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Kyung Hyun Kim and Youngmin Choe, eds., The Korean Popular Culture Reader Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. xi+450 pages. 71 illustrations (9 in color); 2 tables, bibliography, index. Cloth, [...]

Lee Gwang-mo’s 1998 filmSpring in My Hometown(Areumdaun sijeol)tells the story of the tragic impact of the Korean War on the children of a village servicing a local US Army base. One of the film’s distinctive formal features is a set of intertitles in the style of silent film title cards that frame the beginning and end of particular sequences of the film. Each intertitle provides a running commentary of historical and fictional events occurring contemporaneously in the Korean War and in the village. The film’s stunning cinematography has attracted academic attention, but was also criticized for creating an aesthetic spectacle that could be enjoyed by spectators while eliding the brutal history of the war. This paper makes use of publicity materials, reviews, and research on intertitles in silent film to demonstrate that the use of intertitles is central to the film’s foregrounding of tragic history. The film places the audience into a more uncomfortable viewing position than other Korean War films of the period by implicating them in the violence. It also explores the complex relationship between memory and the recording of history, and gives voice to unheard testimonies of the conflict. In this way,Spring in My Hometownaccomplishes something quite singular in distinction with narrative Korean War films either before or since. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article investigates representations of the Korean War in South Korean cinema, focussing on Pak Kwangsu's To the Starry Island and Yi Kwangmo's Spring in My Hometown and using the notion of cultural imagination, in which cinematic representations contribute to collective understandings of war. The article builds from Isolde Standish's 1992 analysis, which argued 1990s Korean War films took an opposite stance to previous representations of the war while continuing to rely on nationalistic and melodramatic discourses. This article argues that in terms of their representation of the causes and character of the Korean War and their formal characteristics, Korean War films from the 1960s onwards are marked by continuity and rely on many of the discourses identified by" Standish to account for the conflict; namely an externalisation of blame, problem-solving violence, and a narrative structure that displaces historical problems onto individual dramas. I argue To the Starry Island and Spring in My Hometown are unique because they place a far greater burden of blame on the Korean population and provide genuine critiques of the Korean War's destruction. The films produce more ambiguous readings of the violence and identify reprisals as a key feature of the conflict, a phenomenon largely neglected in other Korean War films. To the Starry Island avoids a more romanticised treatment of pre-war Korea, presenting more anonymous sites of conflict that detract from heroic narratives of national mythmaking. Spring in My Hometown is a formally challenging work, and both films implicate the viewer in a brutal conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the depiction of Korean War in South Korean films, the sexual objectification of women in South Korean music television shows, and the global viewership of Korean drama.

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