Phantom cinema, trans-cinema, and Korean blockbusters
Soyoung Kim
In the mid-to-late 1990s, Korean cinema began attracting critical attention on the international film festival circuit. The emergent Korean Wave of film, music, and television dramas further expanded awareness of Korean popular culture. In 2012, pop star Psy’s hit single “Gangnam Style” became the ubiquitous marker for the Korean Wave, solidifying it as a global phenomenon. Today, with more and more films being distributed globally—including Snowpiercer (2013)— Korean cinema challenges and expands our understanding of the dialectics of national and transnational cinema. It is incumbent on us to examine South Korean cinema with an attention to intricate discontinuities, ruptures, and an intermeshing of three constituencies—the layers and shifts that occur in national, regional (inter-Asian), and transnational contexts. In exploring a once poor and an unsettling “national” cinema in trans/inter-Asia and global contexts, there is a certain drive to uncover the possibilities of “cinema otherwise” disclosed by Korean cinema in its affective and perpetual states of emergency.
On December 10, 2015, the news report on “North Korea’s all-female pop group will perform in China” was closely followed by another news item: “K-pop group Oh My Girl are detained at LAX office for being mistaken for sex workers.” The news captured the clash of the two Koreas’ popular culture; Korean Wave in South Korea and Moranbong in North Korea, the latter claiming Psy as its rival. These two incidents tellingly portray the resonance and dissonance that the two Koreas have generated with their global audience. North Korea’s all-female pop group Moranbong was soon reported to return to North Korea without having given a performance and no explanation was offered in public. They, however, have a considerable presence on social networking services (SNSs). Their Facebook fan page, “Moranbong” in English, has attracted 2,327 Likes, and as of December 11, 2015 their YouTube channel had amassed a significant 3,521,229 subscribers. The simultaneous outbreak of the news concerning two of Korea’s girl groups is uncanny.
In considering how a modest Korean adventure film, The Himalayas (2015), could topple the global phenomenon Star Wars: Episode VII—The Force Awakens (2015) at the Korean box office, both experts and laymen would come short of an exhaustive analysis. However, two key incidents offer significant contexts for the manifestation of Korean global blockbusters. The first incident is the June Democratic Uprising in 1987, and the second is the IMF crisis that devastated the economy in 1997. In tandem with these two events is the influence of the political disorder endured from 1948 to 1991. In fact, the lasting effects from the legal and political measures undertaken during this time become crucial for locating South Korea’s post-colonial cinema in a critical context. During this period the South Korean government proclaimed a state of emergency nineteen times, and the security status of martial law was employed nine times. Propelled by the establishment of the military demarcation line and the Cold War, the highly mobilized political activities were carried out with the promise of a prosperous postcolonial capitalist modern-state that would replace the impoverished former colony. The state of emergency not only affected the legal and the political sphere, but also the suspension of the rule of law. During the period of capitalism and ensuing modernization, the suspended rulings were sustained by people’s desultory aspiration mixed with terror, fear, and anxiety. The unease wrought incredible tension due to the torturous complicity people were compelled to endure. It is within this political milieu and “emergency culture” as it were, that the Korean Wave exploded creating an “entertainment republic.” It might be odd to see the overdetermined leap of this kind from emergency to entertainment, but the critical inquiry of South Korean cinema1 requires an understanding of this seemingly incongruous trajectory. It presents a new kind of state of emergency, one articulated with states of fantasy.
While the political and legal states of emergency have now been lifted, an “affective state of emergency” continues to operate in South Korea. In effect, it’s a way of processing the new phase of capitalism that Koreans are experiencing today; a postmodern “cognitive capitalism” (Hardt and Negri 2004; Boutang 2007) characterized by its installation across a highly virtualized network society (Cho 2011). A composite state of urgency and criticality operating at a vertiginous pace drives South Korean society into a condition of perpetual “dromology” or “logic of speed” in Paul Virilio’s (1986, 47) terms. This condition has produced a distinct “state of fantasy” (Rose 1996) that imbues the Korean mode of blockbuster cinema as well as, more widely, the Korean Wave—within which K-pop is known for its dynamic girl and boy groups’ song and dance acts. The Korean Wave has brought unprecedented regional and global exposure to popular Korean culture. Following the IMF crisis, with its attendant panic and suspicion about the global regulation of financial power and capital, South Korea experienced the transnational success of a Korean popular culture previously considered esoteric. This surprising shift— from the status of an impenetrable (hopelessly local) cultural formation to that of a “wave” with an immense regional and global circulation—begs for a range of analyses. However, this shift appears to have fundamentally begun with an experience of shock and an incorporation of “otherness” that worked on at least two registers. One of these involved the invasion of a threatening other, demanding, in the name of globalization, transparency in the flow of capital and its organization under the gaze of the IMF in particular. The other was the increasing presence of migrant workers in South Korea. On the one hand there was the gaze of the other empowered by global capital, while on the other hand there was Asian migrant labor (along with female marriage migrants) requiring a politics of empowerment (Benhabib 1986) creating a shift from an allegedly homogeneous nation to a “multicultural” one.
