South Korea co-hosted the football World Cup together with Japan in June 2002. It had been 14 years since the Seoul Olympics, which the nation’s military leaders had billed as a mark of Korea’s entry into the ranks of developed nations. By 2002, the country boasted the world’s eleventh largest economy despite a comparatively small population of 49 million people, and was considered a technological leader in the fields of broadband, mobile telecommunications and electronics. Nonetheless, many Koreans felt their culture and achievements to be under-recognised internationally. The World Cup provided South Korea with an opportunity to present images of a modern, dynamic society to viewers around the globe. When the national team made an unprecedented entry into the tournament’s semifinals, it provided hope that on some level this aim had been reached.
News of other unexpected achievements in the fields of business, sports, science and technology appeared in the middle part of the decade. In 2005, Samsung passed Sony to become the world’s largest electronics company, and the following year its revenue exceeded the GDP of Argentina. Korean scientists also made a number of high profile advances in the field of biotechnology – though revelations at the end of 2005 that top researcher Hwang Woo-suk had used faked data in his studies affected the celebratory mood.
The most unexpected successes of all came in the fields of music, television and cinema. For several years it had been apparent that Korean pop culture was winning over a significant fan base in other parts of Asia. Television footage of Korean singers or TV stars being chased by crowds of adoring fans in China and Vietnam elicited a stunned response from Korean viewers in the late 1990s, given that local films and television dramas had never before provoked much interest among young Asian consumers. However, by the mid-2000s such scenes had become commonplace and journalists across the continent were proclaiming Korean pop culture the hot new thing. Dubbed hallyu or the ‘Korean Wave’ (not to be confused with the Korean New Wave), this grassroots enthusiasm for all things Korean would transform the nation’s image throughout Asia. From Singapore to Hong Kong, enrolment in Korean language classes shot up, while in Japan, long-standing prejudice against Koreans began to be tempered by the phenomenal popularity of hallyu stars. Tourism surged, with locations from famous films and television dramas drawing especially large numbers of visitors. Back in the 1990s, government officials in Korea had recognised the potential for cinema as an industry. In the 2000s, they began to understand that the spread of cultural contents could have a much broader impact than the export of automobiles and flatscreen televisions.
Meanwhile, on the political stage, the election at the end of 2002 to replace Kim Dae Jung had produced another president from the progressive camp, a human rights lawyer turned politician named Roh Moo Hyun. Roh’s campaign had enjoyed high-profile support from several film industry figures, including actor Moon Sung-keun (A Petal), producer Myung Kay-nam (Peppermint Candy) and director Lee Chang-dong, who as noted earlier was chosen by the new president to lead the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Roh would mostly continue the policies of his predecessor with regards to the film industry, providing generous levels of financial support. However, his presidency in general, having initially drawn forth tremendous expectations from young and left-leaning voters, soon lost momentum amidst controversy and political deadlock.
Commercial auteurs: Park Chan-wook, Bong Joon-ho, Kim Jee-woon
The development of hallyu or the Korean Wave, to be discussed further below, was shaped to a large degree by the Korean star system. At the same time, however, a group of directors were establishing names for themselves with ambitious works that won praise at international film festivals and emerged as high-grossing event films at home. Such ‘commercial auteurs’ as Kim Jee-woon, Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho were able to create films of a highly distinctive character within the confines of the mainstream industry, and they are responsible for giving New Korean Cinema some of its most memorable films.
Song Kang-ho in Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder (2003)
The year 2003 marked a key breakthrough for each of the three directors mentioned above. In April, director Bong Joon-ho released his second film Memories of Murder, based on a real-life incident in the 1980s in which a serial killer eluded investigators and terrorised the residents of a rural town. Although adopting the form of a police procedural, the film establishes its independence from genre conventions with its abrupt shifts in mood, dark humour and its undermining of audience sympathies and expectations. Bong’s cinephile roots are evident in an early sequence in which police detectives arrive at a crime scene where a new body has been discovered. The chaos of the moment and the ineffectiveness of the police force are captured in a meandering, richly choreographed single take that recalls other classic uses of the technique such as the opening of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958).
The film also provides vivid illustration of the workings of society under authoritarian rule. The casual manner in which local detectives beat confessions out of their suspects is representative of a mindset that reaches to the top of the government. Bong shows how such practices ultimately come back to weaken the system and hinder the investigation. At the same time, the film demonstrates directly how a government so focused on controlling and suppressing its populace is ultimately unable to protect them.
Midway through the film, a detective from Seoul arrives in the town and begins pursuing a more enlightened, deductive-based approach to solving the crimes. Yet this too proves powerless to stop the murderer, who functions in this work as a kind of force of pure malevolence. Despite the film’s similarities to the mystery genre, it ultimately pursues opposite ends. The average mystery develops by empowering its hero and the viewer with increased knowledge. However, particularly in the film’s enigmatic climax, Memories of Murder forces viewers to confront their own inability to solve or fully understand the case, and thus leads them to question even their most basic assumptions.
