The South Korean Film Renaissance: Local Hitmakers, Global Provocateurs

The South Korean Film Renaissance

Wesleyan Film

A series from Wesleyan University Press Edited by Jeanine Basinger

The Wesleyan Film series takes a back-to-basics approach to the art of cinema. Books in the series deal with the formal, the historical, and the cultural—putting a premium on visual analysis, close readings, and an understanding of the history of Hollywood and international cinema, both artistically and industrially. The volumes are rigorous, critical, and accessible both to academics and to lay readers with a serious interest in film.

Series editor Jeanine Basinger, Corwin-Fuller Professor of Film Studies at Wesleyan University and Founder/Curator of the Wesleyan Cinema Archives, is the author of such landmark books as The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre, A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930–1960, Silent Stars, and The Star Machine.

Anthony Mann

New and Expanded Edition by Jeanine Basinger

It’s the Pictures That Got Small Hollywood Film Stars on 1950s Television

Christine Becker

The South Korean Film Renaissance Local Hitmakers, Global Provocateurs

by Jinhee Choi

The Films of Samuel Fuller If You Die, I’ll Kill You!

by Lisa Dombrowski

Physical Evidence Selected Film Criticism

by Kent Jones

Action Speaks Louder Violence, Spectacle, and the American Action Movie

Revised and Expanded Edition by Eric Lichtenfeld

Hollywood Ambitions Celebrity in the Movie Age

by Marsha Orgeron

A Splurch in the Kisser The Movies of Blake Edwards

by Sam Wasson

The South Korean

Film Renaissance

Local Hitmakers

Global Provocateurs

JINHEE CHOI

Wesleyan University Press

Middletown, Connecticut

Published by

Wesleyan University Press,

Middletown, CT 06459

www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

© 2010 by Jinhee Choi

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

5  4  3  2  1

The Korea Foundation has provided financial assistance for the undertaking of this publication project.

Wesleyan University Press is a member of the Green Press Initiative. The paper used in this book meets their minimum requirement for recycled paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Choi, Jinhee.

The South Korean film renaissance: local hitmakers, global provocateurs / Jinhee Choi.

    p. cm. — (Wesleyan film)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8195-6939-4 (cloth: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8195-6940-0 (p: alk. paper)

1. Motion pictures—Korea (South) 2. Motion picture industry—Korea (South) I. Title.

PN1993.5.K6C4845     2010

791.43095195—dc22        2009035924

To my father,

who loved Westerns and

secretly admired Susan Hayward

Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Faces of Globalization

2 Blockbusters, Korean Style

3 No Blood? No Tears! Gangster Cinema

4 I’m Not a Girl, Yet Not a Woman: Romance Films

5 Once Upon a Time in High School: Teen Pics

6 Not Just Metteurs-en-Scène? High-Quality Films

7 Riding the New Wave

Afterword

Appendix 1. Box Office Top Ten (1986–2006)

Appendix 2. Korean Film Market Share

Appendix 3. Number of Films Produced/Released (1986–2006)

Appendix 4. Number of Theaters/Screens (1986–2006)

Appendix 5. International Film Festivals: Award-Winning Films (1986–2006)

