이만희 영화의 두모스(Thumos)적 주체와 검열시대: 후기 이만희 영화의 쇠락에 관하여

초록

This study examines the distinctive qualities of Lee Man-hee's films by focusing on the diegetic agents — the characters who populate his films — and through this lens investigates why his work flourished in the 1960s only to decline in the 1970s. Although Lee Man-hee's films take on a wide range of genres and forms, an underlying discipline (giyul) that governs them can be identified across his body of work. The premise of this paper is that this very discipline enabled his films to construct a singular world, while at the same time placing them in inevitable conflict with censorship. The paper's hypothesis is that when Lee Man-hee's films failed to win popular support in the 1970s despite maintaining this discipline, it was because that discipline had ceased to resonate with the sensibilities of the decade. To test this hypothesis, the paper divides Lee Man-hee's career into an early period (1961–1967) and a late period (1968–1975), deriving the distinctive features of character in the early films and tracing how these manifest in the later work. Chapter 2 examines how Lee Man-hee demonstrated his talent in the thriller — an avant-garde genre for its time — and argues that this was the source of the unconventional formal experimentation that persists throughout his filmography. It then turns to The Marines Who Never Returned (1963), widely regarded as his breakthrough and most representative work, and Black Hair (1964), recognized for its distinctively personal approach to genre, to show that the characters embodying Lee's identity are animated by a thumos-driven disposition oriented toward righteous spirit and devotion. Chapter 3 demonstrates, through Seven Female POWs, that this thumos-driven disposition was not confined to male characters. The paper argues that the thumos-driven attitude projected onto the "comfort women for U.S. troops" in this film exemplifies Lee Man-hee's boundary-transgressing stance, and that this stance is directly related to the film's censorship ordeal. It then analyzes When a Woman Confesses (1969), Japanese Pirates (1972), and A Girl Resembling the Sun (1974) to trace how this attitude manifests in the late period, showing that the thumos-driven stance is broadly sustained in the way women are represented and in the attitude male characters adopt toward female characters. While Lee Man-hee's late films sought to respond to contemporary generic trends, they conspicuously avoided the derivatization of young women — the reduction of female characters into vehicles for male desire, to be used and discarded — that characterized the films of the same period. This is bound up with Lee Man-hee's consistent commitment to an unconventional, boundary-transgressing thumos-driven subject. During this period, censorship pressure intensified further, and filmmakers were compelled to derivatize the socially marginalized in the name of sublimation in order to give form to ideology. This compulsion produced fissures throughout the films of the era, giving rise to a perverse pathology. Lee Man-hee's films, sustained by a consistent vision, maintained a singular world of their own — yet precisely for this reason, they were unable to absorb the pathologies of the age. It is this dynamic that ultimately accounts for Lee Man-hee's failure to ride the currents of 1970s Korean film and his eventual decline.

키워드