Action films produced by East Asia including Korea in the middle and late 1960's are performing active national negotiations in narrative, characters and iconographic aspects and from the aspect that it is an actual exchange of human/material resources. There are two reasons why these aspects are important for the East Asian action films; first, these films had made a turning point that changed the concept of national cinemas; and second, it proved that the transnational cinemas which are actively discussed are not value but a typical film phenomenon.
Cinema is a product of the modern national state system as well as a product of the global capitalism system. Accordingly, if cinema is situated in the cycle of ethnography/autoethnography as national cinema, there will always be a situation that the cinema has already exceeded national cinemas. The signs of images and signs of movement so-called 'action film' raise a translation possibility problem as the typical case.
As concentrating on one image appeared in the 1960's, I discuss overtranslation - i,e, 'move across' (trans-latio) which is being overused and misused in movies without any mediation. In 1967, the film One Armed Swordman produced by the Show Brothers of Hong Kong was a huge success that surprised entire East Asia including Hong Kong, and many copied films had been produced. This film was an "internationally useable genre" developed by the Show Brothers during the 1960's. In this paper, I discuss how this 'one armed guy' image is nationally used in the Korean action films, unconsciousness on the cold war/division and the crisis of masculinity. Through these discussions, I assert that these action films had made a translation possibility and delivered the political situations of each nation that it was forbidden to discuss at that time using the one-armed-guy images.