ScholarWorks@중앙대학교

초록

This study analyzes the spectacle of construction and the socio-political context of U.S.–Korean relationship represented in Arirang Bridge (1964, Bae Seok-in), a culture film jointly produced by the National Film Production Center and the U.S. 7th Infantry Division in Korea. The film depicts the construction of a bailey bridge in Anheung-ri, Dongducheon, conducted as a part of the U.S. Armed Forces Assistance to Korea (AFAK) program. The analysis approaches the film from the perspective of mobility infrastructure, traversing the boundaries between the text and its socio-political contexts. First, a close reading of Arirang Bridge examines how modern mobility infrastructures are represented and articulated in the text. Mobility infrastructures, including bridges, constitute the modern lived world, conveying to citizens a sense of convenient movement while, through path dependency, functioning as mediators of liberal governmentality that guide and regulate users’ subjectivity. The images and plot of Arirang Bridge, which retrospectively re-enact the act of construction, operate as a form of mobility that co-produces the sensations and discourses of modern mobility. This article then compares the extant film print with the production plan and original scenario preserved in the National Film Production Center’s archival records, revealing the omitted incident of a gun shooting involving U.S. troops as a hidden context of production. The U.S. military’s civil actions and their media representations in local communities did not merely serve to gift modern infrastructures or project images of autonomous liberal subjectivity. Rather, the U.S. military’s policing and sex-labor management strategies, which produced a state of exception, functioned as a form of necropolitics—turning giijichon (camptown) woman and base laborers, the bearers of ‘undesirable’ mobility, into dispensable lives and labor forces. Through the concept of infrastructural brutalism, which designates both the necropolitical operation of modern infrastructure and its aesthetic manifestation, this study exposes how U.S. bases—the very vanguards of necropolitics—and non-normative agents of mobility were effaced from representation in and around Arirang Bridge. Ultimately, this article argues that the public-relations films that visualized liberal mobility through the construction of bridges were inextricably linked to a form of necropolitics that designated the camptown as a space of exception and expelled the bodies marked by non-normative mobility from the field of representation.

키워드