Korean cinema

This essay analyzes Korean films, Traffickers (Gongmojadeul, Hong-seon Kim, 2012), Sea Fog (Haemoo, Sungbo Shim, 2014), and The Yellow Sea (Hwanghae, Na Hong-jin, 2010), to examine the motif of fragmented bodies and perilous cross-border migrations. These films depict vulnerable bodies that are at risk of being brutalized, mutilated, and dismembered according to the calculating logic of global capital.

South Korea is home to one of the most
vibrant film industries in the world today,
producing movies for a strong domestic
market that are also drawing the attention of
audiences worldwide. This book presents a
comprehensive analysis of some of the most
well-known and incendiary South Korean
films of the millennial decade from eight
major directors. Building his analysis on
contemporary film theory and philosophy, as
well as interviews and other primary sources,
Steve Choe makes a case that these often
violent films pose urgent ethical dilemmas
central to life in the age of neoliberal
globalisation.

This paper analyzes several films produced in Korea during the era of its colonization by Japan that pose interesting questions about the problem of internalization, or colonization of the mind. While on the one hand, these works can seem to present examples of Korean characters quite literally internalizing the voices or visions of Japanese authority, they can also problematize the assumption that there is a distinct subject with an established “inside” open to absorbing such commands. This is further complicated, I will argue, by the fact that the cinema of the Japanese metropole was itself often contradictory, despite and sometimes because of its place in a colonial empire. These Korean films offer multiple examples of complex subjectivities crisscrossed by split subjectivities and intersubjective relations that render it difficult to clearly demarcate “internal” and “external.” This paper will be one step in an effort to use close stylistic and film analysis to consider the questions of colonial film and cultural colonization on the level of the cinematic text.

Writing anything on Sion Sono is difficult because he exists in layers, not fragile and nimble, but rather adhered to the opposite of every maxim. Watching his three films- ‘Love Exposure’, ‘Noriko’s Dinner Table’ and finally ‘Strange Circus’ one after the other, leaving an aftertaste that had been, to be very honest, too difficult to give a name to. Absurd, beautiful, stupefying, banal, erotic, pervert, honest, over-the-top a crazy concoction and an equally unexpected journey all his three films had successfully maintained. Whether you would like to join in again, is entirely your wish.

The idea for Rediscovering Korean Cinema struck me unexpectedly during the BIFF Film Conference and Forum held at the Twentieth Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) in October 2015. I was a respondent to the panel "Re-evaluating Korean Film Authors. " Four well-established panelists, Seung-hoon Jeong, Hyangjin Lee, Nam Lee, and Mi-Jeong Lee, discussed such distinguished authors as Bong Joon-ho (Pong Chun-ho), Hong Sang-soo (Hong Sang-su), and Kim Ki-duk (Kim Ki-dŏk). After their thought-provoking talks, during the question and answer session, two audience members raised questions about the availability of an appropriate textbook for teaching Korean cinema in their home countries. One of them strongly requested that we write an accessible and readable book that would cover canonical film texts for students and general readers alike. After the panel, we discussed the request. All of us took this matter seriously and indeed had already acknowledged the absence of such a textbook. Despite the quantum leap in Korean film scholarship in recent years, there is still a shortage of essays on individual films and directors. Yi Man-hŭi (Lee Man-hee), Han Hyŏng-mo (Han Hyung-mo), Kim Su-yong (Kim Soo-yong), Ha Kil-chong (Ha Gil-jong), Yi Chang-ho (Lee Jang-ho), Yi Tu-yong (Lee Doo-yong), Chŏng Chi-yŏng (Chung Ji-young), and Pae Ch'ang-ho (Bae Chang-ho) are among the many Korean directors whose cinematic treasures have not been written about in the English language. Even worse, no systematically structured book-length textbook offering a comprehensive history of Korean cinema had been published when the idea for this book was proposed. I began this project to fill this gap in the field. Three panelists-Seung-hoon Jeong, Hyangjin Lee, and Nam Lee

