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Introduction North Korea. The common name of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), that truculent little pariah state, conjures an Orwellian image of grim dystopia where the repressed population struggles under poverty as appalling as the dogma is rigid. Proclaimed by George W. Bush as part of an ‘axis of evil’, North Korea since the mid-1990s has garnered
Class is one of the foremost factors in the formation of cultural identities of contemporary Koreans living as a divided nation. Class conflict was a major contributor to the breakout of the Korean War, 1 and the ongoing confrontation between North and South is, arguably, the manifestation of their fundamentally irreconcilable stances on class issues. Class defines Koreans’ selfhood in both personal
Film in Korea has always been under governmental censorship. This book examines the ways in which Korean film reveals the ideological orientation of the society in which it is created and circulated. It examines the social and political milieu in which the Korean film industry developed from its beginning during the Japanese colonial period to its bifurcation into South and North Korean cinemas. The book presents a critical analysis of the selected films, which were all made between 1960 and 1990. It discusses the cultural identity of contemporary Koreans by analysing five films based on a popular traditional folk tale, Ch'unhyangjŏn. Three of the five films were made in South Korea: Shin Sangok's Song Ch'unhyang, Pak T'ae-wŏn's The Tale of Song Ch'unhyang and Han Sanghun's SongCh'unhyang. The significance of gender and class issues in Ch'unhyangjŏn can be glimpsed through the three variants of the film title. The book then examines the notion of nationhood held by contemporary Koreans from two interrelated perspectives, political and cultural. It explores the films in relation to the conflicting ideological orientations of North and South Korea. In the North Korean films, anti-imperialism constitutes the core of their definition of nationhood. Class is one of the foremost factors in the formation of cultural identities of contemporary Koreans living as a divided nation. The book discusses six films in this context: The Untrodden Path, The Brigade Commander's Former Superior, Bellflower, A Nice Windy Day, Kuro Arirang and Black Republic.
One of the most distinctive traits of Korean film is its strong political nature. Since its introduction in 1903, film in Korea has always been under governmental censorship. During the Japanese colonial period (1910–45), the government severely suppressed those films that would inspire anti-colonial sentiments among the Korean audience. On the other hand, the colonial government employed film as a
Who is responsible for the national division of Korea? This is the central question for contemporary Koreans in defining their identity as a nation. Contemporary Koreans have a strong sense of nationhood since the peninsula had been ruled by a single polity since being unified in 668 by Shilla, one of the three ancient Korean kingdoms. 1 Moreover, the boundaries of this single polity coincided with
The film industries of North and South Korea adopt totally different production and distribution systems under opposite state ideologies: communism and capitalism. This is manifest in the representation of ideology in their films. The comparative analysis of the selected films from South and North Korea divulges a complex relationship between the political and economic bases, and the cultural forces of society
This book examines the ways in which Korean film reveals the ideological orientation of the society in which it is created and circulated. To understand the workings of ideology in contemporary Korea as a divided nation, this study takes a comparative approach to the films from both sides, considering gender, nationhood and class. A comparative analysis of the representation of ideology in the
This chapter discusses the cultural identity of contemporary Koreans by analysing five films based on a popular traditional folk tale, Ch’unhyangj ŏ n. 2 Three of the five films were made in South Korea: Shin Sangok’s S ŏ ng Ch’unhyang (1961), Pak T’aew ŏ n’s The Tale of S ŏ ng Ch’unhyang (1976) and Han Sanghun’s S ŏ ng Ch’unhyang (1987). The other two films are from
As we shall see, staging an encounter between cinema and countryside is to invoke a rich and diverse spatial imagery. Cinematic countrysides are the expanse of the American Great West and the restraint of the English village street; the mountain terrains of North Korea and the jungle environments of the Viet Cong. Cinematic countrysides are the iconographic backdrop to national founding myths and the
, the key motivational aspects noted by Neale assume a heightened significance. Arguably, the frequent staging of the war at sea rather than on land within Cold War films recognises the fluidity and geographical uncertainty of conflict in the period: the apparent neutrality of the ocean as a battleground, lacking the specificities of a landscape over which to lay claim, throws the questioning of the ideological conviction and the choice to fight into sharper relief, while increasing the potential for escalation to full-blown war. The Korean War (1950–53) provided an