Ten years of philosophical thinking in Korean cinema

Abstract

The philosophical and theoretical approaches utilized toward understanding Korean cinema have developed rapidly in the past 10 years. We have seen scholarly writing take up discursive tools derived from psychoanalytic theory, critiques of ideology and neoliberalism, theories of globalization and transnationalism, affect theory, Deleuzian philosophy, the phenomenology of ethics, and posthuman critiques. While these and other philosophical tools roughly correspond to contemporaneous trends taking place more broadly in film and media theory, their deployment has been closely tied to the particular concerns of Korean cinema. Today the student of Korean film will discover a wide range of critical models for thinking about these concerns, a range that is reflected in the essays that have been published in the Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema since its inception in 2007. In what follows, I would like to try and provide a rough overview of the critical trends that have helped us articulate the aesthetic and political aims of Korean cinema. Before we try and understand the past 10 years or so, it would be helpful to be reminded of some of the discourses deployed by scholars in the years leading up to 2007 so that we can make sense of how recent scholarship responds to them. The 1990s in Korean cinema cannot be separated from active measures taken by Kim Young-sam’s government to globalize and liberalize the national economy. American films flooded the local market and forced local production practices to adapt, particularly around approaches to funding and the relaxation of censorship. Meanwhile the rising importance of chaebol conglomerates in the 1980s provided opportunities for new forms of investment in film production, while the global spectacle of the Summer 1988 Olympics in Seoul seemed to inspire confidence that projects featuring local content could be fuelled by bigger budgets. Films such as Marriage Story (1992), Two Cops (1993), Sopyonje (1993), and Shiri (1999) did well at the box office and proved that this funding model could not only produce films in various genres, but also a return on investment. At the same time, other more challenging films began to address the question of historical trauma, inspiring scholars to take interest in this so-called New Wave in Korean cinema. Films such as Kuro Arirang (1989), Chilsu and Mansu (1988), and A Single Spark (1995) emerged as representatives of a new aesthetic of realism, particularly in the representation of the working class which is often disavowed by the commercial cinema. Psychoanalytic concepts such as mourning and melancholy quickly became important for explaining how these films disclose traumatic memory and reveal the fissures of national