This essay examines two films, Modern Boy (dir. Ji-woo Jeong, South Korea, 2008) and Private Eye (dir. Dae-min Park, South Korea, 2009), both of which depict the Seoul of the 1930s—the period during which Korean colonial modernity was fully shaped—and in so doing draw contemporary Koreans’ attention to the vibrant facade of the city, a long-forgotten facet of the dark colonial era. It stresses that these films, through their regeneration of lost cultural imagery on the screen, evoke a certain sensibility that is commensurable with guilt. For instance, in a climactic scene of Modern Boy, the male hero walks out of the Chosun government-general building and passes the camera. On-screen, as the hero exits from view, the colonial building gradually looms large behind him—beautifully reconstructed in the center of the city, with its iconic aura fully retrieved. At this moment, viewers are awakened to the unfortunate history of Japanese colonialism and thus experience a feeling of regret or melancholy for the past. This cinematic encounter with the past also resonates with cultural imagery of Seoul as a forgotten colonial city that has reemerged across Korean society, especially in worn-out photographs, cinematic reconstructions of lost urban scenery, and even recent repairs of ancient palaces and streets, and in so doing suggests how the discursive space that is Seoul accommodates the negativity that buttresses the historical narrative in Korea.

In the past few years, the South Korean film industry has released a growing number of Korean movies set in the colonial period. This essay focuses on how these films deal with the painful memory of occupation. More specifically, the analysis will be centered on two biopics with narratives that differ from what could be argued to be the mainstream portrayals of the colonial period, which tend to depict the struggle of Korean freedom-fighters under Japanese rule. Moreover, this essay reflects on the meaning of reinterpreting the past through cinema.

In a central scene in 3-Iron, the female protagonist dissects her own photo and reconstitutes it in a cubistic fashion. While in this film the act of reframing seems to symbolize the establishment of a new identity, in other films by Kim Kiduk, various subject positions can be defined neither as re-compositions of disparate identities nor as splits of two polar opposites. Often we are confronted with situations in which the notion of the authentic subject has possibly been overcome. I attempt to understand these patterns evolving in Kim Kiduk’s films, within the Korean cultural context determined by the country’s division as well as occupations by foreign powers.
Critics have noticed the violence and the crude treatment of human relations in Kim’s films because here people seem “to act out of impulses” (Gombeaud, 2006:13). Though literature has extensively treated the relationship between Korean cinema and the country’s troubled past, few authors have attempted to connect Kim Kiduk’s emanations of violence to the problem of the divided nation. Even more surprising is the fact that, so far, few critics have put the problem of identity to the center of a study of Kim’s films, let alone attempted to link this theme to that of the Korean nation suffering from an identity crisis. Still it appears that the main theme in Kim’s films is that of “identity troubles”: most of his fifteen films deal with fundamental changes of personal identities through unusual encounters or situations.
The dissecting and reconstituting of portraits is one of the most recurrent themes in Kim’s films. The identity theme appears most clearly in Time where Sehie, fearing that her boyfriend Ji-woo will soon get bored of her and reject her, decides to undergo aesthetic surgery in order to approach him as a new person (Saehie). Though, socially speaking, Sehie and Saehie are different persons, they share identical lifeworlds. In many of Kim’s films, faces are dissected, reconstituted, and dissected again. Most of the time these procedures are applied to paper faces, but in Address Unknown Eun-ok’s eye is hurt by a knife, and in Time, real faces are submitted to the scissors.
It is clear that the acts of self-mutilation are metaphorical expressions of real social problems existing in the Korean nation. It will be shown that what is elaborated in Kim’s films is not the split of personalities into two segments but rather a play of signifying selves and others that lets any authentic identity entirely disappear and which comes amazingly close to both Roland Barthes’s and Jean Baudrillard’s systems of communication in which “signs are exchanged against each other rather than against the real” (Baudrillard, 1993:7).

