New Korean Cinema: Breaking the Waves

A middle-aged woman with a hardened, determined look on her face walks down a street crowded with protesters. She falls in among students and ordinary citizens chanting slogans and holding banners reading ‘Restore Democracy’ and ‘Chun Doo Hwan is a Murderer’. At one point a grim silence falls when some demonstrators pull a cart filled with slain bodies through the crowd. However, her resolve to support the demonstration is mixed with rising panic: having ignored all her threats, her 15-year-old daughter has followed her from their home into the city streets. The woman implores her daughter to stay behind, but the girl, also panic-stricken, keeps disobeying and running after her. Finally they come to a large central plaza where a teeming mass of protesters have gathered, pumping their fists in the air and shouting at a formation of armed paratroopers. The soldiers are impassive, seeming to ignore them. For a few moments, the citizens’ rage fills the air with an undulating roar. Then with a cracking sound, the soldiers begin firing and bodies start to fall.

This flashback sequence from Jang Sun-woo’s A Petal (Kkonnip, 1996) recreates an incident that occurred on 21 May 1980 in the southwestern city of Gwangju. However, the events that set these horrific scenes in motion stretch back to the previous year and beyond. Former general Park Chung Hee had presided over Korea ever since taking power in a military coup d’etat in 1961. Although some Koreans now remember him fondly for the period of strong, export-led economic growth he initiated in the 1960s and 1970s, he also created a police state where the arrest and torture of dissidents, often on trumped-up charges of pro-communist activity, was common. In the 1970s in particular he had strengthened his control over South Korean society, pushing through a constitution in 1972 that granted him sweeping powers and abolished term limits on his own rule. Although he set up various legislative bodies that were made to resemble democratic institutions, with a small opposition group tolerated in the National Assembly, the system was rigged to give Park the maximum amount of power.

By 1979, however, Park was increasingly isolated and facing an unprecedented degree of resistance from the populace. A sudden economic downturn, an outbreak of labour unrest and conflict between majority and opposition lawmakers led to massive anti-government strikes in Busan and neighbouring Masan in the autumn of 1979. Then without warning on 26 October, at a private dinner party in Seoul, Park was shot and killed by his own intelligence chief and longtime associate Kim Jae-gyu.

Park’s assassination was depicted in memorable fashion in Im Sang-soo’s The President’s Last Bang (Geuttae geusaramdeul, 2004), a work that proved to be hugely controversial even 25 years after the dictator’s death. In the film, Kim is portrayed as having shot Park partly out of personal frustration, and partly out of a genuine desire to bring democracy to the country. His actions are presented as having been planned out in their broadest outlines in advance, but executed on the spur of the moment. Although this coincides with many outside views of the incident, much of that night is shrouded in mystery, and there remain questions about the true motives of Kim’s actions.

The sudden assassination of such a powerful president threw the political sector into chaos. Choi Kyu Hah, who had been serving as prime minister under Park, was named acting president and promised both free elections and a new constitution. Hopes for a transition to democracy and a weakening of government authority spread quickly among the populace, though Choi’s hesitant approach failed to keep pace with public demands. However, on 12 December, Major General Chun Doo Hwan, who as head of the Defence Security Command was in charge of investigating Park’s assassination, staged a coup within the military. Without authorisation from Choi, Chun ordered the arrest of the ROK Army Chief of Staff and after a bloody shootout Chun and a close circle of fellow military men had gained control of the army. In the coming months he would sideline Choi and gradually take over all sectors of the government (see Robinson 2007: 139–40).

The first few months of Chun’s (at this stage, unofficial) leadership were marked by confrontation. Student protests against partially-imposed martial law, which had been declared at the time of Park’s death, began in earnest in March when universities opened for the new semester. Social unrest grew in April when Chun illegally took control of the intelligence agency, and culminated in a massive rally in Seoul on 15 May that drew 70,000–100,000 participants. It was Chun’s draconian response to the rally that would set the stage for the violence in Gwangju.

In a show of force Chun extended full martial law over the nation, dissolved the National Assembly, closed the nation’s universities and arrested 26 key opposition politicians including Gwangju hero (and future Nobel Prize laureate) Kim Dae Jung. Students in Gwangju responded with a wave of protests. A demonstration on 18 May at the gate of Jeonnam National University passed without incident; however, that afternoon as students moved to the city centre they came into contact with a group of elite black-bereted paratroopers. Sent in by the government to crush dissent, the special forces attacked students and passersby alike, in some cases using knives and bayonets. Martha Huntley, a missionary and long-term resident of Gwangju, described what she saw that day:

One man we knew, a businessman [of] about thirty, was pulled off the bus he was riding (along with other youngish-looking people), and was kicked about the head so bad he lost an eye. Another young mother about the same age, thirty or early thirties, was taking her two children to Sunday school, was beaten and left unconscious on the sidewalk – she had to have stitches on her scalp and was incoherent for four months – her husband joined the students Sunday afternoon when they fought with the soldiers. No one knew what was happening or why. (Quoted in Oberdorfer 2001: 127–8)

The following day, as more outraged citizens joined in, the protests grew larger and more paratroopers were dispatched. Several deaths occurred. On 20 May, bus and taxi drivers went on strike and citizens began to gain control of the streets. Protesters burned government television stations KBS and MBC, as well as the tax office. On the following day, a massive rally took place in front of troops who had retreated to Provincial Hall. As depicted in the abovementioned flashback, the soldiers opened fire, killing and wounding scores of people before retreating to the edge of the city. Meanwhile, citizens ransacked rifles and carbines from local police stations and took control of the city. Over the next five days, civilian committees held negotiations with the army, as more deaths occurred on the city’s outskirts. Finally talks broke down, and in the early hours of 27 May, members of the 20th Army Division moved in with tanks and put down the uprising once and for all.

The Korean press, firmly under the government’s thumb, reported the uprising in Gwangju as a revolt led by communist sympathisers. The official death toll as announced by the government was 170, and a 1996 investigation raised the estimate to 240; however, many Gwangju citizens claimed the number of deaths to be higher, as many as two thousand (see Cumings 2005: 383). Authorities, meanwhile, refused to compensate victims. In the aftermath of the incident, Chun found himself firmly in power; however, news about the true nature of the uprising spread through underground sources. Later in the decade, outrage over Gwangju would serve as a key rallying point for larger anti-government protests that would prove more difficult to contain.

In the tense, oppressive years of the early 1980s, Korean cinema was doubly cursed. Filmmakers operated in an extraordinarily hostile environment due to censorship and other sorts of government interference. At the same time, the film industry had recently lost much of its leading talent. Two of the most celebrated directors of the previous decade, Lee Man-hee (Road to Sampo) (Sampo ganeun gil, 1975) and Ha Kil-jong (March of Fools) (Babodeurui haengjin, 1975), had died prematurely in 1975 and 1979, respectively. Veteran masters Yu Hyun-mok and Kim Ki-young were reaching the final stages of their career. Yu and Kim’s contemporary Shin Sang-ok had mysteriously vanished in 1978, only to reappear several years later making films in North Korea with his wife, the actress Choi Eun-hee. Shin later recounted how he and Choi were kidnapped in Hong Kong and brought to Pyongyang at the request of Kim Jong Il to revitalise the industry there. After making seven feature films in the communist nation, in 1986 Shin and Choi made a dramatic escape on a promotional trip to Vienna, defecting to the US Embassy. The couple then spent several years in Hollywood, with Shin producing several films in the Three Ninjas series (1992–98).

Only one director who had been active during Korea’s cinematic ‘golden age’ of the 1960s played a leading role in the 1980s and beyond, and that was Im Kwon-taek. Im debuted as a director in 1962 after serving as an assistant to director Chung Chang-hwa (who would later become famous for directing the 1972 Hong Kong film Five Fingers of Death). He initially found a niche as a highly prolific director of genre films, but in the 1970s his cinematic style underwent a slow evolution, as he became more interested in using the medium of film to explore the historical, cultural and artistic roots of his homeland. Neither his early genre films, nor his work of the 1970s attracted much critical attention, however.

It was only with his 75th film Mandala (Mandara, 1981) that Im would be recognised as a leading director. Based on a novel by Kim Seong-dong, the acclaimed film centres on an eccentric Buddhist monk named Ji-san who drinks heavily and remains sexually active at the same time as he pursues enlightenment through service to others, rather than meditation. The film can be seen on one level as a critique of the dominant Seon (aka ‘Chan’ or ‘Zen’) school of Buddhism practiced in Korea, which prioritises the individual’s seeking of enlightenment through meditation, and encourages retreat from the concerns of the material world (see James 2002: 60). Ji-san is joined in his travels across Korea by another monk, Beob-un, and the two men’s conversations form the basis of a wide-ranging debate on issues of responsibility and enlightenment.

Yet Mandala is just as concerned with the contemporary world as with the intricacies of Buddhist thought. Ji-san’s status as a conscientious outsider who questions established doctrine contains echoes of the idealised figure of the artist, and also that of the social activist. His easy connection with the marginalised, lower-class characters who appear in the film contrasts with Beob-un’s uncomfortable distance. However, Im also portrays Ji-san as being tortured by his excommunication from his faith, and the film, in contrast to the novel, ends on an uncertain note regarding Beob-un’s future spiritual path.

