Remasculinization of Korean Cinema

Kyung Hyun Kim is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Irvine.

• Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Hunting for the Whale 1 1: GENRES OF POST-TRAUMA At the Edge of Metropolis in A Fine, Windy Day and Green Fish 312 Nowhere to Run: Disenfranchised Men on the Road in The Man with Three Coffins, Sopyonje, and Out to the World 523 “Is This How the War Is Remembered?”: Violent Sex and the Korean War in Silver Stallion, Spring in My Hometown, and The Taebaek Mountains 77 4 Post-Trauma and Historical Remembrance in A Single Spark and A Petal 1072: NEW KOREAN CINEMA AUTEURS 5 Male Crisis in the Early Films of Park Kwang-su 136 6 Jang Sun-woo’s Three “F” Words: Familism, Fetishism, and Fascism 1627 Too Early/Too Late: Temporality and Repetition in Hong Sang-su’s Films 2033: FIN-DE-SIECLE ANXIETIES 8 Lethal Work: Domestic Space and Gender Troubles in Happy End and The Housemaid 2339 “Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves”: Transgressive Agents, National Security, and Blockbuster Aesthetics in Shiri and Joint Security Area 259Notes 277Select Filmography of Major Directors of the New Korean Cinema 313Index 321

“Kyung Hyun Kim’s book is a roller coaster ride through modern South Korean masculinity in the cinema. At once unflinching and sympathetic, Kim’s groundbreaking study traces Korean permutations on the gendered imagery of castration and rape and the impossible condition of postcolonial masculinity, caught between incommensurable values and demands.”-Chris Berry, coeditor of Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia “This is an important book. There is a long tradition of scholarship investigating the representation of women in Asian cinema. This has included some consideration of Korean film, which more often than not finds the representations of Korean women wanting in one way or another. It took Kyung Hyun Kim’s writing to turn my attention to the rich complexity of the men. His focus on masculinity-coinciding with the turn to the issue by major feminist film theorists-simply makes perfect sense. His is a particularly compelling contribution to the study of Asian cinema, but is simultaneously in dialogue with all manner of gender studies.”-AbÉ Mark Nornes, University of Michigan