In 1992, as South Koreans looked towards a new future without their hated military government, the local film industry found itself at a similar crossroads. On the one hand, changes in the political sector were promising the birth of a freer society. For socially conscious film-makers, such as Jang Sun-woo (Chang Sŏn-u), Park Kwang-su (Pak Kwang-su) and Im Kwon-Taek (Im Kwŏ n-t'aek), this meant a new-found freedom to explore themes and ideas that had been banned for decades. In the coming years, films such as Park Kwang-su's To the Starry Island (Kŭ sŏme kago ship'da, 1993), which touched on atrocities committed during the Korean War (1950–53), and Jang Sun-woo's A Petal (Kkonnip, 1996), concerning the 1980 Kwangju massacre, would put a new perspective on Korean history and society.

Nonetheless, in 1992 film producers and investors housed in the offices of Ch'ungmuro (a street which formed the Korean film industry's traditional hub, and a byword for the industry) were gripped with the fear that local cinema was about to vanish. Many film companies were going out of business. The percentage of ticket sales accounted for by local films was reaching all-time lows (18.5 per cent in 1992, and 15.9 per cent in 1993). A lack of investors meant that fewer and fewer movies were being made. Most ominously, the local film market which, like that of China, had long enacted strong barriers to foreign imports, had just been forced open.

The story of a beautiful woman who challenges the social prejudice of her lower-class origin and marries above her social position is a universal source material of romantic tales in many cultures. The Tale of Chunhyang is the Korean archetype of this notion of feminine beauty. Chunhyang appeared in a shamanistic legend in early eighteenth-century Korea. Henceforth, her story appeared in many oral-narrative folk traditions. Through time, her beauty has been variously recreated and refined according to the specific demands and concerns of successive audiences. Furthermore, her story has been remade in almost every medium for popular entertainment in each period, such as P'ansori (Korean traditional operatic drama), Chinese poems, popular novels, stage dramas, Western-style operas, films and television dramas. The various aesthetic orientations of each medium can be seen in the relationship between text and audience as revealed through the various transformations (Chǒn 1998). The essence of the folk-tale embodies the popular desire of a Utopian society. Her courageous rebellion triumphs over the prevailing class system. The inevitability of the narrative's internal motif and appropriateness of external elements, however, determine the extent of acceptance or rejection by the audience. Therefore, the dramatic variations between the versions clearly reflect the deciding role of the audience as the subjects of the oral tradition through its historical transmission (Chǒn 2003). The significance of the tale in Korean film history can be seen in its many versions.

Kim Sŭng-ok, one of the most celebrated writers of the post-Korean War era, as well as being one of the first generation of writers to be educated in the national language after Korea's liberation from Japan, is perhaps most famous for his short story: ‘Seoul: Winter, 1964’. Written only a few years after the 19 April student uprising of 1960 that toppled the corrupt Syngman Rhee government and the 18 May coup d'état of 1961 which ushered in a military dictatorship that ruled for three decades, the author's satiric perspective is mirrored in the two main characters, Kim and An, who meet at a street tavern. They are both failures: Kim flunked his military academy entrance exam and An was a student activist of futile political demonstrations. As they eat roasted sparrows and drink cheap alcohol, the two strangers trade lines that neither produce thematic significance nor forge a strong relationship. The conversation constantly trails off, producing awkward intervals. Breaking one of these silences, Kim randomly begins, ‘Of the street lights that are lined up in front of the P'yŏnghwa Market, the eighth one from the east end is not lit …’ All of a sudden, a look of delight appears on An's face. He responds, ‘There were thirty-two people at the West Gate bus stop; seventeen were women, five were children, twenty-one were youths, and six were elders’ (Kim Sŭng-ok 1993: 88–9).

South Korean cinema has undergone remarkable growth over the past decade. By substantially improving technical and aesthetic qualities, and by responding to the sensibilities of contemporary Koreans, recent Korean films have distinguished themselves from their predecessors. In so doing, they have rapidly been winning back the hearts of those previously estranged domestic audiences who had once preferred foreign films with better production values, particularly those from Hollywood. With Korean films now capturing almost 50 per cent of domestic market share, and some local hits beating even the most lavish Hollywood blockbusters at the box-office, Korean cinema is currently enjoying unprecedented domestic success.

