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This article examines how the South Korean cinema has undergone a transformation from an ‘antiquated cottage industry’ in the 1980s into a thriving international cinema—albeit with a host of new challenges and tensions—in the ‘post-boom’ years of the 2000s right up to the present. Its analysis of film culture in the 1980s sets the stage for the Korean cinema’s transnational development over the last decade, and points to a longer historical continuum involving the ‘re-emergence’ in the 1980s of a ‘cinema of quality’ that was marked by widespread critical acclaim. Additionally, this article canvasses the key issues and concerns addressed in the thought-provoking pieces included in this special themed issue of Acta Koreana and how they elaborate on the dynamic and complex links between the Korean cinema’s pioneering developments in the aesthetic, textual, industry, audience, critical, policy and historical fields, and their impact on the transformation of what we have come to call ‘Planet Hallyuwood’.

This article introduces a variety of free-ranging meditations on the recent state of the Korean cinema as I have witnessed in my privileged position as a key insider to the Korean film industry. As someone with experience as a film journalist and a columnist for the weekly film magazine Cine21, I identify a common thread that unites a selection of Korean Cinema Today articles in an attempt to complement the academic essays in this special issue. By assessing the particular character and identity of Korean cinema in the “post-boom” years of 2007 to the present, I demonstrate how the industry has recovered some ground since 2007, when the industry faced widespread losses at the box office, the bursting of a film financing bubble and a steep drop in export revenues led many in the film industry to declare a crisis. Since then, although, there is still a sense that Korean cinema has entered a less bountiful era than the one that preceded it, a constantly evolving film landscape continues to offer hallenges of many kinds.

This article explores the trajectory of Song Kang-ho’s on-screen performances from the release of his fourth film, Number 3 (1997), to one of his most recent films, Thirst (2009). As a case study, it reveals new insights about this popular and representative actor’s numerous screen personae and how they have enabled audiences to peer into a cinematic surface that reflects back a mixture of anti-heroism and pantomime. Beneath the many costumes and performance styles he adopts, audiences have come to see a human being with everyday problems and concerns. In a way reminiscent of the French pantomime clown Pierrot, Song’s characters reflect a depth of human feeling and compassion modulated by a comic undercurrent—the tension between these overlapping layers is precisely what holds his various personae together.

This study analyzes the story structure of director Kim Chiun’s film Changhwa Hongnyŏn (A Tale of Two Sisters), as well as the characters that arouse, lead, and complete the events that unfold in the story. While eight years have already passed since its release, this film continues to serve not only as the subject of many studies conducted by researchers involved in the field of film studies but also those engaged in the field of literary studies. To this end, this study begins by reviewing the opinion pieces written by film critics, pieces which caused much debate in fan magazines at the time of the film’s release, as well as the great majority of the previous studies that have focused on this film. Many individuals have conducted comparative studies about the direct and indirect relationship between the classic novel Changhwa Hongnyŏn chŏn and the film Changhwa Hongnyŏn. Such studies have focused on how the film adapted and transformed the classic novel, or how far the film deviated from the original work. However, these issues were not addressed in this study. This is because it is advanced herein that from the very beginning Kim’s decision to entitle his film Changhwa Hongnyŏn was based on a heavily calculated strategy that did not involve any intention to inherit or adapt (translate) any element of the original story in the film. The second issue which came to the forefront during the review of previous studies was the fact that the majority of researchers had a negative assessment of the film narrative’s degree of completion. In this regard, the present study conducted a thorough segmentation-based analysis of the text that saw the temporality and causal relationships found in the story be reorganized in a logical manner. The narrative structure of the film was also delved into in a detailed manner. Next, an analysis of the relationship between the characters and their personalities was undertaken. The dramatic relationship that exists between the characters was explained using the summary found in Figure 1. Thereafter, an analysis of the key characters, namely Sumi who serves as the film’s main character, and Muhyŏn (father), who serves as the cause of all the events that unfold therein, was carried out. An analogical examination of the elements which caused Sumi’s mental illness was also undertaken. Based on this process, the originality of Sumi’s complex ambivalence and how this ambivalence was expressed are clearly revealed. In the concluding section, the symbolism of the house as the background (space) for this film and its connectivity with the narrative was addressed. While the film does not suggest any alternative measures concerning the tragic situations that have been unlimitedly repeated inside of Sumi’s head, the present study does suggest that Sumi’s physical and mental departure from the house mark the first step towards overcoming her illness.

