Abstract
Korean Screen Cultures: Interrogating Cinema, TV, Music and Online Games seeks to break the imbalance of studies on Korean visual culture, which predominantly focused on South Korean popular culture, “leaving North Korea sidelined and often considered in a negative light because of its political regime.” Given the complicated geopolitical, historical, and cultural interrelations between South Korea (or the Republic of Korea) and North Korea (or the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, DPRK), the volume sheds light on the commonality and distinctiveness of screen cultures in the two countries, and emphasizes the points of geopolitical interactions as well. Andrew David Jackson is associate professor of Korean Studies at the University of Copenhagen and Colette Balmain is senior lecturer in Film, TV and Media at Kingston University and specializes in East Asian cinemas and cultures.
The collection consists of three parts: “The South” (Chapters 1-4), “The South and the North” (Chapters 5-9), and “The Global” (Chapters 10-14). Among them, Chapter 11, “Framing South Korea and Vietnam’s Past and Present in Muoi: The Legend of a Portrait,” is quite impressive and thought-provoking. In comparison with other South Korean horror films, Muoi is one of few that take Vietnam as a setting, but it completely effaces any account of South Korean intervention in the country, including the history of Korean involvement in Vietnam as well as “present day issues of exploitation and racism facing Vietnamese women workers living in South Korea.” In this chapter, Jessica Conte argues against the historical distortion that “elides South Korea’s sub-imperial involvement with Vietnam,” and also deconstructs the ideological construction that the film was supposed to function, say, under the mask of friendship, sympathetic identification, and multiculturalism, to “support an ideal of Korean-Vietnamese cooperation that obscures South Korea’s violent past in Vietnam.”
To a large extent, it is a wide-ranging as well as a practical volume with several merits. First, it is well-organized and rich in content. Not only does it bring together a broad selection of essays that span from South to North but it also covers multitudinous forms of popular media that are intensely attractive to young audiences, including cinema, karaoke, television, the Internet, and music videos and e-games, all of which contribute to the comprehensive depiction of the contours of “Korea” from multifaceted dimensions. Second, different from “the type of analysis found in many existing studies: a simple comparison of Korean popular culture with more dominant forms of popular media,” it adopts diverse methodological approaches to screen cultures, such as semiotics, ethnography, discourse analysis, audience studies, and cultural materialism, alongside with a specific sociopolitical and cultural focus, which is herein proved to be innovative and feasible to the study. Third, the use of a multitude of figures and tables offers an open-and-shut visualized effect, such as photographs, screen captures, detailed information of films in certain series, and record of foreign dancing bodies in K-pop videos. Moreover, a large amount of related background information, in terms of politics, military, history, economy, and culture in or out of Korea peninsula, makes it easier for readers to understand.
Nevertheless, one regret, as mentioned in the Introduction, is that “the DPRK section is limited to a discussion of cinema” only. It would be more informative and instructive if other media forms and popular cultures in the DPRK could be presented and explored, as the book is intended to “function as a reference guide to the variety and diversity of Korean screen cultures.” Still, it is somewhat disappointing that most of the chapters focus primarily on the South or North and strive to “reflect the individuality and particularity of DPRK and South Korean screen cultures shaped by different political and economic realities” respectively. It would be more comprehensive and attractive if the North and South could be taken into consideration simultaneously and compared interactively.
On the whole, the volume is quite unique and worth reading. As “the latest volume to be published in English on the diverse and vibrant popular media of the Korean peninsula,” it demonstrates valuable and updated research achievements in the study of Korean screen cultures worldwide, and is definitely significant to the study of non-Western cultures as well. I would not hesitate to recommend this volume to scholars and researchers who are interested in either Korean or Screen Studies.