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures

Shiri, Kang Je-gyu, 1999

2.1 Yu aims his gun in Park’s direction

2.2 Park fires back at Yu with consistent eye-line match

2.3 A cutaway to the squad before the camera crosses the axis of action

JSA, Park Chan-wook, 2000

2.4 Lee framed in a tight close-up

2.5 The camera pans right to show Choi in a similar shot scale

2.6 A delayed establishing shot that punctuates the scene with great tension

The General’s Son, Im Kwon-taek, 1991

3.1 Kim Du-han challenges a Japanese judo master

Beat, Kim Sung-su, 1997

3.2 Tae-su thrown out of the room after stabbing a mobster

3.3 An impressionistic fight scene

3.4 Min punctuates the impressionistic fight

My Tutor Friend, Kim Kyeong-hyeong, 2003

4.1 Su-wan enjoys the attention from the enthusiastic crowd

Asako in Ruby Shoes, E J-Yong, 2000

4.2 U-in glancing at the wall of a subway train

4.3 An advertisement features actress Kim Min-hee

4.4 An imaginary encounter between U-in and Aya

4.5 U-in turning around in pain

4.6 Aya glancing back at U-in

Memento Mori, Kim Tae-yong, Min Kyu-dong, 1999

5.1 The white piano evokes a usual horror mood

5.2 A memorabilia-filled piano

Whispering Corridors, Park Ki-hyeong, 1998

5.3 Ms. Park hanging from the overpass

5.4 Jeong-suk’s suicide visually parallels Ms. Park’s death

Wishing Stairs, Yun Jae-yeon, 2003

5.5 Jin-seong’s truncated feet

5.6 Jin-seong sheds tears out of frustration

Memories of Murder, Bong Joon-ho, 2003

6.1 The cramped mise-en-scène of a local restaurant

6.2 Gang-ho tumbles out of small attic

6.3 A small room in which an entire family lives

6.4 Jo finds a paper card the children play with

6.5 A container in which porn magazines are stored

A Tale of Two Sisters, Kim Ji-woon, 2003

6.6 The stepmother paces back and forth

6.7 An empty moment which awaits the entrance of a character

Oldboy, Park Chang-wook, 2003

7.1 Dae-su digs a hole

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring, Kim Ki-duk, 2003

7.2 Doors open up to present the next act, Summer

Acknowledgments

A PhD dissertation usually undergoes various stages before it reaches book form, and this one is no exception. Without David Bordwell’s conviction that South Korean cinema was in, I might have chosen to write on a topic that seemed (at least to me) more marketable. I will always be grateful to David for showing me the way. A postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University provided me with both the time and the financial support for this book to be reshaped to as it is now. I appreciate the warm reception of Dudley Andrew and Charles Musser in Film Studies and Anne Letterman from the Council on East Asian Studies. An SSHRC Institutional research grant at Carleton University allowed me subsequent research trips to South Korea necessary to complete the manuscript and the Korea Foundation provided a subsidy for the publication of this book. I also wish to thank my former colleagues at Carleton University who generously granted me leave, as well as my current colleagues at the University of Kent, who saw me through the last phase of this project. This book has also benefited from the comments and suggestions of its two anonymous reviewers. I appreciate Chris Berry’s enthusiasm and encouragement for this project. Parker Smathers at Wesleyan University Press patiently waited as the manuscript went through a series of revisions and Amanda Dupuis at University Press of New England provided assistance in polishing this manuscript.

There was a fortuneteller who once predicted that I would receive two PhDs—not an MD/PhD, but two actual PhDs—in rare fields. Regardless of whether this story was true (or fabricated by my mother with specific intentions), I did end up earning two PhDs, one in philosophy and the other in film studies, both at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. There I met two of the most prolific scholars around, Noël Carroll and David Bordwell, from whom I learned what it is to be an academic writer. Lea Jacobs, Vance Kepley, and Michael Curtin each helped me grow intellectually.

Without friends and family, I would not have been able to see this book through. I thank Vince Bohlinger, who, despite our personality differences, has been my best friend for over a decade, as well as Todd Borgerding, Patrick Keating, Katherine Spring, Rebecca Swender, who would congratulate me on the publication of this book if she were with us today, and Federico Windhausen, who searched, though in vain, for the right colored pencil. Julian Stringer and Lisa Dombrowski helped me find the right publisher for this book. My mother has always been my biggest fan, and my big brother, his family, and my second brother have always stood by my side. Lastly, I dedicate this book to my father, from whom I got my supposed brains. He passed away several years ago, and I never had the chance to say good-bye and tell him how much he meant to me.

A different version of Chapter 3 was originally published in Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities 27.3 (Summer 2008). Portions of Chapters 5 and 6 originally appeared in Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema published by Hong Kong University Press (2009).

JC

The University of Kent

Canterbury, U.K.