Memories of Murder won immediate critical and popular acclaim on its release, and its box-office take of over five million admissions not only established Bong as a leading filmmaker, but also demonstrated the commercial potential of such highly individualistic, director-orientated films. Soon local journalists were proclaiming ‘well-made’ (transliterated from English) to be the newest industry buzzword. Kim So-hui (2004), editor of film magazine Cine21, described ‘well-made’ in this context as a commercial feature that makes use of defined genres and the star system, but which contains both a distinctive directorial style and commentary on social issues.
Another ‘well-made’ film opened in June: Kim Jee-woon’s horror film A Tale of Two Sisters (Janghwa, hongnyeon, 2003). Loosely based on a Korean folk tale, the film focuses on an adolescent girl who returns from a sanitarium to live with her father, stepmother and younger sister in an isolated country cottage. At first the narrative seems to focus on the younger sister Su-yeon’s (Moon Geun-young) nightmares, the eerie atmosphere in the home (where there seems to be a ghost) and a growing tension between the older sister Su-mi (Lim Soo-jung) and the stepmother, Eun-ju (Yum Jung-ah). Yet the plot takes several sharp turns as it becomes apparent that Su-mi, suffering from trauma and guilt, has created some of the personalities that live within her psychological world. Daringly complex for such a commercial project, the film invites all manner of psychoanalytic interpretation at the same time as it can be enjoyed on the surface as a visually sumptuous and terrifying story. Critic Kim Hyung-seok labels the film as ‘subversive horror’ in the sense that rather than staging a confrontation between the subject and the other, A Tale of Two Sisters ultimately locates the other within the subject (2008: 65). The outside world turns out to be far less threatening than the horror that exists within the mind itself.
It is also a primary example of the manner in which Kim prioritises the visual over narrative, foregrounding repeated images, symbolic actions (like the washing of hands) and the predominance of facial close-ups. The director says: ‘I had hidden so much of the theme and story within the picture that the story had to be simple. If you’re doing a hidden picture puzzle, where’s the fun if you only look at the picture on the surface and don’t look for the hidden images?’ (quoted in Kim Hyung-seok 2008: 113). Despite the film’s unconventional touches it sold over three million tickets and remains to this day the highest grossing horror movie in Korean film history.
Finally one of the iconic works of New Korean Cinema, Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy, was released in November. Based loosely on a Japanese manga, the film revolves around the character of Oh Dae-soo, who spends 15 years in a bizarre privately-run jail without ever being informed of his crime. One day he is released, waking up at the top of a building wearing a new suit. He is soon contacted by the mysterious Lee Woo-jin (Yoo Ji-tae), who challenges him to discover within five days the reason for his imprisonment. However, Oh is primarily concerned with vengeance. From this point on, it is his rage and determination that gives the film its powerful momentum – accomplished cinematically with Park’s inventive filmmaking and the visceral performance of lead actor Choi Min-sik.
On one level, Oldboy is an expression of pure cinematic revelry. Drawing inspiration from Alfred Hitchcock, Brian De Palma and other filmmakers, Park makes use of a wide array of cinematic techniques to create some of the most striking, memorable images in Korean cinema. Much of this has to do with the director’s use of the camera as an active, constantly moving presence. Shifting suddenly from one perspective to the other, from extreme close-ups to birds-eye views to straight-on medium shots with the character facing the lens, Park replicates on an emotional level the protagonist’s desperate hunt for his adversary. Key actions are also frequently omitted. For example, viewers see Dae-soo lying on the floor of his cell surrounded by broken glass and with blood stains on the rug near his head, but do not witness him hit his head into the mirror. In being made to piece together such fleeting elisions themselves, viewers are pulled into the narrative’s relentless progression. One of the film’s most famous scenes is a one man vs twenty fight sequence in a hallway. Originally conceived in the film’s storyboard in over forty separate shots, it was ultimately rendered in a single take. In contrast to the chaotic jumble of bodies and the swinging of hammers and sticks, the movement of the camera is a model of simplicity: held in long shot, it merely tracks left and right to keep the protagonist in the middle of the screen. In other scenes Park makes use of sudden fantasy sequences, as when the film’s female lead Mido (Gang Hye-jung), after proclaiming that very lonely people keep seeing ants, imagines a human-sized ant on an empty subway train. Meanwhile, the use of saturated colours, stylish set design (like A Tale of Two Sisters, wallpaper of fantastic patterns keeps reappearing in Oldboy), and curious archaic-sounding dialogue combine to create a wholly original feel to the film.
