EASC Colloquium "From Propaganda to Entertainment: Waging the Cultural Cold War in Asia's Film Industries"

The Indiana University East Asian Studies Center will host Professor Christina Klein from Boston College to present her talk "From Propaganda to Entertainment: Washing the Cultural Cold War in Asia's Film Industries".

In 1951 the CIA created the Asia Foundation as a covert instrument for waging the cultural Cold War in Asia. As an onstensibly private aid organization, the Foundation dispensed millions of dollars to thousands of Asian recipients working in the fields of education, journalism, and the arts. Film soon emerged as an important area of focus. The foundation was dismayed to discover that leftist films were better made and offered greater entertainment value than did films made by "free" Asian producers. This talk explores how the Asia Foundation set out to improve the quality of Asia's commercial cinema, intervening in film industries in Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea in an effort to help film workers produce better and more entertaining films.

Christina Klein is an associate professor in the English department at Boston College, where she teaches courses in American studies and Asian studies. She is the author of Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961, and numerous articles on contemporary Asian cinema. She is currently writing a book about Korean cinema of the 1950s and is launching a new research project on the role of the CIA-funded Asia Foundation in the development of postwar Asian cinema.