Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kyung Hyun Kim is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Irvine.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

"This is an important book. There is a long tradition of scholarship investigating the representation of women in Asian cinema. This has included some consideration of Korean film, which more often than not finds the representations of Korean women wanting in one way or another. It took Kyung Hyun Kim's writing to turn my attention to the rich complexity of the men. His focus on masculinity--coinciding with the turn to the issue by major feminist film theorists--simply makes perfect sense. His is a particularly compelling contribution to the study of Asian cinema, but is simultaneously in dialogue with all manner of gender studies."--Abe Mark Nornes, University of Michigan

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

THE REMASCULINIZATION OF KOREAN CINEMA

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments.................................................................................................................................................ixIntroduction: Hunting for the Whale.............................................................................................................................11 At the Edge of a Metropolis in A Fine, Windy Day and Green Fish...............................................................................................312 Nowhere to Run: Disenfranchised Men on the Road in The Man with Three Coffins, Sopyonje, and Out to the World.................................................523 "Is This How the War Is Remembered?": Violent Sex and the Korean War in Silver Stallion, Spring in My Hometown, and The Taebaek Mountains.....................774 Post-Trauma and Historical Remembrance in A Single Spark and A Petal..........................................................................................1075 Male Crisis in the Early Films of Park Kwang-su...............................................................................................................1366 Jang Sun-woo's Three "F" Words: Familism, Fetishism, and Fascism..............................................................................................1627 Too Early/Too Late: Temporality and Repetition in Hong Sang-su's Films........................................................................................2038 Lethal Work: Domestic Space and Gender Troubles in Happy End and The Housemaid................................................................................2339 "Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves": Transgressive Agents, National Security, and Blockbuster Aesthetics in Shiri and Joint Security Area.....................259Notes...........................................................................................................................................................277Select Filmography of Major Directors of the New Korean Cinema..................................................................................................313Index...........................................................................................................................................................321

Chapter One

Chapters 1 through 4 trace the social and psychic origins of films that deal with historical trauma and post-traumatic recoveries. This section offers textual readings of the select works that best express the transmutations of historical genres that engage this process of recuperation. Not only are these works representative of Korean cinema's foray into art-house film festivals during the last two decades of the twentieth century, but they are also films that have stimulated local commercial interest. Again, the objective, by way of closely examining the categories of urban dramas, road movies, war films, and finally films of social concerns, is to invoke how even in these representative films of the New Korean Cinema, the narrativization of the society's transformation hinges on the narcissistic recasting of masculine figures. In these films, male sexual desires brush up against historical and social issues that place men in difficult positions. In all of the film categories explored in this section, there is a sight of horror that invokes the traumatic losses of pastoral communities (urban dramas), homes (road movie), faithful wives and asexual mothers (Korean War films), and memory and sanity (social problem films). Men are constantly threatened by the state, by the law, and by the erasure of their origin. Amalgamated, these stories of disfiguration and even self-immolation (in the case of Chon T'ae-il in A Single Spark) consistently produce inefficacious conditions in which the central protagonists are robbed of their manhood. The post-traumatic recoveries will only be complete once their emasculations are properly reconciled.

The post-traumatic narrative or recovery is intricately tied to the genre conventions of melodrama. All of the films discussed in this section lament the disintegration of the family. Through this loss, which palpably desires some form of reunion at the end of each narrative, the films demonstrate their inability to depart completely from the conventions of genre. "The genre film is a structure," as Thomas Sobchack remarked, "that is opposed to experimentation, novelty, or tampering with the given order of things." The New Korean Cinema, while increasingly edgy about traditional forms, values, and themes, also attests to the difficulty of departing from the restrictions of genre altogether in an industry that had no vital government support. Korean filmmakers had to aim for the creation of art cinema without the aid of public subsidy. The New Korean Cinema was born not because of but in spite of the role of the government, which had blacklisted and censored many of the featured filmmakers such as Park Kwang-su and Jang Sun-woo. All of the films discussed in this book are works that had virtually no financial contribution from sources other than for-profit businesses. Although the Korean government since 1999 has provided subsidies that have led to art film production grants, this is only a recent change. The New Korean Cinema had to strictly play within the commercial rules of an open marketplace (which meant competing with Hollywood films distributed freely across the nation) and could not completely abandon the conventions of popular filmmaking. Either with great subtlety or irony, the films had to negotiate with the codes of genre, heightening the tensions and catharsis of familial fragmentation, loss of homes, and alienation of individual subjects. But while the hope for reclamation of home and recovery of individual persisted in these stories, the endings desperately fell short of reunions, love, and overcoming life's obstacles. The New Korean Cinema engineered a master narrative that engages with trauma-a narrative trajectory where the protagonist is left with a wound so inerasable that even the spectacular and animated endings of melodrama cannot fully recuperate him from his emotional wreckage.

The strong impulse to reclaim home-fragmented because of the violence produced by national history-did not disengage the hegemonic, masculine tradition. The colonial and military occupation by Japan and the United States throughout the twentieth century weakened and besieged both Korean men and women, but, while women are largely left outside the scope of the thematic concerns of films, male trauma emerges as the centerpiece that drives the narratives. The primary motif in all of the ten films highlighted in this section, even in films where the stories pivot on the lives of women (Sopyonje, Silver Stallion, and A Petal), is the frail male whose lack and disenfranchisement must remain as the central concern for both the narratives and the female protagonists. The recovery of the self remains as the objective in these films, but, as argued in each of the chapters, the subjectivity reconstituted or denied in the end is the man's alone.

The birth of a "new" Korean cinema is stretched over two decades. While some of the most significant films were produced from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, the productivity of films with social relevance-despite its decline-continued well into the 1990s. Also, the primary...