Mandala was screened in the Panorama section of the Berlin International Film Festival in 1982, and within a few years Im would become South Korea’s most familiar name on the international festival circuit. Gilsottum (Gilsotteum, 1985), about a mother, father and son separated during the Korean War and reunited in the 1980s, was shown in competition at Berlin in 1986. Surrogate Mother (Ssibaji, 1987) screened at the Venice Film Festival in 1987 and earned a Best Actress award for Kang Su-yeon – the highest-profile international accolade received by a Korean film to that date. Kang’s depiction of a village girl in Joseon Dynasty-era Korea who is contracted to bear a child for an aristocratic family turned her into a major star at home, and gave her a limited degree of international recognition as well. Surrogate Mother would set a new export record for Korean films, with $455,000 earned in sales to Europe and Asia, and it would gross over $1 million during its commercial release in Taiwan (see the Korea Motion Picture Promotion Corporation’s Korean Cinema Yearbook 1989: 212). In September 1988, Im’s Adada (Adada, 1988) picked up another Best Actress award, this time for Shin Hye-su at the Montreal World Film Festival for playing the role of a deaf woman in 1920s Korea. Then the following year, Kang Su-yeon won yet another Best Actress award from the Moscow International Film Festival for playing a Buddhist nun in Im’s Come, Come, Come Upward (Aje aje bara-aje, 1989), which explored many of the same themes as Mandala.

Im’s films, which often combine a long-take aesthetic with emotionally direct or melodramatic plotlines, are not known for bold experiments in form. Instead, critics praise his best work for the nuanced insight he brings to the historical and cultural forces that have shaped Korea’s development. Born during the Japanese colonial period in a small town outside of Gwangju, and growing up in a family accused of being leftist sympathisers, Im describes himself as carrying on his back the ‘big steel block’ of history (quoted in Chung 2006: 87).

Meanwhile, other directors who were highly active during Chun Doo Hwan’s ‘Fifth Republic’ include Lee Jang-ho, Bae Chang-ho and Lee Doo-yong. Lee Doo-yong is perhaps closest in style to Im Kwon-taek, in that his filmography spans both genre cinema and period-set dramas – though Lee’s work is less didactic than Im’s. Peemak (aka The Hut) (Pimak, 1980), which screened in competition at Venice, revolves around a female shaman who is called to a village to perform an exorcism. Possessed by spirits from the past, she uncovers a vicious crime committed by the family who summoned her. Lee’s best known work Mulleya, Mulleya (aka Spinning Tales of Cruelty Towards Women) (Mulleya, Mulleya, 1984) was the first Korean film to screen in the ‘Un Certain Regard’ section at the Cannes Film Festival. Starring Won Mi-gyeong, the film details the life of a woman living in the Joseon Dynasty who is forced to marry a man who is already deceased. Lee also spent time in Hollywood, co-directing the $2 million action movie Silent Assassins (1988) together with his regular cinematographer Son Hyun-chae. More recently, critical interest in Lee has been revived with the screening of an uncensored version of his 154-minute epic The Last Witness (Choehuui jeungin, 1980), about Korean War-era crimes that resurface in a murder investigation decades later.

Lee Jang-ho originally made his debut in 1974 with the smash hit Hometown of the Stars (Byeoldeurui gohyang), about a woman who battles alcoholism after numerous failed relationships, but his promising career was put on hold in 1976 when he was charged with use of marijuana and banned from working in the film industry. Cleared to return in December 1979, he made an eye-catching comeback with Fine Windy Day (Baram bureo joeun nal, 1980), one of the seminal works of 1980s Korean cinema. Set in the quickly urbanising southern regions of Seoul, where people from the countryside would migrate to take up menial jobs produced by the booming economy, the film gives voice to the frustration of being passed over by Korea’s rapid development. Deok-bae (Ahn Sung-ki), who delivers food for a small Chinese restaurant, develops a verbal stutter after moving to the city, and finds himself further humiliated when a rich young woman, Myung-hee (Yu Ji-in), takes up a playful, mocking flirtation with him. Chun-shik (Lee Yeong-ho), a barbershop assistant, is in love with a masseuse named Miss Yu (Kim Bo-yeon); however, she is being pursued by a wealthy loan shark who tempts her with offers to pay for her father’s hospital fees. Gil-nam (Kim Seong-chan) runs errands for the owners of a ‘love motel’, where couples go for short trysts, but he too is betrayed and swindled. Hyangjin Lee notes that the film depicts the society of that time as ‘producing essentially two types of people: one that has nothing but money to fill their empty lives, and so are always hungry for pleasure, and another that has nothing but their body to trade for survival’ (2000: 170).

Of all the directors of his generation, Lee was most successful in alternating commercial hits with bold experiments in narrative and film style. Declaration of Fools (Baboseoneon, 1983) opens with a film director (played by Lee himself) committing suicide by jumping off a tall building. The film then lurches into a surreal and disjointed story about two misfits who try to kidnap a beautiful university student, only to discover that she is a prostitute. Narrated by a child’s voice to a soundtrack of video game sound effects, the film’s abrupt non-sequiturs and embrace of the absurd function as a strong if indirect critique of the oppressive social climate of that era. A more subdued and lyrical form of experimentation can be found in the short story adaptation The Man With Three Coffins (Nageuneneun gireseodo swiji anneunda, 1987). Told in a series of fragmented, overlapping narrative strands, the film centres around a man carrying the ashes of his dead wife to her hometown, which lies along the demilitarised zone (DMZ) separating the two Koreas. Lee uses shamanic imagery as a visual motif to create a deep and resonant depiction of Korea as a divided nation haunted by its own past.

The most commercially successful director of the 1980s was Bae Chang-ho, who received his training as an assistant director under Lee Jang-ho on Fine Windy Day and the heavily-censored Children of Darkness (Eodumui jasikdeul, 1981). After debuting with People in a Slum (Kkobangdongne saramdeul, 1982), an emotionally intense drama set in a Seoul shanty town, Bae turned out a string of hits which tapped strongly into the contemporary mindset. Whale Hunting (Goraesanyang, 1984) focuses on a cowardly university student, Byeong-tae (Kim Su-cheol), who embarks on a cross-country road trip with an eccentric vagabond, referred to as Captain (Ahn Sung-ki) and a prostitute, Choon-ja (Lee Mi-sook), who has lost her ability to speak. Deep Blue Night (Gipgo pureun bam, 1985), the highest grossing Korean film of the decade, stars Ahn as a Korean immigrant living in California who enters into a false marriage with a wealthy divorcee in order to receive a green card. Shot entirely on location in the US, the film paints a dark picture of the American Dream in an era when large numbers of Koreans were emigrating to America.

All four of the directors mentioned above had significant run-ins with censors in this era. A two-stage system was in place, obliging filmmakers to submit a screenplay for approval before a film went into production, and then a print after the final edit was complete. Censors had the authority to cut or re-edit films as they wished, or else to reject a film entirely if it was considered inappropriate for release. Generally, filmmakers knew better than to submit films that directly criticised the government or its policies, but even works that avoided overt political content were often re-cut by censors if they presented a picture of society that was overly dark or pessimistic. One of the most thoughtful reflections on censorship in this era is part two of Kim Hong-joon’s 2003 video essay My Korean Cinema (Naui hangugyeonghwa) which in analysing the modifications made to Ha Kil-jong’s March of Fools argues that censors had developed into skilled editors who were able to transform the mood of a sequence with just a few well-placed cuts.

There was only one area in which censorship was significantly relaxed under the Chun Doo Hwan administration. Given the deep-seated public dislike of Chun’s government and general discontent among the populace, several initiatives were launched in the early 1980s to distract attention away from politics. Observers at the time sarcastically dubbed this the ‘3S Policy’, standing for ‘sex, screen and sport’. In 1982, Korea’s first professional baseball league was launched. The nationwide switch to colour broadcasting also took place at this time, helping to fuel the expansion of the home entertainment market.

Finally, government censors took on a markedly more tolerant attitude towards onscreen nudity and sex, instigating a mid-decade boom in erotic feature films. The first and most famous of such works was Madame Aema (Aemabuin, 1982). Inspired by the French film Emmanuelle (1974), it was presented in wildly popular midnight screenings, newly legalised after the lifting of a four-decade long curfew. The story of a woman involved in numerous sexual encounters while her husband is in prison ultimately ranked as the highest grossing domestic film of 1982 with 315,738 admissions in Seoul, and would spawn eleven sequels. Although local critics found little in the film to get excited about, directors such as Lee Jang-ho (Between the Knees (Mureupgwa mureup sai, 1984), Eo-u-dong (Eoudong, 1985)) and Lee Doo-yong (Mulberry Tree (Ppong, 1985)) would be more successful in creating innovative works within this sub-genre that also touch on issues of class and gender politics.

At the same time that these established directors were turning out some of their best-known films, a younger generation of aspiring filmmakers was becoming engaged in the art and politics of cinema, even if they had not yet entered the mainstream film industry. Following a markedly different career path from their predecessors, this generation would, by the 1990s, play a leading role in the Korean film industry’s development.

