ABSTRACT
One of the most popular subject matters in recent South Korean films is the image of the colonial period (1910–45). A series of popular feature films offering diverse narratives, characters and perspectives attempt a revision, or reset, of the prevailing memory of the colonial experience and its legacy in contemporary Korean society and culture. In particular, Assassination (2015) and The Age of Shadows (2016) aim to appeal to domestic and international audiences through refined and entertaining spectacles depicting a short-lived armed resistance group called the Heroic Corps (1919–26). The chapter focuses on how the two films thematise the act of betrayal as choice while featuring armed resistance activists who, as the films “remember”, were pushed to the precarious border between patriot and traitor. The films render the colonial era a history’s grey zone in which Koreans had to make a decision of their own to survive and live through vulnerability and unpredictability that mark turbulent moments in the nation’s history. In this sense, the films’ popularity may imply that contemporary Korean audiences experience the reverberation of the same confusion and demand that earlier resistance fighters confronted.
