The thesis examines four films by Lee Han—Wandeugi (2011), Thread of Lies (2013), A Melody to Remember (2016) and Innocent Witness (2019)—that highlight disability problems in contemporary South Korea. While exposing the prejudice against and misunderstanding of people with disabilities embedded in society, these motion pictures promote social integration through development of trusted relationships and effective communication within familial structures. The representations of disability indicate that the cinematic images of exclusion can reinforce disabled characters' marginalized identity and promote inclusive efforts among the viewer at the same time. Through textual, cultural, theoretical analysis, it is argued that the films progressively decrease discriminative description of disability and gradually empower isolated individuals, making Innocent Witness an exemplary disability rights film.

My dissertation, entitled, The Origin of Korean Trauerspiel: Gwangju, Stasis, Justice, argues that the vertiginous vicissitudes of contemporary South Korea since 1997 can be best described in terms of what Walter Benjamin calls Trauerspiel, or Mourning Play. This project identifies the 15-year period as the time-space of a series of suspended and thwarted mourning, in which death, be it in the past or present, hardly partakes of the economy of justice or sacrifice as it putatively does in tragedy in view of a new community to come. Drawing attention to the peculiar interplay between two contemporary catalysts of stasis, or civil war, i.e., the special amnesty granted in 1997 to ex-President Chun Doo-Hwan for his executive role in the Gwangju Massacre in May 1980 and the U.S. War on Terror since 2002, for which 3 Korean civilian hostages were kidnapped and brutally executed in 2004 and 2007, I argue that both serve to render naught the sublime causes (e.g. Democracy, Justice, and Peace) as well as human lives sacrificed in relation to them, generating a genuine crisis of politics and ethics. By analyzing contemporary Korean cinema (e.g. films by Park Chan-wook, Bong Jun-ho, and Kim Jee-woon) and literature (e.g. Kim Hoon) of this period as allegory of this crisis, I show how attempts at doing justice are complicated and increasingly frustrated by progressive dissolution of a series of traditional distinctions between Victim and Perpetrator, Friend and Enemy, and Justice and Vengeance, leading to universal failures of mourning, only to constitute a vast singular Trauerspiel, or Mourning Play.

Hollywood remakes of East Asian films clearly change more than just the language of a film, and the choices that producers and directors make in order to tailor a foreign film so that it better appeals to American audiences creates an entry point that allows for a more direct comparison of aesthetic styles, cultural tastes, and narrative conventions. An analysis of two case studies, South Korean hit film My Sassy GIrl (2001) and Hong Kong's Infernal Affairs trilogy (2002, 2003, 2003) remade into My Sassy Girl (2008) and The Departed (2006), explores the principles of Korean and Hong Kong commercial film industries and how they differ and interact with those of Hollywood.

In this study, I analyze how recent South Korean cinema has responded to the forces of globalization by appropriating these influences both on and off screen. In particular, by situating Korean blockbuster within its local, regional and global contexts, I highlight the ways in which the identity politics of Korean blockbuster complicate our understanding of globalization and national cinema. The second chapter focuses on the globalization of recent South Korean cinema, with critical attention given to hybridity as an industrial strategy and as shaped by intra-regional co-productions. The third chapter analyzes four Korean films to represent the characteristics of Korean blockbuster and Korean national issues. Through the two primary chapters, I argue that Korean blockbuster is a hybrid form between national cinema and Hollywood blockbusters. It is a local answer to the accelerating forces of globalization at home, evident in the growing direct competition with Hollywood blockbusters. In fact, despite the growing reliance on the big-budget blockbusters, the recent rise in the domestic market share of local films against Hollywood movies owes much to the high-profile success of many of Korean blockbusters. The significance of the case of Korean Cinema is multifaceted in our comprehensive understanding of globalization and hybridity. It illustrates that globalization as hybridization takes place at multiple levels and in multiple directions beyond the conventional global-local paradigm. In noting intra-regional exchanges as integral to the construction of today’s hybridities, my study has contended that regionalization and localization strongly contribute to the globalization process. More important, by locating hybridity outside of Western hegemony in the intraregional cultural dynamic, it also resists the Eurocentric approach that tends to view hybridity as only produced through local appropriation of the global/Hollywood model. This is often implied even in the recognition of hybridity as a resistance against hegemonic power. / text

