[Apr 21] Promises of Failure: Dreams of Cinema in Colonial Korea

Speaker: Prof. Irhe Sohn | Smith College | Assistant Professor of Korean Language & Literature

Date: April 21, 2026 (Tue)

Time: 4:00pm – 5:30pm

Venue: CRT-5.41, 5/F., Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

This talk offers a history of colonial Korean cinema organized not around emergence or achievement but around structural failure. Korea was a Japanese colony from 1910 to 1945, and the institutional conditions for a viable national cinema never materialized: films were made, some of them extraordinary, but their material conditions were perpetually unstable, and the films themselves rarely survived. I ask what it means to take that failure seriously—not as a deficiency to be corrected or a prelude to postwar renaissance, but as a singular historical formation with its own affective logic.

My central argument is developed through two interlocutors: Spring of the Korean Peninsula (Yi Pyŏng-il, 1941), one of the few surviving colonial-era films, and Im Hwa (1908–1953), the poet-critic who theorized Korean cinema’s impoverishment as singularity rather than lack. Reading Im Hwa’s essays alongside the film’s recursive structure of departure and foreboding, this talk develops the concept of affective realism—cinema’s capacity to register not the documentary surface of colonial life but its emotional structures. Against the period’s dominant discourse of corporatization, Im Hwa wrote from his desk in full knowledge that the cinema he envisioned would likely never arrive, yet insisted on dreaming it in the future anterior tense. The promises embedded in colonial Korean cinema's failure, I argue, constitute a political and historical legacy that conventional narratives of cinematic development have yet to honor.

All are welcome. For enquiries, please contact Prof. Su Yun Kim at suyunkim@hku.hk