Equally remarkable is the fast-growing popularity of, and interest in, Korean cinema around the globe. With numerous successes at major overseas film festivals and growing international distribution and consumption, recent years have seen a notable rise in Korean cinema's visibility in the international film world. Yet, while contemporary Korean cinema is rapidly drawing attention around the world, its popular success is perhaps most apparent in neighbouring East Asian countries where there has been a veritable surge of interest in Korean popular culture, including films, television dramas and popular music. Indeed, the revenue from film exports alone has grown tremendously, from $0.21 (US) million in 1995 to $11.25 million in 2001 (Kim and Kim 2002: 15). This is an impressive accomplishment especially when considering that, only a decade ago, the South Korean film industry was in severe decline.

This chapter considers two buddy films released in 2001 that exemplify contrasting tendencies within contemporary South Korean cinema: Friend (Ch'in'gu) and Take Care of My Cat (Goyangirŭl but'akhae). Both are ‘friendship- themed’ films, the narratives of which are primarily concerned with the fluctuating relationships among a circle of close-knit school-friends as they make the transition to adult life, although Friend is directed by a man (Kwak Kyŏng-t'aek) and is about four male friends and their macho world, while Take Care of My Cat is directed by a woman (Chŏng Jae-ŭn [Jeong Jae-eun]) and is about five female friends. Interestingly, however, only Friend was actively promoted as a buddy film. With its straightforward but rather unimaginative title, Friend is presented as a film that urges viewers to think about true friendship. Also emphasised in its publicity material is the fact that the film is based on a ‘real’ story of the film's writer/director, Kwak, and his three childhood friends. Kwak, who dedicated the film to ‘my friends and family’, expressed a wish that the audience would consider contacting their old friends again after watching his film. As such, the male friendship theme in Friend is prominently used and foregrounded, whereas the issue of female friendship in Take Care of My Cat is rather subdued, only receiving the occasional passing remark in its promotional material.

The above words – drawn from Salman Rushdie's short story about the famous footwear worn by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz (US, 1939) – find the author in a reflective mood. No stranger to the kind of emotional upheaval and cultural displacement literally ‘weathered’ by Dorothy in her picaresque rite of passage from sepia-toned Kansas to kaleidoscopic Oz, Rushdie slips from reverie to rhetorical yearning, and evokes – in his description of a ‘scattered’ and ‘damaged’ home – a sentiment that has become increasingly salient in South Korean cinema. It should come as no surprise that this Holy Grail of movie memorabilia, this fetishised pair of magic slippers which first enticed the exiled writer as a young boy in Bombay, emblematically figures in a millennial film that similarly revolves around departure and return, migration and habitation. As suggested by its English-language title, Asako in Ruby Shoes (Sunaebo, 2000) is a ‘hymn … to Elsewhere’, one that plunders the iconography of a Hollywood classic so as to reformulate such perennial themes as alienation, desire and boredom in the context of another geospatial imaginary.

South Korean cinema is finding its place in the sun. At the dawn of the new millennium, the growing enthusiasm for Korean movies around the world is evidenced by intense activity on multiple fronts. Titles as varied as Chihwaseon (Chiwihwasŏn, 2002), Oasis (Oasisŭ, 2002) and Old Boy (Oldŭ poyi, 2003) are winning prizes at major international film festivals. Others – including Friend (Ch'in'gu, 1999), Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter … and Spring (Pom, yŏrŭm, kyŏ ul … kŭrigo pom, 2003), and The Way Home (Chip ŭro …, 2001) – are opening hearts and purses in markets across Asia, Europe and North America. With hundreds more films circulating in subtitled versions on multi-region DVD and inexpensive VCD, Korean movie fandom is on the rise just about everywhere. Hollywood executives are also sitting up and taking notice. Stories concerning Korean cinema published in trade papers such as Variety reveal just why and how US studios are so eagerly gobbling up remake rights to domestic hits like My Sassy Girl (Yŏpki chŏk-in kŭnyŏ, 2001) and A Tale of Two Sisters (Changhwa wa Horgryŏn, 2003).

