Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema最新文献

{"title":"Daehan neo-realism and the conundrum of aimless Confucianism in Yu Hyun-Mok’s Obaltan (1961)","authors":"Aaron Han Joon Magnan-Park","doi":"10.1080/17564905.2017.1368138","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17564905.2017.1368138","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Yu Hyun-Mok’s Obaltan (1961) is a paragon of what I will term Daehan Neo-realism, which is a South Korean version of Italian Neo-realism. Daehan Neo-realism introduces a homophonic and homonymic linguistic play involving three distinct types of Korean daehan: (1) 大韓 (the great ethnic Han Koreans), (2) 大漢 (the great ethnic Han Chinese), and (3) 大恨 (the great eternal woe). The goal is to reimagine 大韓 without 大漢 or 大恨. The resulting Confucian conundrum arises when the capitalist rule of profit supplants the Confucian rule of virtue. The film’s critique is directed against the evaporating virtuousness of President Rhee Syngman as he abandons democracy in favour of greater authoritarian rule. This creates a scenario where the resulting aimless Confucianism transforms each South Korean into an obaltan (aimless bullet).","PeriodicalId":37898,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema","volume":"9 1","pages":"106 - 90"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17564905.2017.1368138","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44099116","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Introduction","authors":"C. Berry, Jinhee Choi","doi":"10.1080/17564905.2017.1368134","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17564905.2017.1368134","url":null,"abstract":"This special issue of The Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema both celebrates and continues the legacy of the Korean Screen Culture Conference. The Korean Screen Culture Conference held at King’s College London between June 2 and 4 in 2016 (Figure 1), was only the fifth-year event since the one-day workshop, ‘Korean Film: Years of Radical Change’, hosted at the School of Oriental and African Studies in 2012. As Andrew Jackson sketches in his introduction to the special issue (Volume 8, no. 1) of this journal, despite the short history of the conference it has indeed attracted a wide range of interest from media and Korean studies scholars and students not only in the UK and Europe but across the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. As will be discussed below, the topics and various threads that ran throughout the conference showcase the expansion of not only the object and scope of study, but also the methods employed. In 2016s conference, the number of panels reached twelve with over forty presenters, a great increase from the previous year of seven panels with twenty six presentations. We appreciate the continuing support from the Korea Foundation, without which the conference would not have been feasible. Those funds helped us to support speakers who otherwise would not have been able to attend, and this was especially important for the substantial number of research students who participated. Speakers came from as far afield as New Zealand and Ghana. The School of Arts and Humanities and the Department of Film Studies at King’s College London further granted generous support. The Korean Cultural Centre in London kindly collaborated with the conference organizers for this event, holding a very convivial reception that was a memorable social highlight to match the academic ones. The papers given at the 2016 Korean Screen Cultures Conference featured continuing strength in core areas of Screen Studies, such as analysis of classic films and auteurfocused projects. But they also demonstrated the diversification of objects of study and approaches that has been a characteristic of the KSCC all along. These two tendencies are reflected in the selection of articles for this special issue. The focus on classics and auteurs is evident in the inclusion of the essays by Hee-seung Irene Lee (University of Auckland), Andrew D. Jackson (Monash University), and Aaron Han Joon Magnan-Park (University of Hong Kong), which focus on Hong Sang-soo’s Right Now, Wrong Then, Lee Gwang-mo’s (Lee Kwangmo) Spring in My Hometown and Yu Hyun-Mok’s Obaltan respectively. The diversification of objects and approaches appears in the essays by Julia Keblinska (University of California, Berkeley) on the television drama Reply 1994 and by Antonetta","PeriodicalId":37898,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema","volume":"9 1","pages":"85 - 89"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17564905.2017.1368134","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48317436","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Mediated Nostalgia: touching the past in Reply 1994","authors":"Julia Keblinska","doi":"10.1080/17564905.2017.1368191","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17564905.2017.1368191","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT ‘Mediated Nostalgia: Touching the Past in Reply 1994’ argues that the aesthetic and thematic treatment of television technology in the nostalgic 2013 South Korean television drama Reply 1994 puts viewers productively in ‘touch’ with the past. The high definition aesthetics of the 2013 series and the low definition image of 1990s television and other domestic media featured in Reply 1994 produce viewing modes that oscillate between closeness and distance. While watching, the viewer enters a sensory dialogue with the medium of television in its dual guise as a cathode ray tube monitor and flat screen. The sensory interaction with memories of the recent past that materialize in her present disturbs the linearity of cosmological time with the time of mediated phenomenological experience. This nostalgic dialogue is not a trivial consumption of meaningless images but a powerful interaction with the past which produces a new version of history about politics and about media. By putting analogue and digital television images in dialogue, Reply 1994 gestures toward a new narrative of the media archaeology of convergence culture and a new mode of understanding contemporary South Korean history.","PeriodicalId":37898,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema","volume":"9 1","pages":"124 - 