, and deals with the issues of war, patriotism, love, and friendship of Korean student soldiers, ‘comfort women,’ and Burmeses independent fighters. One of the impressive aspects of the film is the spectacles of war and exotic Burmeses landscapes with women. However, I find that there are scenes of the war tragedy that the film intentionally does not include in the spectacles. This study analyzes the dual representational strategy of showing and not showing, visualizing and non-visualizing in this film. Through the study, I suggest that this film’s unique strategy of creating spectacles reveals the sympathy of the director toward the Korean victims of the Pacific War whose sacrifices were silenced by the Korea-Japan Treaty in 1965. It indicates the conflicts and negotiations that the director underwent as a genre filmmaker at the intersection of the socio-political environment, the memory of the colonial period, and his own artistic ambition.