Beneath the film’s seductive filmmaking lies a dark sensibility and a surprisingly sober contemplation of such issues as sin and vengeance. Although in Western countries much of the discourse surrounding the film has focused on its elemental violence (including a severed tongue, no less disturbing for not being shown onscreen; and Oh Dae-soo biting into a live octopus), there is little of the tongue-in-cheek mischief that characterises scenes of graphic violence in, for example, the works of Quentin Tarantino. Park has stated that his intention in shooting the films in his so-called vengeance trilogy (including also Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance from 2002 and Lady Vengeance (Chinjeolhan Geumjassi) from 2005) was to show the ultimate futility and emptiness of revenge. In Oldboy especially, Park presents his characters as archetypal figures, lending the work something of the qualities of an ancient myth or fairytale.
Despite its dark themes, Oldboy emerged as a major hit on its local release (3.3 million admissions). Then in May 2004 it was invited to screen in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, where a jury headed by Quentin Tarantino awarded it the Grand Jury prize – the festival’s second highest honour. It was the most prestigious award Korean cinema had ever received, and it helped to turn Park and other top Korean directors into household names at home. Such fame would increasingly translate into virtually total creative control over their films.
Interestingly, there is one actor who has played an integral part in the filmographies of all three of the above-mentioned directors. Born in 1967, Song Kang-ho started his career in the theatre before appearing in a small role in Hong Sang-soo’s The Day a Pig Fell into the Well. He first drew mainstream attention playing a hapless gangster engaged in training three recruits in the comedy No.3. Although Song receives only limited screen time, one scene in particular when he disciplines his recruits is recognised as one of the standout comedic performances in Korean film history. After appearing in key supporting roles in Kim Jee-woon’s The Quiet Family and blockbuster Shiri, he took the lead in Kim’s second film The Foul King (Banchikwang, 2000), about a shy businessman who takes up WWF-style pro-wrestling in secret. It was in this performance, which encompassed everything from acrobatic stunts in the wrestling ring to abject humiliation in the office, that Song first displayed the emotional depth that would characterise his later roles.
He went on to work with Park Chan-wook (JSA, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Thirst (Bakchwi, 2009)), Bong Joon-ho (Memories of Murder, The Host (Goemul, 2006)) and Kim Jee-woon (The Good, the Bad, the Weird (Joeunnom nappeunnom isanghannom, 2008)) not to mention Lee Chang-dong (Secret Sunshine) and several debut directors, to amass the most remarkable filmography of any Korean actor of the last decade. His contribution to such works, through the theatricality of his body movements and the unusual expressiveness of his voice, should not be overlooked. Although Asian viewers may recall good-looking young stars at the mention of the words ‘Korean film’, in Europe and North America the most representative image of this national cinema may be that of Song Kang-ho’s inscrutable face.
Ten million admissions
Although by mid-2003 many industry observers had written off big-budget genre fare as overly risky and commercially dubious, the Korean blockbuster would stage a furious comeback at the end of the year with Silmido (Silmido, 2003) and Tae Guk Gi (Taegeukki hwinallimyeo, 2004), the first Korean films ever to sell more than ten million tickets. Directed by Kang Woo-suk – founder of distributor Cinema Service, director of hit films Two Cops (Tukapsseu, 1993) and Public Enemy (Gonggongui jeok, 2002), and voted nine years in a row the most powerful figure in the Korean film industry – Silmido is based on a real-life incident in the late 1960s when a group of men were abducted by the government and then trained under extremely harsh conditions to infiltrate North Korea, with the goal of assassinating leader Kim Il-sung. When in the early 1970s a period of detente set in between the North and South, the men were abandoned and they responded by hijacking a bus and setting off for the president’s office. Adapted for the screen in bombastic, melodramatic style, the film, with its 8.4 billion won ($7.3 million) budget, received wide publicity when the local media began to look back on the almost-forgotten incident and interview family members of the deceased men. On 19 February 2004, less than two months after its release, Silmido became the first Korean film ever to pass the ten million admissions mark. It would end its run with 11.2 million tickets sold. Observers were shocked that a single film could sell so many tickets in a country with a population of 49 million. Although Silmido did not go on to perform well internationally, its domestic success would re-focus attention on the film industry and inspire similarly large-scale, commercial films based on recent history such as May 18 (2007). The traumas of Korea’s turbulent twentieth century, which were still visible under the surface of contemporary society, had proved to be rich source material for commercial cinema.