Initially, the French and German cultural centres in Seoul played an active part in the formation of this new community. With few foreign art films screened in Korean cinemas, and the country holding no international film festivals of note, it was difficult for young Koreans in the 1970s and 1980s to become acquainted with world cinema. However, in 1975 the French Cultural Centre began holding three screenings a day at its modest 119-seat theatre in Seoul, and three years later the German Cultural Centre launched a similar programme. The screenings were well attended, and before long the centres were hosting cinema clubs in which to discuss or study film (see Nohchool Park 2009). The members of this ‘cultural centre generation’ include many names that are now well-known, including directors Park Kwang-su (Chilsu and Mansu (Chilsuwa mansu, 1988)), Chung Ji-young (Partisans of South Korea (Nambugun, 1990)), Kim Hong-joon (Jungle Story (Jeonggeul seutori, 1996)) and Jang Kil-soo (Silver Stallion (Eunmaneun oji anneunda, 1991)); producer Shin Chul; and noted film critics Chung Sung-il, Kang Han-sub and Gina Yu.

Many aspiring filmmakers were also aligned with the broader dissident movement, which was centred in universities. Modern Korean history is steeped in a rich tradition of student protest, from the colonial period onwards. Most notably, in April 1960 demonstrations on university campuses against rigged elections grew into mass protests that toppled the corrupt authoritarian government of Syngman Rhee. Two decades later, the oppressive political situation had bred an activist movement that was increasingly displacing academics at the nation’s leading schools. Many students pursued their own, parallel courses of study consisting of banned Marxist works and other political texts.

Some of the central concerns of the dissident movement are contained in the term minjung, a word that has acquired numerous connotations and so is difficult to translate into English. Derived from the Chinese characters ‘min’ (

/people) and ‘jung’ (

/masses), the term can be rendered as ‘the masses’, but is tied to the idea of a repressed and exploited populace, the working class in particular. One of the central tenets of minjung theory is that the masses are the subjects, not the objects, of history, and so history should be understood from their point of view (see Standish 1994: 86). Activists felt keenly the need to establish solidarity with the working class, and thousands of students in this era left university and went to work in factories or coal mines. However, the concept of minjung also encompasses Korea’s efforts to establish its own cultural uniqueness in the face of colonialism, war and political turmoil. Traditional Korean music and dramatic forms were embraced by students as a means of drawing closer to the nation’s roots. One of the products of Korea’s minjung youth culture was a wave of (illegal) theatrical productions that fused modern political theatre with traditional Korean mask dances, which have their own rich tradition of class criticism.

Local cinema, in contrast, was considered by many activists to be shallow and politically emasculated. However, in the late 1970s several key intellectuals, notably director Ha Kil-jong and well-known dissident poet Kim Ji-ha, began to argue forcefully on behalf of the cinema. Kim compared the works of Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein to traditional Korean theatrical genres, and encouraged artistically-minded students to explore the potential of the film medium. As interest in cinema spread, film clubs were launched in major universities in Seoul. When students began to produce their own work, they often embraced minjung-related themes.

By 1984, more and more amateur films and documentaries were being made on campuses and in other filmmaking groups. One prominent example was the Seoul Film Collective, launched in 1982 and made up primarily of recent graduates from Seoul National University. Including future directors Park Kwang-su, Jang Sun-woo, Hong Ki-seon, and Song Neung-han, among others, the collective produced the 8mm short Pan-nori Arirang (1983), which focused on an audience’s response to a stage performance; That Summer (Geu yeoreum, 1984), about labourers from rural areas working in Seoul; and an 8mm documentary Suri-se (1984) about agricultural issues in southwestern Korea (see Gang 2005: 74–7). The group also published the influential essay collection Towards a New Cinema (Saeroun yeonghwareul wihayeo, 1983), which, echoing some of the ideas of the Third Cinema movement that developed in Latin America in the 1960s, called for politically relevant filmmaking that distinguished itself from both Hollywood and European art-house traditions.

Yet many of these young filmmakers faced a dilemma. The short film format offered creative freedom, but outside of informal screenings and a limited number of small film festivals, it was difficult to find an audience. The mainstream film industry offered the opportunity to reach and potentially influence many more viewers, but immense hurdles stood in the way of bringing meaningful work to the screen. Jang Sun-woo tells of his own predicament after taking on his first professional job in the film industry:

When Lee Jang-ho made Fine Windy Day at the beginning of the 1980s, the political atmosphere had opened up a little, but right after that the Chun Doo Hwan regime showed its true face and the situation regressed back to that of the 1970s. At the time I was working as the script boy for Lee’s next film, They Shot the Sun [Geudeureun taeyangeul ssoattta, 1981], but because the film depicted a group of social outsiders, the censors made 18 cuts to it. I was shocked, and confused about whether I should go on in the film industry. But right after that, when Lee made Declaration of Fools, nobody touched the film and it maintained its political message, and this gave me some encouragement. I discussed with [poet] Kim Ji-ha whether I should continue to work in cinema, and he told me it’s not only a film’s content that matters, he said, ‘You have to change your eyes, then you can change the world.’ I still remember that sentence, it was very important for me, and that’s how I became interested in pursuing film style. (In Cazzaro 2005: 115–16)

By 1987, long-suppressed frustrations were seething on university campuses, in labour circles, among the political opposition, in agricultural communities and among many ordinary middle-class citizens. Although Chun Doo Hwan had taken a few steps towards reform after establishing his power – lifting martial law in 1982, and allowing his chief opponent Kim Dae Jung to return from exile in 1984 – Korea remained an authoritarian society ruled in top-down fashion. Highly-educated and increasingly wealthy after a decades-long boom in economic growth, the Korean populace was growing ever more frustrated at their lack of political representation and the general state of Korean society. Particularly reviled was the government’s large and ruthless police force. Armour-clad riot cops carrying shields and clubs waged battles against student demonstrators on city streets. Plain-clothes toughs wearing jeans, helmets and leather gloves slipped into crowds and dragged off suspected activists for questioning. Young citizens accused of being communists, and threatened with jail terms or retaliation against family members, were pressured to enrol in university clubs as student spies. Meanwhile, the urban middle class had grown weary of the constant menace of tear gas, which was being used by riot cops in city centres to disperse hostile and non-hostile crowds alike.

Several incidents in the first half of 1987 served as sparks for the conflagration to follow. In January, a Seoul National University student named Park Jong-cheol died while being tortured by policemen. Interrogating him on the whereabouts of a radical student leader, the police dunked Park’s head repeatedly in a tub of water and crushed his throat against the tub’s rim (see Eckert 1990: 351–2). When the incident was later publicised by a Catholic priest, the government first tried to pass it off as an isolated case (even though such torture was believed to be widespread), then paid two police officers to publicly accept responsibility for the crime (see Becker 1987).

Then in April, Chun announced that negotiations on reforming the Korean constitution would be suspended until after the Seoul Summer Olympics in September 1988. This amounted to more than a mere delay, since Chun’s own term expired in February 1988, and pro-democracy activists had been pushing for the next president to be chosen by popular vote.

Frustrations finally boiled over on 10 June, when former general Roh Tae Woo was named the official presidential candidate of the ruling Democratic Justice party, virtually assuring his election by the nation’s electoral college. A close friend and former high school classmate of Chun’s, Roh had played a key role in the military coup that brought Chun to power, as well as in the later assault on Gwangju. Students and activists responded to the announcement with the biggest wave of anti-government demonstrations since 1980. In 16 cities across the nation, protesters clashed with 120,000 soldiers and riot cops, and clearly retained the upper hand. In Seoul, conflict originally centred around Myeongdong Cathedral, where 300 students remained barricaded inside with the support of Catholic priests. In the turbulent twenty days to follow, however, more and more middle-class citizens joined in the protests, and soon all of downtown Seoul was a mass of demonstrations. Thousands of activists were arrested each day, to little effect.

Perhaps inevitably, given memories of Gwangju and the long-standing brutality of the police force, the demonstrations of June 1987 were considerably more violent in nature than those that had liberated the Philippines from Ferdinand Marcos’s rule a year earlier. Students hurled rocks and Molotov cocktails at lined formations of riot cops, attacked government buildings and burned police cars. Several luxury hotels in downtown Seoul were forcibly occupied by student demonstrators. Towards the end of the three-week conflict, activists in Daejeon and Busan had taken to hijacking buses, emptying them of passengers and driving them at full speed through police barricades (see Tram & Becker 1987). Meanwhile, far from being cowed by the horrors of 1980, Gwangju provided some of the most forceful resistance of any city, with demonstrators seizing total control of the downtown area. Numerous injuries on both sides occurred throughout the conflict, although almost no actual deaths. One exception was a student from Yonsei University in Seoul who was left brain-dead after being hit in the head by a tear gas canister, but kept on life support throughout the conflict, allegedly so as not to provide another rallying point for demonstrators (see Swain 1987).

Meanwhile the twin leaders of the political opposition, Kim Dae Jung and Kim Young Sam, were alternately wooed and harassed by the government in a fruitless effort to control the crisis. Kim Dae Jung, feared by Chun for his rhetorical skills and unmatched ability to electrify a crowd, had his long-standing house arrest lifted on 24 June, reinstated eight hours later, and then lifted again the following day. In an unprecedented move, Chun also agreed to a direct meeting with Kim Young Sam, who of the two Kims was the more traditional politician. Little was achieved, however.

