A cultural interpretation of the South Korean Independent Cinema Movement, 1975-2004
Nohchool Park
Language: English
Pages: 229
ISBN: 2:00143431
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A Cultural Interpretation of the South Korean Independent Cinema Movement, 1975-2004 examines the origin and development of the independent cinema movement in South Korea. The independent cinema movement refers to the films, film theories, film-related cultural activities that emerged as a way to document social realities, to advocate the freedom of artistic expression, and to represent the voices of marginalized social identities. My dissertation is the first attempt in English film scholarship on Korean cinema to explore the history of non-commercial filmmaking conducted in the name of cinema movement from 1970s to 2000s. The primary sources of investigation for this research include films, books, and archive materials. The hitherto unpublished memories and historical information obtained from the direct interviews with the independent filmmakers add originality to this dissertation. Investigating the independent cinema movement offers new perspectives on the cultural study of national cinema movement and the existing scholarship of South Korean cinema. This dissertation questions the dominant historiography regarding South Korean cinema which centers on the 1960s as the `golden age' of South Korean cinema and the 1990s as its renaissance. This position tends to dismiss the intervening decades of the 1970s and 80 as the `dark age' of the national cinema. Defying the conventional view, this study shows the presence of the new generation of filmmakers and young cinephiles who launched a series of new cinema movements from the 1970s onward. In this regard, the 1970s should be reinterpreted as the period that marked the genesis of the new wave consciousness in the history of South Korean cinema. Second, this study analyzes the history of the independent cinema movement as a dialogic process between domestic cultural discourse and foreign film theories. The filmmakers who initiated the independent cinema movement drew on Euro-American art cinemas, New Latin American Cinema, and the feminist films from the West to incorporate them into the domestic cultural context, producing the new concepts such as the Small Film, the People's Cinema and the woman's film. This fact challenges the national cinema discourse which presupposes that the history of South Korean cinema is established within the closed circuit of the national history and traditional aesthetics. My dissertation helps create an alternative perspective by which to see the construction of national cinema as fundamentally an interaction between indigenous popular discourses and international film new waves. Finally, this dissertation takes into consideration the active roles of the independent filmmakers. It examines the films and manuscripts produced by the filmmakers to see how they invented and elaborated their positions about cinema movement in the given cultural field in each period. It pays attention to the cultural field where the filmmakers are conditioned between what they wanted to visualize and what is externally granted. Viewing an established cultural field as a hegemonic construction, this study also investigates the way in which transformation occurs from one cultural field to another.
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films were not different from other genre conventions. Statistics from the Korean Film Institute in 1978 sum up the overall situation: out of 117 domestic films produced in that year, 48 films were melodramas, 37 films were action films, 12 were national policy films (anti-communism propaganda), and there were 12 literary films (the categories are not mutually exclusive).28 The majority of the films were either governmentsponsored or market-driven. To the Visual Age Group (1975-1978), the
See, Kathleen McHugh and Nancy Abelmann, South Korean Golden Age Melodrama (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005) 2 See, Shin Chi-Yun and Julian Stringer, New Korean Cinema (New York: New York University Press, 2005) 3 Jang Mi-Hee The Dictionary of Korean Women Filmmakers [ in Joo Jin-Suk, Jang Mi-Hee -Ran (Eds.), ] (Seoul: Sodo, 2001), p. 188. 4 Kim Kyung-Hyun, The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 208. 5 This table is made based on the
the individual and society. However, the existentialist theme might have been the only mode of expression allowed for the young film-makers who otherwise could not enunciate the social oppression of the day. Lastly, Doors (16mm, b/w, 12 min. 30 sec.) appears as a social commentary that pronounces the inhumane anonymity of urban life. A schoolboy is desperately looking for a rest room, stepping in and out of buildings he encounters on his way home. But every bathroom the boy is lucky to find is
womens independent films that, first, challenged the stereotypical description of women in mainstream commercial cinema and, secondly, endorsed womens issues in defiance of male-centrism in the independent cinema sector. In this sense, the womans film may claim itself as the independent cinema par excellence. The male-oriented historiography of the South Korean independent cinema movement has tended to dismiss the womans film as a satellite of the cinema movement, failing to see the uniqueness
Night before Strike and other works of labor literature nurtured her aspiration to become a labor activist.66 However, she did not involve herself in any type of labor movement after graduation, but worked for three years as a typist and reporter for the progressive journal The National Art (Minjok Yesul). Ryu says that the relinquishment of the initial vision resulted from her defeatism and disillusionment with organized activities.67 In 1998, at the age of 28, Ryu made a drastic career change