Tae Guk Gi is a Korean War epic from Shiri director Kang Je-gyu featuring stars Jang Dong-gun (Friend) and Won Bin. Budgeted at a record 14.7 billion won ($12.8 million), the film utilised vast sets and elaborate pyrotechnics in illustrating the story of two brothers drafted together into the South Korean army. Although not what one might call revisionist history, the film did introduce some new elements into the long tradition of Korean war films, in that it portrayed atrocities by Southern as well as Northern soldiers, and saw one of its heroes switch over to fight for the Northern side towards the end of the film. But the work’s primary draw for local audiences was its dramatic (and melodramatic) portrayal of a nation that lived through tremendous upheaval and suffering, ultimately shaping the kind of country that exists today. Tae Guk Gi’s plumbing of national sentiment proved capable of drawing not only younger audiences, but also viewers in their sixties and seventies who remembered the war, and were visiting a movie theatre for the first time in decades in a kind of collective remembrance. Released on 6 February, the film sold tickets at an even faster rate than Silmido, and ultimately recorded 11.8 million admissions.
The breaking of the ten million admissions barrier ranked as the most dramatic of the many milestones passed by Korean cinema in its decade-long expansion. Newspapers and investigative news programmes gave the event wide coverage, and also took this opportunity to reassess the growth and current state of the local film industry. Despite the impressive numbers, their conclusions were not always positive. Although audiences showed strong interest in local films, and the industry contained a deep pool of talent, Korea’s distribution system was developing in ways that elicited concern. In particular, the accumulation of power by major vertically integrated distributors threatened to make what was already an unlevel playing field even more imbalanced.
Table 2: Film industry statistics, 1996–2007. Source: Korean Cinema Yearbook
In the 1990s, chaebol such as Samsung and Daewoo had emulated the classical Hollywood model of a vertically integrated studio with interests in every stage of a film’s creation, from investment and production to distribution, exhibition and ancillary markets. However, such companies exited the film industry before they were able to achieve dominance in the exhibition sector, which was the most lucrative and strategically important link in the chain. By the mid-2000s, a new group of distributors had achieved dominance, most notably the film divisions of two giant food conglomerates, the CJ Group (CJ Entertainment) and the Orion Group (Showbox). Both companies were active investors in Korean films – in 2007, CJ Entertainment participated as the main investor on twenty films for a total sum of $86 million. However, the level of their involvement in the exhibition sector gave them an unprecedented degree of power.
As in other territories, the spread of modern multiplexes in Korea was considered to be a strong factor in the increased rate of theatre attendance. The three biggest multiplex chains in order were: CGV, originally structured as a joint venture between Korea’s CJ Entertainment, Hong Kong’s Golden Village and Australia’s Village Roadshow (the latter two would eventually sell their stakes); Lotte Cinema, a division of the massive Korean chaebol which focused on building cinemas in its upscale Lotte department stores; and Megabox Cineplex, a joint venture between the Orion Group and US-based Loews Cineplex (which sold its stake in 2006).
Therefore the country’s top two distributors controlled two of the most powerful theatre chains. Although both companies took care not to appear to be taking advantage of their situation, in the behind-the-scenes negotiations that form a major part of the distribution process, their weight was clearly felt. Other distributors without their own venues were unable to release films on the same scale, which arguably harmed these films’ ability to reach their commercial potential. Over time, the large distributors gained more and more power. In this Korea formed a contrast to the United States, where the Paramount decision of 1948 had forced the Hollywood studios to sell their theatre chains (although under Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s many of them were allowed to start reacquiring venues, in the belief that conglomeration would create stronger, more competitive companies).
Of a nationwide total of 1,100 screens, Silmido was released on 325 screens (30%) and Tae Guk Gi on a record 430 (39%). Smaller films that had been released at the same time found themselves pushed out of theatres even if they were performing well. The Screen Quota proved to be of no help to small-scale releases, as theatres could simply fulfil their quota obligations by slotting in high grossing Korean blockbusters. How to best support and protect smaller films in the increasingly industrialised Korean film market became an urgent task for policymakers in the coming years.
The Korean Wave
The Korean Wave or hallyu can be traced back to 1997–98 when the television drama What Is Love All About? (Sarangi muogillae) and the boy band H.O.T. began to attract a surprisingly large audience in China and Taiwan (see Shim 2006: 25). From the beginning, it was television serials and pop music rather than cinema that would be hallyu’s driving force, but the film industry too would influence (and be influenced by) the phenomenon.