이 논문은 최근 10년 간 한국 독립영화 비평에서 주목을 받아 온 정재훈과 임철민의 영화를 ‘디지털 실험 다큐멘터리(digital experimental documentary)’의 관점에서 논의한다. 여기서 실험 다큐멘터리는 영화 제작의 목적과 양식 및 영화의 상영에 있어 서로 구별되는 두 범주로 인식되어 왔던 다큐멘터리와 실험영화의 생산적 교차와 상호 영향을 바탕으로 한 영화적 실천의 결과물을 가리킨다. 이렇게 볼 때 디지털 실험 다큐멘터리는 디지털 테크놀로지의 다양한 활용이 이와 같은 두 범주의 혼종적인 교환을 가동시키는 데 결정적인 역할을 수행하는 영화적 실천으로 정의된다. 정재훈(<호수길> [2009], <도돌이 언덕에 난기류> [2017])과 임철민(<프리즈마> [2013], <야광> [2018])의 영화적 실천을 디지털 실험 다큐멘터리의 관점에서 분석함으로써 이 논문은 한편으로는 이들의 영화가 필름 영화와는 다른 디지털 테크놀로지의 미학적, 형식적, 경험적 새로움을 탐구하면서도 다른 한편으로는 이와 동시에 이 테크놀로지의 매체-특정적 특징들을 영화사에서의 실험 다큐멘터리의 형태, 기법 및 관습과 연결한 결과로 볼 수 있음을 밝힌다.

This paper investigates the films of Jung Jae-hoon and Lim Cheol-min, which have received notable critical reception in Korean independent film criticism during the last decade, in terms of digital experimental documentary. Here, experimental documentary refers to a kind of films predicated upon the productive intersection and cross-influence of experimental film and documentary, two categories that have largely been regarded as mutually distinct or exclusive in the light of the purpose and mode of film practice, as well as of film exhibition. In this sense, digital experimental documentary can be defined as a set of films in which digital technology plays a vital role in facilitating the hybridized exchange between experimental cinema and documentary. Through the lens of digital experimental documentary, this paper demonstrates that the films of Jung (Hosu-gil [2009] and Turbulence at Dodoli Hill [2017]) and Lim (Prisma [2013] and Glow Job [2018]) explore digital technology’s formal, aesthetic, and experiential novelties while also linking its medium-specific features to the forms, conventions, and techniques of experimental documentary that have been developed in the history of cinema.

IS 207 KOREAN WAVE: Contemporary Korean Popular Culture
Instructor: Nemo Kim
Class Meetings: Mon-Thurs TBA
COURSE DESCRIPTION:
This course introduces major approaches to the study of globalization of contemporary popular culture and the formation of Korean identity as expressed by the media.
The course consists of viewing and reading assignments, field trips, guest speaker/performers, along with analysis and discussions which explore cultural phenomena of South Korea as presented in media such as K-pop, TV dramas and shows, films and other products of the Korean Wave.
This course also investigates Koreaness such as familism, fatalism, and customs, from the perspective of post modernity to contemporary neoliberal era. Limitations, backlashes, and future prospects of the Korean Wave will also be examined.
(...)
WEEK 5: Conclusion: Korean Wave, Its Past Criticism and Future Prospects Falling? Constant Re-Rising?
The World’s New Contact Zone: Neoliberalism of Korean New Wave
 Field Trip (by students‟ vote) and discussion
 Final Project Presentation and Q & A Sessions
 Readings:
Dennis Hart, “Advertising in Korea: Articulating the Materialist Culture”
Andronika Martonova, "Contemporary Korean cinema - production, tradition and Kim Ki-Douk""""

The modern South Korean cultural imaginary has been marked by a curious lack of large-scale, naturally occurring, apocalyptic disaster narratives. This absence becomes significant when mapped against narratives of manmade disasters that are typically juxtaposed with depictions of solid and unchanging physical land, within which the hyangto (home soil) frequently emerges as a comforting signifier for the cultural continuity of the Korean nation in the face of social and political disasters. This article will discuss the significance of this representational insistence of safe land, and why the physical soil of the Korean peninsula itself takes such a central stage in narratives of national (but very rarely natural) disasters. To foreground a reading of the only Korean natural disaster blockbuster film to date, Haeundae (Tidal Wave, 2009), as an example of how disaster narratives have been integrated into wider political discourses of communal or even national identity, this article will highlight a clear resistance to the mere possibility of nature turning on human beings in the modern Korean cinematic imaginary. This approach, in turn, reveals a strong symbolic link between the grand narrative of the Korean people and culture as being inextricably entwined with the unchanging nature of the physical soil itself.

