Study Document
Korean Cinema and the Renaissance Heritage and Hollywood Essay
Pages:2 (603 words)
Subject:World Studies
Topic:Korean Culture
Document Type:Essay
Document:#23582627
Renaissance of Korean National Cinema' as a Terrain of Negotiation and Contention between the Global and the Local: Analyzing two Korean Blockbusters, Shiri (1999) and JSA (2000)" by Sung Kyung Kim
This article analyzes the state of nationalistic cinema in Korea as it borrows film trends from Hollywood in order to carve out a better foothold among Korean audiences, who have a taste for Hollywood fare but still want to see local sentiment expressed on screen. Thus the two blockbusters Shiri and JSA look Hollywood but feel Korean. This means that the films are working on several levels to affect Korean audiences and are being labeled as part of a Renaissance in Korean filmmaking.
Kim looks at the way nationalistic sentiment plays a part in Korean cinema by serving as an underlying guide in the overall movement and sense of the story and its moral. Animosity towards the West after Korea's financial crisis of the 1990s and the relaxation of censorship in film, allowed audiences to embrace its cultural cinema, not only because it reflected "nationalistic sense" but also because it had a Hollywood feel to it.
Kim also looks at the textual dimensions and the specific enjoyment that Korean audiences gain from Shiri and JSA. JSA is a film about friends from North and South Korea and so is a story that touches on Korean history and culture. Shiri is also about the war between North and South and focuses on a love affair between two secret agents. Both films deal with this split in Korean society so are dear to the Korean people -- but both also embrace the Hollywood spectacle style so are also very popular in Korea. This accounts for the reason audiences made both films into blockbusters: the texts reflect real Korean issues while the style reflects the greater global trends in movie-making with Hollywood flair.
"Do Not Include Me in Your 'Us': Peppermint Candy and the Politics of Difference" by Kim Soyoung
Peppermint Candy (2000) is a film that deals with the Gwangju Uprising, a part of Korean history, but as Soyoung argues the film's plot reflects male trauma and not the "general" trauma of general Korean society. It obfuscates the trauma experienced by women and promotes the male gendered trauma of the film as a "progressive" representation of history. Thus, the film acts as gendered example of political historiography, a retelling…
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Peppermint Candy (2000) is a film that deals with the Gwangju Uprising, a part of Korean history, but as Soyoung argues the film's plot reflects male trauma and not the "general" trauma of general Korean society. It obfuscates the trauma experienced by women and promotes the male gendered trauma of the film as a "progressive" representation of history. Thus, the film acts as gendered example of political historiography, a retelling or repainting of history that reflects current political ideologies.
Moreover, the film also negates the difference between victims and criminal perpetrators of the trauma by utilizing a "homosocial" narrative that exploits identification through spectacle and encourages sameness in terms of social feeling. By doing so, the film denies the complexity of the Uprising and the complex feelings and traumas associated with it, adopting a simplistic narrative and viewpoint that is vigorously male-centered and politically progressive, to the point that the female experience vanishes from history and alternative ways of viewing this portion of history are dismissed.
Thus, through a method of using historical material for cinematic pleasure, the film cuts up the actual events of the Uprising and uses it to propagate a vision that will support the current ideological interests of a certain segment of society, while hurting other segments through its neglect of their own experiences. The modes of cinematic representation thus utilized offer a "decoded form of totalitarian theory" in order to subjugate the viewer's own sense of himself or herself and his or her sense of history and how each should view the past. It purports to speak for all the audience but in actuality only speaks for a very specific portion of it.