Korean Cinema and the Politics of Struggle

Korean Cinema and the Korean Culture Industry has exploded in the last two decades to create some of the most interesting, experimental, and provocative cinema currently in circulation.

In production, conception and reception, Korean films such as Oldboy, Peppermint Candy, Save the Green Planet, Spring/Summer/Fall/Winter/Spring, Oasis, have intrigued, puzzled, and astonished audiences and critics around the world.

At the same time, the “Korean Wave”—television, music, performance, art—has transformed the existing cultural topography in Asia, challenging established centers of cultural hegemony and production.

This presentation will offer tools for understanding and deciphering Korean Cinema and its rise to prominence, while analyzing the politics of struggle behind this cultural wave: the traumas of colonization, fascism, and hyper-militarized capitalism; the interstitial struggles for subaltern representation in history and culture; and the contestation and recuperation of ideological space & artistic vision within the country’s brutal and nightmarish transition to Capitalist modernity.

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" Among the points of fracture in artistic formations, film is one of the most dramatic. We may truly say that with film a new realm of consciousness comes into being".--Walter Benjamin

"The logic of the principle of expression implies the moment of its negation, a negative form of truth that changes love into an inflexible power of protest."--Theodor Adorno