The government felt its hands to be tied. Day by day the situation was slipping further and further out of control, but a harsher crackdown could have disastrous implications for its image abroad. In particular, the Chun administration had planned for the 1988 Seoul Olympics to be a coming-out party: a celebration on the world stage of South Korea’s economic miracle and its newly acquired status as a developed nation. Yet already the unrest was increasing the risk that the games would be shifted to another country. In one internationally reported incident, a friendly match between the Korean and Egyptian national football teams in Masan on 10 June was suspended when tear gas from a nearby demonstration wafted onto the field, causing players to stagger off the pitch vomiting (see Swain 1987). The situation called for restraint, but at the same time, Chun feared that if a democratically elected president took office in the following year, he would be tried and convicted for his role in the Gwangju massacre. Meanwhile, Chun’s closest ally, the Reagan administration, was urging compromise and arguing against the reintroduction of martial law.

On 29 June, the government waved a white flag. As head of the ruling party, Roh Tae Woo issued a surprise ‘eight point’ reform proposal that promised a new constitution, free presidential elections by the end of the year, the restoration of civil rights to Kim Dae Jung, freedom of the press and an amnesty for most political prisoners. People power had prevailed, and Kim Dae Jung and Kim Young Sam, as heads of the opposition, seemed poised to lead South Korea into a new era.

Both Kims would eventually take their turns serving as president; however, it was not to happen in 1987. After his June announcement, Roh Tae Woo began to distance himself from Chun and issue statements in support of reform, so that many citizens began to see him as a viable presidential candidate. He also took a leading role in negotiating a new democratic constitution that was ratified by 93% of the electorate in October 1987, and which remains in place to the present day. During the run-up to the December presidential election, a strong advantage in campaign spending and biased coverage in the major state-owned television stations gave Roh an added boost. Meanwhile, despite earlier promises, the two Kims were unable to agree on an alliance before the election. With the reformist vote split, Roh won the election with 36.6% of ballots cast, compared to 28% for Kim Young Sam and 27% for Kim Dae Jung. South Korea had held a groundbreaking democratic election, but the return to civilian rule would be postponed to 1993.

As these dramatic political developments were playing out on the streets, a group of socially conscious young directors were injecting a new vitality into the mainstream film industry. The Korean New Wave, as it was dubbed at the time by foreign critics (the term ‘new realism’ was initially used in Korea) was an incorporation of the minjung movement’s focus on the exploited masses into the mainstream film industry – at least to the extent that this was possible under the existing regime. It was also a generational shift, as the students and activists who got their start in film clubs began to make feature-length work. Although perspectives on the movement vary, it would last more or less until the mid-1990s when the next generation of directors emerged.

Two developments made the Korean New Wave possible. The first was a partial relaxation of censorship, which allowed filmmakers to depict subjects and topics that had previously been off-limits. As of 1988 directors were no longer required to submit their scripts to censors at the screenplay stage, and a certain degree of social critique was newly allowed. The second was a change in film policy, discussed further in chapter two, that opened the door for independent producers to work in the film industry. This in turn made it easier for directors like the Paris-trained Park Kwang-su and the young political activist Jang Sun-woo to find like-minded producers to work with.

If there was one thing shared by the filmmakers of the Korean New Wave, it was a commitment to using the medium of film to push for social change. The turbulent political events of the late 1980s called out for a cinema that engaged with the defining issues of the day, and shed new light on Korea’s troubled past. Isolde Standish describes the Korean New Wave as a shift towards ‘new characters (the working classes, radical students), new settings (the factory, slum houses) and new problems (the north/south division, urbanisation, industrial unrest, and family breakdown)’ (1994: 77). Kyung Hyun Kim refers to the movement as the first true flourishing of a protest cinema in Korea since the 1920s (2002: 36).

Despite the stylistic differences between the various directors, there was also a common acceptance of realism as an important aesthetic and political ideal. Decades of censorship had created a pent-up urge for a realist, politically-informed cinema that put the working classes (the minjung) at the centre of the narrative. Although a few notable realist works such as A Fine Windy Day, People in a Slum and Lee Won-se’s A Small Ball Shot by a Dwarf (Nanjangiga ssoaollin jageungong, 1981) had emerged in the early 1980s, the latter part of the decade marked a much more comprehensive shift. Though not for the most part popular with audiences, the New Wave represented a thematic and aesthetic revitalisation of Korean cinema.

Chilsu and Mansu (1988) by Park Kwang-su: a pioneering work of the Korean New Wave

Perhaps the most famous Korean film of the late 1980s, and one of the landmark early works of the Korean New Wave, was Park Kwang-su’s debut feature Chilsu and Mansu. Based on a story by Taiwanese writer Huang Chunming, whose work was banned in Korea at the time, the film focuses on two billboard painters: Chil-su (Park Joong-hoon), a smooth-talker who struggles to hold down a job; and Man-su (Ahn Sung-ki), a capable and intelligent worker held back in life because he is the son of a jailed communist sympathiser. Much of the plot focuses on the frustrations they experience as marginalised members of the working class, with Man-su denied permission to work abroad and Chil-su pursuing a hopeless infatuation with a middle-class university student. They are in many ways opposites – Chil-su talks too much, and Man-su hardly at all – but they share the same alienation and sense of helplessness.

It is an extended sequence at the end of the film for which Chilsu and Mansu is justly famous. One hot summer day the two are atop a tall building in downtown Seoul painting a ‘Glamour Whiskey’ advert (featuring a smiling Caucasian woman in sunglasses and a flesh-coloured bikini) onto a giant billboard. On a break, sitting at the very top of the billboard, they drink soju and finally begin to speak honestly to each other about their failures in life. At this, Man-su stands up and begins screaming out his frustrations to all the ‘well-off, educated, upper-class bastards of Seoul’ living below. Chil-su joins in, and far below them a curious crowd, who cannot hear what they are saying, starts to gather. Soon, some policemen on the street hear their shouting and misinterpret it as a radical labour protest, leading to a surreal confrontation on the roof. There are multiple ironies in the way that, just when the two men finally find their voice, their words are misinterpreted and never actually heard by the people below. The state, for its part, moves in immediately to silence them. The sequence seems an appropriate symbolic starting point for the Korean New Wave, which was founded on the notion of giving voice to the oppressed, and which also had its share of confrontations with the state.

A second distinctive and innovative voice to emerge out of the Korean New Wave was Jang Sun-woo. His major films from this period include his second feature, the capitalist satire Age of Success (Seonggongsidae, 1988); working-class infidelity drama The Lovers of Woomook-baemi (Umukbaemiui sarang, 1990); his meandering critique of Korean intellectuals Road to the Racetrack (Gyeongmajang ganeungil, 1991); the Buddhist-themed Hwa-Om-Kyung (Hwaeomgyeong, aka Passage to Buddha, 1993); sexually explicit novel adaptation To You, From Me (Neoege nareul bonaenda, 1994); and A Petal, about the lingering wounds of the Gwangju massacre. All display the mark of a filmmaker who is constantly pushing into new thematic and formal territory. Jang brings an unusual psychological depth to his work, with a strong interest in sexuality and the human instinct towards violence and cruelty. Yet the actions and traits of the individuals in his films often reflect or throw light upon broader aspects of Korean society. Jang’s early, realist-influenced work, Woomook-baemi in particular, remains much loved by Korean cinephiles and other directors to this day, but as his career progressed – and particularly with his later features Bad Movie (Nappeun yeonghwa, 1997), Lies (Geojinmal, 1999) and Resurrection of the Little Match Girl (Seongnyangpari sonyeoui jaerim, 2002) – his disorientating formal experimentation, abstract philosophical references and raw perusal of sexual themes left him an isolated figure within the larger film industry.

The Korean New Wave included numerous films that tackled social issues or depicted changes that were transforming Korean society. Park Kwang-su’s second feature Black Republic (Geudeuldo uricheoreom, 1990), which many critics identify as his best work, revolves around a student activist, wanted by the police, who gets a job in a rural coal mine. Various characters in the film – the young intellectual, the blue-collar workers, the rich son of the mine owner and a prostitute who befriends the hero – reflect the fraught relations between different sectors of Korean society. Park Chong-won’s Our Twisted Hero (Urideurui ilgeureojin yeongung, 1992), based on a famous novella by Yi Munyol, examines dictatorial rule on an allegorical level through the depiction of a fifth grade classroom. Several films also explore identity issues faced by Koreans who had been adopted at a young age by families in the West, including Susan Brink’s Arirang (Sujan beuringkeuui arirang, 1991) by Jang Kil-soo and Berlin Report (Bereullin ripoteu, 1991) by Park Kwang-su.

Although not a single female director would debut in the late 1980s/early 1990s, feminist issues were also taken up by male filmmakers of the New Wave. Kim Yu-jin’s Only Because You Are a Woman (Danji geudaega yeojaraneun iyumaneuro, 1991) centres around a housewife who is sued after biting off the tongue of her would-be rapist. Jang Kil-soo’s Silver Stallion depicts a woman raped by an American soldier during the Korean War, who after being ostracised by her community ends up becoming a prostitute at a US army base. Lee Hyun-seung’s feature debut The Blue in You (Geudaeanui beullu, 1992) examines gender issues related to career and family, while Lee Min-yong’s spirited A Hot Roof (Gaegateun narui ohu, 1995) depicts a group of women who occupy the roof of their building in rebellion against domestic violence and discrimination.

