Over the past two weeks I took in two works on Korean film history. The first was the newly released book “New Korean Cinema: Breaking the Waves” by Darcy Paquet, published as part of Wallflower Press’ Short Cuts series of introductory film texts. The second was the documentary/essay film by Jang Sun-woo, THE CINEMA ON THE ROAD (1995), which was made as part of the British Film Institute’s Century of Cinema celebration in which they chose numerous directors (such as Martin Scorsese, Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Mieville, Oshima Nagisa, Stephen Frears, and others) to make films about his or her respective national cinema. Coincidentally, Paquet’s book and Jang’s movie complement each other in very intriguing ways. In terms of their medium, their time period, and their method, the two are completely different, but yet both are worth seeking out if one is desires to understand Korean cinema and how it has developed.

Darcy Paquet is a familiar name to anyone with an even passing interest in Korean cinema. In 1999, he launched the website koreanfilm.org, which has been and remains an invaluable site for fans of Korean films. Paquet also began to publish articles in Korean cinema anthologies, including a very fine piece on Hur Jin-ho’s CHRISTMAS IN AUGUST that first made me seek out that film. His new book is a short volume, just over a hundred pages (not counting the appendixes), that is meant as a textbook for either second year national cinema courses on Korean film or even first year classes that use Korean cinema to discuss the topic of national cinema as a whole. And towards this goal, the book is a success. It is well-written and easily accessible, and gives the reader a concise yet accurate overview of Korean film. Paquet frames the book by focusing on “New Korean Cinema”, which he marks as beginning in 1996 but really taking off by the end of the decade. This movement is associated with such commercially successful auteurs as Park Chan-wook, Bong Joon-ho, and Kim Hee-won but also smaller directors like Hong Sang-soo, Kim Ki-duk, and Lee Chang-dong. He contrasts this movement with the films of the Korean New Wave, which lasts from 1988 to 1996 and includes figures such as Park Kwang-su, Jeong Ji-Yeong, and Jang Sun-woo. As Paquet writes:”By 1998 it was becoming clear that a younger generation of directors was bringing a distinctly new aesthetic to Korean cinema. Youth-oriented, genre-savvy, visually sophisticated and not ashamed of its commercial origins, the New Korean Cinema of the late 1990s was perceived by Korean audiences as being something entirely different from the works that preceded it.” (63)

This contrasts with the earlier New Wave directors, who were much more overtly political and yet, Pacquet argues, unable to connect with the very audience they were supposedly speaking for: “The films of the Korean New Wave were ostensibly made for the minjung (Korean term describing the workers movement of the 70s/80s), but their formal experimentation and political orientation served to alienate many ordinary viewers.” (60) While this narrative Paquet describes may be a bit too neat (Lee Chang-dong, for example, does not really fit well), overall it is a convincing and compelling narrative line for the book. He is especially strong in the sheer breadth of films discussed, with a great filmography listing almost 200 Korean films (of which I’ve only seen a fraction). This includes many popular works often overlooked as well as many smaller, independent films that are far off the radar. Paquet’s knowledge of the industry and of such pop culture movements as the “Korean Wave” (hallyu) are also impressive. The only small complaint, and given the space constrictions one that is slightly unfair, is that the text is not overly compelling in its description of the films themselves. Paquet does not take many risks here; there are no real arguments about any of the films, and thus the uninitiated reader is not really excited to discover this remarkable body of cinema. Paquet’s book is a solid contribution to Korean scholarship, but I would still argue that Kim Kyung Hyun’s THE REMASCULINIZATION OF KOREAN CINEMA (2004) is the more engaging, if more difficult, single volume text on the subject.

Jang Sun-woo’s THE CINEMA ON THE ROAD (1995) is a very different piece of history. Instead of offering a comprehensive overview of the subject, Jang films a personal essay in which he travels throughout the country interviewing various participants in Korean film history’s past. Coming near the end of the Korean New Wave, Jang concentrates on directors of this movement, such as Park Kwang-su and Jeong Ji-Yeong, as well as older directors that predate the movement, such as Im Kwon-Taek and Lee Jang-ho. In addition, there are interviews with people usually considered more peripheral to the industry, such as theatre owners and billboard painters. The result is a political education in the background to Korean films, with discussions of the Kwangju massacre of 1980, the military regimes of Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-Hwan, and how the filmmakers dealt with these realities. Jang includes numerous clips from Korean films, many of which have now been forgotten with the rise of the New Korean Cinema.

I was particularly interested in Im Kwon-taek’s rather atypical social realist drama TICKET (1986), a movie I was unfamiliar with but am now anxious to try to see. Also, Jeong Ji-Yeong’s WHITE BADGE (1992) and THE LIFE AND DEATH OF THE HOLLYWOOD KID (1994) are works from a now neglected auteur that I want to familiarize myself with. It is clear that Jang is very enthusiastic about both the recent films of the Korean New Wave as well as many of the older Korean directors that inspired them: Shin Sang-ok, Yoo Hyeon-mok, Kim Ki-Young and Lee Man-hee. A viewer new to both Korean cinema and history may be slightly bewildered by all the information that Jang throws at the screen, but they are just as likely to be invigorated by the glimpses of this rich tradition that are displayed.

Jang concludes the film with a fantastic montage sequence that shows that this is a documentary made by a skilled director in his own right. Jang cuts together footage of an ancient Korean ritual, a shamanist exorcism, with clips from various classics of the nation’s film archive. The result is a dazzling collision of the primitive and modern, as the clips begin with the classic MR. PARK from 1960 and continue until recent classics like BLACK REPUBLIC. The small canon that Jang gives in this film has unfortunately been forgotten, replaced by the slicker and more commercially viable genre cinema of the New Korean Cinema.

Jang chooses to end the film with the above image of Kim Sun-Myung, a man arrested for conspiracy with Communists back in 1951 and still in prison as of 1995. A reminder from Jang that no true history of Korean cinema can ignore the political and social context that has so shaped the country.

THE CINEMA ON THE ROAD is, like the films it discusses, difficult to track down, but worth the effort. And, as I mentioned, it nicely complements Paquet’s more scholarly but less personal account of the era that would replace this movement.

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