Some of the earliest successes for Korean film came in Hong Kong. Hur Jin-ho’s Christmas in August (1998) opened on a single screen at the Hong Kong Art Centre in August 1999, but due to unexpectedly strong demand it was shifted to the commercial theatre Broadway Cinematheque in late September. The understated but emotionally stirring melodrama arguably occupied a genre niche that local Hong Kong films had left unfilled, and word-of-mouth was strong. After a lengthy 56-day release, the film’s box-office take amounted to HK$795,000 ($100,000) (see Paquet 2007c: 39). Then in November, Shiri opened on 15 screens and took the number three slot at the box office in its first week, ultimately grossing HK$6 million ($770,000). Although the film’s marketing in Hong Kong focused on actor Han Suk-kyu, the combination of blockbuster-style action and tragic melodrama is also believed to have contributed to its local appeal. A rush of releases would follow: in 2002 alone a total of 22 Korean films were released in the territory, capturing a 4.9% market share. Japan would embrace the new Korean blockbuster as well, at least those films with a North Korean theme (given North Korea’s close proximity to and hostile attitude towards its former coloniser, such issues were seen as highly relevant to Japan as well). Shiri opened in January 2000 and hit number one at the box office, grossing an impressive 1.85 billion yen ($17.6 million), while JSA also topped the box office on a massive 235-screen release in May 2001, earning a final tally of 1.2 billion yen ($9.8 million) (see Bak & Nam 2006).
The film that would prove most successful in reaching large audiences in Asia was Kwak Jae-yong’s My Sassy Girl (Yeopgijeogin geunyeo, 2001). Based on a serial novel published on the Internet, the film chronicles the adventures of a university student, Gyeon-woo (singer/actor Cha Tae-hyun) who starts dating a pretty but rather unpredictable and aggressive young woman with a drinking problem (Jun Ji-hyun, who would develop her role in this hit into one of Asia’s most prominent modelling careers). The film derives much of its humour from its upending of gender stereotypes, with The Girl (she is never given a name) picking fights in public and shouting threats to her obedient boyfriend. Yet the film clearly lacks any feminist agenda, in that The Girl’s domineering attitude is later explained away as a kind of pathological response to personal trauma, and she begins to assume much more traditional gender roles. The film’s saccharine conclusion thus beats a retreat into the patriarchal status quo. More of interest is the way the narrative captures a sense of confusion over morals and gender relations in a society upended by furiously accelerated modernisation. With parental figures looming in the background, the protagonist picks his way through a minefield of choices regarding everything from sex to holding hands to emotional commitment. If many iconic comedies succeed by targeting society’s deep-seated anxieties, then My Sassy Girl may express the uneasy tension that exists between slowly eroding traditional values and the uncertainty of the new.
Produced by Shincine, My Sassy Girl sold 4.8 million tickets in Korea and then spent two weeks at number one in Hong Kong, grossing HK$10 million ($1.3 million) – more than any Korean film has earned in that territory before or since. In China, where film imports are highly restricted, the film won over a huge audience on pirated DVD, with an estimated ten million copies sold. Its popularity can be seen in the fact that in a 2006 poll, Chinese Internet users asked to name ten words that remind them of South Korea cited the film’s title, together with ‘kimchi’ and ‘tae kwon do’.
Despite the success of a few individual titles, the Korean Wave’s biggest impact on the film industry lay in increasing the regional star power of Korean actors. This process gathered pace in 2004 and 2005 with the runaway success of several Korean television serials. Winter Sonata (Gyeoul yeonga), a television drama starring Bae Yong-joon and Choi Ji-woo, was first broadcast in Japan by an NHK-operated cable channel in April 2003. A rapturous audience response led to a re-broadcast in December, and then in April 2004 it was shown on NHK’s main terrestrial channel. By this time Bae was achieving fame on an unprecedented scale, particularly among middle-aged female viewers. Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro may only have been stating the obvious when he joked that Bae’s popularity had exceeded his own. The following year, traditional costume drama Jewel in the Palace (Daejanggeum) received close to 50% viewer ratings in Hong Kong, where lead actress Lee Young-ae was named Woman of the Year. The programme would be similarly successful in Taiwan and China.
Growing interest in Korean stars went hand in hand with a broader expansion in film exports. Prior to 1998, annual exports of Korean films generally added up to well under $1 million. However the year 1999 saw the launch of Korea’s first international sales companies, including both independent firms like Mirovision and Cineclick Asia as well as specialised divisions within major studios such as CJ Entertainment or Cinema Service. By operating booths at major international markets such as Cannes’ Marché du Film or the American Film Market, sales companies began to market Korean films directly to international buyers. Due to such companies’ efforts, and the growing marketability of Korean films, annual exports jumped to $6 million in 1999, to $15 million in 2002, and to $58 million in 2004.
It was in Japan, the world’s second-largest film market, that the most spectacular rise took place. By the peak of the Korean Wave, deals for films featuring major stars were being struck for $3 million to $4 million each, including Lee Myung-Se’s Duelist (Hyeongsa, 2005) starring Gang Dong-won and action film Running Wild (Yasu, 2006) starring Kwon Sang-woo. The highest price of all was paid for Hur Jin-ho’s April Snow (Oechul, 2005) starring Bae Yong-joon in his first film role since 2003; although not publicly announced, the deal was rumoured to be at least $7 million. Of the record $76 million in Korean cinema’s export earnings in 2005, an astonishing $60 million was made from sales to Japan.