The LGBT movement in Korea may have a relatively short history dating back to the mid-1990s, yet Korean queer cinema has had a unique role in breaking ground in the LGBT realm well before the onset of social activism. We break down the history of Korean queer cinema into three distinct chronological periods, according to the manner in which queer content is displayed and the reception of the films by both the government authorities and the public: the Invisible Age (1976–1998), the Camouflage Age (1998–2005), the Blockbuster Age (2005–present). The Invisible Age could reach as far back as the earliest days of Korean cinema, but two landmark films deserve attention: Ascetic and Broken Branches. The former in particular characterizes the period when its lesbianism was too invisible in the eyes of the public to create much of an impact. Even with the relaxed ‘ethical standards’ since 1998, homosexuality was still deemed too explosive. In the Age of Camouflage, therefore, such popular films as Memento Mori and Bungee Jumping of Their Own masked their homosexual content with horror and romance fantasies. The mega-success of The King and the Clown has proven that LGBT-themed films can compete in the box office, opening the Blockbuster Age of queer cinema. While the ‘flower boy’ formula of beautiful gay character in The King and the Clown has been widely adopted by the mainstream film and entertainment industries, No Regret exemplifies a genre-bending strategy to express queer sexualities in Korean independent cinema.

This article examines the production, release and reception of Wonderful Days (Wŏndŏp’ul teisŭ, 2003), in the context of the historical developments and contemporary standing of the Korean animation industry, both at home and around the world. More specifically, this article discusses the transformation of Wonderful Days into Sky Blue, addressing the changes to the film’s content and title, and providing an analysis of the marketing and critical reception of the film in the USA and UK. The film’s Korean identity was largely disguised in its marketing and ignored by reviewers; Wonderful Days is therefore an important example of the limitations of the Korean wave, an instructive case study that reveals a perception of Korean animation as inferior and superficial. Finally, this article concludes with a discussion of South Korea’s internationally co-produced animated films, the release and reception of which also demonstrate the difficulty of Korean animation overcoming its invisibility and establishing a meaningful international identity alongside Japanese animation.

The global production, distribution, and consumption of SF is difficult to explain on the basis of extant theories linking SF reception and production to industrialization. South Korea offers a striking example of a highly-industrialized society saturated with technosocial change, influenced by foreign SF but without more than marginally successful localization of the SF genre in literary or cinematic form. The Korean film industry’s forays into the “foreign landscape” of SF over the past decade allow for alternative interpretations. Analysis of Lee Si-Myung’s 2009: Lost Memories (2002), Jeong Yun-su’s Yesterday (2002), Jang Sun-woo’s The Resurrection of the Little Match Girl (2002), Jang Joo-Hwan’s Save the Green Planet (2003), Min Byung-Chun’s Natural City (2003), andBong Joon-Ho’s The Host (2007), among others, reveal specific aspects of Korean culture that problematize the localization of the SF genre to a Korean setting, namely problems of generic fluency on the part of audiences and creators alike, post-colonial nationalist-historiographic concerns, anxieties of influence regarding foreign-originating genre and narrative forms, and more. A study of recent Korean SF films—primarily those which fail as specimens of the SF genre—is followed by a discussion of approaches which have resulted in the successful circumvention of cultural barriers to the localization of SF, suggesting tantalizing possibilities for the continued localization process and development of a native Korean SFnal imaginary.

During the 2000s, the Korean cinema rose to prominence as one of the hot spots in the global film industry. Along with the U.S., India and Japan, the Korean cinema has now taken its place as one of the strongest local film industries. The contemporary Korean cinema embraces arthouse as well as commercial cinema, producing a variety of genre films based on Hollywood and other film conventions. Nonetheless, the Korean cinema has developed a hybrid entity of its own that mixes the local and the global (mainly Hollywood) through dynamic cultural and artistic processes of assimilating, modifying and re-creating. What we have come to call the ‘New Korean Cinema,’ with its real origins in the late 1980s, has reached maturity, and its exponents take pleasure in manipulating what they have learned from Hollywood. As such, this article analyzes the historical development of a confidence and willingness to take on creative challenges. The genre-bending practice found in the Korean Cinema, however, has its historical connection to the 1960s, which is best represented by a hybrid genre-bending quality unique to Korea’s film history, indeed, one that is characterized by the 1960s anticommunist film.

