Asia’s Transformations, 49. New York; London: Routledge, 2016. xxii, 282 pp. (Illustrations.) US$145.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-415-70765-7.
This is one of the first monographs published in English that traces the South Korean (Korean hereafter) government policies and censorship on film production from the 1960s up to 2015. This volume makes a valuable supplement to the existing scholarship on the Korean film industry, as the majority of the existing scholarship in English on Korean cinema has focused on the transformation of the contemporary film industry since the 1990s (often characterised as the “New Korean Cinema” or “Korean Film Renaissance”), although as of late more attention has begun to be paid to the golden age of Korean cinema of the 1950s and 60s. Previous monographs on contemporary Korean cinema have explored how the Korean domestic film industry has blossomed in response to the US demand to deregulate the market, and subsequently yielded several internationally acknowledged directors, such as Bong Joon-ho, Hong Sang-soo, Park Chan-wook, Lee Chang-dong, and Kim Ki-duk.
The volume is divided into three parts, each of which is dedicated to one of three different eras—the 1960s, the 1970–80s and the1990s onward—with three or four chapters in each part discussing the changing governmental policies, salient industry practices, and various case studies. The authors further pay adequate attention to the transnational dimensions of the Korean film industry, by exploring production strategies between Korea and its neighbouring film industries—the industry’s attempt to adhere to governmental co-production guidelines by forging relationships with the Hong Kong industry, and the production of illicit adaptations of Japanese cinema (both of which are discussed in chapter 4), and the industry’s efforts to make inroads into the PRC’s opening market by offering co-financing and post production facilities (chapter 11).
Part I, on the golden age, shines the most in the volume, not only because less scholarship on the film policies of this era is available in English, but also because the chapters are more in conversation with the scholarship on other national cinemas, carefully advancing arguments with references. Such a case study as The Empty Dream (dir. Yu Hyon-mok, 1965), an adaptation of the Japanese film Daydream (dir. Takechi Tetsuji, 1964), exemplifies the ways in which the industry had been governed by diverse and, sometimes conflicting, forces: the governmental policies, the industry’s desire to carve out a niche market in the absence of Japanese cinema that was then officially banned in Korea, and the directors’ craving for artistic inspiration. The Empty Dreamdemonstrates well the government’s censorship of obscenity and the scapegoating of the directors who were vocal in criticizing the then government’s anti-communist ideology, as well as Yu’s experiment with aesthetic. The ambiguous status of the “literary film” (munye yŏnghwa) within the industry—an outcome of the industry’s effort to secure government subsidies as well as to earn aesthetic esteem from the public and critics—is nicely contrasted with European “art cinema” as a mode of practice. The adaptation of literary sources, often the work of well-established authors, well served the government’s desire to propagate cultural nationalism while providing an aesthetic safety net to be protected from controversies and criticisms.
Compared to part I, parts II and III engage less with the existing scholarship on both contemporary Korean and Western cinema. Some chapters suffer from the lack of adequate referencing, especially on corporate profiles and mergers (159; 164–166). Indeed, the 1970s and 80s were considered by many the “dark age” of Korean cinema, but the chapters do not provide insight into the directors and genres other than the decades’ usual suspects: Lee Jang-ho and the often discussed “hostess” films or “ero” films. If the youth (counter) culture, as the authors claim, had been such a key phenomenon that underlined the 1970s, they could further have explored how that culture had been negotiated through other genres, such as youth films or teen pictures, despite the government’s controls over cultural outlets and expressions.
The most interesting chapter in part III is its focus on women producers and directors (chapters 8 and 9), a topic that deserves a monograph in and of itself. The authors rightly acknowledge the significance of women producers and directors, yet could have further questioned and challenged the industry practice that still seems to be based on familial relationships and ties; many female producers and directors are married to Korean male directors (for instance, Choi Eun-hee/Shin Sang-ok; Shim Jae-myung/Lee Eun; Ahn So-hyun/Choi Dong-hun; Hong Ji-yong/Min Kyu-dong). To what extent, then, despite the changing Korean film industry in terms of gender, is it a challenge to penetrate the networking system that still governs the many facets of Korean society: hakyŏn(education background)-chiyŏn(region)-hyŏlyŏn (familial relationship)? What were some of the women producers’ struggles in securing finance, or in manoeuvring within the patriarchal industry? What were some of the creative inputs from the women producers on particular films? Chapter 9 on women directors also reads rather descriptively, without offering insights into the films themselves.
Throughout the volume, except a few cases (Yeongja’s Heyday, 146), no original titles are offered for Korean films. The English translations of some titles (Old Park, Pak sŏbang) and film movement (“Visual Age,” yŏngsang sidae) diverge from those more commonly circulated: Mr. Parkand the “Age of Images,” respectively. Plot summary, occasionally, does not accurately reflect a film’s content (e.g., The Guests of the Last Train). Some of the Korean names neither abide by the Revised Romanization nor follow commonly circulated transliterations, including two of the so-called troika of the 1980s—Jeong Yun-hi [sic. Jeong Yun-hui] and Jang Mi-hi [sic. Chang [Jang] Mi-hee] and the well-known founder of Samsung, Lee Byung-chull [sic.]. In total, the quality of part I does not carry through to parts II and III, which results in the final work being somewhat uneven.
Jinhee Choi
King’s College London, London, United Kingdom
pp. 604-606