140"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17564905.2017.1368191","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45343470","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The ethics of becoming a subject // A reading of Hong Sang-soo’s Right Now, Wrong Then (2015)","authors":"Hee-seung Irene Lee","doi":"10.1080/17564905.2017.1368146","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17564905.2017.1368146","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Hong Sang-soo’s recent film, Right Now, Wrong Then (2015), features a film director who idly spends a day in a strange city and meets a female artist whom he instantly falls for. Hong constructs an interesting template for this banal encounter: the film’s narrative is evenly divided into two parts, only to repeat the same story twice without any causal connection. The juxtaposition of two versions of the same story, however, weaves a web of minute, insignificant differences the couple improvises in each version. The film’s parallel structure allows viewers to closely observe the protagonists through fissures created between fantasy, desire and act. Drawing upon Jacques Lacan’s theorization of man as a divided subject and his or her ethical dimension that emerges at the moment of one’s unflinching manifestation of desire through an act, the article will attempt to engage with Hong’s film as an attempt to seek a new ground for human desire. The following discussion will address how the film instantiates Lacan’s definition of the ethical ground for a divided yet desiring subject, which he articulates in a rather confronting question: ‘Have you acted in conformity with the desire that is in you?’ [1992, 314. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII. Translated by Dennis Porter. New York: W. W. Norton & Company].","PeriodicalId":37898,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema","volume":"9 1","pages":"141 - 154"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17564905.2017.1368146","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60398814","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Mŏkpang: pay me and I’ll show you how much I can eat for your pleasure","authors":"A. L. Bruno, Somin Chung","doi":"10.1080/17564905.2017.1368150","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17564905.2017.1368150","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article analyses the production and consumption of live-streaming personal broadcasts, focusing on their commercial and economic aspects, as well as their interactivity with their users. Mŏkpang is a term that refers to ‘eating broadcasts’, in which content creators, called Broadcasting Jockeys (BJs), televise themselves while eating. Based on a case study involving in-depth interviews with three BJs and a shop owner, this paper examines how the BJs achieve their success (attracting a huge audience and earning a high income), and how their performances interact with the audience and the pay items purchased on the digital platform. We argue that the pay items, especially the ‘star-balloon’, have unique cultural meanings beyond capitalism. We then consider the cultural context of the viewers’ behaviour during the performance. This essay shows that live-streaming personal broadcasts are critical vehicles for analysing these practices – their production and consumption – in a digital space constructed via and beyond digital technology. In particular, mŏkpang attests to the way multi-layered interactions mediated by commercial devices are taking place with the cooperation of dining businesses, viewers, and BJs. The article also aims to inquire into the meanings of mŏkpang’s commercial and economic aspects, exploring how and why they build and strengthen their relationship with the imagined community. Finally, it speculates that mŏkpang is part of a network of communities that actually accommodate recent social and cultural needs in Korea.","PeriodicalId":37898,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema","volume":"9 1","pages":"155 - 171"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17564905.2017.1368150","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43711124","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Korean screen cultures: interrogating cinema, TV, music and online games","authors":"Jieun Lee","doi":"10.1080/17564905.2017.1289635","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17564905.2017.1289635","url":null,"abstract":"elsewhere. It also seems Roquet’s argument is more of an addendum to existing works on biopower and affect rather than significantly furthering these discussions. Even so, he does draw the reader’s attention to a class of media often ignored by media critics and a cultural context that remains peripheral to English-speaking scholars. For scholars particularly interested in Japanese or East Asian media theory and history, Ambient Media is useful in its historicization of ambient media in Japan from roughly the 1970s onwards. This book may also be relevant to North American scholars by touching on U.S. specific trends that intersect with similar aesthetic and critical movements in Japan, without conflating the two contexts. Moreover, concepts the author introduces, such as ‘ambient media’, ‘ambient subjectivation’, and ‘subtractivism’, can find application in other areas, particularly for scholars interested in new and emerging media. Others may find use value in Roquet’s incorporation of music and sound theory in the book, which is in keeping with an intensified focus on the audible dimension of audiovisual media in recent years. Overall, Roquet provides a quick and informative read that has surprisingly broad application despite its narrow focus, and may appeal to readers from multiple disciplinary angles.","PeriodicalId":37898,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema","volume":"9 1","pages":"82 - 84"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17564905.2017.1289635","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42635946","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Time in the camptown: aesthetics for ethics in American Alley (2008)","authors":"Namhee Han","doi":"10.1080/17564905.2017.1309621","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17564905.2017.1309621","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Films about camptown women have been marginalized