The Korean Wave, including its strong K-pop component, is at least in part an aggressive response to, and also a constituent of, a newly multicultural, globalized nation (Chua and Iwabuchi 2008; Mori 2006). “I’m gonna make history” is a line from “The Boys,” a Girl’s Generation song that continues: “History will be written anew and the world is noticing us.” This representative K-pop group incorporates the gaze of the global other in their formation of identity. Reciprocally, the Korean Wave claims to be located in a multitude of regions across the globe. It can be found, heard, and watched not only on the streets of Bangkok and Tokyo, but also on YouTube, on fan sites, and in Korean-Wave tourism. It desires to be global and ubiquitous. A peculiar assemblage of K-pop, K-drama, and film, the Korean Wave is a phenomenon of a post-authoritarian society reaching out to regional and global audiences in the age of neo-liberalism. At once an offspring of a militarized society, which enables a socially recognized and acceptable training in “drilling” for both girl and boy groups from a very early age, the Korean Wave is also a harbinger of a civil and democratic society to come—a complex and historically hybrid cultural form.
The political change towards democratization in 1987 (the 1987 system), along with the IMF crisis in 1997, is shared with other Asian countries, such as Taiwan and Indonesia. Examining the commonalities and differences of the political changes and financial crisis offers grounds for comparing inter-Asian and trans-Asian modes of cultural production. The 1987 system and the IMF crisis once appeared as isolated events, but in hindsight we see their interconnections traversing the local, the regional, and the global. In this context, we acquire a new understanding of how the global Korean blockbuster was established. The 1987 system, constructed by an alliance of labor and student movements, contributed to loosening the censorship of films and helped launch many domestic film festivals. It was indeed a transformative moment which would eventually configure “trans-cinema,” taking a cue from the proliferation of digital cinema vis-à-vis new modes of receiving and interacting with visual content.2 Trans-cinema proposes that digital and Internet cinema, LCD screens (installed in subways, taxis, and buses), and gigantic electrified display boards—called jeongwangpan in Korean) should be seen as spaces into which cinema theories and criticism should intervene. These immense urban screens exist as a phantasmic space permeating and simultaneously constructing the everydayness of the city. They are not only a crucial constituent of trans-cinema, but also demonstrate an individual’s “right to the city” or the freedom individuals have in constructing their environment in relation to their desired “lifestyles, technologies, and aesthetic values” (Harvey 2015, 1).
