Consumer Culture and the Black Market: Mise-en-Scène

This chapter explores Cold War cosmopolitanism via material culture. It focuses on Han’s mise-en-scene, which it interprets from three perspectives. It begins with textual analysis, examining the expressive role of consumer goods in three films: Madame Freedom, Hyperbolae of Youth, and The Hand of Fate. It next investigates the flow of these goods into Korea through transnational networks: the legal import economy, regional smuggling routes, and the web of US military bases, the latter two of which sustained a vast black market. The chapter’s final section investigates poaching as a material practice within the film industry, showing how filmmakers relied on resources procured from the black market and U.S. military to bring their films into existence.