Korean Cinema: Books

A wide-ranging analysis of one of the world's most important contemporary film industries, New Korean Cinemaadopts a cross-cultural and multi-dimensional perspective and provides a comprehensive overview of the production, circulation and reception of modern South Korean cinema.

As the first detailed English-language book on the subject, Korean Horror Cinema introduces the cultural specificity of the genre to an international audience, from the iconic monsters of gothic horror, such as the wonhon (vengeful female ghost) and the gumiho (shapeshifting fox), to the avenging killers of Oldboy and Death Bell.

Like many ideological dictatorships of the twentieth century, North Korea has always considered cinema an indispensible propaganda tool.

New Korean Cinema charts the dramatic transformation of South Korea's film industry from the democratization movement of the late 1980s to the 2000s new generation of directors.

In one of the first English-language studies of Korean cinema to date, Kyung Hyun Kim shows how the New Korean Cinema of the past quarter century has used the trope of masculinity to mirror the profound sociopolitical changes in the country.

This catalogue, based on a festival held at the ICA in 1994, provides a survey of contemporary Korean cinema and offers background information and material on 5 key Korean directors: Im Kwon-Taek, Jang Sun-Woo, Kim Ui-Seok, Lee Myung-Se and Park Kwang-Su.

Despite its rise in the global market, recent political progress, and a surging interest worldwide, Korean films are relatively unknown and rarely studied.

In Transnational Korean Cinema author Dal Yong Jin explores the interactions of local and global politics, economics, and culture to contextualize the development of Korean cinema and its current place in an era of neoliberal globalization.

For the past decade, the Korean film industry has enjoyed a renaissance. With innovative storytelling and visceral effects, Korean films not only have been commercially viable in the domestic and regional markets but also have appealed to cinephiles everywhere on the international festival circuit.

Immediately following the Korean War, South Korea's film industry flourished with vibrant local production of high-quality films. Characterized by its stunning melodramas, this "Golden Age" of South Korean cinema produced a body of work as historically, aesthetically, and politically significant as that of other well-known national film movements such as Italian Neorealism, French New Wave, and New German Cinema. Conditions that fostered South Korea's cinematic Golden Age were short lived; a brief period of intense poverty and struggle--but also creative freedom--was ended by the dictatorship of Park Chung Hee in the late 1960s.