April Snow (2005): featuring hallyu star Bae Yong-joon
All of these developments were completely new for Korea, and numerous commentators struggled to make sense of what was happening and what it all meant. Cho Hae-Joang (2005) divides the various responses and arguments surrounding the Korean Wave into three broad groups. The first she terms the ‘cultural nationalist perspective’, which proposed various reasons for the spread of Korean pop culture vis-a-vis American or Japanese cultural products, including Korea’s embrace of Confucian family values or the presence of anti-Japanese sentiment in the rest of Asia. The ‘neoliberal perspective’ focused on the mass-market appeal of Korean pop culture, and the development of new markets and distribution networks in the Asian region. Finally the ‘postcolonialist perspective’ was taken up primarily by cultural researchers interested in modernisation and global shifts, and considered among other issues the building of an Asian ‘cultural bloc’.
The content of Korean films was inevitably affected by hallyu. Any film that was being packaged around a major star had to incorporate a narrative that would maintain and build on the actor’s pre-existing image. A growing belief that casting, rather than original content or a well-developed screenplay, was the surest route to profitability discouraged a focus on quality. By 2005 and 2006 critics were deriding the trend for quickly-developed, star-centered projects such as Now and Forever (Yeolliji, 2006), about not one but two protagonists with fatal illnesses, or the Korea-Hong Kong co-production Daisy (Deiji, 2006) starring Jun Ji-hyun, that were obviously trying to replicate its stars’ past successes. Ultimately the majority of such films performed poorly both in Korea and other Asian markets, setting the stage for the later waning of the Korean Wave.
The Host
Bong Joon-ho’s The Host opens in a mortuary at the 8th US Army base in central Seoul. An American officer, fretting over several hundred dusty bottles of formaldehyde, orders a Korean private to empty them into the sink. The private tries to object, noting that the drain leads into the Han River, but he is overruled and soon the carcinogenic substance is trickling towards Seoul’s famous waterway. Several years later, something begins to stir in the Han River: a truck-sized amphibian mutant that has developed a taste for human flesh.
The Host, a genre-bending extravaganza that broke all box-office records on its release in July 2006, is a film with a keen and ironic sense of history. The scene at the mortuary is based on a real-life incident which sparked an uproar on its exposure by an environmental watch group in 2000. Although the director’s utilisation of this episode as a kind of creation myth is playfully tongue-in-cheek, its presence here also functions as a reminder of how events from the past can return to impact the present in unpredictable ways. Later scenes in the film, in which the creature visits destruction upon the people of Seoul, are meant to evoke memories of previous disasters that would be familiar to its audience: the collapse of Seongsu Bridge in 1994, the crushing of two schoolgirls by a US tank in 2002, the Daegu subway fire in 2003, not to mention SARS and the Iraq War.
Meanwhile the film’s protagonists, a family that runs a food stand next to the Han River, are also linked to recent Korean history. Their means of employment betray their past, in that the right to operate the Han River food stands were the sole compensation provided to residents of the Sanggye-dong slum, after their neighbourhood was levelled in a ‘beautification campaign’ before the 1988 Olympics (as depicted in Kim Dong-won’s documentary Sanggye-dong Olympics). Each character may also be seen as representing a different decade of Korean history: Hee-bong (Byun Hee-bong), the 1960s patriarch who struggled to raise his family amidst poverty; Gang-du (Song Kang-ho), who appears mentally affected by the traumas of the 1970s; Nam-il (Park Hae-il), a Molotov-cocktail throwing veteran of the 1980s student movement, currently drunk and unemployed; Nam-joo (Bae Doo-na), an amateur competitive archer of the subsequent generation who seems unable to realise her significant potential; and the industrious and levelheaded Hyun-seo (Ko A-sung), a middle school student representing the 2000s who is captured by the monster at the start of the film.
Bong Joon-ho’s The Host (2006) sold over 13 million tickets
The Host’s central conflict is the family’s struggle to save Hyun-seo from the monster’s grasp. The family is nothing if not dysfunctional, but the initiative and passion they display in their search forms a strong contrast to the misguided and incompetent efforts of the Korean and US governments to contain the situation. Ultimately, the four bereaved family members spend more time fighting health professionals, military personnel and representatives of the government than the monster itself.