March 2009

Introduction

In the precredit sequence of Oldboy (Park Chan-wook, 2003), Dae-su, the protagonist, stops a man from committing suicide, and he then tells the man the story of his fifteen-year imprisonment. Later in the film, Mi-do, the female lead, reads the diary that Dae-su wrote while he was locked in a cell, and she sheds tears at Dae-su’s hardship and loneliness. Toward the end of the film Dae-su tells his story again, this time to a female hypno-therapist, as he begs her to erase the memory of his incestuous relationship with his daughter Mi-do. This urge to tell one’s story is emblematic of the current status of the South Korean film industry. South Korean cinema is telling its own story, both personal and national, and it has been heard loud and clear both inside and outside the country.

The South Korean Film Renaissance will examine the transformation of the South Korean film industry and the corresponding formal changes between 1986 and 2006, years that mark significant turning points within the history of the Korean Motion Picture Law (MPL). In 1986 the MPL was amended to grant direct distribution by major Hollywood studios; and two decades later, the MPL was further modified to reduce the screen quota from 146 to 73 days allotted for domestically produced films. During the past two decades, however, South Korea saw its domestic film industry blossom, and its film culture matured significantly. In the late 1990s the Korean block-buster established itself as a feasible production/marketing strategy within the South Korean domestic market, with the commercial success of such films as Shiri (Kang Je-gyu, 1999) and Joint Security Area (also known as JSA, Park Chan-wook, 2000). Since then, box office records have been constantly exceeded by subsequent blockbusters, including Silmido (Kang Woo-suk, 2004), Taegukgi (Kang Je-gyu, 2004), and The Host (2006, Bong Joon-ho)—which attracted more than 13 million viewers out of a population of 48 million.¹ South Korean cinema has become one of the strongest commercial film industries in the region, outperforming Hollywood cinema at the local box office. In the past ten years, annual paid cinema admissions in the region have more than tripled from 42 million in 1996 to 148 million in 2005, during which time Hollywood’s market share was cut in half, dropping from 77 percent to 36–38 percent.² By 2005 South Korea had become the fifth largest theatrical market in the world, with $890 million in box-office receipts.

The box-office success of domestically produced films has coincided with international recognition of South Korean filmmakers on the film-festival circuit. In 2002 Im Kwon-taek was named Best Director at Cannes for his film Chihwason, and Lee Chang-dong received the Special Director award at the Venice Film Festival for his film Oasis. In 2004 Kim Ki-duk won major awards: the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival for Samaritan Girl and the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival for 3-Iron. In the same year, Park Chan-wook—director of JSA and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002)—took home Cannes Film Festival’s Grand Prix for Oldboy.

The widely circulated term Hallyu (literally, Korean wave) underscores the emerging popularity of South Korean culture in the regional market.³ Hallyu is typically associated with exported South Korean television series but also encompasses the dissemination of South Korean cultural products in general, including music and cinema. The rising stardom of South Korean actors such as Bae Yong-joon, Choi Ji-woo, Lee Byung-hun, and Jang Dong-gun has further helped the Korean industry sell distribution rights to neighboring countries, as their fan base demands the simultaneous release of their films across the region.⁴

The South Korean Film Renaissance situates the influence of South Korean cinema in the world film scene within the context of globalization by focusing on how the South Korean film industry adapted to regional and global demands by modernizing industry practices and elevating film production value. The South Korean film renaissance underscores the complex nexus of globalization; and like every other industry in Korea, the film industry has been and continues to be tightly controlled by the South Korean government. At the end of the Korean War (1950–1953), the Korean film industry was negligible, producing fewer than thirty films a year. By the late 1950s, however, the industry had begun to grow. By 1959 there were seventy-one production companies, which produced over a hundred films.⁵ The MPL was first legislated in 1962 with the aim of accelerating the industrialization of the Korean motion picture business. The government wished to model the Korean film industry after the Hollywood studio system by eliminating small, unstable production companies. Such an attempt only resulted in further instability of the industry with many small- to mid-sized companies going bankrupt. Despite these drawbacks, Korean cinema enjoyed its first renaissance in the 1960s with the emergence of new production companies and commercial success at the box office.