AN ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION OF KWANG WOO NOH, for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Mass Communication and Media Arts, presented on August 25, 2009, at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. TITLE: MEMORIES OF RAPID TRANSFORMATION: RETROSPECTION AND NOSTALGIA IN CONTEMPORARY SOUTH KOREAN CINEMA MAJOR PROFESSOR: Deborah Tudor, Ph.D. The recent tendency of returning to history in Korean cinema corresponds with the conjuncture of democratization and globalization from 1992, which is an antithesis of the former conjuncture: modernization and military dictatorship from 1961 to 1992. Through the rapid economic development, Korea's economy reached its apex in the mid 1990s. However, Asian economic crisis of 1997 - 1998 accelerated the economic decline. The democratization and the economic crisis provided Korean filmmakers with a motivation to re-examine the past. The research contained herein will focus on these Korean reexaminations of the past. With regard to this re-examination, Korean cinema employed two main trends. Some films refer to historical and political moments, and suggest a relationship between such moments and Korean destiny. Other films deal with personal stories from the 1960s to 1990s. Both trends provide not only retrospection of the rapid transformation but also nostalgia for the past despite differences of subject matters and genre. Film studies pertinent to the subject include political criticism in U.S. film studies of ideology, historians' and film scholars' approaches to film representation of the history and the past, as well as New German cinema and post-Franco Spanish cinema. Methodology will incorporate textual analysis, followed by an examination of four films in retrospective trend, as well as four films in the nostalgic trend. For the purpose of analysis, eight films, released from 2000 to 2007, are examined. In terms of subject matter, all films are connected to Korea from the 1960 to the 1990s. In the first trend of films of historical reference, four films will be examined: The President's Barber(Im Chan-sang, 2004), The President's Last Bang (Im Sang-soo, 2004), Peppermint Candy (Lee Chang-dong, 2000), and Memories of Murder (Bong Joon-ho, 2003). The President's Barber covers the era from the last days of Rhee Syng-man regime through the Student Revolution of April 19, 1960, through the military coup on May 16, in 1961, to the assassination of Park Chung-hee on October 26, 1979, through the life of a fictional barber who served the president. The President's Last Bang (Im Sang-soo, 2004) dramatizes the assassination of Park Chung-hee. With its reverse chronological narrative progress, Peppermint Candy (Lee Chang-dong, 2000) traces how the Kwangju massacre of May 1980 influenced Korean society. Finally Memories of Murder (Bong Joon-ho, 2003) treats the expansion of capitalism during the 1980s within the form of mystery and thriller film. Four films that tell personal stories are chosen: The Classic (Kwak Jae-yong, 2003), My Mother the Mermaid (Park Heung-Shik, 2004), Once Upon A Time in A High school: The Spirit of Jeet Kune Do (Yu Ha, 2003) and Friend (Kwak Kyung-taek, 2001). All but My Mother the Mermaid adopt the form of "high teen film" for their genre conventions. Once Upon A Time in A High School: The Spirit of Jeet Kune Do (Yu ha, 2003) is a coming-of-age film set in a high school located in Kangnam, a newly developed periphery of Seoul in the late 1970s. The Classic and Friend compare adolescence and maturity by putting episodes from main characters' high school days in the middle of storyline. Whether they are set in a remote island or a high school in an urban area, these films depict not only the bitterness and poignancy of growing up but also show diverse aspects of, or responses to, the rapid socio-economic transformation of South Korea.

This dissertation performs close readings of a body of well-known East Asian films. The Japanese films discussed include Kitano Takeshi's Hana-bi (1997) and Fukasaku Kinji's Battle Royale (2000). From Korea, the dissertation focuses on Peppermint Candy (1999, Lee Chang-dong), The Coast Guard (2002, Kim Ki-duk), The Chaser (2008, Na Hong-jin), and four films by Park Chan-wook: Joint Security Area (1999), Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), Oldboy (2003), and Lady Vengeance (2005). Through an analysis of these films, this dissertation argues that the narrative cinema of South Korea and Japan, produced between 1997 and 2008, uses the representation of violence to foreground and critique the ideology of capitalism. Both South Korea and Japan see substantial economic growth, collapse, and rebuilding in the twentieth century. From 1986 to 1991, Japan experienced an asset price bubble, but its collapse in 1991 led to the period known as Japan's “Lost Decade” which marked the end of the nation's post-war economic miracle. A comparable trajectory occurs in South Korea. Following significant development in the 80s and 90s, the Asian Financial Crisis brings South Korea to a halt in 1997. In what came to be locally known as the “IMF Crisis,” South Korea had to rely on a $21 billion bailout loan from the International Monetary Fund. Just as Japan's economic collapse almost immediately preceded Korea's, both countries attempt to work through the trauma of the Lost Decade and the IMF Crisis in their national cinemas. Mirroring what audiences in East Asia were experiencing, the characters in these films endure instances of violent displacement. In response to their disenfranchisement, the protagonists of films such as Hana-bi and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance brutally lash out. But unlike in the majority of narrative cinema, the characters' violent actions do not lead to resolution. Instead, violence only creates a recursive loop where systemic inequity persists. As a result, the brutal cinema of Korea and Japan pushes the representation of violence to its limit point and reveals the tacit goal-oriented logic where it is repeatedly used as a justified means to legitimate ends. By illustrating and problematizing this idea, these films uncover how this ideology of violence is a central tenet to the larger structure that actually produced the source of alienation: neoliberal capitalism. This dissertation thus demonstrates two points. First is the way in which economic trauma in Japan resonates in Korea, a process that carries over into their respective cinemas. Second is how these films assert that the representation of violence does not merely concern issues of film and media, but rather shares a deeper connection with the dominant ideology within globalization. As the films demonstrate, capitalism ultimately benefits the capitalist, a dynamic that can only occur at the expense of the laborer. These films thus articulate the inherent violence in this worldview that disregards the wellbeing of the Other. At the same time, the films also contend that it is that single-minded impetus towards profit that fueled the economic collapse, an almost inevitable result of the region's furious adaptation of industrial capitalism in a process referred to as ‘compressed modernity.’ Less interested in the enormous prosperity resulting from modernization in the region, the films confront and lament the often neglected but equally exorbitant costs. The violent cinema of South Korea and Japan thus insists that the financial crises of the late twentieth century, the persistence of economic inequality, the cinematic representation of violence, as well as the growth of its own industries, constitute a knot that can only be understood in its totality.

