Cinema and the Cultural Cold War: U.S. Diplomacy and the Origins of the Asian Cinema Network. Sangjoon Lee. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020.

The existential stakes of the Cold War provided movie screenwriters with ample material to draw in audiences. Major T.J. “King” Kong rides an atomic bomb down towards a Soviet target as he gleefully waves his cowboy hat.[1] During a period of détente, James Bond works with KGB agent Triple X to prevent Karl Stromberg from starting a nuclear war.[2] Jed and Matt Eckert and their “Wolverines” fight to liberate their small Colorado town after a shock communist invasion.[3] David Lightman teaches a computer that the only way to win a game is not to play and saves the world.[4] The high stakes of the Cold War put the real and imagined battlefields of the period on the silver screen for mass consumption. However the battlefield extended beyond the screen, as the Cold War also touched every aspect of film production from the funding and writing to the theaters they played at.

Sangjoon Lee explores this battlefield in Cinema and the Cultural Cold War: U.S. Diplomacy and the Origins of the Asian Cinema Network. The book primarily examines how during the first two decades of the Cold War, the Asia Foundation utilized funding from the Central Intelligence Agency to support the work of, and establish connections between, anti-communist filmmakers throughout East Asia. Program directors sought to model the Asia Foundation’s work on that of the Committee for a Free Europe which achieved success with Radio Free Europe and the “Crusade for Freedom.”[5] Unlike its European counterpart though, the Asian Foundation would find success elusive, and its cultural programs would not find large audiences or become an effective ideological weapon in the Cold War in Asia.

Cinema and the Cultural Cold War shows how the Asia Foundation invested heavily in the movie industry in several east Asian nations, including Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, as well as the British colony of Hong Kong. Its initial efforts included providing the budget for locally produced films that emphasized traditional stories and anti-communist messages. Its first film, The People Win Through, was written by Burma’s prime minister and its low production values, poor editing, and bad acting unsurprisingly led to the movie failing at the box office.[6] Productions with Hong Kong’s Asia Pictures similarly failed to find mass audiences and the studio failed to become a large counterweight to communist-friendly rivals.[7] Lee then follows how the Asia Foundation ceased directly funding individual movie projects and instead sought to support friendly producers in other ways. Support included initiatives to bring in Hollywood screenwriting and technical expertise, sponsorship of film festivals, and providing access to modern filmmaking equipment. These initiatives also failed to garner preferred movies a popular reception and the Asia Foundation’s favored directors and producers were often surpassed by peers who received no support from the group.[8]

The book shines in exploring the reasons behind these failures. Lee argues the Asia Foundation’s managers lacked the regional expertise to match their anti-communist zeal. This lack of understanding manifested in several ways. The “political instability [and] an intensifying nationalism” in the region led to an underestimation of how historic rivalries between nations would prevent success for a country’s films outside its home market.[9] Japan stands out, and Lee shows how other nations viewed its films as a continuation of “Japan’s unfulfilled imperial adventure” rather than coming from a “reformed colonizer” as Japanese producers hoped.[10] At other moments, film festivals became inextricable from local political concerns, as when the South Korean members of the awards jury for the 1966 Asian Film Festival had to appear in court for violating the nation’s anticommunist laws after awarding the best director prize to a Japanese director with communist sympathies.[11] The Asia Foundation also failed to recognize the difficulties inherent in operating with multiple currencies and navigating different national frameworks surrounding import and export. This made the purchase of raw materials and equipment difficult and contributed to cost overruns.[12]

Perhaps most importantly, Lee shows how the foundation’s partners were poorly chosen. Local producers’ “blatant ideological stances often compromised the commercial values necessary to attract local audiences” ensuring the anti-communist films played to empty seats.[13] The Asia Foundation’s lack of local expertise and desire to subsume local issues into a broader Cold War story left it pushing stories that did not resonate. In this regard its partnership with figures like Chang Kuo-Sin in Hong Kong and Masaichi Nagata in Japan resembles U.S. policy makers favoring leaders like South Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem and South Korea’s Syngman Rhee. Both the producers and dictators benefitted by ingratiating themselves with like-minded Americans but had little to offer their domestic audiences.

