Film Style and Foreign Relations: The Case of Korea

My ambition in this paper, and the larger project from which it is drawn, is to bring diplomatic history and film studies into closer conversation with each other.  I bring an historian’s perspective to bear on one of the core issues in film studies: film style. I propose a careful investigation into how South Korea’s foreign relations have directly shaped the evolution of Korean film style.

Since 1999 Korea’s film industry regularly makes movies that outperform imported Hollywood fare.  Numerous film studies scholars have noted that this new Korean cinema bears a stylistic similarity to Hollywood cinema.  Too often, however, this similarity is explained by merely gesturing towards international power relations: it is a result of American “domination” or “neo-imperialism.”  In contrast this paper examines three well-known Korean films from three distinct historical moments -- Hurrah! For Freedom (1946), Flower in Hell (1958), and The Host (2009) – and explore how their styles were shaped, respectively, by colonial Japanese economic and cultural policies, the post-Korean War U.S. military presence, and late 20^th century U.S. military media infrastructures.   Both Flower in Hell and The Host have narratives critical of Korea’s relationship with the United States with an embrace of Hollywood’s visual and genre conventions.  By reading these films with an historian’s eye, I hope to make more visible the often-contradictory transnational forces that have shaped the development of Korean “national” cinema.