Urban Landscapes And National Visions In Post Millennial South Korean Cinema

This book explores South Korean cinema's inimitable relationship with the urban landscape and identifies the ways in which Seoul is utilised as a celluloid canvas, national artefact and, above all else, a distinctive cultural backdrop. Using five different approaches to urban space, from five distinctive and contrasting theoretical perspectives, Urban Landscapes in Post-Millennial South Korean Cinema investigates and seeks to understand why the cinematic representation, identity and presence of Seoul have been central to the preservation and recognition of the South Korean film industry as an independent, autonomous and nationally unique institution. Gemma Ballard currently works as a lecturer in the School of East Asian Studies (SEAS) at the University of Sheffield, UK. Her research background is in Film Studies and Film Theory. She is particularly interested in discussions around national and transnational cinemas, cinematic landscapes, genre theory and narratives of postmodernity. In 2021 and 2022, she presented her work at the prestigious International South Korean Women's Cinema Conference and the Sheffield Centre for Research in Film (SCRIF).

This book explores South Korean cinema’s inimitable relationship with the urban landscape and identifies the ways in which Seoul is utilised as a celluloid canvas, national artefact and, above all else, a distinctive cultural backdrop. Using five different approaches to urban space, from five distinctive and contrasting theoretical perspectives, Urban Landscapes in Post-Millennial South Korean Cinema investigates and seeks to understand why the cinematic representation, identity and presence of Seoul have been central to the preservation and recognition of the South Korean film industry as an independent, autonomous and nationally unique institution.

A wide-ranging analysis of modern South Korean cinema.

As the two billion YouTube views for “Gangnam Style” would indicate, South Korean popular culture has begun to enjoy new prominence on the global stage. Yet, as this timely new study reveals, the nation’s film industry has long been a hub for transnational exchange, producing movies that put a unique spin on familiar genres, while influencing world cinema from Hollywood to Bollywood. Movie Migrations is not only an introduction to one of the world’s most vibrant national cinemas, but also a provocative call to reimagine the very concepts of “national cinemas” and “film genre.” Challenging traditional critical assumptions that place Hollywood at the center of genre production, Hye Seung Chung and David Scott Diffrient bring South Korean cinema to the forefront of recent and ongoing debates about globalization and transnationalism. In each chapter they track a different way that South Korean filmmakers have adapted material from foreign sources, resulting in everything from the Manchurian Western to The Host’s reinvention of the Godzilla mythos. Spanning a wide range of genres, the book introduces readers to classics from the 1950s and 1960s Golden Age of South Korean cinema, while offering fresh perspectives on recent favorites like Oldboy and Thirst. Perfect not only for fans of Korean film, but for anyone curious about media in an era of globalization, Movie Migrations will give readers a new appreciation for the creative act of cross-cultural adaptation.

Rights advocacy has become a prominent facet of South Korea’s increasingly transnational motion picture output, especially following the 1998 presidential inauguration of Kim Dae-jung, a former political prisoner and victim of human rights abuses who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000. Today it is not unusual to see a big-budget production about the pursuit of social justice or the protection of civil liberties contending for the top spot at the box office. With that cultural shift has come a diversification of film subjects, which range from undocumented workers’ rights to the sexual harassment experienced by women to high-school bullying to the struggles among people with disabilities to gain inclusion within a society that has transformed significantly since winning democratic freedoms three decades ago. Combining in-depth textual analyses of films such as Bleak Night, Okja, Planet of Snail, Repatriation, and Silenced with broader historical contextualization, Movie Minorities offers the first English-language study of South Korean cinema’s role in helping to galvanize activist social movements across several identity-based categories.

Korean cinema as industry, art form, and cultural product.

South Korean Film: Critical and Primary Sources is an essential three-volume reference collection representing three distinct phases in the development of South Korean national cinema, foregrounding how epochal characteristics inform the way in which the national cinema represents the penetrating thematic concern of auteur-ship, genre, spectatorship, gender, and nation, as well as the way in which these themes find expression in distinct visual styles and forms.

This book presents a comprehensive analysis of the work of twenty-one of the most well-known South Korean films of the twenty-first century from eight major directors.