{"id":5032,"date":"2020-06-09T22:21:59","date_gmt":"2020-06-10T05:21:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5032"},"modified":"2020-06-09T22:21:59","modified_gmt":"2020-06-10T05:21:59","slug":"korea-blog-rediscovering-korean-cinema-an-academic-look-at-the-zombies-mutants-criminals-and-prostitutes-of-south-koreas-silver-screen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5032","title":{"rendered":"Korea Blog: Rediscovering Korean Cinema, An Academic Look at the Zombies, Mutants, Criminals, and Prostitutes of South Korea\u2019s Silver Screen"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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I live in Korea now in large part because I discovered Korean cinema in college \u2014 or rather, because I discovered Korean cinema right after graduating college. Though an avid film-viewer since I was a teenager, I somehow passed all four years at my university without partaking of the DVD selection at its library. Whatever I was looking for when I first went to have a look at it, I found something else, something life-changing: a wide selection of Korean movies, dating from the early 1960s to the mid-2000s, all distributed by the Korean Film Council (KOFIC). (One of the university\u2019s librarians, I later heard, was a fan of Korean media, and made sure to receive all of KOFIC\u2019s releases.) I checked out a few of its movies on DVD and, over the following years I stuck around town after graduation, proceeded to watch nearly all of them, intent on understanding this expansive film culture then entirely unknown to me.<\/p>

Or rather, almost entirely unknown to me: when asked to name my first Korean film, I remembered having seen Park Chan-wook\u2019s\u00a0Joint Security Area<\/em>\u00a0(\uacf5\ub3d9\uacbd\ube44\uad6c\uc5ed) as part of my sole film-studies class. Released in 2000, that thriller got traction in the West by dealing with the intrigue at the border between South and North Korea, the latter being the only Korea that interested most of the world at the time. More than a few other enthusiasts may remember\u00a0Joint Security Area<\/em>\u00a0as their gateway into Korean cinema, but nowhere near as many as came in through Park\u2019s 2003 film\u00a0Oldboy\u00a0<\/em>(\uc62c\ub4dc\ubcf4\uc774). Though based on a Japanese comic book, that tale of incest, abduction, revenge, and more incest did much to define Korean cinema \u2014 and to place it, not quite rightfully, under the heading of \u201cextreme Asia\u201d \u2014 in the 2000s. I actually screened it myself, at one of my frequent movie nights; as I recall, my friends\u2019 reactions varied.<\/p>

Bong Joon-ho\u2019s politically charged mutant-monster movie\u00a0The Host\u00a0<\/em>(\uad34\ubb3c) fared better, as I recall, when it played on campus not long thereafter. Back then few American moviegoers knew Bong\u2019s name; thanks to the performance of his class-warfare satire\u00a0Parasite<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(\uae30\uc0dd\ucda9) at this year\u2019s Academy Awards,\u00a0unprecedented for a non-English-language film<\/a>, that has changed. Korean cinema just last year\u00a0marked its official centenary<\/a>, but the pre-Parasite<\/em>\u00a0and post-Parasite<\/em>\u00a0divide has the potential to become its new B.C. and A.D., and this new era will see a great many Western viewers looking to get a handle on it. When I was watching through all those KOFIC DVDs, I could find almost nothing in the way of related reading material in English apart from poorly translated monographs on individual directors. But a number of such books have been published since then, including the brief introduction I still recommend most often, Darcy Paquet\u2019s\u00a0New Korean Cinema: Breaking the Waves<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Read the whole thing at the Los Angeles Review of Books<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I live in Korea now in large part because I discovered Korean cinema in college \u2014 or rather, because I discovered Korean cinema right after graduating college. Though an avid film-viewer since I was a teenager, I somehow passed all four years at my university without partaking of the DVD selection at its library. Whatever […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,74],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film","category-korea-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5032"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5032\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5034,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5032\/revisions\/5034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}