Attack the Gas Station (Juyuso sŭpgyŏksagŏn, 1999, dir. Kim Sang-jin) is a violent comedy: despite the considerable violence that runs the entire course of the film, the film has been widely appreciated as hysterically funny. In the words of one critic, ‘This is the first truly comedy-like South Korean comedy action film that I've seen in a long time’. The plot is this: four young men attack a petrol station, holding its ‘president’ (sajang) and workers hostage. Viewers laugh hard, for example, at radical role reversals: at the petrol station ‘president’ who offers to relinquish his presidency the moment he is instructed to ‘bow down, head down!’ because he is the ‘president’; or at the dumbfounded response of petrol-station customers who are told that ‘today is a cash and full-tank-only day’. This humour aside, there are moments that make us wince – when the violence, some of it misogynistic, is simply too ruthless to laugh away: for example, when the attackers lock a defiant woman in the boot of her car and proceed to hack at the boot (the film ends having left her and another customer locked away); or when, time after time, one of the attackers smashes the painstakingly repaired telephones that he had commanded the ‘president’ to fix. A box-office success, Attack the Gas Station ranked second among domestic films in 1999 (garnering slightly less than one-half of the viewers of history-making Shiri [Swiri] – 962,000 in Seoul by its eleventh week) and third overall (only slightly overshadowed by the American film The Mummy) (see www://koreanfilm.org).

The nation is a narcissistic entity for it celebrates rather than questions its past. Underlying this narcissistic sense of itself as a national self is the necessity not to remember certain aspects of its own history. This holds especially true when these historical moments would question the nation's ability to live up to its full national promise to those who constitute the nation as well as to retain its honourable status within the community of other nations. This double imperative – simultaneously to remember and not to remember – is a key factor in theorising the nation. In ‘Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?’ Ernest Renan stipulates:

In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson concurs with Renan by drawing attention to Renan's insistence on having ‘already forgotten what Renan's own words assumed that they [the French have] naturally remembered!’ (Anderson 1991: 200) Anderson does this by highlighting Renan's use of the ‘peremptory syntax of doit avoir oublié [have already forgotten] instead of doit oublier [must forget]’ (ibid.) when discussing the nation's darkest past history.

What makes a horror film a horror film? That it evokes an overwhelming sense of terror and abjection in the viewer? That it compels us to watch the unwatchable and name the unnameable? If these definitions hold true, then director Chang Yun-hyŏn's Tell Me Something (T'elmissŏmding, 1999) and Pak Ch'anuk's Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (Poksu-nŭn na-ŭi kŏt, 2002: hereafter Sympathy) are horror films through and through. Indeed, they perform the objectives of ‘scaring’ and ‘terrorising’ the audience with an almost excessive level of efficiency.

Even so, the marketing campaigns for both films scrupulously avoided the ‘horror’ label. In South Korea, Tell Me Something was confusingly marketed as a ‘hardcore thriller’. For the most part, however, the movie was mainly perceived by the audience and film reviewers as a star vehicle for Han Sŏk-kyu and Shim Ŭn-ha, and therefore not really worthy of serious critical analysis. On the other hand, Sympathy, stuck with an equally strange tagline, ‘authentic hardboiled movie’, was received favourably by many film critics, and was selected as the best Korean film of 2002 by Film 2.0 magazine, among other journals. It turned out, however, to be a box-office disappointment despite the casting of major stars Song Kang-ho, Bae Du-na and Shin Ha-kyun.

Even though horror films no longer constitute a marginalised genre, they are still sometimes considered distastefully misogynist, gratuitously violent or inherently conservative, in the sense that they seem to categorise the outsiders and the underprivileged (homosexuals, ethnic minorities, political critics, women) as ‘other’ or monstrous, and to punish with acts of graphic violence (in the case of the non-supernatural ‘slasher’ genre) those who are sexually active or unconventionally minded.

Introduction

The border between North and South Korea is notoriously impermeable. As Chen Kuan-Hsing (2005) argues in a recent article, the Cold War is far from over in East Asia. He begins his disturbing analysis of the numerous ways it continues to structure developments in Taiwan with a moving account of the rare family reunions that filled Korean television screens in August 2000. This chapter examines some ways in which the ongoing Cold War on the Korean peninsula is shaping North and South Korean cultural developments and differences and, in particular, images of nation and national identity. As well as blocking communications between family members, the Cold War has barred cultural exchange between the North and South for almost fifty years. Therefore, the most fundamental difference between Taiwan and Korea is that, while different Chinese and other ethnic groups inhabit the same space in Taiwan, Koreans have been rigorously separated and their cultures have developed with little contact on the popular level.

At about the same time that the ‘sunshine policy’ pursued by former President Kim Dae Jung from the South enabled family reunions, however, it also opened the door for cultural and sporting exchanges. On 24 August 2001, the North Korean film Soul's Protest (Sarainnǔn ryǒnghondǔl, 2000), directed by Kim Ch'un-song, was screened in Seoul. It presents the North Korean perspective on an historical tragedy.