Celluloid Democracy: Cinema and Politics in Cold War South Korea
Hieyoon Kim
University of California Press: 2023
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The past two decades of Korean cinema have been associated with celebratory accounts of its globalisation, as part of the booming international popularity of Korean pop culture, known as the Korean Wave (or Hallyu). Once associated with military dictatorship on the frontline of the Cold War in Asia, post-authoritarian South Korea has risen to become an entertainment powerhouse. Writing on Hallyu for two decades, I have often attributed this phenomenon to the broader trends of the country’s democratisation, which allowed for a release of creative energies in the 1990s. I based this argument on an assumption that the media industry was a commercial beneficiary of democratisation.
With Hieyoon Kim’s Celluloid Democracy: Cinema and Politics in Cold War South Korea, I am now seeing a more activist angle in South Korean cinema as part of the broader democratic social movement. Actors, auteurs, mise-en-scene, montages, dramatology, portrayals. These are some of the vocabularies found commonly in the areas of film studies that abstract the medium with its distinctive aesthetics and hierarchies. None of such vocabularies is found in Kim’s monograph.
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- Tags: Hieyoon Kim, Issue 34, Liew Kai Khiun, South Korea