Bong Joon-ho’s global blockbuster Snowpiercer (2013) is perhaps the first major Korean film that tackles outright the fate of humanity facing environmental and sociopolitical crises of the entire world. Set in a new ice age, it unfolds a sci-fi parable about a never-stopping train where post-apocalyptic survivors are put in a dystopian caste system. This iron Ark draws our attention to a series of issues and dilemmas allegorically related to today’s economy and ecology, revolution and sustainability. Discussing these points along with detailed film analysis, the chapter weaves through diverse discourses on critical topics such as biopolitics, capitalism, utopia, and cinema. It particularly illuminates how the train as a biolpoitical ecosystem implies post-historical symptoms and how its final catastrophe leaves room for some new potential of human agency.

This essay examines the last Korean silent film, A Public Prosecutor and a Teacher. Relying on a cultural fantasy of the “sonorous envelope,” this project showcases how this film emblematizes the constitution of Korean modern subjectivity within the convoluted political situation after Korea's national liberation in 1945.

Using horror as social commentary is not an unknown practice for filmmakers; however, instead of virtue signaling or a ham-fisted storytelling approach to represent his political views overtly, Kim Ki-young ambivalently depicts the disparity of South Korean social hierarchy in his 1960 psychological thriller, The Housemaid. By doing so, he tells the viewer not what to think of the characters that represent each social class, but instead presents to the viewer how the nation is developing through modernity and westernization, the gap between economic classes, and the futility of capitalism. Making no direct claims on preference of traditionalism versus modernity, Kim's film ends with no solution on the state of South Korea in the 1960s without a call to action other than for older men, the upper-middle class, to not interact with younger women, the working class. Nevertheless, even this is done with a hint of irony, a strange breaking of the fourth wall, not an actual call for class segregation by the director himself. With only the meeting of the Confucian-steeped, patriarchal traditionalism of the couple of the house, and the newfound westernization and modernization of urban Korea, represented by the destructive, titular housemaid, Kim presents the incompatibility of the era, rather than an answer for what is right and what is wrong. More succinctly, The Housemaid is about the crossing of borders: both into westernization and in social class, and the resulting consequences.

How do actors reposition their racialized and gendered bodies? Why is Asianness invisible in global film culture? Join us for this illustrated presentation on representations of race, gender, and East Asia on film and television. ::::: The global pandemic of COVID-19 has exacerbated anti-Asian racism, but we can enhance our strategies for inclusion by identifying tacit forms of misogynistic racism. Taking stock of East Asian adaptations of Shakespeare as well as the manifestation of the ideas of yellow peril and yellow fever in American films and television series, this presentation explores how the spectatorial aspect of racism has both fetishized Asian bodies and erased Asianness from content creators’ visual landscapes. ::::: Taking a tripartite approach to the question of self/representation, this talk explores: (1) adaptations that offer a corrective to gender ideologies within Shakespeare, such as Muni Wei’s all-female As We Like It (Taiwan, 2021), Feng Xiaogang’s The Banquet (China, 2006), Abel Ferrara’s China Girl (USA, 1987), and Sherwood Hu’s Tibetan Prince of the Himalayas (2006); these films use the Western canon to de-colonize Western knowledge about Asia; ::::: (2) films portraying racialized and gendered trans-Pacific imaginations, such as Jon M. Chu’s Crazy Rich Asians (2018), Lulu Wang’s Farewell (2019), Mina Shum’s Double Happiness (1994), Debbie Lum’s Seeking Asian Female (2012), and Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari (2020); and queer films with mainstream aesthetics, such as Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet (Taiwan, 1993) and Liu Kuang-Hui’s Your Name Engraved Herein (Taiwan, 2020); ::::: (3) ornamental use of Asian motifs in dystopian science fiction films such as George Lucas’ Star Wars, Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, Ridley Scott’s The Blade Runner, Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element. ::::: Professor Joubin’s research reveals deep connections among East Asian and Anglophone cinematic traditions and the new creativity the cultural exchange has made possible. ::::: These case studies reveal that racialized thinking is institutionalized as gendered power relations in the cultural and political life, take the form of political marginalization of minority groups, and cause emotional distress and physical harm within and beyond the fictional universe.

