Authorship and the Location of Postwar South Korean Cinema: In the Region of Shin Films

Date: 

Monday, October 21, 2013, 12:30pm to 2:00pm

Location: 

Thomas Chan-Soo Kang Room (S050), CGIS South Building, 1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

East Asian Media Ecologies

Event Poster

Steven Chung, Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies, Princeton University

Steven Chung is Assistant Professor in the East Asian Studies department at Princeton University. He focuses his research on Korean cinema, particularly the relationship between politics and aesthetics in the film cultures of the late colonial through the early postwar periods. He has published articles in edited volumes – North Korea: Toward a Better Understanding (2009) and Democracy and Cinema (Korea) – and in the Journal of Korean Studies and Memory and Vision (Korea). His first book, Split Screen Korea: Shin Sang-ok and Postwar Cinema, is forthcoming from Minnesota UP in February 2014. Chung is currently at work on his next book, Cold War Optics: Asia.

Abstract

This talk outlines a history of Shin Films studio, the leading film production entity in South Korea from 1960 to 1975, which details the era’s industrial practices and therein locates Shin Sang-ok’s directorial specificity within the forces of the domestic regional market. Its core argument is that local conditions for economic development and aesthetic legibility were the crucial supplement to the transnational flows in which postwar South Korean cinema and culture were imbricated.

With generous support from the Min Young-Chul Memorial Fund at the Korea Institute, Harvard University