O tema da pesquisa da presente dissertação é investigar a poética narrativa do cineasta sulcoreano Kim Ki Duk a partir dos elementos nomeados labirintos imagéticos presentes na narrativa fílmica Time (Shigan)-2006. O ponto de partida do estudo é a análise da narrativa focalizando o trânsito entre textos e os jogos de significantes no discurso amoroso e na criação de corpos orgânicos, imagéticos, simbólicos e ficcionais. Sendo assim, foram explorados os labirintos do discurso amoroso e os labirintos do corpo como os responsáveis pela formação dos labirintos imagéticos que permeiam a narrativa fílmica em análise. Ao longo do estudo do objeto híbrido— narrativa fílmica, pontuaram-se questionamentos sobre Intertextualidade, Interdisciplinaridade, Imagem, Olhar e o objeto a. Pretendo estabelecer diálogos entre Teoria Literária, Psicanálise, Antropologia, Filosofia, Estudos Intermídias e Estudos Culturais, uma vez que a narrativa fílmica do cineasta Kim Ki Duk é tecida e mediada por elementos de uma poética dos limiares, de jogos vertiginosos das imagens e de provocação dos limites da linguagem, oscilando entre a presença e a ausência de significantes. / The theme of this thesis is discuss the visual poetic in narratives of South Korean filmmaker Kim Ki Duk through elements named mazes imagistic in film narrative Time (Shigan) -2006. The starting point of the study is the analysis of narrative focusing on transit between texts and significants in love speech also in the constructions of organic bodies, imagery, symbolic and fictional. Thereby, the labyrinths of love's speech and the labyrinths of the body were exploited, as responsible for the formation of imagistic mazes that permeate the film narrative in analysis. Throughout the study of hybrid object- film narrative, some questions emerged about Intertextuality, Interdisciplinary, Image, Gaze and the object a. I intend to establish dialogues between Literary Theory, Psychoanalysis, Anthropology, Philosophy, Intermídias Studies and Cultural Studies, since the film narrative filmmaker Kim Ki Duk create elements of a poetics of the transit of images and limits of language, through oscillations between the presence and the absence of significants.

O tema da pesquisa da presente dissertação é investigar a poética narrativa do cineasta sulcoreano Kim Ki Duk a partir dos elementos nomeados labirintos imagéticos presentes na narrativa fílmica Time (Shigan)-2006. O ponto de partida do estudo é a análise da narrativa focalizando o trânsito entre textos e os jogos de significantes no discurso amoroso e na criação de corpos orgânicos, imagéticos, simbólicos e ficcionais. Sendo assim, foram explorados os labirintos do discurso amoroso e os labirintos do corpo como os responsáveis pela formação dos labirintos imagéticos que permeiam a narrativa fílmica em análise. Ao longo do estudo do objeto híbrido— narrativa fílmica, pontuaram-se questionamentos sobre Intertextualidade, Interdisciplinaridade, Imagem, Olhar e o objeto a. Pretendo estabelecer diálogos entre Teoria Literária, Psicanálise, Antropologia, Filosofia, Estudos Intermídias e Estudos Culturais, uma vez que a narrativa fílmica do cineasta Kim Ki Duk é tecida e mediada por elementos de uma poética dos limiares, de jogos vertiginosos das imagens e de provocação dos limites da linguagem, oscilando entre a presença e a ausência de significantes. / The theme of this thesis is discuss the visual poetic in narratives of South Korean filmmaker Kim Ki Duk through elements named mazes imagistic in film narrative Time (Shigan) -2006. The starting point of the study is the analysis of narrative focusing on transit between texts and significants in love speech also in the constructions of organic bodies, imagery, symbolic and fictional. Thereby, the labyrinths of love's speech and the labyrinths of the body were exploited, as responsible for the formation of imagistic mazes that permeate the film narrative in analysis. Throughout the study of hybrid object- film narrative, some questions emerged about Intertextuality, Interdisciplinary, Image, Gaze and the object a. I intend to establish dialogues between Literary Theory, Psychoanalysis, Anthropology, Philosophy, Intermídias Studies and Cultural Studies, since the film narrative filmmaker Kim Ki Duk create elements of a poetics of the transit of images and limits of language, through oscillations between the presence and the absence of significants.