For a long time, Hollywood has been interested in remaking films
of different countries. On the level of transnational cinema, a remake
can be considered as borrowing ideas, and adaptation of a work of one
cultural background to another society and country in modern period of
globalization. Hollywood tends to produce remakes of East Asian films
in 21st century while it had done mostly of European films in the
previous century. Among Hollywood remakes of East Asian films, the
case of Oldboy is noticeable. Korean Oldboy and its US remake made
by Spike Lee are two films which expressed the same feeling and
pursue of revenge in the same circumstances, but at the same time two
directors showed to spectators two different main heroes through
different narration and heroes' different representation within the
cinema. To discuss about two films, researchers of this article refer to
concepts of puzzle film studies, which deal with complex non-linear
narrative strategies in contemporary art films. This study examines and
compares two films in terms of complex narrativity, evolution of main
characters from an ordinary human to a monster, and the removal of
monstrosity in the conclusion.

This article examines some of the formal properties, stylistic motifs and thematic preoccupations of classic and contemporary South Korean horror films. As a genre that has enormous box-office appeal and crossover potential for western audiences, horror might seem to be little more than a commercial platform for young film-makers to exploit popular tastes and cash in on derivative stories offering scant insight into the social conditions faced by modern-day Koreans. However, even the most cliché-ridden, shock-filled slasher films and ghost tales reveal the often-contradictory cultural attitudes of a populace that, over the past three generations, has weathered literally divisive transformations at the national and ideological levels. As such, the genre deserves scrutiny as a repository of previously pent-up, suddenly unleashed libidinal energies, consumerist desires and historical traumas , as well as a barometer of public opinion about such issues as class warfare, gender inequality and sexual identity. Specifically, I explore some of the most salient features of Korean horror cinema, including filmmakers' tendency to adopt narrative analepsis -- typically rendered as flashbacks -- in the course of plotting out scenarios that, though far-fetched, are rooted in unsettled (and unsettling) real-world problems. Historical return, I argue, truly is a horrifying prospect, especially for anyone old enough to remember, or to have experienced firsthand, the brutality of a military dictatorship or an ongoing abuse of presidential power resulting in severe rights violations (e.g. the Park Chung-hee [1961–79]) and Chun Doo-hwan [1980–88] administrations). But historical return simply must be dramatized as part of the regurgitative ‘purging’ for which the genre has been singled out by theorists who recognize horror’s socially productive function.

The films of Bong Joon-ho (Memories of Murder, The Host, Snowpiercer) both synthesize and negotiate the complex relationship between South Korea and the United States, and often do so in a way that charts parallels between globalization and cinematic genre. This article examines how this peculiar transnational navigation of foreign form and local content manifests in the films themselves.

Available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01956051.2019.1563449

21.yy’da popülerliği giderek artan Güney Kore sineması, tarihi bakımından savaş öncesi
ve savaş sonrası dönem olarak ele alınmaktadır. Gelişen toplumun kapitalist sistem düzeninde yaşam göstermesi bireylerin bu hayat döngüsü içerisindeki yaşamlarını şekillendirmektedir.

Drawing from existing literature in the field of comedy studies (including work related to three long-established theories of laughter: superiority theory, incongruity theory, and relief theory), this paper examines the humorous elements in Hong Sang-soo's films. Focusing on the Korean director's tellingly titled film HaHaHa (2010), the author puts forth the idea that both internal and external bursts of hilarity (coming from the characters and from the audience, respectively) form a line of bivalent critique that links textual and extratextual aspects of screen comedy. That linkage is gestured toward by the artificial ‘movement’ (or, rather, magnification) of the image specific to the zoom shot, which can be seen in nearly every one of this film's simultaneously painful and pleasurable, uncomfortable and entertaining, sequences. In addition to expanding Paul Willemen's theory of cinematic zooming, the author seizes upon some of the most persuasive writings about the comic mode in order to critically frame Hong Sang-soo's unique brand of humorous self-reflexivity.

[collection edited by Chi-Yun Shin and Mark Gallagher]

What is East Asian film noir?  What are its origins, its constituent features and preoccupations, and its significance as a form of global cinematic expression?  Film noir, always retroactively conceived, has been understood as a discrete Hollywood production cycle, a form of generic expression, an international filmic sensibility, and a discourse loosely joining innumerable texts and a range of production and reception phenomena.  However defined and categorized, film noir in many guises offers a compelling frame through which to view individual works, looming political and cultural contexts, film industry and reception activity, and wider circuits and frictions of global screen-media flow.

