Product Description

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 two decades has used the trope of masculinity to mirror the profound socio-political changes underway in Korea. Since 1980, the country has transformed from an insular, authoritarian culture into a democratic and cosmopolitan society. The transition has fueled anxiety about male identity and, as Kim shows, amid this tension, empowerment has been imagined as remasculinization. He argues that the brutality and violence ubiquitous in many Korean films is symptomatic of Korea's ongoing 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 between roughly 1980 and 2001. 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 self-sufficient subjects capable of destroying others.He discusses a range of movies from arthouse 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, Jung 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #761136 in Books
• Published on: 2004-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 344 pages

Review
"Kyung Hyun Kim's book is a roller coaster ride through modern South Korean masculinity in the cinema. At once unflinching and sympathetic, Kim's groundbreaking study traces Korean permutations on the gendered imagery of castration and rape and the impossible condition of postcolonial masculinity, caught between incommensurable values and demands."--Chris Berry, coeditor of Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia "This is an important book. There is a long tradition of scholarship investigating the representation of women in Asian cinema. This has included some consideration of Korean film, which more often than not finds the representations of Korean women wanting in one way or another. It took Kyung Hyun Kim's writing to turn my attention to the rich complexity of the men. His focus on masculinity--coinciding with the turn to the issue by major feminist film theorists--simply makes perfect sense. His is a particularly compelling contribution to the study of Asian cinema, but is simultaneously in dialogue with all manner of gender studies."--Abe Mark Nornes, University of Michigan