Magnificent obsessions.

SOUTH KOREAN GOLDEN AGE MELODRAMA: GENDER, GENRE, AND NATIONAL CINEMA

EDITED BY KATHLEEN MCHUGH AND NANCY ABELMANN

DETROIT, MICHIGAN: WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2005

262 PP./$27.95 (SB)

NEW KOREAN CINEMA

EDITED BY CHI-YUN SHIN AND JULIAN STRINGER

NEW YORK: NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2005

234 PP./$65.00 (HB), $22.00 (SB)

Kathleen McHugh and Nancy Abelmann's South Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre, and National Cinema and Chi-Yun Shin and Julian Stringer's New Korean Cinema represent two of the latest and most high-profile additions to a growing list of academic studies of South Korean cinema. Both offer essays by some of the most widely recognized scholars and critics currently writing about Korean film.

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McHugh and Abelmann's anthology focuses on South Korea's "Golden Age." This period, roughly from 1955 to 1970, witnessed a cinematic phenomenon that rivaled the far better known French New Wave and New German Cinema movements. McHugh's study of the 1956 film Chayu puin/Madam Freedom by Han Hyong-mo examines the relation between femininity and modernization with impressive attention to even the smallest detail. The author investigates the transnational influences at work on South Korea's evolving society immediately following the war. Unlike American melodramas, in which female characters attain financial independence while simultaneously losing their husbands and children, Madam Freedom and other films like it depict "women's sexual independence and vulnerability as inextricable from their much more positively valued financial abilities, status, and concerns, precisely what takes them outside the domestic sphere in the first place!" (29)

Abelmann's essay, "Melodramatic Texts and Contexts: Women's Lives, Movies, and Men," interrogates the important connections between the lived experience of several women who came of age during the period immediately following the Korean war and the melodramas that they watched. Abelmann's subjects reveal the startlingly profound influence that popular representation exerts on perceptions of their own lives and the lives of others. Ultimately, Abelmann's analysis suggests that these texts helped viewers to organize and make sense of their experiences in an overwhelming and confusing period of rapid modernization and westernization.

Jinsoo An analyzes the role played by Christianity in several South Korean melodramas, arguing that the sometimes surprising appearance of Christian themes in these films, often at the last minute, can be linked to the rapid conversion of postwar South Korean society to Christianity, with its appealing promises of redemption and salvation. Other essays of note include Eunsun Cho's study of representations of masculinity in the 1960 feature Obaltan/The Stray Bullet (by Yu Hyun-mok) and Hye-sung Chung's outstanding presentation of The Stray Bullet as a South Korean parallel to the American films Love is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955, by Henry King) and Waterloo Bridge (1940, by Mervyn LeRoy).

South Korean Golden Age Melodrama is an impressive collection of essays sure to be of interest not only to scholars of South Korean cinema, but also anyone with an interest in transnational Asian cinema, the melodrama, and/or gender and representation. Unfortunately, very few of the films produced during this era are readily available; some, indeed, may be lost forever. Perhaps the interest generated by McHugh and Abelmann's book will motivate South Korean distributors to make these important archival materials available on DVD.

Although it is less cohesive than McHugh and Abelmann's text, Shin and Stringer's New Korean Cinema is no less valuable. The fourteen essays collectively include material on a remarkable assortment of recent South Korean features and tackle a wide spectrum of important topics. The book is divided into three main sections, each of which focuses on a specific thematic concern. The first section, "Forging a New Cinema," lays out a brief and concise history of South Korean film. Michael Robinson and Darcy Paquet's essays each exhibit the extraordinary talents of their respective authors to synthesize economic, historical, and social research into cogent and accessible analyses of Korea's cinematic past. Hyangjin Lee's essay on Im Kwon-taek's Chunhyang (2000) is a real standout in this section. Lee literally wrote the book on South Korean cinema when, in 2000, she published the first English language study of contemporary Korean cinema. Lee's book remains required reading for anyone interested in the field. Her essay in Shin and Stringer's anthology nicely illustrates the author's penchant for combining academic and popular media texts in exciting and enlightening ways. Lee traces the development of the story of Chunhyang, from oral tradition to transnational Asian blockbuster, charting the attendant shifts in both representation and reception that occur along the way.

Although the book's second section, "Generic Transformations," is the shortest, it raises a number of pertinent questions about the reception of South Korean film. One essay in particular stands out: Abelmann and Jung-ah Choi's study of melodramatic elements in Juyuso seubgyuksageun/Attack the Gas Station (1999, by Sang-jin Kim). Abelmann and Choi examine how the seemingly incongruous insertion of melodramatic elements into an otherwise raucous comedy help facilitate spectatorial identification with otherwise unsympathetic characters, while at the same time situating these characters within specific socio-cultural and historical contexts.

The third section, "Social Change and Civil Society," contains what are clearly the most provocative and impressive essays in the collection. Aaron Han Joon Magnan-Park's "Peppermint Candy: The Will Not To Forget" illustrates how Lee Chang-dong's feature Peppermint Candy (2005) uses themes of trauma, recollection, and recovery to break the representational cycle of repetition and open up possibilities for coming to terms with the nation's disastrous and traumatic past, and in the process, look toward the future. Hye Sung-chung and David Scott Diffrient's essay on EJ-yo's 2000 film, Sunaebo/Asako In Ruby Shoes, is a prime example of academic writing at its most engaging. The authors incorporate a dizzying array of cultural and inter-textual references in their analysis of a film that manages to insert warmth, humanity, and even humor into its harrowing depiction of a collection of lonely, aimless, young people in Korea and Japan, two nations divided by a long history of animosity toward one another, which are magically reconciled in this film's idealistic (if somewhat fantastic) ending.

ROBERT CAGLE writes about film and popular culture.