Ultimately selling just over 13 million tickets in its home country (equivalent to 27% of the populace), The Host was a landmark work in any number of respects. Mixing a creative approach to genre with sociopolitical commentary and big-budget spectacle, the film doubles as both a blockbuster and a work of auteur cinema. With creature modelling carried out at New Zealand’s Weta Studios, computer-generated effects supplied by San Francisco-based The Orphanage, and the film’s first confirmed financing coming from Japan (Happinet Corp.) instead of Korea, the making of the film involved talent and resources from around the world. Pre-release hype grew strong after its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival’s Directors Fortnight section, and reached fever pitch before its summer release, when marketing/distribution giant Showbox (a division of the Orion group) opened the film with a record 620 prints – over a third of the nation’s screens. Budgeted at $11 million, it earned the equivalent of $17.2 million on its first weekend, and $97 million by the end of its theatrical run (see Paquet 2007b). International sales agent Cineclick Asia sold a total $5.9 million in foreign distribution deals, though it would perform better in some territories (China, the US, Spain, Singapore) than in others (Japan, the UK, Hong Kong).
The Host represents the final maturation of Korean cinema in terms of its growth from a weak, highly regulated industry that operated under the government’s hand to a competitive, globalised business that could turn out almost any kind of film. The end result of that maturation produced ambivalent feelings in many observers, who worried that commercial forces were starting to overpower the filmmaking process. And yet Bong, whose right to final cut on The Host was never challenged, had created a work of surprising originality and depth. It seems appropriate that this film, with its contradictory mix of commercial power, artistic precision and sociopolitical commentary, should represent the high water mark of Korean cinema’s post-democratic boom.
Independent films in the twenty-first century
The independent film movement had functioned as a close-knit community in the 1990s, turning out short films, documentaries and the occasional feature-length work that strove to highlight its independence from capital interests and the mainstream film industry. During the industrialisation and commercial success of Korean films in the following decade, independent films did not fade but rather underwent a significant expansion. Although the increased diversity of subject matter and shooting styles led to an occasional blurring of the lines between mainstream and independent aesthetics, the overall health of the independent film sector in the latter part of the decade served as a point of optimism as the fortunes of the mainstream industry began to slide.
As in other countries, one of the most significant shifts to take place over this period was the decreased cost of making feature films due to new digital technologies. Whereas short films had formerly occupied the central position in Korean independent film, by the mid-2000s many aspiring filmmakers were choosing to finance their own feature debuts (often at great personal sacrifice). By 2008 it was even becoming common for students and film programmes to shoot feature-length films as their graduation projects.
Leading figures in the independent film movement had also turned their efforts to expanding distribution opportunities for features and documentaries. Taking advantage of financial and logistical support from the Korean Film Council, filmmakers were successful in securing theatrical releases for large numbers of independent films. Whereas only four films released in 2004 had a budget of less than 1 billion won ($900,000), by 2008 this number had expanded to 38 or 35% of the total.
One notable example of a film that took full advantage of its independent status to pursue an aggressively non-mainstream vision is Kim Gok and Kim Sun’s Capitalist Manifesto: Working Men of All Countries, Accumulate! (Jabondang seoneon: mangukui nodongjayeo, chukjeokhara!, 2003). Playfully channeling Karl Marx to illustrate the instabilities and pitfalls of the capitalist system, the Kim brothers structure their film as a system of repetitive transactions between dull-eyed protagonists who act like cogs in a machine. In place of a conventional narrative, scenes involving prostitutes and gangsters are presented and re-presented with various elements changed until the entire system lurches towards crisis.
Other films stood out for their foregrounding of non-mainstream perspectives. Leesong Hee-il, the most prominent of Korea’s openly gay filmmakers, first made a name for himself with highly praised short films such as Sugar Hill (2000) and Good Romance (2001). His feature debut No Regret (Huhoehaji anha, 2006) details the relationship between a prostitute in a gay bar and a man from a rich, conservative family who refuse to acknowledge his sexual orientation. After premiering at the Pusan International Film Festival, the low-budget film enjoyed a surprisingly successful commercial release, earning a higher rate of return than even The Host.
Meanwhile the career of Zhang Lu illustrates the increasingly transnational character of Korean cinema. An ethnic Korean from Yanbian, China, Zhang worked as a novelist before making his debut as a filmmaker with the assistance of Korean producer Choi Doo-young. Insisting on the universal, transnational nature of his work, Zhang locates many of his films in vaguely defined spaces in which various ethnicities interact. Grain in Ear (Mangjong, 2005) focuses on an ethnic Korean widow who sells kimchi in an undefined Chinese town. Desert Dream (Gyeonggye, 2007) is set in Mongolia at the edge of the Gobi Desert, and presents an encounter between a Mongolian man and a North Korean refugee who arrives with her son. Although still a Chinese citizen, Zhang has received various kinds of financial support from the Korean Film Council and has been embraced wholeheartedly by the Korean film community. He has also taken advantage of his position to support other ethnic Korean filmmakers in China, producing works such as Jin Guang-hao’s Life Track (Guedo, 2007) which won the top award at the 2007 Pusan International Film Festival.