In the past decade, the Korean film industry has enjoyed never-before-seen success at home and abroad. With the high domestic market share of local movies (recording more than 40% market share continuously from 2001), it has been reported that Korea is “the only nation during the post-Vietnam War history that would regain its domestic audiences after losing them to Hollywood” (Kim, 2004). Based on this domestic achievement, Korean cinema’s foreign exports have also drastically increased, from 14 movies that generated revenue of US$173,838 in 1993 to 202 movies that reached about US$75 million in 2005 (Korean Film Council, 2010). Despite this achievement, trade headlines and popular news reports have continued to rave about these external figures while ignoring significant internal changes from within the Korean film industry. In addition, there is a tendency among scholars to interpret this commercial achievement simply as successful resistance against American cultural imperialism within the local vs. global paradigm. In order to understand the cultures of production (du Gay, 1997) of the currentKorean film industry, this study examines the changing industrial formations and ownership concentration processes in the Korean film industry of the 2000s against the backdrop of distinct media globalization processes. It relates this finding to larger discussions concerning the overseas development of the Korean Wave or Hallyu. From this political-economic approach, it is expected that readers can gain a more holistic understanding of the Korean film industry and the Korean Wave.

This study1 analyzes how the Ten Diagrams on Sage Learning (聖學十圖, sŏnghak sipto) (1568) written by T’oegye Yi Hwang (1501–1570) was disseminated and diffused amongst future generations of kings and Confucian scholars (16th–20th centuries). It also examines the characteristics of the perceptions of the Ten Diagrams on Sage Learning (聖學十圖, Sŏnghak sipto) that existed during the Chosŏn era. What’s more, based on a perusal in a chronological manner of related materials, this study reviews the characteristics of the dissemination of the Ten Diagrams on Sage Learning amongst the kings of Chosŏn; moreover, the annotations of Confucian scholars who emerged after Yi Hwang are used to analyze trends in terms of the diffusion of the Ten Diagrams on Sage Learning. Such an exercise is designed to analyze the characteristics of the perceptions of the Ten Diagrams on Sage Learning during the Chosŏn era from a diachronic standpoint. Based on this analysis of the characteristics of the dissemination of the Ten Diagrams on Sage Learning during the 16th–20th centuries, as well as trends in the annotation thereof, the perceptions of the Ten Diagrams on Sage Learning during the Chosŏn era can be summarized as follows. First, in its capacity as materials for the learning of monarchs (chewanghak) and of ideological significance of state administration, the Ten Diagrams on Sage Learning can be said to have a great influence on Chosŏn. One can see that it served as the standard model for the learning of monarchs in Chosŏn. Second,the trends in the diffusion and annotation of the Ten Diagrams on Sage Learning greatly influenced the course of the development and theoretical deepening of Neo-Confucianism (Zhu Xi’s School of Thought). The annotations of “The Mind Combines and Governs Nature and Emotions” (心統性情圖, Simt’ong sŏngjŏng to) Chapter of the Ten Diagrams on Sage Learning produced during the 17th century revolved around discussions about the differences between Yi Hwang and Yi Yi over the Theory of Mind and Nature (心性論, simsŏngnon), discussions which greatly influenced the deepening of the Theory of Mind and Nature during the development process of Neo-Confucianism. Meanwhile, reverence (敬, kyŏng) and simsŏngnon-related annotations of the Ten Diagrams on Sage Learning were actively carried out during the 19th century. This trend in terms of the annotation of the Ten Diagrams on Sage Learning can be considered as an example of the theoretical enrichment which the simsŏngnon-based standpoint and kyŏng-centered structure of the Ten Diagrams on Sage Learning introduced in terms of the deepening of the importance of kyŏng and the simsŏngnon in the subsequent development of Neo-Confucianism in Chosŏn. Third, we can see that Yi Hwang’s thought, which served as the foundation for their own thought, influenced the Silhak (Practical learning) scholars of Chosŏn.

While Japan’s perceptions of a security threat was the paramount reason for its takeover of Korea, a second reason surfaced that linked Korean emigration to Hawaii with a threat to Japan’s prestige as a leading nation in the world. Needing to prevent enactment of a Japanese Exclusion Act by the United States, the Japanese Foreign Office undertook to bring that emigration to a halt. Skillfully using missteps by the Korean government, Japan was able both to hide their ulterior motives from the United States and make it easier to absorb Korea’s diplomatic functions abroad, resulting in the establishment of the Protectorate in 1905.While Japan’s perceptions of a security threat was the aramount reason for its takeover of Korea, a second reason surfaced that linked Korean emigration to Hawaii with a threat to Japan’s prestige as a leading nation in the world. Needing to prevent enactment of a Japanese Exclusion Act by the United States, the Japanese Foreign Office undertook to bring that emigration to a halt. Skillfully using missteps by the Korean government, Japan was able both to hide their ulterior motives from the United States and make it easier to absorb Korea’s diplomatic functions abroad, resulting in the establishment of the Protectorate in 1905.