In the 1970s, under Park Chung-hee’s dictatorship, a new set of regulations was imposed on the film industry. In 1973 the MPL changed from a registration system to a license system.⁶ A production license was given only to film companies with studio facilities and capital. The number of studios that received licenses under the revised MPL amounted in total to fewer than twenty.⁷ This number remained the same until the fifth amendment of the MPL was introduced in 1984. A quota system for production and distribution was also implemented, in order to encourage reinvestment in film production using distribution revenue. Only studios that met the production quota could earn distribution rights. However, the production-distribution quota system did not serve its original purpose in securing the domestic market. Instead, it was exploited, with studios making low-budget quickies that would fill the production quota in order to focus on the importation and distribution of more profitable foreign films.

With the country’s rapid economic growth in the 1970s and 1980s, the Korean government was under pressure to liberalize its import policies and financial markets for all industries, including film. As part of a bargaining session at the Uruguay Round meeting, the United States pressed for the abolition of protective measures that had been guarding the South Korean film industry. The industry had relied on the quota system to gain screen time for its product and to ensure a certain amount of revenue. Against the U.S. government’s continuing press to abolish quotas, in 1999 filmmakers, along with actors and actresses, protested and expressed concerns over the consequences of eliminating the quota system. In 2006, when the South Korean government finally agreed to reduce the screen quota to seventy-three days for the Free Trade Agreement, there was a protest relay, which would always find a few actors or filmmakers demonstrating in downtown Seoul. The protest relay lasted for months.⁸

South Korea also faced competition from Japan, occupier of the Korean peninsula beginning in 1910, whose media had been banned after Korea gained its independence in 1945. In 1998 the Ministry of Culture and Tourism announced its plan to lift the ban on Japanese pop culture.⁹ The older generation, who experienced colonial rule directly, continued to express anxiety and resentment toward Japan. Three and a half decades of Japanese colonial rule are still vivid in the collective memory of the nation. Korean workers were transported to work in coal mines in Siberia and elsewhere; Korean women were conscripted as jeongsindae (comfort women) for the Japanese Army during World War II. Koreans were also forced to adopt Japanese names and were taught in Japanese at school. The younger generation, on the other hand, openly accepts and enjoys Japanese media saturation in the form of manga, anime, television series, film, and music. By 1999 Japanese films that had been circulated at film festivals could earn distribution rights in South Korea, and Japanese artists’ performances in small venues (fewer than two thousand seats) were allowed. In 2004 Japanese films of all ratings were allowed, and Japanese TV drama series were shown on cable television. The last to be imported were Japanese TV variety shows, including comedy shows and anime feature films, both of which gained permission in 2004 and 2006, respectively.¹⁰

The anxiety over direct competition with Hollywood and Japan within the domestic market, however, was slowly overcome with the generational shift within the industry. The relaxation of restrictions on production, in conjunction with the inauguration of a civilian government, provided an opportunity for independent production companies and a new generation of directors—often identified as the 386 Generation—to propel an industrial boom unprecedented in the history of South Korean cinema. The term 386, referring to the speed of an Intel computer chip, has been appropriated by the South Korean media to designate a generation—in their thirties when the term began to circulate—whose members were born in the 1960s and attended college in the 1980s. There is an overlap between the 386 Generation and South Korean baby boomers, who were born between 1955 and 1963. But the use of the term 386 Generation underscores a shared cultural and political proclivity, whereas baby boomers is a less culturally specific demographic term in the Korean context. For those in college during the 1980s, it was a time when the South Korean people experienced painful political turmoil and trauma.

In film history, we often find cases in which a national film industry has been transformed with the arrival of a new generation of filmmakers. French New Wave directors, for example, most of whom were cinephiles, reshaped French film culture and industry in the 1960s. Hong Kong New Wave directors, with their kindred sensibilities, launched the golden era of Hong Kong cinema in the 1980s. Likewise, 386 Generation directors of a similar political predilection contribute to the current industry boom by quickly adapting themselves to industry demands. The concept of generation implies that a demographic group tends to manifest similar attitudes or stances toward its national and cultural history because of its shared experience. However, the collective experience of 386 Generation directors is in and of itself insufficient to characterize the specific characteristics of the South Korean film renaissance. According to Pierre Bourdieu, sociopolitical and cultural proclivities of artists are manifested in their work only through demands from and positions available within the field.¹¹ The opening up of the Korean film market, brought about by the world film industry’s globalization process, creates demand for commercially viable films; and with conglomerates’ and venture capitalists’ money pouring into the South Korean film industry, a majority of 386 Generation directors pursued cinema with entertainment value, comparable—even superior—to that produced by Hollywood.

