Goldsmiths College University of London Locating Contemporary South Korean Cinema: Between the Universal and the Particular Seung Woo Ha A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the department of Media and Communications January 2013 1 DECLARATION I, Seung Woo Ha confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. Signed……………………….. Date…..…10-Jan-2013……… 2 ABSTRACT The thesis analyses contemporary South Korean films from the late 1980s up to the present day. It asks whether Korean films have produced a new cinema, by critically examining the criteria by which Korean films are said to be new. Have Korean films really changed aesthetically? What are the limitations, and even pitfalls in contemporary Korean film aesthetics? If there appears to be a true radicalism in Korean films, under which conditions does it emerge? Which films convey its core features? To answer these questions, the study attempts to posit a universalising theory rather than making particular claims about Korean films. Where many other scholars have focused on the historical context of the film texts’ production and their reception, this thesis privileges the film texts themselves, by suggesting that whether those films are new or not will depend on a film text’s individual mode of address. To explore this problem further, this study draws on the concept of ‘concrete universality’ from a Lacanian/Žižekian standpoint. For my purpose, it refers to examining how a kind of disruptive element in a film text’s formal structure obtrudes into the diegetic reality, thus revealing a cinematic ‘distortion’ in the smooth running of reality. The thesis will demonstrate that Im Kwon-taek’s Beyond the Years, Bong Joon-Ho’s The Host, and Zhang Lu’s Grain in Ear and Hyazgar show how an excessive element in the formal aspect of the film text explodes an explicit narrative line, thus allowing us to redefine the whole narrative line. In my chapter on how Korean films screen the past, I find that Beyond the Years provides a dialectical way of moving out of the alleged Koreanness, by posing a third party between official historiography and popular memory. In the chapter on how Korean 3 blockbusters invent the Other and how the subjects respond to the encounter with the Other through an ethical framework, I suggest that The Host reveals the fundamental antagonism at the heart of contemporary South Korean society, thus confronting viewers with truly ethical concerns. In the chapter on how cinematic strategies are used in depicting the shadowy underside of the law, I demonstrate through a close reading of Zhang Lu’s films that the radicalism of Korean cinema does not stem from the empirical description of a wretched reality but from disclosing an ontological shift in filmic images. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1 Introduction ............................................................................................................. 10 Chapter 2 The Transition in Contemporary South Korean Film Culture ................................. 42 2.1 The ‘Real Subsumption’ Phase in the Global Visual Economy .................................. 43 2.2 From Korean New Wave to Asia Extreme .................................................................. 58 2.3 ‘Blockage’: From the Opposition between the Premodern and the Modern to the Opposition between the Totalising One and its Excess ........................................................... 85 2.4 Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 93 Chapter 3 The Dialectic between Universality and Particularity ............................................. 96 3.1 ‘Concrete Universality’ as the Real and the Time-Image ............................................. 98 3.2 ‘Official Universality’ versus ‘Spectral Universality’ ................................................ 116 3.3 Laclau’s Theory of Universality: The ‘Equivalential Chain’ .................................... 123 3.4 Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 133 Chapter 4 A Text-focused Approach against the Emphasis on Historical Context ................ 135 Chapter 5 Screening the Past: Trauma, Memory, and the Question of Mediation ................. 148 5.1 The Male Intellectual’s Narcissistic Illusion as Postmodern Ideology: Black Republic 5 and A Single Spark ................................................................................................................. 153 5.2 The Erasure of a Mediatory Role: Peppermint Candy ............................................. 165 5.3 Ideological Fantasy as Interpretive Framework: Memories of Murder .................... 176 5.4 The Detour of South Korean Cinema through Im Kwon-taek .................................. 189 5.5 Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 200 Chapter 6 The Invention of the Other and the Issue of Ethics in the Korean Blockbuster .... 202 6. 1 The Ethical Question on the Self-Cancelling Gesture and the Spectacle of Visual Brutality: Silmido and TaeGukGi: Brotherhood of War ......................................................... 213 6.2 Failing in the Encounter with Radical Otherness: Joint Security Area .................... 226 6.3 The ‘Geopolitical Unconscious’ of Shiri Seen through an Ethical Framework ....... 235 6.4 The Host: The Encounter with Loss Itself ................................................................ 246 6.5 Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 260 Chapter 7 Suspension, the Spectral, and the Question of the Void in Marginal Space .......... 262 7.1 The Interplay between the Visible and Invisible in the Lawless World: Oldboy ...... 267 7.2 The Ontological Scrutiny of the Spectral Apparition: Bad Guy, Breath, and 3-Iron 279 7.3 From the Gesture to the Void: Grain in Ear and Hyazgar ........................................ 295 7.4 Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 310 Chapter 8 Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 313 6 Bibliography .......................................................................................................................... 323 Filmography ........................................................................................................................... 347 7 LIST OF FIGURES Figure 3-1 Laclau’s diagram .................................................................................................. 131 Figures 5-1 a – d: Ki-young recollects his past...................................................................... 158 Figures 5-2 a – f : A Single Spark shows Tae-il’s time through Young-soo’s look ................ 161 Figures 5-3 a – c: Tae-il looks back to both Young-soo and the viewer. ............................... 163 Figures 5-4 a – j: Yong-ho looks at Sun-im from an army truck in Peppermint Candy. .. 166-67 Figures 5-5 a – f: Yong-ho in the closing scene in Peppermint Candy ............................. 171-72 Figure 5-6: Yong-ho in panic after killing a local girl ........................................................... 174 Figures 5-7 a – p: crime scene of the killer in Memories of Murder ................................ 182-83 Figures 5-8 a – g: Baek-sa’s seventieth birthday party ..................................................... 198-99 Figure 6-1 Sergeant Jo leaves the island to renegotiate the government’s elimination project ................................................................................................................. 215 Figures 6-2 a –d: Jin-tae recognises Jin-suk in TaeGukGi ..................................................... 219 Figures 6-3 a – b: Jin-tae’s sacrificial gesture ........................................................................ 220 Figures 6-4 a – b: Jean reveals that Sergeant Lee is responsible for the killing of Jung Woo-jin .......................................................................................................................... 231 Figures 6-5 a – f: the closing scene of Joint Security Area ............................................... 232-33 Figure 6-6 Lee Pang-hee is trained as a military machine in the opening sequence ............. 237 Figure 6-7 Lee Pang-hee is glimpsed on a rooftop ................................................................ 238 Figures 6-8 a – h: Yu kills Lee Pang-hee ............................................................................... 241 Figures 6-9 a – d: the prologue of The Host .......................................................................... 249 Figures 6-10 a – h: Hyun-seo makes a hallucinatory appearance ..................................... 253-54 Figures 7-1 a – c: the opening scene in Oldboy ..................................................................... 274 8 Figure 7-2 the camera focuses on a close-up of Dae-su’s face when he was taken into custody at a police station. .................................................................................................................. 275 Figures 7-3 a – c: Dae-su extracts the private prison manager’s teeth