Publisher description: The volume provides the first detailed and authoritative overview of Korean cinema history, and in so doing develops new historical and critical understandings of Korean cinema from the period of Japanese colonial rule to the present day, with two very different cinematic traditions in this divided peninsula. The contributed chapters approach the subject … [Read More]
Booklist: Film and TV
The Wailing [forthcoming]
Na Hong-jin’s The Wailing (2016) has been acclaimed as one of the very best horror films of recent years. In The Wailing, a mysterious illness turns its rural victims into comatose perpetrators of familicide. In the fog of an unknown spiritual war, police officer Jong-goo is helpless as his community fragments and suspicions turn to a mysterious Japanese … [Read More]
Worm-Time: Memories of Division in South Korean Aesthetics [forthcoming]
Worm-Time challenges conventional narratives of the Cold War and its end, presenting an alternative cultural history based on evolving South Korean aesthetics about enduring national division. From novels of dissent during the authoritarian era to films and webtoons in the new millennium, We Jung Yi’s transmedia analyses unearth people’s experiences of “wormification”—traumatic survival, deferred justice, and warped … [Read More]
The Bloomsbury Handbook of North Korean Cinema [forthcoming]
This first handbook on North Korean cinema contests the assumption that North Korean film is “unwatchable,” in terms of both quality and accessibility, refusing to reduce North Korean cinema to political propaganda and focusing on its aesthetic forms and cultural meanings. Since its founding in 1948, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) has … [Read More]
North Korea’s Nuclear Cinema: Simulation and Neoliberal Politics in the Two Koreas [forthcoming]
North Korea’s Nuclear Cinema examines why and how North Korea has transitioned to an image-based nuclear power in the changing context of a post-Cold War world. What exactly is the North Korean nuclear threat? Why is North Korea engaging in hostilities when its erstwhile adversaries have offered a diplomatic exit ramp? Chapter by chapter, it explains how … [Read More]
The South Korean Film Industry
As shown by the success of Squid Game and Parasite, South Korea’s film industry is producing films and original series for streaming services, film studios, and television stations worldwide. South Korea is now arguably considered one of the few countries outside the United States to have captivated the world’s hearts and minds through pop music, TV dramas, and … [Read More]
Mediating Gender in Post-Authoritarian South Korea
Mediating Gender in Post-Authoritarian South Korea focuses on the relationship between media representation and gender politics in South Korea. Its chapters feature notable voices of South Korea’s burgeoning sphere of gender critique enabled by social media, doing what no other academic volume has yet accomplished in the sphere of Anglophone studies on this topic. Seeking … [Read More]
How K-Dramas Can Transform Your Life: Powerful Lessons on Belongingness, Healing, and Mental Health
Discover the power of how K-Dramas can benefit your mental health and provide a sense of belonging In How K-Dramas Can Transform Your Life, celebrated licensed mental health professional Jeanie Y. Chang explores the powerful interrelationship between Korean dramas, mental health, and belongingness. In the book, you’ll explore what K-Dramas have to teach us about our own … [Read More]
Activism and Post-activism: Korean Documentary Cinema, 1981 – 2022
Activism and Post-activism: Korean Documentary Cinema, 1981—2022 is a new book about nonfiction filmmaking in the private and independent sectors of South Korean cinema and media from the early 1980s to the present day. Drawing on the methodologies of documentary studies, experimental film and video, digital cinema, local discourses on independent documentary, and the literature on … [Read More]
The Late and Post-Dictatorship Cinephilia Boom and Art Houses in South Korea
Examines the 1990s growth of art film exhibition, consumption, and cinephilia within South Korean cinema. This book is a narrative history of art film exhibition and cinephilia in post-dictatorship South Korea It is the first study to consider the practical, cultural, and social experience of cinema-going during a formative period of Korean film history It … [Read More]
ReFocus: The Films of Yim Soon-rye
Highlights the cinematic oeuvre of Yim Soon-rye, one of the most influential Korean female filmmakers First comprehensive English-language book on Yim Soon-rye and her films, placing her within the larger perspectives of Korean cinematic history and women’s cinema First English volume on any Korean woman filmmaker, that calls for a need to address the work … [Read More]
Political Moods: Film Melodrama and the Cold War in the Two Koreas
Melodrama films dominated the North and South Korean industries in the period between liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945 and the hardening of dictatorship in the 1970s. The films of each industry are often read as direct reflections of Cold War and Korean War political ideologies and national historical experiences, and therefore as aesthetically … [Read More]
Film Korea: The Ghibliotheque guide to the wonderful world of Korean cinema
Explore the magical, mysterious world of Korean cinema, in this new book from the authors of Ghibliotheque. From smash hits such as Parasite to cult favourites Oldboy, The Handmaiden and Train to Busan, Korean cinema is a hotbed of creative talent and the force behind the most exciting, captivating filmmaking in the world right now. In this essential guide to the country’s cinematic … [Read More]
Celluloid Democracy: Cinema and Politics in Cold War South Korea
Celluloid Democracy tells the story of the Korean filmmakers, distributors, and exhibitors who reshaped cinema in radically empowering ways through the decades of authoritarian rule that followed Korea’s liberation from Japanese occupation. Employing tactics that ranged from representing the dispossessed on the screen to redistributing state-controlled resources through bootlegging, these film workers explored ideas and practices … [Read More]
Korean Film and History
Cinema has become a battleground upon which history is made―a major mass medium of the twentieth century dealing with history. The re-enactments of historical events in film straddle reality and fantasy, documentary and fiction, representation and performance, entertainment and education. This interdisciplinary book examines the relationship between film and history and the links between historical … [Read More]
Fate and Freedom in Korean Historical Films
This open access book examines the depiction of Korean history in recent South Korean historical films. Released over the Hallyu (“Korean Wave”) period starting in the mid-1990s, these films have reflected, shaped, and extended the thriving public discourse over national history. In these works, the balance between fate and freedom—the negotiation between societal constraints and individual will, … [Read More]