Initiatives
Partner:
Center for Korean Studies –University of Washington, Seattle
When Chan-wook Park’s debut feature The Moon Is… the Sun’s Dream was released in the spring of 1992, the South Korean film industry had the lowest domestic film market share in its history. From the 1970s through the 1990s, the Korean film market, like the markets of many countries around the world, was dominated by Hollywood. Local film critic Kim Young-jin lamented, “The Korean film industry began 1993 without a single coin to inherit from the past, and in a state of self-examination, embarked on a solitary battle for its very survival. It was a year distinguished by steely resolve and a solitary, terrible fight for survival.” The majority of film critics, students, and industry professionals viewed the future of South Korean cinema as bleak.
Surprisingly, barely nine years later, South Korea became the first film industry in recent history to reclaim its domestic market from Hollywood in 2001. Soon thereafter, South Korean cinema entered its most iconic year in its history. The year 2003 brought a wave of new South Korean films, including Oldboy, A Good Lawyer’s Wife, Save the Green Planet!, A Tale of Two Sisters, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring, and Memories of Murder. In 2004, the New York-based film magazine Film Comment published its first special issue on Korean cinema in 2004. Chuck Stephens, the special issue’s editor, proclaimed South Korean cinema “one of the greatest renaissances in global filmmaking the world has ever seen.” Since then, South Korean cinema made a history. South Korean cinema provides one of the most striking case studies of non-Western cinematic success in the age of the neoliberal world order, in which Hollywood dominates the global movie consumer’s heart, mind, and soul.
What happened to South Korean film cinema between 1992 and 2003? How did what was once a “invisible” cinema become one of the world’s most influential film industries so quickly? In November 2019, Lincoln Center in NYC held a South Korean cinema retrospective. The focus was on a selection of films released between 1996 and 2003. In 1996, the University of Southern California (USC) hosted the first North American retrospective of a South Korean master, Im Kwon-taek, while Hong Sang-soo released his debut feature The Day a Pig Fell into the Well. ‘2003’ was the year in which the aforementioned masterpieces of contemporary South Korean cinema were released. This research project will examine the 1990s film cultures and industries in South Korea and the ways in which the transformation of the industries, the emergence of the media conglomerates, cinematheque movements, the birth of Busan international film festival, proliferation of the film schools, new film journalism, translations of film studies textbooks and theories, digital technologies and portable dvcam, and the IMF crisis and dot-com revolution laid the groundwork for the renaissance.
