ABSTRACT
This chapter traces some of the major interconnections between state policy and film production during the 1970s and 1980s and their various effects on Korean cinema. Unquestionably, the methods used by the successive military regimes headed by Park Chung Hee and Chun Doo-hwan to enforce their national anti-communist agendas had the greatest impact on domestic filmmaking, as they did on society at large. Throughout these two decades, the Motion Picture Law (hereafter MPL) remained the government’s chief means of harnessing the potential power and influence of the domestic film industry and of directing it, indirectly but emphatically, through two powerful agents: the Producer Registration System and censorship policy. Controlling the activities of film producers and directors through these two avenues for state pressure was made possible in practice with assistance from Korea’s only quasi-government film industry administrative body—the Korean Motion Picture Promotion Corporation (hereafter KMPPC), which was established in 1973.