The collection East Asian Film Noir looks at a range of cases that have been explicitly framed as film noir or East Asian noir or that acquire legibility as noir texts through reception discourse and other critical activity.  Contributors look at historical and contemporary cases to understand the terms on which national, regional and transnational cinemas conceive artistic expression.  Classical US noir’s downbeat sensibility finds compelling expression in later films from Japan, South Korea and greater China (the mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan) that both participate in and are excluded from circuits of global-noir traffic past and present.  Across this book, conceptualization and articulation of an internationally situated ‘East Asian film noir’ helps raise questions around the politics of representation, authorial activity, generic and modal positioning, and local and cross-cultural reception.

Film “Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, … and Spring” karya Kim Ki-duk merupakan sebuah film arthouse Korea bertemakan Buddhisme yang sukses di kancah internasional. Lewat penayangannya di box office negara-negara Barat, film ini memperoleh pendapatan tinggi jika dibandingkan dengan pendapatan domestiknya. Film ini juga mendapatkan banyak penghargaan baik domestik maupun internasional. Menggunakan metode kualitatif, temuan dari penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa film tersebut mengandung praktek self-orientalism. Self-orientalism sendiri merupakan afirmasi dari konsep Orientalisme yang diimajinasikan bangsa Barat terhadap bangsa belahan bumi lain. Penelitian ini juga menjelaskan bagaimana self-orientalism menjadi faktor penting yang memungkinkan film ini sukses di kancah internasional.

Kata Kunci: orientalisme; self-orientalism; Kim Ki-duk

This paper examines the ways in which several Korean documentary films in the 2010s use archival footage of the distant or recent histories of Korea. It argues that the films testify to what I call the ‘post-vérité’ turn of recent Korean documentaries: an array of experimentations with the forms and aesthetics of documentary, which are distinguished from the vérité style—an activist tradition of Korean independent documentary—but also inherit and renew its commitment to politics and history. As a subcategory of the ‘post-vérité’ turn, I characterize the recent Korean documentary’s increasing uses of found footage as the ‘archival turn’ and argue for its two implications. First, this term suggests that the extensive uses of found footage allow filmmakers to develop other modes of documentary filmmaking—compilation documentary, essay film, and metahistorical documentary—besides the participatory mode distinguished by the supremacy of the camera’s immediate, on-the-spot witnessing of reality. Second, this term indicates that Walter Benjamin’s idea of historiography is shared by the filmmakers, as their appropriation, reassessment, and manipulation of found footage are motivated by the desire to endow it with a new historical perspective in relation to their engagement with the politics of the present.

This article presents a critical overview on how the formal and aesthetic variations of the Korean documentary cinema in the twenty-first century have differed from and simultaneously renewed the activist, cinéma-vérité tradition of Korean independent documentaries of the 1980s and 1990s. These variations encompass personal documentaries and essay films, experimental documentaries on landscapes, documentaries extensively using archival materials, digitally enabled documentaries, and intersections of documentary and contemporary art. Mapping these variations onto five categories, I use the term “post-verité” to theorize these new constellations of aesthetics and politics. By departing from the epistemological and aesthetic assumptions of its predecessor, the Korean documentary in the twenty-first century has formed the most vibrant screenscape for cinematic experimentations. At the same time, I argue that these experimentations have also updated the activist tradition’s political and ethical commitment to history and politics by reinventing the ways of engaging with the traumas of modernization and the new problems of neoliberalized contemporary Korea.

This dissertation takes into consideration Park Chan-Wook’ The Handmaiden (2016), a transcultural adaptation of Sarah Waters’ novel Fingersmith. We will seek to unearth the film’s themes and values, such as the colonial relations and pornography, both invested with shifting thymic values and both establishing shifting hierarchies. We will demonstrate that the text requires a Korean or east-Asian encyclopaedia. Then, through a semiotic approach, we will delve into the strategies the film employs to either betray or guide the viewer through the interpretation of the film. Ultimately, we will seek to demonstrate how the film employs repetitions and ambiguity to undermine conventional ways of viewing cinema.

