
What happens if we take the Korean dish budae jjigae --Army base stew-- as a metaphor for Korea's popular cinema of the 1950s? like the cooks of this modest dish, postwar filmmakers struggled to make something worth consuming during an era of extreme scarcity and they, too, "poached" resources from a number of different sources. This talk focuses on the film "Madame Freedom" ( 1956) and explores how it borrowed creatively from Korean, Japanese, and American sources. It pays particular attention to how the US military functioned as a reservoir of resources -- material, symbolic, experiential -- from which Korean cultural producers could draw to produce something distinctly Korean.