in the studies of Korean cinema, despite their significance as immediate responses to the Korean War and critiques on the collaboration between the local governments and America’s global military power. From the mid-1950s to the early 1990s, a number of narrative films were set in base towns, a few of which featured camptown women as protagonists. After the 2000s, there was a marked shift towards independent documentary films. Among recent examples in this field, American Alley (Amerikan aelli, Kim Dong-ryeong, 2008) stands out to us because it explores temporal aesthetics in terms of documentary ethics. In this essay, I first discuss how American Alley as a human rights film challenges media sensationalism and voyeurism, examining the previous representations of camptown women. Second, I investigate the contentious dynamics between aesthetics and ethics in documentary filmmaking and suggest engaging in Emmanuel Levinas’ ideas of ethics, time, and image. Finally, by analyzing three temporalities that articulate camptown women’ experiences, I argue for the possibility of temporal aesthetics in addressing camptown violence and abuse and in ensuring an ethical relationship between the filmmaker, the subject, and the viewer.","PeriodicalId":37898,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema","volume":"9 1","pages":"47 - 60"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17564905.2017.1309621","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46882910","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Contesting images of gender: reexamining Mizoguchi Kenji’s Sisters of the Gion for the twenty-first century","authors":"Kelly Hansen","doi":"10.1080/17564905.2017.1292098","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17564905.2017.1292098","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Japan today is known for one of the lowest levels of gender equality in the developed world. Orientalist perceptions of feminine beauty, both domestically and internationally, frequently contribute to this gender gap by privileging nostalgic images of women who conform to premodern values. This study examines Mizoguchi Kenji’s well-known 1936 film Sisters of the Gion (Gion no shimai), a work that has gained a new audience in the twenty-first century through release on DVD. I propose that re-examining this film as a loose adaptation of Aleksandr Kuprin’s portrayal of prostitution in his early twentieth- century Russian novel Yama: The Pit (1909–1915) can expose these contesting images of nostalgia and gender inequality. Centered on the geisha world of the 1930s, Sisters of the Gion depicts the struggles faced by women whose existence depends on the whims of men. When considered alongside Yama, the film becomes not simply a depiction of an outdated geisha system, but a broader statement of the inability of women to attain any degree of autonomy in a world where premodern patriarchal values continue to govern social norms.","PeriodicalId":37898,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema","volume":"9 1","pages":"1 - 13"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17564905.2017.1292098","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49172643","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A long way home: the rhetoric of family and familiarity in Yang Yong-hi’s Pyongyang Trilogy","authors":"Shota Ogawa","doi":"10.1080/17564905.2017.1289296","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17564905.2017.1289296","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Nothing is more emblematic of the increasingly transnational and decentralized conditions for filmmaking in Japan today than Yang Yong-hi’s meteoric rise from a freelance video journalist to a leading minority director in Japan. In just over seven years, Yang has collected awards in film festivals including Berlin, Sundance, and Yamagata with two documentary features and one narrative fiction that she completed with Japanese and South Korean funding. But the cosmopolitan reception of Yang’s works belies the fact that all her works to date have singularly focused on the obstinacy of the national border that has divided her family: her brothers in Pyongyang and her parents in Osaka. This study offers an analysis of Yang’s ‘Pyongyang Trilogy’ comprising Dear Pyongyang (2005), Sona, the Other Myself (2009) and Our Homeland (2012), with a particular emphasis on her creative uses of familial framing, that is to say, snapshots, home videos, and family melodrama. I examine the ways in which ‘family’ functions as a critical third space outside the national paradigm of the diaspora discourse, on the one hand, and the post-sovereign paradigm of independent cinema, on the other hand.","PeriodicalId":37898,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema","volume":"9 1","pages":"30 - 46"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17564905.2017.1289296","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41621993","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Queer Korean cinema, national others, and making of queer space in Stateless Things (2011)","authors":"U-sang Kim","doi":"10.1080/17564905.2017.1296803","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17564905.2017.1296803","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article examines the spatial politics and aesthetics of queer Korean cinema through a close reading of Stateless Things (Jultak dongsi, Kim Kyung-mook, 2011). The focus of this article is twofold. Firstly, it explores the way in which the film experiments with both narrative and formalistic elements in critiquing South Korean national logic of progress and their ethnocentrism. Secondly, it delineates the queer use of space in the film. Through a careful examination of the film, this article argues that the virtue of queer Korean cinema lies in its ardent effort to reinstate the history of socially marginalized people on screen and to disclose the aspects of queer lives that cannot be subsumed under the heteronormative logic of progress.","PeriodicalId":37898,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema","volume":"9 1","pages":"61 - 79"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17564905.2017.1296803","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44652881","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}