Just as the issue of “Korean cinema” as a paradigmatic example of national cinema has been controversial, similarly the collective identity of Korean filmmakers has also remained difficult to define. This is because this notion of a collective identity can hardly be posited in a coherent continuum when we consider Korea's modern historical and political trajectory, as the peninsula transitioned from being a colony of Japan to becoming two sovereign states. This historical complexity serves to frame Korean filmmakers’ identity outside any single, solid category. The difficulty here derives from the several different possible approaches to defining “Korea” as a nation: one that follows transcendental boundaries, independent from the state-formation process, one that adheres to the frame of the established state system in consideration of legal rationality and legitimacy, and another that traces an ongoing dynamic in the formation of a collective consciousness as nationhood. On the other hand, this difficulty also stems from the ambiguity that exists in any definition of what is “national” in cinema. Controversies can emerge, such as whether one can attribute a film's nationality to that of its producers, whether one can firmly locate the nationality of a film which was made by producers from different countries, whether films from the colonial period should be registered as the products of the decolonized country or the former colonial power, and, beyond these legalistic issues, whether one can indeed ever definitively establish the national identity of a film that is both a work of collective creation and a medium through which audiences around the globe potentially share their experiences with one another. Therefore, it is inevitable to find heterogeneity, and even indefinability, in the notion of a collective identity that can be assigned to Korean filmmakers, especially that of those filmmakers who personally experienced a discontinuous sense of national belonging from the colonial period (1910–45) to the liberation and to the subsequent division of the nation in 1945.

This chapter examines such a contested identity of Korean filmmakers during the period of reconstruction after the Korean War, especially in the years between 1953 and 1955, by examining the case of director Kim Ki-young.