Psychological Operations of Documentary (P)reenactment in USIS-Korea Films

Scholarship on Cold War US film diplomacy and the institutional history of US information agencies has largely focused on government documents and archivally preserved films. This article instead applies critical discourse analysis to the production contexts of both extant and nonextant state-sponsored films. It examines how US information operations in post-liberation and postwar Korea used the documentary format to project a free world imaginary. I argue that the simultaneously backward-casting and forward-projecting performance of (p)reenactment in films by the United States Information Service in Korea (USIS-Korea) and its predecessors was central to shaping new norms of South Korean citizenship.