The other major category of New Wave films was reinterpretations of key events from twentieth-century Korean history. A groundbreaking work in this respect was Chung Ji-young’s 1990 hit film Partisans of South Korea (Nambugun). Adapted by Jang Sun-woo from a bestselling novel, the film considers the experience of communist partisans fighting deep within Southern territory during the Korean War. Not since the 1955 classic Piagol, which covered similar subject matter, had a South Korean filmmaker made a film which put the audience so firmly in the perspective of communist sympathisers – although most critics consider Im Kwon-taek’s later feature The Taebaek Mountains (Taebaek-sanmaek, 1994) to provide a more nuanced depiction of this sensitive historical topic. Chung also directed White Badge (Hayanjeonjaeng, 1992), an adaptation of Ahn Junghyo’s acclaimed novel about South Korean soldiers serving in the Vietnam War. Park Kwang-su’s To the Starry Island (Geuseome gagosiptta, 1994) centres around a massacre of civilians on a remote island by South Korean troops during the Korean War, and its lingering effect into the present day. Finally, Lee Jeong-guk’s Song of Resurrection (Buhwarui norae, 1990) was one of the first mainstream Korean features to reference the massacre in Gwangju, although censors cut more than 25 minutes from the film, in addition to the 15 minutes that the filmmakers had voluntarily removed.

The relaxation of film censorship in the late 1980s is seen as a key factor behind the development of the Korean New Wave. However, Seung Hyun Park (2002) argues that the political ambitions of Korean Wave filmmakers were still significantly hindered by the government.

Park notes that although censorship at the screenplay stage was officially discontinued in 1988, the Public Performance Ethics Committee still required producers to submit two copies of each script before the start of shooting. The PPEC would then send ‘comments’ to the production company, and – given the board’s power to edit a film at will after its completion – filmmakers felt strong pressure to adhere to the board’s suggestions. Despite this, few films passed through the final censorship stage without at least some cuts being made. According to the Sixth Revised Motion Picture Law in effect at the time, the PPEC was authorised to cut films under the following vague conditions: (1) when a film impairs the spirit of the constitution and the dignity of the state; (2) when a film impairs social order and morals; (3) when a film impairs friendship between Korea and another country; and (4) when a film impairs the soundness of the people. Government statistics indicate that only 44 of the 88 Korean films approved for screening in 1988 were passed without cuts in footage or dialogue, followed by 55 of 110 in 1989, 52 of 113 in 1990, 51 of 121 in 1991 and 45 of 96 in 1992 (see the Korea Motion Picture Promotion Corporation’s Korean Cinema Yearbook, 1988–92).

Park points out that the board, while adopting a more flexible attitude overall, focused their energies on blocking content related to three issues: industrial strife, oppression carried out by previous military regimes and the role of the US in Korea. His case study of Park Chong-won’s debut film Kuro Arirang (Guro arirang, 1989) is a telling example. Based on a novella by Yi Munyol, the film is set in one of Seoul’s infamous textile factory districts, which from the 1960s to the 1980s were witness to some of the most abusive working conditions Korea has ever known. Largely staffed by female workers from rural regions, the factories were also the sites of the country’s earliest and most famous labour conflicts. Kuro Arirang focuses on the female worker Jong-mi (Ok So-ri) and male student Hyun-shik (Lee Kyung-young), who has joined the factory without revealing his university background in order to build solidarity between student activists and labourers. As the film progresses, conflicts arise between the workers and their manager (Oldboy lead actor Choi Min-sik, in his film debut) over his irresponsible conduct which has caused two lethal accidents. When workers plan a strike, the police cooperate with company bosses in order to apprehend the leaders of the action.

Park argues that given the sheer number and scale of labour conflicts in Korea during the late 1980s, Kuro Arirang’s content would hardly have shocked its intended audience. Nonetheless, the PPEC made 21 visual and audio cuts to the film before allowing its release (see 2002: 130). The removed elements include a scene showing a male supervisor sexually assaulting a female worker; evidence of collusion between the police and the factory management; and images of riot police trampling on a dead woman’s photograph. Bits of dialogue hinting at class conflict were also removed, such as ‘Rich bastard!’ and the lines of a poem read by a worker. It is testament to the government’s belief in the power of the film medium that, although Yi’s novella was published with all these elements in place, censors considered them too incendiary to be shown in a mainstream movie.

With its most politically relevant elements excised, Kuro Arirang came across as disjointed and weak, with the workers appearing to lack will (the exact opposite of the filmmakers’ intention). Critical response was poor, and audiences largely ignored it. Years later in 2002, a surviving portion of the deleted elements were reinserted and the film was screened on Korean public television station EBS. Nonetheless, it seems certain that the film would have occupied a far more important position in Korean film history if it had escaped the censor’s hand.

Meanwhile, numerous other projects from the late 1980s were abandoned at the script stage due to the severity of PPEC comments and the likelihood that, if the films were shot, the board would cut them beyond recognition. These include Jang Sun-woo’s The Red Room (Bulgeun-bang), about ‘a good citizen who is arrested for political activities, jailed and severely tortured’ (Rayns 2007: 28), and Samcheong Gyoyukdae, a depiction of the infamous 1980s ‘re-education camps’ to which the government sent criminals and dissidents to engage in hard labour (see Park 2002: 127).

Roh Tae Woo was officially inaugurated in February 1988, and in certain ways Korean society began opening up to change. The country experienced an unprecedented wave of labour disputes, more or less tolerated by the government, which saw many workers receive long-overdue increases in pay. The increasing independence of the press, and a number of landmark decisions by the Constitutional Court also brought about modest but genuine expansions in citizens’ basic freedoms. In the realm of diplomacy, South Korea took on a noticeably warmer attitude towards the Soviet Union, China and other communist nations; one sign of this was the first ever commercial release of films from these countries in 1988: War and Peace (Voyna i mir, 1967) and Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Tears (Moskva slezam ne verit, 1980) from the Soviet Union, When Father Was Away on Business (Otac na sluzbenom putu, 1985) from Yugoslavia, and the Chinese film The Last Empress (Mo dai huang hou, 1986). Meanwhile, given the diminished powers of the presidency under the new constitution, and the dominance of opposition parties in the National Assembly, Roh’s ability to set the domestic political agenda was limited.

Nonetheless an unexpected political development came in the run-up to the 1990 National Assembly elections, when Roh and opposition leader Kim Young Sam announced an alliance and merger of their two parties. Kim’s supporters were stunned, but the move offered political benefits to both sides. Kim immediately established himself as the leading candidate in the 1992 presidential elections by ensuring that the government party would not field a competitor. Roh for his part acquired much more political leverage for the remainder of his term. Soon after the announcement, Roh’s policies took on a more hardline bent, with an increase in political arrests and a crackdown on labour (see Robinson 2007: 170).

Meanwhile a large number of new independent film groups, often with ties to the labour movement, began to form under Roh’s presidency with the aim of producing outside the mainstream industry. Although sharing many of the same goals and ideals of the Korean New Wave directors, independent filmmakers worked with considerably fewer resources and presented their works to students or workers in unofficial (and therefore illegal) on-site screenings.

The most famous of these groups was Jangsan-gotmae, named after a novel by dissident writer Hwang Suk-young. The group’s first production was the 16mm feature Oh! Land of Dreams (O! kkumui nara, 1988), about a Korean student who participates in the Gwangju Uprising and is then wanted by the police. He eventually finds himself questioning his prior admiration for the United States. Shot without registering the production with the state or submitting it to censors, it was first screened in a Seoul theatre in December 1988, and went on to play before 100,000 viewers in 500 unofficial screenings across the country (see Jeong 2007: 202). In January 1989 arrest warrants were issued for Jangsan-gotmae president Hong Ki-seon and future producer Yu In-taek, who arranged for the first screening of the film.

The most famous of Jangsan-gotmae’s works is the 16mm feature Night Before the Strike (Paeopjeonya, 1990), about a disagreement among factory workers which management tries to exploit on the eve of a walkout. Shot in an actual factory in Incheon which was being occupied by workers, the film features non-professional actors and was praised by Joong-Ang University professor Lee Yong-kwan for ‘creating, in its content and form, a new style for national [minjok] cinema’ (Anon. 2000: 39). Even more famous than the film itself were the circumstances surrounding its screenings. The filmmakers organised a simultaneous release in eleven cities on 6 April, and the government responded by sending in squadrons of riot cops and even police helicopters. Multiple accounts tell of half an audience sitting in a darkened theatre watching the film as the other half battled riot police outside the door. Numerous arrests were made and projectors confiscated; nonetheless an estimated 300,000 people across the country eventually saw the film – the equivalent of a mainstream commercial hit (see Kim Sunah 2007a: 331–2).

Jangsan-gotmae went on to make one more film, Opening the Closed School Gate (Dachin gyomuneul yeolmyeo, 1991), before disbanding in 1993. Interestingly, members of the group included some key figures in Korean cinema’s later commercial revival, including Chang Youn-hyun (director of the 1999 thriller Tell Me Something (Telmisseomding)), Lee Eun (co-president of Myung Films and producer of JSA, The President’s Last Bang), Kong Su-chang (director of the 2004 horror film R-Point (Alpointeu)) and Hong Ki-seon (director of 2003 human rights drama The Road Taken (Seontaek)).

Another movement that was gathering steam was the emergence of independent documentaries shot on video. Kim Dong-won’s Sanggyedong Olympics (Sanggyedong ollimpik, 1987), about the forced relocation of slum residents in order to ‘beautify’ the city for the 1988 Olympics, is widely considered the starting point of the independent documentary movement. Inspired by the work of Japanese documentarist Ogawa Shinsuke, Kim began living among the slum residents and his filmmaking activities eventually became an integral part of their political struggle. Several years later, Kim would establish Purn Productions, which would produce 33 documentaries by various directors in the next decade and a half.

