New Korean Cinema

Catalog description

New Korean Cinema: This course will examine the shifting Korean-icity of contemporary Korean Cinema – what makes a Korean film Korean? How has Korean Cinema of the 90s to present day informed and been informed by shifting attitudes toward genre, style, and South Korea’s socio-political history? And how has Korean film today been made to become, like K-pop or Kimchi, a global export? This course will examine post 90s Korean Cinema according to several key historical, ideological, and aesthetic frameworks by which ‘New Korean Cinema’ has been understood – as a response to the social and political turmoil of the 70s and 80s, its emerging status festival and commercial status as ‘World Cinema,’ the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, the emergence of a corporatized ‘Hollywood’ style studio system, and the politics of transgender and queer representation in South Korea. This course will consider the history of production and reception for a range of Korean films from the 90s to present under the theoretical lens of psychoanalytic, queer, feminist, Marxist, and post-colonial theory.