Trans-cinema succeeds and transforms “phantom” cinema, the intriguing invisible entity rendering the problematic historiography and archival issue of South Korean films. Until 1998, the Korean Film Archive did not possess any colonial period films—all the more remarkable considering the fact that two-thirds of the silent films for which there is documentation of their existence, have been lost. Consequently, the majority of Korean film historians have formed a phantom canon of a fantasmatic unity known as Arirang. This phantom cinema has to construct film history on vanished, lost, and rumored films of colonial times. According to Slavoj Žižek, the phantom, the “object-impediment,” plays an ambiguous role of guaranteeing fantasmatic consistency (2001). We find this not only for post-colonial Korean society but also for both North and South Korea. It also exposes a hole, a rupture, and a discontinuity that encourages re-examining the episteme of cinema in Korea. Methodological speculation on phantom cinema has been a driving force in South Korean film studies. Yet, the employment of the term phantom cinema signifies the unsettled status of the spectral canon in the post-colonial archive. The term also endeavors to suggest a need for an alternative film historiography, raising vital theoretical questions. For instance, how should we conceptualize a national cinema grounded in canonical films that are no longer available to be seen?3
A notion of trans-cinema that is more attentive to and privileging of a network of distribution, spectatorship and alternative public sphere rather than insisting on a single filmic text, is partly derived from the above concerns incurred by phantom cinema. Whereas the conceptual frameworks for trans-cinema are driven more by a quest for an alternative practice, the blockbuster mode is more discursive. While phantom cinema draws on the post-colonial archive, and the 1987 system has contributed to the formation of trans-cinema, the IMF crisis expedited the blockbuster culture. But this has created a tension with trans-cinema, which can be more transient, ambient, mobile, but most of all transformative. Trans-cinema also presents itself as an apparatus of transformation from phantom cinema to cinema otherwise. Trans-cinema and local blockbusters are, however, not in opposition, but can supplement each other. They might be coalesced and diversified towards something else. For instance, the clips of blockbuster films on the big screens in busy urban areas are a kind of trans-cinema in terms of spectatorship, but not as concerns content. The blockbuster mode and trans-cinema are also not distinct binaries. This is despite the fact that trans-cinema is more receptive to the aesthetic aspects of cinema—in its technical, social, and political apparatus—while local, blockbuster mode tends to refer to more of the technical, regional, and financial aspects of cinema.
In South Korea, these two trans-cinemas and the blockbuster emerged just after the turmoil of the IMF crisis. Undoubtedly, South Korean films of both modes (inclusive of independent films), claimed overwhelming numbers at the local box office—an audience of ten million is regarded a big success at the domestic box office. These films were vibrantly resonant and vehemently dissonant with the political, economic, and social changes wrought by the 1987 and 1997 system, on both national and transnational lines. There emerges a certain “affective community,” touched and shaped by the global Korean blockbuster, that contained independent film scenes that were profoundly engaged with the distribution of the sensible—or, the ethical, the representational, and the aesthetic regime in Rancière terms.4 These three regimes become more intelligible if they were redistributed via the temporal regime of the emergent, the hegemonic, and the residual.
Within the dynamics of the blockbuster culture, trans-cinema, and phantom cinema, one film of note is the exceptional pan-Asian hit movie, My Sassy Girl (dir. Kwak Jae-yong, 2001). After its rather unexpected popularity in various countries, its heroine, Jeon Ji-Hyeon, has been promoted as a pan-Asia star, appealing to viewers from Hong Kong, China, Japan, Vietnam, and Thailand. The pan-Asian fandom Jeon enjoyed with My Sassy Girl was followed by K-drama (My Love from the Star, 来自星星的你, 2014). The film also shows the increasing relevance of the Chinese market to the Korean Wave.
A synopsis of the emergence and consolidation of the Korean blockbuster since the end of the twentieth century reveals a history of excessive redistribution of the sensible—the visible/invisible, the sayable/unsayable, the audible/inaudible. Shiri (dir. Kang Je-gyu, 1999), produced on a budget of just US$5 million, is a suspense film about a terrorist plot enacted by a North Korean band of renegade spies in Seoul. Its production values and special effects were modeled to some extent on the American blockbuster, and the film became the most successful box-office draw in Korean history, having even outgrossed Titanic (1997). The success of Shiri drew the interest of venture capitalists to the film industry and was a contributing factor to stimulating other companies to sell Korean films on the international market. In 2000, another blockbuster about the North–South division of Korea, J.S.A.: Joint Security Area (dir. Park Chan-wook, 2000), would break the record set by Shiri and make more inroads into the international film market. J.S.A.: Joint Security Area’s take at the box-office would in turn be broken in 2001 by Chingu (Friends, dir. Kwak Kyeong-taek, 2001), a film about four young men who grew up together in Busan, three of them falling into organized crime.5
The unsettling distribution is most apparent when the popular culture faces political and economic challenges. What has become the most observable in the first phase of the blockbuster mode is a narrative strategy of multi-nationalizing women characters. As South Korea is exposed to a powerful global gaze—such as the IMF—and in turn mimics this gaze in its desire to be a player in Asia, anxiety and desire explode within the Korean blockbuster in unexpected ways. Relegating South Korean women to the realm of the invisible, blockbusters underline male-dominant groups such as the army, the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, and organized crime, to foreground homosocial relations. What the impenetrability and opacity of male bonding in blockbusters suggest is quite evident. However, the brotherhood of nationalism is not destined to find a secure space of its own under the global gaze that demands transparency. This sense of the impossibility of reconstructing a nationalist male space is both a cause and a consequence of the endless remaking of blockbusters.
