Film Culture, Sound Culture: Setting, Cinematography, and Sound

This chapter explores Madame Freedom through the frameworks of textual poaching. It argues that Han forged his cosmopolitan style by borrowing material from the larger film culture and sound culture that he inhabited. In so doing, he expressed South Korea’s integration into the Free World through the visual and aural registers of film form. This chapter explores Han’s relationship to Japanese cinema (especially Ozu Yasujiro’s Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice), Hollywood cinema, and recordings of Western music. It explores the question of plagiarism of Japanese films, and argues that Han created an emotionally and sensuously rich representation of modernity by appropriating elements of setting, cinematography, and sound from texts that were already in circulation within South Korea.