Renegotiating Film Genres in East Asian Cinemas and Beyond by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030550776
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Representing Premodern History in Postmodern Korea

While the success of the domestic film industry over the past twenty years had been considered a second renaissance for Korean cinema, this change has more specifically seen the recovery of the Korea’s period genre. Throughout the past decade, especially, the period film in Korean cinema has taken on the blockbuster mentality of spectacle, scale and excess. Stephen Teo (2013, 53) notes that “historical blockbusters are national monuments of a kind, and the ‘monumental style’ is a style of historicist filmmaking that sets out to produce a narrative of the nation. This style is more devoted to capturing the spiritual essence intrinsic to a people and its history and this is perhaps more important than the mere details of accuracy”. Contemporary Korean period blockbusters reflect similar attitudes in the way that they prioritise feeling over facts through the manipulation of heritage, history and tradition. The films I highlight in this chapter each rely on a particular aspect of Korea’s premodern Joseon heritage, whether through the re-adaptation of folklore, the playful manipulation of fact and fiction or the continued glorification of an idolised figure. In these films, the past is seen as a spectacle, and they show how blockbuster cinematography has been adopted and used as presentational prowess to show the capabilities of Korea’s contemporary national cinema.

First, Jeon Woo Chi (Choi Dong Hoon, 2009) is a comedic action fantasy film about the titular folkloric figure, whose origins go back to the fifteenth century. The Taoist wizard begins the film in the Joseon era before being transported 500 years into present-day Korea, where he must both defeat evil and navigate the urbanised Seoul metropolis. The film can be seen as a turning point in Korean cinema and the nation’s period genre. Produced with analogue film, Jeon Woo Chi is one of the last Korean blockbusters of the 2000s to be filmed using celluloid before the majority of filmmaking turned to digital technology. James Austin, in his essay on the digitisation of French cinema, especially in the context of historical reconstruction, questions how the industry took on the Hollywood aesthetic of digital effects and localised them. He (2004, 296) considers how the global economic and cinematic trends around the turn of the millennium “may have encouraged a moment of introspection about what would become of France, its identity, its place in the world in relation to the American superpower, and about what would become of its cinema. The future looked relatively bright, in fact, if not entirely clear, and so it was perhaps a propitious time to work out what to do with American technologies in the cinema”. The same situation occurred in Korean cinema around the same time. In Korea’s specific context, the last years of the twentieth century resulted in the economic disaster of the IMF crisis. The nation’s economy had developed substantially since the 1950s but suffered greatly during the wider Asian Financial Crisis of 1997. As part of the International Monetary Fund bailout package,

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