The book could do more to exploit those similarities and tie Lee’s “Asian Cinematic Network” more clearly into the broader Cold War. McCarthyism in Hollywood elicits an occasional reference, but more direct examination would be useful. Doing so would help Lee better demonstrate that the ideological battle over cinema was a global concern and something seen by many policymakers as critical to the broader Cold War. One example is the presence of formerly blacklisted director Edward Dmytryk as a juror at the San Francisco International Film Festival.[14] Lee notes it was an unimportant regional event, but one supported by the Asia Foundation, which suggests his attendance was part of Dmytryk showing he remained reformed after his Saturday Evening Post confessional of being a communist and Ronald Reagan’s declaration it showed others that they “too can be free men again.”[15]

More on the use of cinema by communist nations in the region would also strengthen Lee’s narrative. He highlights Hong Kong’s Great Wall Pictures as the communist backed target of the Asia Foundation supported Asia Pictures, but more on the nature of Great Wall’s backing, the films it produced, and their reach would be a useful contrast to the failures of the Asia Foundation’s efforts. Similarly, North Korea’s kidnapping of South Korean director Sang-ok Shin and his wife, actress Ch’oe Un-hui, so they could make films for Pyongyang, including the infamous kaiju film Pulgasari, only receives a passing mention at a chapter’s closing. Further exploration of this incident would reinforce the seriousness with which nations in the Cold War took cinema and its ability to bolster ideological messaging. So too would further exploration of the epilogue of the burgeoning war over cinematic content in Asia sparked by China’s explosive growth as both a market for and producer of movies.

Cinema and the Cultural Cold War is a welcome addition to the growing historiography on how Cold War belligerents actively sought to influence popular culture both domestically and abroad. Much like Duncan White’s Cold Warriors and Christina Klein’s Cold War Orientalism, Lee’s book shows the importance of popular culture as a battlefield each side viewed as critical to their success. Impressively, unlike the former two works, Cinema and the Cultural Cold War is able to do this without the benefit of featuring works immediately recognizable to most readers. While this does create a potential challenge of accessibility, Lee largely overcomes it by supplying local context in a brief and clear manner, making the book an excellent one for those interested in the Cold War in Asia or the use of information as an element of national power. With Cinema and the Cold War, Lee deftly demonstrates that the efforts of the Asia Foundation to push U.S. interests through film failed for many of the same reasons attempts by U.S. military and aid organizations did. The characters were new, but the story remained the same.

Ben Griffin is the Chief of the Military History Division in the History Department of the United States Military Academy and the author of Reagan’s War Stories: A Cold War Presidency from the Naval Institute Press. This review reflects his own views and not necessarily those of the  Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

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Header Image: Cinema (AchDaily/Visual Hunt)

Notes:

[1] Dr Strangelove or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, film, directed by Stanley Kubrick, Hawk Films, 1964.

[2] The Spy Who Loved Me, film, directed by Lewis Gilbert, Eon Productions, 1977.

[3] Red Dawn, film, directed by John Milius, United Artists, 1984.

[4] Wargames, film, directed by John Badham, United Artists, 1983.

[5] Sangjoon Lee, Cinema and the Cultural Cold War: U.S. Diplomacy and the Origins of the Asian Cinematic Network, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020), 22.

[6] Ibid, 36.

[7] Ibid, 11.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid, 132.

[10] Ibid 57-58.

[11] Ibid, 160.

[12] Ibid, 132.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid, 120.

[15] Richard English, “What Makes a Hollywood Communist?” Saturday Evening Post, May 19, 1951; Lee Zhito, “Picture Business,” Billboard, June 16, 1951