The explosive rise of the so-called Hallyu, or “Korean wave,” the term used to describe the popularity of Korean music, cinema, and TV dramas in the East Asian market, seemingly caught everyone by surprise, not only the academic specialists but also the Asia-savvy journalists, “industry insiders,” and trend-conscious consumers in Europe and North America. This has been especially true of Korean cinema: many non-Korean observers are stunned and mystified not only by the artistic prestige and fan enthusiasm it enjoys abroad, but also by the overwhelming strength of local films at the local box office, routinely besting Hollywood blockbusters.
Yet, even a casual examination of its history shows that its current success is not a fluke. Korean cinema had already enjoyed its “golden age” from the late ‘50s to mid-‘60s, during which many artistically ambitious works were produced, that could have brought international recognition in due time. Unfortunately, in subsequent decades Korean cinema was brought down by the combined effects of oppressive censorship, the onslaught of new media including TV, and the short-sightedness of the film industry itself. As the book's title, The South Korean Film Renaissance, indicates, Jinhee Choi is well aware of this past history. She provides a comprehensive overview of the evolution of the Korean film industry in the last two decades, interspersed with in-depth analyses of certain titles, clustered around marketing strategies, journalistic designations, and consumer discourse: domestic “blockbusters,” gangster comedies, “teen pics,” romantic tear-jerkers, and “high-quality” (or as the Korean media calls them, “well-made”) films.
Choi's book possesses many strong points. First, it includes in its discussion the kind of films that, to paraphrase film critic Richard Corliss, are actually enjoyed by the locals rather than by foreign film critics and festival organizers, and for that reason tend to remain outside purview of usual scholarly works: Whispering Corridors (1999), My Wife is a Gangster (2001), Marrying the Mafia (2002), and My Tutor Friend (2003), among others. Second, she brings out into the open the complex patterns of interface among artistic ambitions, commercial considerations, and strategic thinking that operate at all levels of production, consumption, and global marketing of Korean cinema. In doing so, she avoids veering into extreme auteur-ism that exaggerates individual initiatives of the élite directors or excessive particularism that reify “Korean-ness” based on unhelpful concepts like han (“resentment”). Without overstating her case, Choi demonstrates how top-level Korean filmmakers were able to adapt select foreign film genres and styles, including Hollywood blockbusters, Hong Kong neo-noir, and Japanese romantic drama, to satisfy the demands of local consumers while maintaining their artistic integrity. In other words, she makes it clear that the strength of contemporary Korean cinema comes not from its obsessive concern with the unique traits of “Korean culture” (as evident in those works aspiring to the status of “national cinema”) but from its close interaction with diverse non-Korean cultures as well as global commercial trends.
Theoretically, Choi's work is heavily indebted to David Bordwell's Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). Her analyses of specific Korean films yield many fresh insights, as in when she discusses the ingeniously contrived narrative structure of Park Chan-wook's JSA (2000) or the emotional effects generated by skillful deployment of mise-en-scène in Bong Joon-ho's Memories of Murder (2003) and Kim Ji-woon's Tale of Two Sisters (2003). Her refusal to subscribe to the conventional division between “art-house” and “commercial” films is an important element of her astute analyses of these films. Choi, for instance, rightly acknowledges that in the works of such directors as Park, Bong, and Kim, “[mise-en-scène] provides as much spectacle as an explosion or a fistfight,” and, conversely, “a well-edited fight scene can and should be appreciated as much as a meticulously drawn [mis-en-scène] (p. 163).” Likewise, her discussion of Hong Sang-soo' oeuvre is, as far as I know, the first to convincingly demonstrate that one of the keys to their appeal is Hong's superb command of various narrative strategies such as flashbacks, manipulation of sound, and parallelism.
Choi's interpretations of a few other films and filmmakers are not as satisfactory. She is right when she claims Park Chan-wook's Old Boy (2003) is not really about “Korean experience” at all (as Kim So-yŏng has already noted), but given the global impact of Park's “revenge trilogy” on industry professionals, critics, and film fans, lack of any insight beyond the recognition of the film's aesthetic sophistication is rather disappointing. Similarly, while I wholeheartedly agree with her assessment of Kim Ki-duk's Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…Spring (2003) that its Buddhist imprimatur is “a mere evocation of generic Asian-ness” (p. 180), Choi stops short of tying the film to Kim's pursuit of international recognition and the strategies he has adopted to construct the image of an artist unappreciated by his own countrymen. In truth, there are not many intrinsic reasons for Park Chan-wook and Kim Ki-duk to be grouped together in the same chapter, other than that these two belong to the category of “Extreme Asian” filmmakers, drawn to “aesthetics of cruelty” (pp. 174–175) in the eyes of Euro-American observers. In Korea, however, these two filmmakers cater to different audiences and their commercial strategies (not to mention artistic aims) are as different from one another as, say, David Fincher's is from Lars von Trier's.
If anything, Choi could have explored further some intriguing developments in contemporary Korean cinema involving indigenization and transmutation of film genres, especially film noir, science fiction, and horror. What would be her explanations, for instance, for the spectacular failures of big-budget science fiction film projects such as Resurrection of the Little Match Girl (2002)? And for the overwhelming success (eight million tickets sold) of a thoroughly generic and artless SF-monster film, D-War (2007), the debates on which elicit the kind of reactions from its defenders that recall, in its passion and rhetorical intensity, those on North Korean human rights or on evasion of military draft by celebrities? Choi also relies a little too much on the terms and categories such as “386 generation,” or “Extreme Asia,” that are, like the American phrase “political correctness,” really media inventions or rhetorical devices designed to evoke certain political connotations and are not suitable to be used as heuristic concepts.
These minor caveats notwithstanding, Choi's well-informed study makes a significant contribution toward our understanding of the rise of the contemporary Korean cinema. Devoid of excess scholarly jargon and filled with many incisive observations, The South Korean Film Renaissance, along with Darcy Paquet's New Korean Cinema: Breaking the Waves (London: Wallflower Press, 2010), should be a prime candidate for consideration as an undergraduate textbook for a Korean cinema or popular culture course. It is strongly recommended to not only academics and students but also to general readers interested in contemporary Korean cinema.