O tema da pesquisa da presente dissertação é investigar a poética narrativa do cineasta sulcoreano Kim Ki Duk a partir dos elementos nomeados labirintos imagéticos presentes na narrativa fílmica Time (Shigan)-2006. O ponto de partida do estudo é a análise da narrativa focalizando o trânsito entre textos e os jogos de significantes no discurso amoroso e na criação de corpos orgânicos, imagéticos, simbólicos e ficcionais. Sendo assim, foram explorados os labirintos do discurso amoroso e os labirintos do corpo como os responsáveis pela formação dos labirintos imagéticos que permeiam a narrativa fílmica em análise. Ao longo do estudo do objeto híbrido— narrativa fílmica, pontuaram-se questionamentos sobre Intertextualidade, Interdisciplinaridade, Imagem, Olhar e o objeto a. Pretendo estabelecer diálogos entre Teoria Literária, Psicanálise, Antropologia, Filosofia, Estudos Intermídias e Estudos Culturais, uma vez que a narrativa fílmica do cineasta Kim Ki Duk é tecida e mediada por elementos de uma poética dos limiares, de jogos vertiginosos das imagens e de provocação dos limites da linguagem, oscilando entre a presença e a ausência de significantes. / The theme of this thesis is discuss the visual poetic in narratives of South Korean filmmaker Kim Ki Duk through elements named mazes imagistic in film narrative Time (Shigan) -2006. The starting point of the study is the analysis of narrative focusing on transit between texts and significants in love speech also in the constructions of organic bodies, imagery, symbolic and fictional. Thereby, the labyrinths of love's speech and the labyrinths of the body were exploited, as responsible for the formation of imagistic mazes that permeate the film narrative in analysis. Throughout the study of hybrid object- film narrative, some questions emerged about Intertextuality, Interdisciplinary, Image, Gaze and the object a. I intend to establish dialogues between Literary Theory, Psychoanalysis, Anthropology, Philosophy, Intermídias Studies and Cultural Studies, since the film narrative filmmaker Kim Ki Duk create elements of a poetics of the transit of images and limits of language, through oscillations between the presence and the absence of significants.

Bong Joon-ho‟s monster movie blockbuster, The Host (Gweomul, 2006), is the most commercially successful film in South Korean cinema history. The film‟s popularity and significance derive from its unearthing of the ambivalence concerning South Korea‟s rapid transformation from a rural dictatorship to an urban democracy with one of the strongest economies on the planet. This ambivalence is buried beneath a veneer of "progress" blanketing contemporary South Korea and constitutes a condition I call inverted exile. The Host explicitly engages life in inverted exile through my notion of aesthetic dialogue. Aesthetic dialogue, takes influence from the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and allows for proliferation of meaning beyond authorial intent by focusing on The Host‟s context. My approach focuses on genre, narrative, and style to flesh out the political, historical, and social ambivalences behind any given moment of The Host to put them in dialogue with one another. The project progresses through sites of cultural dialogue central to the film and/or life in inverted exile: the monster, the city, the home. I approach each site through the genres associated with them and gender roles each of them assume in inverted exile. South Korea‟s transformation and its relationship with the United States are causes of anxiety (e.g. loss of traditional values, overwhelming Western influence) and desire (political freedom, economic opportunity). Ultimately, I argue, The Host suggests that South Korea and its citizens need to embrace the ambivalences of inverted exile and actively shape an identity that takes an active and critical attitude towards Western influence. Such an attitude can better preserve the desirable aspects of traditional culture (e.g. traditional food, familial unity) and alleviate the anxieties caused by Western influence (e.g. rampant consumerism, unjust class divisions). The Host‟s dialogic form is integral to its shaping of Korean identity as it takes from multiple cultural sources (i.e. Hollywood and Korean history) without challenging their polarization.