Along with the expansion of the commercial film industry, local governments launched international film festivals. In 1996 the Pusan International Film Festival (PIFF), held in Busan (also known as Pusan), a southern port city, was initiated with the aim of transferring the cultural foci from other Asian cosmopolitan cities such as Hong Kong and Tokyo to the local cities of Korea.¹² PIFF is now touted as Asia’s premier film festival. The Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival, launched in 1997, and the Jeonju International Film Festival, launched in 2000, have provided further venues to showcase Korean cinema for a wider international audience. Small-scale independent and/or documentary film festivals such as the Human Rights Film Festival, the Queer Film and Video Festival, and the Women’s Film Festival have proliferated, challenging the hegemonic discourse on the national identity and providing alternate public spheres in which people address the socioeconomic and cultural issues of class, gender, and sexual identity.¹³ South Korean cinema provides a model for what Chris Berry calls full service cinema, which ranges from both commercial and art cinema to independent filmmaking, documentary, and animation.¹⁴

The bifurcated pursuit of both commercial and festival-oriented films can be partly attributed to the South Korean government’s control—although weakened of late—and support of the ongoing renaissance. The tax incentives for those who invest in the film industry have attracted and introduced a new generation of financiers to the film industry during the Asian economic crises.¹⁵ The South Korean government has also been preparing for a new era of Korean cinema by educating the new talent that the industry has been so desperately looking for. Such directors as Lee Jeong-hyang, Bong Joon-ho, Hur Jin-ho, and E J-Yong (a.k.a. Lee Je-yong), all of whom have been both commercially and critically acclaimed, graduated from the Korean Academy of Film Art (KAFA), which was established in 1984. The Korean government’s indirect involvement with the new ongoing renaissance challenges the divide often drawn between the global and the national or local.

Although Korean cinema earned recognition as commercial cinema outside the country after the success of the blockbusters, the transformation of the industry had begun in the mid-1980s, with the 1986 revision of the MPL in response to the U.S. government’s demand to abolish some of the protective measures for domestically produced films. Yet current attempts to define the starting point of the New Korean cinema are unsatisfactory. Authors such as Kim Kyung-hyun and Yi Hyo-in, who identify the beginning of the New Korean cinema more or less with the Korean New Wave, mark 1988 as the starting point of the New Korean cinema.¹⁶ The precise referent of the Korean New Wave shifts from author to author, but it is mostly associated with the directors born in the 1950s—slightly older than the 386 Generation—and who debuted in the latter half of the 1980s: directors such as Jang Sun-woo (b. 1952), Park Kwang-su (b. 1955), and Lee Myung-se (b. 1957). For example, in 1988 two of the New Wavers, Park Kwang-su and Lee Myung-se, debuted with Chil-su and Man-su and Gagman respectively. In contrast, though, for industry personnel such as Shim Jae-myung (MK Pictures), Cha Seung-jae (Sidus), and Shin Cheol (Shin Cine), 1992’s The Marriage Story (dir. Kim Ui-seok), which was born out of a marriage between Chungmuro (the Korean film district) and corporate conglomerates, signaled an important turning point.¹⁷ Shin Chi-Yun and Julian Stringer note a transformation at the industry level around the time Im Kwon-taek’s Sopyonje (Seopyeonje, 1993) was released. Post-Sopyonje cinema departs radically from the cultural cinema of the 1980s.

I shy away from identifying the newness of Korean cinema in either the New Wave films of the late 1980s or the more commercially oriented films of the 1990s and onward. I refer to the ongoing phenomenon as a second South Korean film renaissance, a label that can encompass both the resurgence of socially conscious, and/or aesthetically experimental films and the industrial boom. A precedent can be found in the film renaissance of the 1960s,¹⁸ when the number of commercially successful films soared in conjunction with the emergence of a new generation of Korean directors, such as Yu Hyun-mok, Shin Sang-ok, Hong Seong-gi, Lee Man-hui, Kim Ki-duk, and Jeong Chang-hwa.

