Kpop

Kyung Hyun Kim seems well placed to write an interesting study of contemporary Korean cinema. The UC Irvine professor has already written one book on the subject, The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema (Duke University Press, 2004), produced a number of films (including Im Sang-soo’s recent high profile remake of The Housemaid[2010]), and is impressively connected within the Korean film industry. A glance through the notes at the end of the book finds him dining with Choi Dong-hun (director of Tazza: The High Rollers [2006]), lending his Jean Eustache videos to Hong Sang-soo, and explaining Korean cinema to Martin Scorsese, who has also written the foreword here. On the basis of this, one might think of Kim as someone intent on bridging the gulf between film academia and film practitioners.

As the subtitle of the book suggests, Kim takes a large-scale view of his subject. His historical approach is that of eras and epochs, and the links they entail between signifying systems writ large and forms of subjectivity as they can be read from artworks. Hence his project is to situate Korean cinema in relation to Big Theory historical ideas such as modernism and post-modernism and their connection to various phases of capitalism and the ways that they produce certain forms of subjectivity. A single sentence from his book, referring to the domestic success of Korean films, might give potential readers a good indication of his approach. It will also let them decide, better than any review of mine, whether this is a text from which they will profit:

“Perhaps it is not a coincidence that one of the greatest anomalies in film history from the past hundred years was projected within the confined space of South Korea, where the coevalness of emergent and late capitalism, global and local forces, and cultural oscillation between modernist affectation of the sublime and its postmodern invalidation produced a desire to magnify the cultural significance of authentic cultural