Korean Cinema in Global Contexts: Postcolonial Phantom, Blockbuster and Trans-Cinema

BOOK LAUNCH, INTER-ASIA CULTURAL STUDIES SOCIETY, TRANS ASIA SCREEN CULTURE INSTITUTE

SOYOUNG KIM

Korean Cinema in Global

Contexts: Postcolonial Phantom, Blockbuster and

Trans-Cinema situates itself in the local, Inter-Asian, and transnational contexts by mobilizing the critical frameworks of feminism, postcolonial critique, and comparative film studies. It is attentive to the enmeshment of the cinematic, aesthetics, politics, and cultural history.

The state of emergency to the Entertainment Republic

• The sense of crisis conjured up by the contradictions in gae (開) (개화 openness to the west and the world) from the late 19^th century is overlaid with the prolonged political reign of a succession of states of emergency and the present kind of “entertainment republic” where the Korean wave( Hallyu) rules. It might seem odd at first to see an overdetermined leap of this kind from the state of emergency to the “entertainment republic,” but a critical inquiry into colonial and postcolonial Korean cinema requires an understanding of this seemingly incongruous trajectory

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From Pre-Cinematic Culture to Trans-Cinema

• Given Korea’s complex encounter with modernity, writings on Korean cinema inevitably require critical frameworks that are attentive to loss, absence, ruptures, fragments, noises, traces, and suspensions, which mark the perilous but surprisingly prosperous trajectory of Korean cinemas, including colonial cinema from 1910 to 1945, and the postcolonial cinema of South Korea from 1945 to the present. Part 1 of this book, “From Pre-Cinematic Culture to Trans-Cinema,” collects a series of essays addressing and understanding this problem.

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Table of Contents

• Part1. From Pre-Cinematic Culture to Trans-Cinema�
• 1. Cartography of Catastrophe: Pre-Colonial Surveys, Post-Colonial Vampires, and the Plight of Korean Modernity�2. The State of Fantasy in Emergency: Fantasmatic Others in South Korean Films�3. Modernity in Suspense: The Logic of Fetishism in Korean Cinema�4. Do Not Include Me in Your “Us”: Peppermint Candy and the Politics of Difference�5. Cine-Mania or Cinephilia: Film Festival and Identity Question�6. The Birth of the Local Feminist Sphere in the Global Era: Yeoseongjang and ʻTrans-cinema'

Part 2 Korean Cinema in a Trans-Asia Framework �

• 7. Inter-Asia Comparative Framework: Postcolonial Film Historiography in Taiwan and South Korea
• 8. Postcolonial Genre as Contact Zone: Hwalkuk and Action Cinema
• 9.Geopolitical Fantasy: Continental (Manchurian) Action Movies during the Cold War Era
• 10. Anagram of Inter-Asian Korean Film: The Case of My Sassy Girl
• 11. Comparative Film Studies: Detour, Demon of Comparison, and Dislocative Fantasy

Lost films, Phantom canons, Colonial archive

• With the primal scenes of early cinema illuminated, this book poses
• theoretical and historical inquiries into the cinematic culture known as
• Korean cinema, whose significant films from its founding moments are
• lost, even though the stories about them are abundant. These lost films –
• such as Arirang (1926) – have become urban legends and templates for the
• cinematic culture. In writing these essays, I have seen the retrieval of a handful of colonial films, which also contributed to my thoughts about the idea of suspension, loss, and re-writing.

Phantom cinema

• The situation compels one to think about how to theorize the postcolonial archive to make a phantom cinema conceptually visible. The phantom object, the lost canon Arirang ensures fantasmatic consistency not only for the south Korean society but for the two Koreas-South and North. It, however, exposes a hole, a rupture, and a discontinuity that encourages re-examining the episteme of cinema in Korea. Methodological speculation on “phantom cinema” has been a driving force in film studies.

Inter-Asia comparative framework

• “Inter-Asia Comparative Framework: Postcolonial Film Historiography in
• Taiwan and South Korea,” “Postcolonial Genre as Contact Zone: Hwalkuk and
• Action Cinema,” “Geopolitical Fantasy: Continental (Manchurian) Action
• Movies during the Cold War Era,” and “Comparative Film Studies: Detour,
• Demon of Comparison and Dislocative Fantasy” use the emergent framework
• of comparative film studies to illuminate the unresolved site of the colonial
• cinema of Joseon (Korea) under Japanese rule.

Comparative film studies

• They accomplish this by mobilizing terms such as “detour and “dislocative fantasy,” departing from the usual mode of the demon of comparison to situate and conceptualize Korean cinema in inter-Asian, trans-Asian and transnational comparative film studies.

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易trans

• In 2000, I set up the Trans: Asia Screen Culture Institute at Korea
• National University of Arts. “Trans” in the name points to crisscrossing and
• multilayered signifying processes of translation and transformation. In the
• process, “trans” transforms itself from being a prefix to become a noun and
• a verb. I chose the Sino-Korean term 역 (易)to communicate this multitude
• of meanings. “The Birth of the Local Feminist Sphere in the Global Era:
• Yeoseongjang and ‘Trans-Cinema’” was written with “trans-cinema” thrown
• into relief.

Trans- cinema

• “trans-cinema” as a counterstrategy to the
• operations of legitimation, de-legitimation and exclusion that permeate
• the dominant discourses, institutional practices and habits of signification
• underlying the formation of canons and archives, cinematic and otherwise.
• In particular, “trans-cinema” articulates modes of cultural production as
• alternatives to the Korean blockbuster, often by reinhabiting the various
• digital communication devices most closely identified with the global
• capitalism essential to the blockbuster’s hegemony

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Yeoseongjang (women’s sphere) and trans –cinema

• Response to a marked proliferation of different forms
• Of feminist production in South Korea. Feminist websites provide a case of
• Activism in the way that they are linked to both existing and newly formed
• Feminist publishing houses, street protests, performances, and women’s
• film festivals. I propose the use of the terms “yeoseongjang” (which I take
• to mean “women’s sphere” doubly resonant with public space 場and mourning 葬 )

I’ll be seeing her: Women in Korean Cinema, part of Women’s History Trilogy documentary

Ana Inn: Harvesting Light Trans- cinema as Public media passage

• Photosynthesis (harvesting light) of migrant workers from North Korea in Kamchatka, the Soviet Union, in the mid-1950s. Coex-mall, K-Pop square
• Post-Exile trilogy piece

Phantom and trans-cinema

Trans-cinema continues

• In writing about a troubling “national” cinema in inter,trans-Asian
• and global contexts, what I have tried to keep in mind over the past fifteen years is the possibilities of “cinema otherwise” and the geopolitical “fantasy of elsewhere” that Korean cinema offers in its continual states of emergency.
• This work has been a search for a heterotopia where the wind blows to open a breathing space against all the odds of colonial rule, authoritarian regimes, fascism, partition, and the manic capitalist drive in a condensed mode. I can only hope that this book might engage its readers to envision it with me