In one of the first English-language studies of Korean cinema to
date, Kyung Hyun Kim shows how the New Korean Cinema of the past
quarter century has used the trope of masculinity to mirror the
profound sociopolitical changes in the country. Since 1980, South
Korea has transformed from an insular, authoritarian culture into a
democratic and cosmopolitan society. The transition has fueled
anxiety about male identity, and amid this tension, empowerment has
been imagined as remasculinization. Kim argues that the brutality
and violence ubiquitous in many Korean films is symptomatic of
Korea's on-going quest for modernity and a post-authoritarian
identity.
Kim offers in-depth examinations of more than a dozen of the
most representative films produced in Korea since 1980. In the
process, he draws on the theories of Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Zizek,
Gilles Deleuze, Rey Chow, and Kaja Silverman to follow the
historical trajectory of screen representations of Korean men from
self-loathing beings who desire to be controlled to subjects who
are not only self-sufficient but also capable of destroying others.
He discusses a range of movies from art-house films including "To
the Starry Island" (1993) and "The Day a Pig Fell into the Well"
(1996) to higher-grossing, popular films like "Whale Hunting"
(1984) and "Shiri" (1999). He considers the work of several Korean
auteurs--Park Kwang-su, Jang Sun-woo, and Hong Sang-su. Kim argues
that Korean cinema must begin to imagine gender relations that defy
the contradictions of sexual repression in order to move beyond
such binary struggles as those between the traditional and the
modern, or the traumatic and the post-traumatic.
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