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This chapter examines early film culture prior to the 1920s in order to offer a detailed historical background for the book’s exploration of the major advancement of Joseon cinema since the late 1910s. The first half of the chapter critically scrutinizes socio-political and cultural conditions that influenced the formation of early film culture in pre-colonial and colonial Korea. Equal attention is given to the collective efforts of early film entrepreneurs and exhibitors in creating film exhibition sites, including movie theatres, defining social and cultural functions of theatre space for a society devoid of theatrical tradition, and cultivating film audiences. The second half traces the activities of the first film production entity of colonial Korea: the Moving Picture Unit (MPU) of the colonial government. The author’s attempt to uncover the forgotten history of the MUP ultimately reveals the problematic of Japanese and Korean film historiographies that have pushed this crucial film unit of the empire onto the margin of film history.

In 1910 George Kleine published an ambitious catalogue of “educational motion picture films” that consisted of titles he had collected from a number of European companies, notably Pathé, Gaumont, and Urban. This chapter argues that Kleine’s catalogue demonstrates a peculiarity whose origin can be traced back to an ambivalence in the concept of curiosity itself. On the one hand, his project was aligned with modern pedagogical research that argued for education via visual means as the most efficient form of instruction. Simultaneously, however, Kleine’s film catalogue recalls the cabinets of curiosity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The catalogue’s most successful and well-documented film, The Fly Pest, exemplifies this dynamic, oscillating between a hygienic argument that construes the fly as a disease vector and an appreciation of the magnified fly images that participates in the aesthetics of wonder.

This chapter, by S. Park-Primiano, examines the use of noncommercial films by the U.S. military to facilitate its diverse roles during its occupation of South Korea in the aftermath of World War II. Used by the American Military Government in Korea, educational films aided the U.S. military's efforts to Americanize the Korean population and combat Communism. Films were also used to inform and rally support for its policy in Korea from American military and civilian personnel at home as well as abroad. For this purpose, the U.S. military sought cooperation from and enlisted the assistance of Korean filmmakers in the production of films about Korean culture and history that challenge any straightforward interpretation of Americanization or a unidirectional influence. Moreover, such conflicting efforts had a long-lasting effect in South Korea. It was a practice that was continued by the succeeding information apparatus of the U.S. State Department and the United Nations during the Korean War and beyond to further expose the need for a closer examination of U.S. control of the Korean cultural imaginary.

This chapter offers, through a series of examples from different kinds of museums, an overview of the types of audio-visuals they use: found footage materials, educational films, documentaries, video testimonies. Also, it discusses their museological functions: there are used for their pedagogical value, as means of contextualization, or to create spectacular effects.

When the U.S. invaded Iraq, they acted according to their standard doctrine of using overwhelming force to incapacitate and destroy the enemy. Despite their initial success, the U.S. forces quickly lost control and faced an insurgency, a kind of warfare for which they were ill prepared both in terms of doctrine and institutional culture. Lacking an up-to-date counter-insurgency doctrine, in the fall of 2003, the Pentagon turned to Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 anticolonial docudrama The Battle of Algiers for instruction. This chapter, by Vinzenz Hediger, traces the role the film played in the elaboration of the COIN doctrine and discusses why, despite the considerable intellectual efforts of the authors of manual FM 3-24, the film’s lessons went largely unheeded by the American military.

This chapter examines an enduring promotional construct of oil-based existence—“entrepreneurial life”—that propelled the neoliberal refashioning of American social life, institutional politics, and urban settlement during the last several decades of the twentieth century. Using a Gramscian-Foucauldian approach, the chapter first articulates three interventions to the debates over “neoliberalism.” It then outlines the basics of the refining process and suggests that the very nature of the process itself ensures multiple petroleum products. It also considers a specific cultural object produced by the petroleum industry that actively constructs an imaginary of petroleum-dependent life: an “educational” film titled Fuel-Less (a parody of the hit 1995 film Clueless), prepared by the American Petroleum Institute for sixth- to eighth-graders. The chapter concludes by discarding the neoliberal politics of ecology (or nature) in favor of a framework that takes into account the ecology of neoliberal politics.