The disappearance of images of South Korean women also constitutes a new globalized national discourse. The orchestration of transparency and impenetrability bitterly resounds in the global and the national arena and increasingly stages an orchestra without women players— an unfortunate retreat of gender politics. This departure does not stop, however, at the level of representation. In addition to the South Korean government’s official declaration of the collapse of public intellectuals and their replacement with twenty- or thirty-something young venture capitalists as the “new intellectuals,” feminist intervention in a public sphere attuned to a concept of a globalized national is doubly denied.
Turning our attention to several instances of the Korean blockbuster, we’ll not only offer a critical analysis of a society that is rapidly changing but one that also offers “room for play,” performance, and taking a “gamble” (Hansen 2004) with cinema; in short, a fantasmatic space. While the first phase of the Korean blockbuster highlights many issues relating to gender politics, the second phase of Korean blockbusters delves into questions of national identity and affective labor provided by mothers and domestic helpers. This cluster of films seems to suggest the social emergence of a new set of problems about gendered and emotional labor, the volatile corporeality of the female body and, as I shall argue, the miraculous corporeality of the male body receiving and returning extreme violence. Further, alongside commercial thrillers and dramas from renowned directors such as Park Chan-wook (Bakjwi [Thirst] 2009), Bong Jung-ho (Madeo [Mother] 2009) and Im Sang-soo (Hanyeo [The Housemaid] 2010), another direction is taken by a series of films preoccupied with issues such as immigration, refugees, and diaspora.
In South Korean there are increasing numbers of migrants, particularly those from the Korean diaspora in China and refugees from North Korea. The representation of the miraculous and fantasmatic other in Hwanghae (The Yellow Sea, dir. Na Hong-Jin, 2010), is a particularly interesting exposition of issue, wherein “a specter haunts the world and it is the specter of migration” (Hardt and Negri 2001, 213). We are introduced to hit man, Gunam (played by the celebrated actor Ha Jeong-woo) who follows an illegal trail of migrant workers coming from Yanbian, in Northeastern China, just north of the North Korean border, an area mostly inhabited by a Korean–Chinese diaspora. A temporary migrant, Gunam is pursued by the triple threat of a South Korean gang, a Yanbian gang and the South Korean police. Significant works in this vein have also been produced by the independent sector, despite the depletion of filmmaking subsidies by the reactionary government of Lee Myung-bak. Independent films in particular have inscribed North Korean refugees and Bangladeshi migrant labor into the radical platform of representational politics in South Korea as critical discourse increasingly pays attention to them.
At the same time, in a low-budget independent film produced by Kim Ki-duk, Poongsangae (Poongsan Dog, dir. Jung Jai-hon, 2010), we find a protagonist who belongs neither to North Korea nor South Korea. He does not identify his nationality but deliberately chooses to function solely as a transient entity, a delivery person who travels back and forth across the DMZ from Seoul to Pyongyang and vice versa. As a result, agents from both North and South Korea pursue him for disobeying national security laws in both countries. Films like Hwanghae and Poongsangae unveil the people who are deprived of citizenship.
The popular film, Ajeossi (The Man from Nowhere, dir. Lee Jung-beom, 2010) also deals with a former North Korean spy who is now a refugee, although that aspect is treated as more of a generic component. The emergence of a male protagonist who figures, in Giorgio Agamben’s (1998) terms, not as bios (citizens’ “qualified life” incorporated into the political body) but as a homo-sacer or “set-apart man” epitomizing zoe (“bare life”), is most viscerally displayed in Hwanghae. Gunam’s cognitive skill is severely tested by traveling from China to Korea and then having to find his way back to China without any guidance. His mental stability is wrecked by the tripartite pressure of the South Korean police, the Chinese Korean gang, and the South Korean gang; his muscles, energy, and blood are all drained, reducing him to bare bones. The power and the violence to which he is subjected undo the body as if it were never meant to feel pain; body and brain are completely expended. Displaying a thoroughly carnivorous expropriation of cognitive ability and bodily power from its male protagonist, the film provides an allegory for the ways in which the regime of neoliberalism impacts both cognitive skills and physical power. Gunam’s body is detached from his mind and reconstructed as the raw material that is subject to violence. At the same time, his body is also its own producer of violence and power.