This essay looks at Na Hong-jin’s 2008 film "Chugyeokja/The Chaser," based loosely on the Yoo Young-chul serial murders of 2003 and 2004. While the film asserts that the killer’s pathology can be understood as resentful misogyny, "The Chaser" simultaneously suggests that it originates in a perceived loss of sovereignty. Read alongside the film’s attempt to resist Hollywood hegemony at the box office and the idea that serial murder is a form of ‘advanced nation disease’, I argue that "The Chaser" reveals the relationship between the South Korean serial killer and neoliberal modernity in the country – both as a horrible side effect as well as a perverse emblem of progress.

This thesis mainly deals with repetition in film form. Repetition which is a key concept shows itself in many different forms. In philosophy there are several perceptions at stake. In art forms in which it is structured systematically repetition is one of the basic elements. As for film form, there are concepts that help us to understand the function of it. The basic concern of this thesis is constructing three basic repetition types by grounding on the perceptions of repetition in philosophy by also using basic concepts of repetition in film form. These types of repetitions in film form are specified as informative, constructive and poetic repetitions. As the case study, the films of Kim Ki-duk who is an amateur-auteur director with a unique cinematic style are analyzed on the ground of these constructed types.

Film Parasite Bonga to jedna z częściej nagradzanych i najlepiej ocenianych przez recenzentów premier 2019 r. Większość dziennikarzy podkreślała w swych opiniach krytyczny i satyryczny wydźwięk utworu wymierzony przeciw rozwarstwieniu ekonomicznemu społeczeństwa Korei Południowej (i nie tylko). W proponowanej interpretacji jest jednak zaakcentowany zupełnie inny wymiar filmu, zasygnalizowany w tytułowej formule „architektura jako fabuła”. Artykuł składa się z trzech części. Część pierwsza obejmuje wstępne ustalenia teoretyczne związane z kategorią przestrzeni filmowej oraz relacją miasta (architektury) i filmu. Rozdział drugi to analiza semiotyki miasta oraz architektury domu, w którym rozgrywa się większa część akcji. Część trzecia jest poświęcona rozważaniom na temat architektury jako generatora kolejnych zdarzeń, które ostatecznie można interpretować jako rodzaj udawania na scenie bądź gry planszowej. W ramach konkluzji pojawia się propozycja, by ostatecznie potraktować film Bonga jako wypowiedź autotematyczną, której precyzyjna struktura jest nie tyle celem, ile tematem.

<서울역><부산행><반도>로 이어진 연상호의 좀비 3부작은 한국적 로컬리티를 글로벌화하는 스케일의 확장 속에 ‘좀비 아포칼립스’의 장르 문법을 강화하며 답습해가는 한편, 이 장르 자체의 발달사와 함께 다른 장르들의 좀비적 출현을 시사하기도 한다. <부산행>이 할리우드식 ‘좀비 포맷’을 주류 감수성으로 국지화하면서 신자유주의 체제가 배태한 ‘유동적 공포’를 날렵하게 포착했다면, <서울역>은 이 공포를 통제하며 체화하는 한국 공권력과 계급적 착취 및 이에 대한 저항적 아나키즘으로서의 ‘좀비-되기’를 통해 이명박-박근혜 시대에 대한 직설적 사회 비판을 리얼리스트 애니매이션의 외피에 씌워 좀비 포맷을 뒤튼 바 있다. 반면 <반도>는 이미 퇴락한 문명의 잔여에서 재가동되는 원시 공동체가 자연화된 좀비를 사육하며 구축하는 초법적 주권의 원형을 디스토피아 SF 혹은 <매드 맥스>류의 포스트-아포칼립스 영화처럼 그려낸다. 이런 관점에서 3부작은 좀비 아포칼립스적 세계의 과거, 현재, 미래를 예시하는 가운데, 국가의 몰락과 유사 국가의 탄생을 매개하는 좀비를 통해 문명의 (악)순환을 환기한다. 사회적 바이러스로 등장하는 이 존재론적 타자에 대한 전염과 방역의 드라마는 그렇게 쳇바퀴 도는 문명의 부산물과 악전 고투를 벌이는 인간의 궁극적 가치가 무엇인지 되묻게 한다.