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네이버 공유 카카오 공유 트위터 공유 페이스북 공유

Past, Present and Future of Research<br> on Korean Cinema and Media

The Department of Cinema Studies, New York University, hosted an international conference on “Korean Cine-Media and the Transnational” on November 11-14, 2010. The gathering of 40 participants, including relevant scholars, critics, industry professionals, and film festival curators, engaged in fresh and productive discussion on the state of Korean cinema.



New York University has realized unrivalled competitiveness for the past several decades in such disciplines as politics, law, economics, and business administration. I believe, however, it is probably the Tisch School of the Arts that best represents the image of New York University. Established in 1969 with support from media tycoon Lawrence Tisch, the school has produced many leading artists in cinema, such as Oliver Stone, Martin Scorsese, and the Coen Brothers, along with maintaining a leadership position in the field.
In addition, its Department of Cinema Studies, the second department that opened a doctoral course in cinema studies in the United States, has been at the forefront of research on film, while making a notable impact on cinema studies around the world. However, the department, with its focus on the study of European and American films, has failed to pay close attention to the importance and trend of Asian cinema, which has rapidly emerged since the 1990s. As a result, the number of faculty members and students studying Asian cinema has been far too small in comparison with those studying the cinema of other regions.
It was relatively recently that this situation has started to change. The clearest example of such change is the recent conference on “Korean Cine-Media and the Transnational.” The conference on Korean cinema, the biggest of its kind in North America, was jointly organized Professor Choi Jung-bong and myself, an adjunct lecturer in Cinema Studies, New York University. With full support from the Korea Foundation and New York University, it was held at the Michelson Theatre, Department of Cinema Studies on November 11-14. The conference reaped a bounty of fruitful results, successfully satisfying its academic goal to outline a new trend in the study of Korean cine-media by re-defining and re-historicizing the trend of transnational acceptance and circulation of Korean cinema.

Passionate Participants
The conference event began with a keynote address by Dudley Andrew, professor of film at Yale University. Professor Andrew offered an acute analysis of change in the global geology of cinema and the geopolitical importance of Korean cinema, which had shown up in the world cinema scene since the 1990s. Distinguished scholars of various disciplines, such as cinema studies, Korean Studies, literature, and history participated in the conference.
NYU professors of cinema were surprised to see such a passionate audience fill every available seat, and even sit on the steps from the morning, to listen to recent research related to Korean cinema. There were also graduate students who flew in from Chicago and Florida, showing their thirst for Korean film studies. Expressing her astonishment, Professor Antonia Lant, Chair of Cinema Studies, New York University, said she had never seen a conference with such a passionate and lively atmosphere since she joined the university some 20 years ago.
Accompanying events also attracted great attention. There were two rounds of focus discussions on the global exposure and distribution of Korean films with the participation of industry experts involved in the import and distribution of Korean cinema and media in the United States, film festival curators, film critics, and opinion leaders at the forefront of introducing Korean films and culture, via social networking websites and webzines. The participants included Goran Topalovic, film curator of the New York Asian Film Festival; Donald Krim, President of Kino International, a distributor of many Korean films in North America, including “Poetry” to be officially released in the region early next year; Seung Bak, Marketing Developer of dramafever.com, an online distribution platform of Korean television dramas; and Rufus De Rham, co-founder of cineawesome.com, a webzine on Korean and Asian films.
Sending a fresh shockwave, they persuasively argued that Korean television dramas and cinema were rapidly spreading to and being accepted by an increasing number of youths, with black, Latin American, and Middle Eastern backgrounds, while the scope of research on Hallyu, or the Korean Wave, which is currently focused on the United States, Japan and Southeast Asia, should be widened to other areas. Various films were also screened during the conference period, attracting many film fans and Koreans in New York. The films included Director Hong Sang-soo’s new film, yet to be officially distributed in North America, “Oki’s Movie,” Director Jeon Soo-il’s “With a Girl of Black Soil,” and the late Director Lee Man-hee’s “A Day Off” (1968).



Research on Korean Cinema
The conference sought to define a new trend in Korean cine-media research by overcoming the methodology of the existing research on Korean cinema and media from a national perspective, and by sounding out the possibility of transnational acceptance and circulation. The organization of the conference started from a thought that the transnational spreading and acceptance of Korean popular culture had not been properly dealt with by the Anglophone academic community, despite the brilliant achievement of Korean cinema and media at home and abroad. This situation reveals itself far more clearly in the comparison with Chinese cinema that has attracted attention in the United States since the mid 1990s. Currently, there are dozens of books on Chinese cinema in the United States and almost all American universities offer courses on Chinese films. In commemoration of the centennial of Chinese cinema, various academic and outreach events, including a large-scale international conference and the screening of 100 Chinese films by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, were held in 1995 in New York. These events contributed greatly to making the present heyday of research on Chinese cinema.
In comparison, research on Korean cinema has failed to produce results matching the growth of Korean cinema since the publication of “Remasculinization of Korean Cinema” by Kim Kyung-hyun in 2004, the first book on Korean cinema published in North America. Of course, Korean cinema and media may be able to attract short-term attention through large-scale film festivals and cultural events. However, it is clear that education at the university level, along with scholars, textbooks, and various research results for such education, are important for helping Korean cinema and media to take root more deeply in the daily life of Americans, beyond the cultural and artistic circles over the long term. Therefore, the animated discussion that often continued beyond the time limit, although a headache for the organizers, was especially meaningful.
The organizing committee is committed to making the conference more than just a one-time event. For this purpose, it plans to contribute conference results, by topic, to the Journal of Korean Studies for its feature articles, and to publish the proceedings in the form of an anthology through a major publishing concern in the United States. I hope that the conference and its academic results will trigger full-scale research on Korean cinema and media among the film studies circles in the West. Finally, I would like to express my deep appreciation to the Korea Foundation for its active support since the preparatory phase of this conference.

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