The Reproduction of a Cultural Film as Propaganda - A Case Study of Barbed Wire

This study analyzes how foreign cultural films, reproduced by the Korean National Film Production Center in the early 1960s, were utilized as propaganda tools to promote anti-communist ideology in South Korea. Focusing on the case of Stacheldraht (1961), a documentary produced by Sender Freies Berlin (SFB) in West Germany and later re-edited and screened in Korea under the same title (Cheoljo-mang), the paper examines the ideological recontextualization of cultural films. Following the 1961 military coup, the Park Chung-hee regime enacted the Film Act and institutionalized the mandatory screening of cultural films, actively employing them as instruments of state propaganda and public enlightenment. In particular, anti-communist cultural films produced and distributed under the direction of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) intertwined Cold War geopolitics with the realities of Korea’s national division, delivering anti-communist messages and shaping national identity through audiovisual means. Drawing on Jacques Ellul’s theory of propaganda and Bill Nichols’s concept of the expository mode in documentary films, this paper offers a comparative analysis of the narration, editing, and sound design of the original German Stacheldraht and its Korean version. The study reveals how identical audiovisual materials were restructured to serve different political agendas, demonstrating that cultural films during the Cold War were not merely documentary records but were as well crucial instruments for the transmission of ideology.