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]