As the Korean New Wave was struggling to take root, another important film emerged seemingly out of nowhere. Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East? (Dalmaga dongjjogeuro gan kkadalgeun?, 1989) was shot at a mountain temple in southeastern Korea by Bae Yong-kyun, a painter with a strong interest in Buddhism and Asian philosophy. Korea has produced a long line of Buddhist-themed works by such well-known directors as Shin Sang-ok, Kim Ki-young, Im Kwon-taek, Kim Soo-yong, Bae Chang-ho, Jang Sun-woo, Park Chul-soo and Kim Ki-duk. However Bodhi stands apart even from these in the extent to which it internalises Buddhist thought, shaping the film’s own relationship to narrative and meaning (only Jang Sun-woo’s 1993 feature Hwa-Om-Kyung comes close in this regard).

Ten years in the making, Bodhi centres around three Buddhist monks living in a remote hermitage: a seven-year-old boy, Hae-jin (Hwang Hae-jin), first becoming acquainted with the concept of life and death; a man in his thirties, Ki-bong (Shin Won-seop), facing an internal struggle over his decision to leave the material world – and his blind mother – behind; and the elderly master, Hye-gok (Yi Pan-yong), who offers them guidance as his own death approaches. The title is taken from a koan riddle about the Indian monk Bodhidharma who travelled eastward to China and became the first recognised patriarch of Chan (that is, Zen, or in Korean ‘Seon’) Buddhism. With its non-linear, image-centred narrative and cryptic dialogue, the film upsets viewer expectations to an extreme degree, like a marathon runner who turns and starts running in the opposite direction. Francisca Cho contrasts mainstream cinema, which imparts to the viewer a sense of broad intelligibility and ‘mastery’ over the text, with the kind of Chan discourse embraced by the film, which disrupts or undercuts any sense of a comprehensive truth or correct vision. She notes that ‘Westerners who survive the pace and subverted narrative conventions of Bodhi will invariably want to know what it “means”’, but says that is to miss the point of the film (1999: 180). She compares the work to Buddhist koans – ‘speech acts specifically designed to violate and call attention to the illusion of mastery’ – and argues that Bodhi pursues this objective by cinematic means (1999: 188).

Another major aspect of the film’s achievement is its striking visuals. There is a sensuousness to Bae’s images, in part because of the immense care he takes in lighting, and in part because the imagery is complemented by an unusually immediate and pure sound (though, unfortunately, there is a distracting dated quality to the post-dubbed dialogue). Natural settings, old wooden architecture, robed human figures and the occasional object from the modern world are arranged together in visual compositions that, although nearly always incorporating movement, unmistakably evoke the art of painting. On the occasions when the monks venture out into the modern world, the images are composed with equal artistry, but the chaotic, jumbled quality of the scenes comes across as a shock in comparison. Meanwhile, the music by Jin Gyu-yeong, hypnotic in its long phrasing, adds considerably to the overall atmosphere of the film.

Despite the challenges posed by the work, Bodhi became the first (and, at the time of writing, still the only) Korean film to win the top award at a major European festival, receiving the Golden Leopard at the 1989 Locarno International Film Festival. It also secured a $100,000 sale to France – quite significant in that Korean cinema exports in the 1980s averaged less than $300,000 per year (see the Korea Motion Picture Promotion Corporation’s Korean Cinema Yearbook 1990). Bae would go on to make one more feature, The People in White (Geomeuna ttange hina baekseong, 1996), a bleak tale about memory set in an industrial wasteland, before largely retiring from public view in the following decade.

As 1993 approached, a new era was dawning. Roh Tae Woo’s five year term as president was scheduled to expire in February 1993, and as expected Kim Young Sam beat his rival Kim Dae Jung with 41.4% of the vote to usher in the return of civilian rule to South Korea. It was an era of new beginnings, marked by the sense that Korea was stepping out of its past and joining the community of modern nations. Kim Young Sam began his term with a 92% approval rating; his decision to purge the government of military figures and appoint intellectuals and former dissidents to key positions was broadly popular.

Meanwhile, the onset of participatory democracy caused many citizens to rethink various aspects of national identity. Over the previous three decades, Korea had gone through a stunning but highly disruptive period of economic expansion. The country had been massively urbanised. Globalisation had introduced new cultural influences into what many viewed as an ethnically homogeneous nation. Michael Robinson notes: ‘A new debate emerged in the 1990s as a consequence of the rapid creation of wealth in South Korean society. How had successful economic development altered the lifestyles, but more importantly, the values of the average Korean?’ (2007: 186).

As it happened, a film appeared at this time that spoke to such concerns. Im Kwon-taek’s Sopyonje (Seopyeonje, 1993) depicts a singer of pansori (a kind of traditional Korean folk opera native to Korea’s southern provinces) who devotes his life to teaching the art form to his adopted daughter. Set in the years after Korea’s liberation from Japan in 1945, the film depicts how pansori falls out of favour with the spread of Western music and culture. The father Yubong (Kim Myeong-gon), his daughter Songhwa (Oh Jeong-hae) and his stepson Dongho (Kim Gyu-cheol), who has been taught to play a drum accompaniment, eke out a living by performing in street markets and at private gatherings. Soon, however, even this limited form of employment dries up. Frustrated by hunger and enraged by his stepfather’s cruelty and authoritarian character, Dongho eventually runs away. Several years later, Yubong’s lessons to Songhwa are taking place in isolation and poverty, and it is clear that her improving skills will bring her neither fame nor a steady income. Yet the obsessive father proves willing even to inflict shocking misfortune upon Songhwa in order to keep her at his side, and to turn her into a master.

Many observers interpreted the struggles of the family to survive as pansori performers as a symbol of Korean filmmakers’ efforts to resist domination by Hollywood. At the same time, resting beneath the surface of the narrative is a discourse on the concept of han – another term that is difficult to translate into English (but which bears similarities to the Russian word toska). Han can be described as a deep-seated feeling of sorrow, bitterness or despair that originates in oppression or injustice, accumulates over time and remains unexpressed in the heart. It is believed by some to be intrinsic to the Korean cultural experience; the poet Ko Eun, for example, is quoted as saying, ‘We Koreans were born from the womb of han, and brought up in the womb of han’ (quoted in Yoo 1988: 222). In the latter part of Sopyonje, Yubong singles out Songhwa’s inability to access her han as the one thing preventing her from achieving true mastery: ‘Your pansori is smooth, but it lacks han … You have experienced more than enough pain, but your pansori doesn’t express it.’ It is only at the film’s conclusion, long after Yubong’s death, that the viewer knows from listening to her singing that Songhwa has tapped into this emotional reservoir.

Sopyonje was never expected to become a box-office hit. The film opened on 6 April, 1993 to a muted reception, and producer Lee Tae-won says it was almost pulled from theatres after its first week (and in many regional cities it was pulled, only to be reinstated later). However, as time passed, it soon developed through word of mouth into a popular phenomenon, with even president Kim Young Sam attending a viewing. A resurgence of interest in pansori followed. By October, Sopyonje had become the first Korean film ever to pass the one million admissions mark in Seoul, and it ended its run with 1.03 million admissions in Seoul and an estimated 2.2 million nationwide (see Kim Sunah 2007b: 339). The novel by Lee Cheong-jun on which the film was based became a bestseller, and 130,000 copies of the soundtrack CD were sold. The film was also exported to Japan, where it performed surprisingly well on limited release in 1994.

Im Kwon-taek was no stranger to box-office success – in fact, the film that Sopyonje surpassed to set a new local record was Im’s own The General’s Son (Janggunui adeul), a period gangster film that had 678,946 admissions in 1990. However, the director himself argues that had Sopyonje been released in the 1980s, it would not have been a commercial hit, suggesting that in some way it spoke to the needs of the moment (in Cho 2002: 150). In this sense, Songhwa’s embrace of the ‘uniquely’ Korean emotion of han can be read as indicating a way forward for a culture struggling with issues of identity. Nonetheless, Im’s representation of han is in many ways problematic. Feminist critics in particular took issue with the way that han and the pursuit of artistic perfection serves as justification for the violence done to Songhwa, and the implication that her suffering makes her, in some way, more authentically Korean (see, for example, Chungmoo Choi 2002).

Apart from the political reforms he introduced, one of President Kim Young Sam’s key initiatives was to push ever more actively for the globalisation of South Korean business and society. Coined as segyehwa (from the roots segye meaning ‘world’ and hwa meaning ‘becoming/turning into’), the official policy promoted broad political, economic, social and cultural restructuring, with a particular emphasis on the economy (see Shin 2005: 53). Local firms were encouraged to operate on a global scale, and to compete more effectively with international firms in the domestic market. Segyehwa was particularly notable for its top-down orientation (in most countries, globalisation progresses in bottom-up fashion, with government playing a supporting role), and for its ambition to affect all sectors of society. In a 1995 speech, Kim said:

Fellow citizens: Globalisation is the shortcut which will lead us to building a first-class country in the twenty-first century. This is why I revealed my plan for globalisation and the government has concentrated all of its energy in forging ahead with it. It is aimed at realising globalisation in all sectors – politics, foreign affairs, economy, society, education, culture and sports. To this end, it is necessary to enhance our viewpoints, way of thinking, system and practices to the world class level … We have no other choice than this. (Quoted in Kim 2000: 1)

Although Korea had pursued an export-driven, internationally focused economic policy since the 1960s, Samuel S. Kim argues that segyehwa marked the most aggressive embrace of globalisation by any state in the post-Cold War era (2000: 2). Subsequent presidents would continue Kim’s policy with similar zeal.