A further similarity between these two renaissances can be found in the broadening of production trends. Although melodrama had been a predominant genre in the Korean film industry in the 1960s, comprising up to 70 percent of the films produced,¹⁹ Korean audiences saw films that embodied various trends, including costume drama—Seong Chun Hyang (Shin Sang-ok, 1961); comedy—Romance Papa (Shin Sang-ok, 1961) and Petty Middle Manager (Lee Bong-rae, 1961); youth films—Private Tutor (Kim Ki-duk, 1963) and The Barefooted Young (Kim Ki-duk, 1964); action—A Bonanza (Jeong Chang-hwa, 1961); horror/thriller—The Housemaid (Kim Ki-young, 1960), The Devil’s Stairway (Lee Man-hui, 1964), and The Public Cemetery Under the Moon (Kwon Cheol-hwi, 1967); and war films—Five Marines (Kim Ki-duk, 1961) and The Marines who Never Returned (Lee Man-hui, 1963). Contemporary Korean audiences are witnessing the rebirth and transformation of similar genres.

These two renaissances, however, mark significantly different historical junctures in the history of South Korean cinema. If the first renaissance came into being in the midst of the Park Chung-hee regime’s failed attempt to modernize the film sector—a by-product rather than an intentional outcome—the current one is a result of the increasing globalization of the world film industry and of Korea’s striving for cultural visibility; it is also an attempt to reach a wider regional and global audience. The use of the dates 1986 and 2006 does not suggest that there is a clear-cut beginning and end to the current renaissance. Rather, these dates provide a timeframe that allows for a fruitful discussion of how the Korean film industry responded to the increasingly globalized world film industry. As Darcy Paquet notes, unlike the fifth amendment of the MPL in 1984, which was designed to reform an outdated mode of production, the sixth amendment was a direct result of the pressures coming from outside Korea.²⁰ In 1986 the Korean government finally amended the MPL to respond to demands from the Motion Picture Export Association of America (MPEAA) and alleviated the regulations on foreign investment in the Korean film industry. The import quota and the tax imposed on foreign films were also abolished in the same year.²¹ In 2006, two decades after the sixth amendment, the screen quota, which was the government’s last-resort attempt to protect domestically produced films, was reduced in half, as Korea prepared to enter negotiations on the bilateral Free Trade Agreement with the United States. The record-breaking box-office success of The Host in the same year made it look as if the Korean film industry was unaffected by the decision. But in 2007 Korean films saw a drop in audience attendance; it was the first box-office drop in a decade.²²

Throughout the book, the discussion of Korean cinema primarily focuses on feature films made in South Korea, but the approach taken here is hardly protectionist or reflectionist. The concern is how the concept of national cinema is articulated both within and outside the South Korean film industry, often as a marketing strategy. Globalization is not, as previously construed by some cultural theorists, a totalizing, homogenizing process that erases the local specificity. Rather, as Darrell Davis notes, Nationality sparks and thickens instead of fading away.²³ Such a dynamic between the global and the local foregrounds the fact that even if the notion of national cinema is challenged as a vehicle to carry national identity, it still serves as a formative category, providing ingredients to be explored and exploited by global corporations and local filmmakers, by festival programmers and critics, and by academics and individual viewers.²⁴

The domestic enthusiasm for Korean cinema should partly be attributed to the evocation of consumer nationalism. In 1999 the industry protested when the South Korean government proposed further changes to MPL. Earlier changes had already granted the United States direct distribution rights. The protests directed viewers’ attention to the unfair nature of Hollywood’s demands for free trade and to the endangerment of the domestic film industry’s very existence. Laura Nelson in Measured Excess characterizes the South Korean consumer pattern from the 1970s to the 1990s as an instance of consumer nationalism: consumers basing their decisions on the best interests of the nation and not on the interests of individuals.²⁵ South Korea’s export-driven economic polices since the 1970s put heavy emphasis on