A film of this kind, however, has the potential to evoke a constellation of violence (gewalt) which paradigmatically generates a signifying chain of power, force, vitality, authority, and the state, as it is conceptualized in Walter Benjamin’s 1921 essay, “Critique of Violence” (Benjamin 1978). In the second phase of the Korean blockbuster, the state of fantasy and the state of emergency are articulated with this assemblage of violence. In these films, there is a peculiar tension and different tenor of the states of emergency and those of fantasy. Snowpiercer, in pivoting on the states of fantasy in the state of emergency that is bordering on catastrophe, takes a leap at the box office in the United States, earning US$86.8 million.
In weaving a contemporary history of Korean cinema, it is crucial to recognize a working disjuncture, revealing a gap in the cultural, political, and economic manifestation and structure, as well as a specificity of film texts. As we analyze the effects of the 1987 system, the IMF crisis, and the long period of states of emergency in Korean history, the forceful and coercive threads of the political and the economical become evident.
1 In this chapter South Korean cinema functions as a comprehensive term that includes both postcolonial and colonial cinema.
2 I argued in the following concerning trans-cinema: I have previously proposed a notion of transcinema, or a cinema that should be attentive to the transformation of its production, distribution, and reception modes, as shown by independent digital filmmaking and its availability on the Internet. Yet, trans-cinema is a curious entity, an unstable mixture. It cuts across film and digital technology, and challenges the normative process of spectatorship that followed the institutionalization of cinema. As a critique of, and successor to, the pairing of world cinema with national cinemas, it proposes the need to rethink the constellations of local cinema in the era of transnational capitalism (Kim 2003).
3 On phantom cinema, refer further to Kim (2011).
4 Rancilem in The Politics of Aesthetics is mainly concerned with the European art practice but this essay locates the non-Hollywood mode of local blockbuster in tandem, and in tension, with trans-cinema at precarious lines of distribution of the sensible (Rancière 2004, 12–19).
5 The production budgets grew even larger, the spectacle more sweeping, and the cinematic universe more insistently and myopically male-centric in 2003 and 2004. Silmido (dir. Kang Woo-seok 2003) is a US$8 million epic version of an actual incident during the Pak Chung-hee administration.
Agamben, G. (1998). Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Behbabib, S. (1986). Critique, Norm, and Utopia. New York: Columbia University Press.
Benjamin, W. (1978). “Critique of Violence.” In P. Demetz (ed.) Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, pp. 277–300. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Boutang, Y .M. (2007). Le Capitalism Cognitive: La Nouvelle Grante Transformation. Paris: Editions Amsterdam.
Cho, J.H. (2011). Cognitive Capitalism: Great Shift of the Modern World and the Reconstitution of Social Life. Seoul: Galmuri.
Chua, B.H. and Iwabuchi, K. (eds) (2008). East Asian Pop Culture: Analyzing the Korean Wave. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
Hansen, M. (2004). “Room-for-Play: Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema.” October, 109: 3–45.
Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2001). Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2004). Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: The Penguin Press.
Kim, S. (2003). “The Birth of the Local Feminist Sphere in the Global Era: Trans-cinema and Yosongjang.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 4(1): 10–24.
Kim, S. (2011). “Cartography of Catastrophe: Pre-Colonial Surveys, Post-Colonial Vampires, and the Plight of Korean Modernity.” Journal of Korean Studies, 16(2): 285–301.
Mori, Y . (2006). Winter Sonata and The Pro-active Consumption of Fans in Trans Asian Screen Culture, Soyoung Kim (ed.) pp. 239–276. Seoul: Hyeonshil Munhwa Yeongu.
Rancière, J. (2004). The Politics of Aesthetics. Edited and translated by Gabriel Rockhill. London: Bloomsbury.
Rose, J. (1996). States of Fantasy. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Virilio, P. (1986). Speed and Politics. New York: Columbia University.
Žižek, S. (2001). Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York: Routledge.