The bubble bursts
Analysing industry statistics for the year 2006 reveals a contradiction. In one sense, it was the most successful year ever for Korean cinema. Not only The Host, but period drama King and the Clown (Wangui namja) by director Lee Joon-ik also emerged as an unexpected smash hit, selling 12.3 million tickets. Both the market share of Korean cinema (63.8%) and overall theatrical admissions (153.4 million tickets) reached astounding levels compared to the lows of a decade earlier. One might think that the Korean film industry would have been celebrating its successes, but the mood was sombre. In fact, apart from the producers of a few runaway hit films, almost everyone in the film industry was losing money. Part of the problem was that the number of mainstream commercial films being produced had risen to unsustainable levels. During the production boom of 2005 and 2006, so many films were being shot that producers faced a shortage of cameras, and began to talk of borrowing equipment from Japan or China. By the time this glut of films reached theatres, cutthroat competition made it difficult for any of them to turn a profit.
More seriously, the basic economics of feature film production in Korea were being called into question. Throughout the boom period, the cost of making films had steadily grown, affected by star salaries, labour costs and rising technical standards. When exports to Japan were booming, producers could afford to absorb these extra costs. However, as interest in the Korean Wave began to wane, overall exports crashed from $76 million in 2005 to $24.5 million in 2006 and only $12.3 million in 2007. Without the prospect of earning a six- or seven-figure guarantee from a sale to Japan, Korean films had to depend almost exclusively on their (highly unpredictable) performance in domestic theatres.
The Korean film industry’s most serious commercial vulnerability vis-a-vis Hollywood was the lack of a healthy market for DVDs and other ancillary products. Whereas US films received a majority of their revenues from DVD, cable television, merchandising and other sources, the situation in the Korean film industry resembled Hollywood in the 1970s, when theatrical admissions accounted for 70–80% of overall revenues. For example, in 2006 DVD sales in Korea (excluding rentals) were the equivalent of $72 million, compared to theatrical revenues of $954 million. By contrast, in the same year the US market for DVD sales was $16.6 billion compared to $9.49 billion in theatrical revenues (Anon. 2007). The most commonly cited reason for the weakness of DVD in Korea was online piracy, which gained an early foothold in South Korea thanks to the country’s edge in broadband Internet technologies.
The end result of this was that films that failed at the box office had little or no second chance to recover profits on DVD. Given that distribution patterns had moved towards the Hollywood model of the wide release, with just a handful of films saturating the nation’s screens during peak seasons, smaller films that depended on word of mouth were particularly disadvantaged.
The industry’s basic structural problems together with the burst bubble in film finance led to a deep slump in 2007 and 2008. Venture capital investors, after suffering heavy losses, reduced their investment in Korean films or pulled out entirely. Producers began looking for ways to lower costs, from shooting on digital cameras to choosing less technically demanding projects. The geographical centre of the film industry, which had coalesced in the business/financial district of Gangnam in Seoul, began to disperse as film companies sought neighbourhoods with cheaper rent. Fewer and fewer mainstream commercial projects were being produced (although the number of low-budget independent features continued to rise). Worries began to spread that, unable to find work, experienced technicians and crew members were leaving the film industry. Meanwhile a collapse in the stock prices of many entertainment firms, which had achieved ‘backdoor’ listings on the local stock exchange during the boom years, caused additional turmoil (see Paquet 2009).
Compounding the gloom was the fact that in early 2006 the Korean government had bowed to long-standing pressure from the US and reduced Korea’s Screen Quota to 73 days per year, from its previous level of 106–46. The move was made as a prelude to talks on a US-South Korea Free Trade Agreement. Filmmakers felt betrayed, and nearly a year of large and small demonstrations, both in Korea and at international film festivals, ensued. Most memorable were a long series of single-person protests held by directors, actors, producers and other members of the film industry in various locations throughout Seoul. By this time, the public’s support of the quota system had waned compared to in 1998, when the industry was much weaker. Although the quota’s practical effect on the film industry was uncertain in a time when market shares remained above 40% and most theatres were owned by local distributors, its reduction was a psychological and political blow, and distracted the film industry from addressing other of its structural problems.
After the box-office peak of 2006, Korean audiences started becoming noticeably more selective about their consumption of domestic films. Market share fell to 51% in 2007 and 43% in 2008. Whereas in the middle of the decade, politicians boasted about the strength of Korean film and spoke of using cinema as a kind of ‘soft power’ to improve the nation’s standing within Asia, a few years later all talk had turned to addressing the industry’s weaknesses. Nonetheless there remained deep pools of talent within the Korean filmmaking community, and the more notable work produced each year continued to screen at major festivals and open in foreign markets. The end of Korea’s boom and bubble was more of a humbling than a crash.