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Trajectories of Korean Cinema StudiesThursday April 21st 2005 • HIB 135
Panel 1 - 2:30 pm Eunsun
Cho Jinsoo An Hye
Seung Chung
Panel 2 – 4:30 pm Hyungsook
Lee Yung Bin Kwak
The workshop will be followed by a screening of E J-yong’s Untold
Scandal, For more information please contact Steven Chung at sychung@uci.edu Thanks to the generous support of: sentation Abstra Eunsun Cho I would like to discuss the construction of Korean national cinema of the 1960s and its hybridization of transnational cinematic styles. I am specifically concerned with Korean melodrama of the 1960s and its interaction with Italian Neo-realism. The Korean cinema of the 60s mobilized Italian Neo-realism in order to foreground abstract concepts of art and humanism and, thereby, founded an apolitical cinematic realm. It led to the legitimization of art cinema as national cinema, which played out with the marginalization of melodrama as lacking the authentic embodiment of nationality. I illustrate the self-conscious attempt to create a national aesthetics by excluding melodrama which was punctuated with the Italian neo-realist style.
My work examines the inter-ethnic romance between Koreans and Japanese in two South Korean films of the 1960s: Over Hyonhaet’an (Kim Kiyong, 1961) and The Remembered Traces of Yi Dynasty (Shin Sangok, 1967). These films visit the colonial past of Korea through heterosexual romance between a Korean man and a Japanese woman (Over Hyonhaet’an) and a Japanese man and a Korean woman (“Yi Dynasty”). I interrogate how tropes of romantic love and high art are mobilized differently and distinctively in two filmic instances. The way these tropes operate to render and problematize the political dilemma of colonial subjugation as well as Korea’s nationalist desire to overcome such a predicament will also receive close attention. The film analysis will illustrate how the question of “Japan” still remains an important issue in the contradictory notion of national cinema in South Korea of the 1960s.
While South Korean cinema has historically been influenced by external forces (American, Japanese, and Hong Kong in particular), the direction of the cultural flow has reversed in recent years—as demonstrated by not only the ascendancy of Korean popular culture (hanryu) in pan-Asian markets but also Hollywood’s attempt to assimilate this regional leadership through cross-cultural remakes. The fact that major American studios have purchased remake rights to a number of Korean box-office hits (with some already in production), such as Il Mare (Siwolae; 2000), My Sassy Girl (Yopgijok kunyo, 2001),Hi, Dharma (Dalmaya nolja, 2001); My Wife Is a Gangster (Chop’ok manura, 2001), The Way Home (Chipuro, 2002), and Old Boy (2004), begs certain questions about the transnational translatability of South Korean cinema as an increasingly disseminated product for global consumption and rapacious recycling. This presentation focuses on three specific scenes taken from My Sassy Girl, Asako in Ruby Shoes (Sunaebo, 2000), and Untold Scandal (Suk’aendul, 2003), which together make a compelling case study of the ways in which textual moments whose meanings are accessible to Korean audiences may be untranslatable with a global gestalt. The presence of such “untranslatables” renders these films as more complex, culturally specific texts despite their broad appeal and transnational circulation. These examples of untranslatability do not necessarily diminish spectatorial pleasure for non-Korean audiences (as evidenced by the enormous commercial success of My Sassy Girl in both East and Southeast Asian markets as well as the popularity of Untold Scandal in international film festivals and arthouse theaters). However, they do provide differentiated viewing positions for local audiences capable of understanding “encoded” messages aimed at cultural insiders. They also offer additional tasks for bilingual, bicultural critics working outside Korea to act as go-between and decipher these untranslatables for global audiences with limited cultural access.
This paper examine the recent transformation of Korean cinema in its textual quality as well as in its mode of production, especially focusing on the recent international success piece, Park Chan-Wook’s Oldboy. The success of Korean cinema since the 1990s in the international film circuit following its Asian predecessors such as Japanese, Chinese, Taiwanese, Hong Kong cinemas are no longer news to international cinephiles. However, what kind of textual and technical quality brought such success to the single national cinema in what context is a question to be seriously examined to find out the patterns and practice of the national cinema’s introduction or initiation to the larger “global” markets. Keeping this in mind, I find quite interesting common trajectories in the process of East Asian cinemas’ internationlization – I would say that they made it with unique “national qualities,” which in the larger international markets, is easily reducible to common “East Asian qualities.” Mostly the themes focusing on the unequal gender roles in the traditional or contemporary East Asian societies, or those focusing on the unique history of East Asian countries heavily colored with the trauma caused by colonialism and by the cold war politics are some of the common routes through which a lot of East Asian cinemas have gained international recognition. Park Chanwook’s Oldboy, however, shows an interesting turn around by still following the “typical” historical consciousness embedded in the Korean society, but at the same time, formalistically referencing numerous transnational East Asian cinemas, not insisting on Koreanness per se. The director’s transnational perspective in filmmaking is even more obvious when we consider his participation in the recent East Asian omnibus project, “Three Extremes.” Observing this general transformation of filmmaking in East Asia in recent years, I would argue that Oldboy is a model text on which the tension, resistance, and negotiation process of transnational cinema go through at the moment.
My paper will (re)read Park Chan-Wook's complete commercial failure Sympathy
for Mr. Vengeance (2000) in (oblique) response to the question
of "After politics, what next?," (Kyung Hyun Kim, 2004, 208)
a considerably significant question in the history of contemporary
Korean cinema in the late1990s. By reading the film, particularly several
significant scenes visually and aurally while relating them to Park's
other films, I will argue that this film forces the audience -allegedly
free from any political ideologies- to confront the Lacanian Real,
i.e., the substitution of politics or Revolution by ethics or Vengeance. |
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