Meanwhile, a symbolic turning point for the film industry came in May 1994, when the Presidential Advisory Council on Science and Technology issued a videotaped report on the media sector to Kim Young Sam. Included within the presentation was the observation that in its first year on release, Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993) earned revenues equivalent to the export of 1.5 million Hyundai cars (see Shin 2005: 53). Given that the exports of Hyundai and other Korean car manufacturers totalled 640,000 vehicles in 1993, Spielberg’s film had more than doubled the annual production of one of Korea’s proudest industries. The report urged the president to support the media sector and related high-tech industries (such as computer-generated imagery) as a strategic growth sector.

Kim was convinced, and this incident can be seen as initiating a new kind of relationship between the Korean government and the film industry. Whereas in the past, film policy had been primarily geared towards regulation or control, from this point onward there was wide and unchallenged consensus that the government’s primary role was to promote and support the film industry. The reference to Hyundai cars is also laced with significance: previous governments viewed cinema chiefly as an ideological tool, either supportive or critical of the status quo. The identification of filmmaking as an industry that could potentially create revenues on a par with large-scale manufacturing, however, was a significant shift in perspective (see Jo 2005: 176–7). In the coming years, and especially during the commercial boom of the early 2000s, more and more citizens began to view Korean cinema as an important part of the nation’s overall economy. Jobs in the film industry became a popular choice for new business graduates. Even some of the vocabulary began to change: derogative terms used in the past such as banghwa (literally ‘country picture’, a term referring to Korean films) and ttanttara (meaning ‘entertainer’, a slur term into which filmmakers were grouped) fell out of use, to be replaced with neutral words like yeonghwa-saneop (film industry).

Korean films in the mid-1990s were in a transitional phase, as the political and social battles of the 1980s became supplanted by new concerns. This era also saw the increased prominence of two directors who are sometimes grouped with the Korean New Wave for reasons of chronology, but who have largely been preoccupied with different aesthetic and thematic concerns. Park Chul-soo began his career in television in the late 1970s before attracting notice with a series of award-winning genre films in the mid-1980s, including Mother (Eomi, 1985), Pillar of Mist (Angaegidung, 1986) and You My Rose Mellow (Jeopssikkot dang-sin, 1988). However, his most famous works appear in the mid-1990s. Park adopted a working method that contrasted with industry norms, in that he produced his own films and kept budgets low by striving to limit the number of shooting days and making efficient use of film stock (not unlike the approach taken by director Kim Ki-duk in the following decade). His films are known for their focus on everyday human conflicts, presented in a freewheeling, black comic style. He also displays a particular interest in the perspectives and lives of women. 301,302 (Samgongil samgongi, 1995) stars Hwang Shin-hye and Pang Eun-jin as single women living in opposite apartments. Song-hee (Pang) is an enthusiastic cook who, in the aftermath of a failed marriage, turns to food for comfort, while Yoon-hee (Hwang) suffers from anorexia after being sexually abused as a young girl by her stepfather, a butcher. The film’s garish colours and gruesome finale marked a significant departure from other realist Korean films of the time.

Farewell My Darling (Haksaengbugunsinwi, 1996), winner of an artistic contribution award at the Montreal World Film Festival, depicts the elaborate funeral proceedings of a family patriarch. Shifting perspectives between the various family members, who are virtually all in conflict with each other, Park satirises the family’s disingenuous outbursts of grief and their stubborn adherence to complex traditional funeral rites that none of them fully know or understand. Shot in 14 days, Park’s film was released in the same year as Im Kwon-taek’s Festival (Chukje, 1996), which also presents a Korean funeral but in a much more reflective and reverential style.

Another director who carved out a niche for himself with a highly individual style was Lee Myung-Se. An assistant director to Bae Chang-ho for much of the 1980s, Lee made his debut in 1989 with Gagman (Gaegeumaen), an inventive comic drama about a stand-up comedian who dreams of becoming a film director. He followed that up with the commercial hit My Love My Bride (Naui sarang naui sinbu, 1990), a drama about the trials of early marriage starring Choi Jin-sil and Park Joong-hoon that would help to inspire a string of romantic comedies in the mid-1990s.

However, Lee is best characterised by his unwavering focus on what he considers the purely cinematic elements of the medium: light, movement, sound, colour. In an industry that had, for the most part, prioritised words and narrative over image, Lee’s films stood out for their visual experimentation, stylish sets (often designed by the director himself) and inclination to suspend narrative development to visually depict a character’s mood. First Love (Cheotsarang, 1993), which many critics consider the peak of his early career, plays with notions of cinematic time in its depiction of a university student’s secret crush on her theatre instructor. Their Last Love Affair (Jidokan sarang, 1996), with actress Kang Su-yeon, depicts the slow disintegration of an extra-marital affair, with its abstract imagery imparting to the narrative a sense of finite beauty and impending sorrow.

Lee largely sidestepped the social concerns that preoccupied filmmakers of the New Wave. After the release of his critically acclaimed action/art-house film Nowhere to Hide (Injeongsajeong-bolgeot eopta, 1999), film weekly Cine21 described Lee as ‘a cinephile with a stubborn belief in his own personal creativity, and virtually the first Korean director to seriously consider fundamental aspects of the cinematic form’ (Anon. 2000: 38). In this sense, Lee should perhaps best be understood not as the black sheep of the Korean New Wave, but as a precursor of the genre-influenced, image-centred movement that took shape in the late 1990s with the debut of a new generation of filmmakers.

One other key work that emerged in the mid-1990s was Byun Young-joo’s The Murmuring (Najeun moksori, 1995), the first Korean documentary ever to receive a theatrical release. The film, and two more works that followed – Habitual Sadness (Najeun moksori 2, 1997) and My Own Breathing (Sumgyeol, 1999) – detail the lives of former comfort women who were abducted by the Japanese military during World War Two and forced into prostitution. Screenings of the film in both Korea and Japan helped to publicise the women’s efforts to receive an official apology from the Japanese government. Byun’s interactions with the women are intimate but hands-off; although she does not conceal her presence as in works of Direct Cinema such as David and Albert Maysles’ Salesman (1968), she tries to encourage the women to become active agents in telling their own story. By the final film in the trilogy, the women have become knowledgeable in operating the camera, and one of them acts as the film’s primary interviewer.

By the mid-1990s a new enthusiasm for cinema was developing among Korea’s youth. This may have been part of a broader developing interest in the arts: Korean commentators have referred to the 1990s as the ‘decade of culture’, following the 1980s ‘decade of politics’ (and preceding the ‘decade of economics’, the 2000s). But cinema held a special place in this shift, according to Soyoung Kim:

As is often noted, the quasi-religious energy of the 1980s Korean student movement – in fact a kind of youth culture – is hardly detectable on 1990s streets and campuses. Unexpectedly, and unlike the 1980s, quasi-religious energy is found in film spectatorship. The fascination for cult movies or a mode of cult spectatorship around American B-movies, European art-house cinema, Hong Kong action movies and Wong Kar-wai, in particular, are phenomenal in Korean youth culture. The term ‘cine-mania’ was coined in recognition of the large number of such spectators. (2005: 82)

One of the earliest manifestations of this newly developing ‘cinemania’ was an influential radio programme hosted by announcer Jeong Eun-im from 1992–95 which introduced a broad range of films to its many listeners. The year 1992 was also notable for the unexpectedly strong performance of a string of French films, including Claude Berri’s Manon des sources (247,639 admissions in Seoul), Leos Carax’s Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (The Lovers on the Bridge) (275,607 admissions), Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Delicatessen (99,519 admissions), Jean-Jacques Annaud’s L’Amant (The Lover) (337,233 admissions) and Régis Wargnier’s Indochine (300,865 admissions). The surprising commercial strength of these French films, and the large number of customers requesting European art-house titles, are said to have pushed video rental shops to diversify their selections in this period (see Kim Hak-su 2002: 80–1). In May 1995, two influential film magazines made their debut: the monthly Kino, headed by film critic Chung Sung-il (a regular guest on Jeong’s radio show), and the weekly Cine21, launched by Korea’s leading progressive newspaper The Hankyoreh. Before long, Cine21 was the bestselling weekly magazine of any type in Korea. November 1995 marked the official launch of Dongsoong Cinematheque, operated by a small art-house distribution company Baekdu-daegan which was headed by future director Lee Kwang-mo (Spring in My Hometown (Areumdaun sijeol, 1998)). The video market was especially vibrant, in contrast to the 2000s, with even obscure titles finding an audience among cinephiles or B-movie enthusiasts.

What occurred in the 1990s was not an overall increase in film attendance – in fact, annual admissions declined throughout the decade and hit a 35-year low of 42.2 million in 1996 – but a diversification of tastes and the emergence of an influential group of cinephiles. It is not entirely unexpected that highly stylised and youthful films like Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai’s Fallen Angels (Duoluo Tianshi) (151,163 admissions) should perform well at the box office – although its estimated Seoul theatrical take of $850,000 is almost five times its North American gross of $173,000 (see Anon. n. d.). But truly surprising was the box-office performance of several highly challenging art-house films. Andrei Tarkovsky’s austere 1986 feature The Sacrifice (Offret) sold 24,743 tickets on its release in 1995 and drew a considerable amount of mainstream attention, while Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s Where is the Friend’s Home? (Khane-ye doust kodjast?, 1987) sold 48,209 tickets on a single screen release, slightly outgrossing The Cable Guy (1996) with Jim Carrey which was released by Columbia Tristar a month later on eight screens. Such instances led at least one Western critic to refer to Korea as ‘the most cinephile country in the world’ (Rayns 1996: 5). Hong Kong director Peter Ho-Sun Chan has argued that the Korean film industry’s biggest strength is the sophistication of its audience (interview with author, January 2008); if true, then the origins of this are located in the cinephilia of the 1990s.

The 1990s also witnessed the birth of Korea’s first major film festivals, ranging from small, independently-organised events to large-scale international showcases sponsored by metropolitan governments. Soyoung Kim argues that many of the smaller festivals that were launched in the mid-1990s, such as the Women’s Film Festival in Seoul, the Seoul Queer Film and Video Festival, the Human Rights Watch Film Festival (launched by a former political prisoner) and IndieForum (organised by young independent/activist filmmakers) are extensions of the progressive movement, and a sign of its changing strategies. Particularly as the labour movement began to relinquish its position as the primary vehicle of social change in the 1990s, an increasing focus on group identities – women, gays, migrant workers, and so on – began to overshadow the 1980s emphasis on class identity (2005: 86–9). In this way film festivals emerged as a productive space in which to further define and explore these emerging identities. (For an insightful overview of such issues in relation to the 1998 Seoul Queer Film and Video Festival, see Berry 1999.)

But the most spectacular manifestation of Korean cinephilia in the 1990s was the birth of the Pusan International Film Festival (PIFF). Launched by a group of critics from Busan (spelled ‘Pusan’ according to the romanisation system in use at the time) together with director Park Kwang-su and former Vice Minister of Culture Kim Dong-ho, PIFF held its first event in September 1996. Organisers set a goal of selling 50,000 tickets. As it turned out, crowds of enthusiastic, primarily young viewers poured in from all corners of Korea and total attendance topped 184,000 (see Cazzaro and Paquet 2005).

In the coming decade, PIFF became arguably the top film festival in Asia, and was instrumental in helping Korean cinema build an international reputation. Successful premieres of Korean films at Pusan were often followed by invitations to European festivals like Berlin, Rotterdam or Cannes. Retrospectives of veteran filmmakers Kim Ki-young, Shin Sang-ok, Yu Hyun-mok, Lee Man-hee and Kim Soo-yong helped to spread awareness of Korean film history. In addition, the launch of the Pusan Promotion Plan in 1998 – a ‘pre-market’ where Asian directors with treatments or scripts for new films are put in touch with potential financiers and co-production partners – greatly enhanced the level of interaction between Korean filmmakers and industry figures from other countries. In the coming years, two other major international festivals would emerge in the Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival (PiFan) and the Jeonju International Film Festival (JIFF). By 2007, close to forty film festivals would be officially registered with the Ministry of Culture (see the Korean Film Council’s Korean Cinema Yearbook 2007).

The 1990s were, for the most part, an era in which Korea looked towards the future. However, 1996 is notable for several attempts to come to terms with its recent past. For the film industry, a key development came regarding censorship, a practice that although less politically-motivated under Kim Young Sam, was still a major issue: even in 1995, only 59% of local features emerged from the ratings process without modifications of some sort (see the Korea Motion Picture Promotion Corporation’s Korean Cinema Yearbook 1996).

On 4 October 1996, the Constitutional Court issued a ruling that government censorship of films and videos before their release was unconstitutional. The case had been brought to the court in 1993 by Kang Heon, producer of Jangsan-gotmae’s aforementioned underground film Oh! Land of Dreams. The court’s decision cleared the filmmakers of all criminal charges connected with its unauthorised 1988 screening, and forced a rewrite of the law to restrict the powers of the ratings board (see Bae 2005: 504). Struggles over censorship would not go away after the decision. In fact, in 1997 they ranked as one of the year’s defining issues, given a ratings battle over Jang Sun-woo’s antisocial Bad Movie (1997), an import block placed on Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai’s Happy Together (Chun gwong cha sit, 1997), the banning of the inaugural Queer Film Festival and the arrest of Seoul Human Rights Film Festival director Seo Jun-shik under the National Security Law, for screening the Korean documentary Red Hunt (Redeu heonteu, 1996), about a 1948 civilian uprising on Jeju Island. Despite the continuing conflicts, however, the 1996 decision still stands as an important legal precedent and a symbolic milestone in the development of the Korean film industry.

Meanwhile, a much more dramatic court case took place earlier in the year, when the Kim Young Sam administration took the surprise decision to try former presidents Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo in court. The two men were arrested and charged with mutiny and sedition for their roles in the 1979 military coup that established their power, and for the violence in Gwangju in 1980. Separately, they were also charged with creating gargantuan personal slush funds worth hundreds of millions of dollars during their years in office. An official investigation into Gwangju was launched prior to the trial, and television stations broadcast a host of documentaries revisiting the events of May 1980.

In August 1996, the Seoul District Court sentenced Chun to death and Roh to 22-and-a-half years in prison. An appeals court later reduced the sentences to life in jail and 17 years, respectively, and the two men would spend a year in jail before being pardoned in December 1997 at the urging of president-elect Kim Dae Jung.

These dramatic developments, and the media storm they unleashed, gave Koreans an opportunity to collectively start coming to terms with the darkest moments of the 1980s. However, on a smaller scale this process had already begun the previous year with the broadcast of the tremendously popular and influential television serial Sandglass (Morae sigye). Shown in 24 episodes over six weeks, the serial followed the lives of two men (a gangster played by Choi Min-soo and a prosecutor played by Park Sang-won) and one woman (a pro-democracy activist played by Ko Hyun-jeong) who become variously entangled in the politics and power hierarchies of the Chun Doo Hwan era. With its dramatic re-enactment of the Gwangju Uprising and broadly realistic depiction of the period’s political and social oppressions, Sandglass brought Gwangju and other traumas of the 1980s into mainstream public debate for the first time since the end of military rule. The serial ranks as one of the most popular television shows ever screened in Korea, averaging a 45.3% viewer rating and peaking at 61.5% during its re-broadcast in early 1998 (see Lee 2005).

Meanwhile, another work from this period would re-examine the traumas of Gwangju, though in a far more controversial manner. Jang Sun-woo said that the desire to make a film about Gwangju was what originally drew him into the film industry. Ultimately, 15 years passed before he got the opportunity. In contrast to the television documentaries about the incident that were broadcast in 1996, A Petal presents a psychological and allegorical take on the tragedy. Jang describes the narrative as functioning in the same way as a ssitkkim-gut, a kind of shamanic ritual meant to relieve a burdened soul.

A Petal takes place some time after the massacre and focuses on a severely traumatised teenage girl, played by future pop star Lee Jung-hyun, who attaches herself to an abusive, disabled labourer Mr. Chang (Moon Sung-keun). Their relationship itself is a site of trauma: the man beats and rapes her, yet she – believing him to be her elder brother, at least initially – refuses to leave. As time goes on the man begins to feel shame and regret for his actions, and he too begins to show signs of psychological trauma. Violence pervades the film; like other of Jang’s works, the characters exhibit strong sadistic or masochistic tendencies that complicate the viewer’s identification with them. Viewers expecting a morally black-and-white depiction of innocent civilians and murderous government troops were taken aback, while feminist critics attacked Jang for his use of the rape-as-national-trauma metaphor, which by the mid-1990s had grown wearyingly familiar in Korean cinema. (Though it may be said in Jang’s defence that his use of the metaphor is far more complex than that of his predecessors.) Jang says, ‘I didn’t want only to question the violence of the military regime which killed so many people in Gwangju in 1980. I thought we should also question the violence in ourselves … It seems to me that there’s a kind of inner violence, prevalent throughout society, and that we’ll never solve our fundamental problems until we confront that’ (quoted in Rayns 2007: 42–3).

The film’s best-remembered scene is a flashback to the massacre, described at the start of this chapter. Here the trauma of the event is captured in heartbreaking fashion; it is one of the most intense and moving scenes in Korean cinema. Yet it is typical of Jang that this ssitkim-gut seems to provide little resolution. The girl vanishes at the film’s end, and the labourer is left equally traumatised and unable to speak. In this film, the re-visiting and re-visualizing of trauma is more the working of human instinct than of a conscious effort to heal.

By 1996, Korean directors had secured at least a partial victory in their efforts to bring a new consciousness to local cinema, and to revisit the defining moments of the nation’s recent past. Park Kwang-su’s A Single Spark (Areumdaun cheongnyeon jeontaeil, 1995), about labour leader Jeon Tae-il’s dramatic self-immolation in 1970, which helped to launch the modern labour movement, was another key milestone in this regard. It goes without saying that it would not have been possible for Park or Jang to shoot such films a decade earlier.

Korean cinema had changed in other ways too. In particular, the industrial environment in which films were created had transformed beyond recognition. From financing, distribution and marketing to production methods and government policy, Korean films were conceived, developed, produced and presented to audiences in an entirely new way. Inevitably, such changes had a profound effect on the style and content of films produced in the 1990s and beyond. The conditions that led to the film industry’s restructuring, and the many implications of those changes, are considered in the next chapter.