No discussion of Korean film or culture is meaningful without considering its production within, until recently, an extraordinarily unstable political context. While a halting transition to constitutional rule since 1988 has tempered the violent ups and downs of South Korean politics, it is still a society in which cultural production free from the stultifying influence of governmental controls or political passions is a relatively new experience. Recent global recognition and fascination with Korean film gloss over the complex experience that underlies the evolution of this now vital, innovative and regionally influential industry. The critical emphasis on its freshness, innovation and daringness is particularly ironic in the light of the recent history of South Korean cultural production. Until recently the Korean film industry was in decline and its production, with notable exceptions, focused on generic melodramas (often of poor quality) made expressly for the purposes of gaining licences to screen more profitable Hollywood exports. The shift is a direct result of political changes in South Korea. It also heralds the emergence of a new generation of Korean artists in all fields whose creative energies are free from overt control by the state and, more importantly, the restricting political, cultural and social obsessions that dominated Korean society between its liberation from colonial rule in 1945 until the advent of real civilian democratic politics after 1988.

Recognition or Refusal and Something Else

Organising the Women's Film Festival in Seoul during April of 1996, one among many film festivals launched in South Korea in the mid-nineties, I came to wonder about the ways in which certain Korean film festivals mobilise specific identities. In fact, each festival claims a raison d'être which includes not only the coverage of identity-oriented themes, but also the endeavour to construct a discursive space where the relevant issues can emerge and take shape.

Various factors have contributed to the recent proliferation of all kinds of film festivals in South Korea. First, there is cine-mania, the Korean version of cinephilia. Second is the enactment of a local self-government system. Third, there has been a shift in the site of Korean activism from the politico-economic to the cultural sphere. And last, there is the ambitious project of Saegaehwa, the Korean official version of globalisation. Saegaehwa was initiated with the establishment of civil government in 1991. It reverberates in 1997 as follows:

In an English-language anthology dedicated to the ‘new’ South Korean cinema, where issues of Western cultural imperialism and neo-colonialism will inevitably raise their heads, we encounter special difficulties as we address themes of alternative sexuality. Even if basic civil rights ideology derived from much-dreaded ‘Western cultural imperialism’ has recently swollen the ranks of Seoul's gay-pride ‘Mujigae Parade’, South Korea has yet widely to disseminate queerly contentious media, let alone foster something like a Westernised queer film movement. Therefore, when we consider Korea's few extant queer films, we are caught between condescendingly excusing the absence of a progressive queer theory in Korea, and engaging transnational or universalised readings that, with equal condescension, pretend Korean homosexual identities are not historically particular. But Korean sexual culture diverges not only from Western sexuality, but also from other East Asian sexualities.

While, in China, the records of the Han Dynasty glorified male homosexuality among the aristocracy, and while Japanese literature, from Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji to Saikaku's Life of a Sensuous Man, has traditionally included bisexuality as a regular facet of upper-class hedonism, Korea has no classical or canonised literature of same-sex love. True, it is well known that, in the Silla Kingdom (57 bc–ad 935), the Hwarang, a military troop of handsome, aristocratic youths, made homosexual love (and occasional transvestism) a part of their martial ethos, and that, during the Koryǒ Dynasty (935–1392), homosexuality was tolerated among aristocrats and Buddhist monks.

A fly lands on a street and is run over by a car, leaving a small red spot on the road. In a restaurant the wind causes a table-cloth to billow up, making two glasses dance as if by magic. A man returns to his office and erases a name from his address book. Another man's sperm penetrates the egg of his wife, the wife becomes pregnant, and a baby is born. As these events – including the conception, pregnancy (shown as a fast-motion set of jump-cuts of the woman's changing body) and childbirth – are shown visually, a voice-over narrator describes them with a cool, scientist-like detachment:

In an essay entitled ‘Towards an Archaeology of the Computer Screen’, Lev Manovich describes four developmental stages in the screen's history: the classical screen of painting and photography, the dynamic screen of cinema, the real-time screen of television, and the interactive screen of the computer (Manovich 1998: 27–34). While this genealogy contributes to a broad understanding of screen technologies and visual cultures, recent new punk cinemas, and the mainstream and experimental film traditions upon which they draw, complicate Manovich's proposal. More specifically, Manovich claims that the arrival of the television and computer screen displaces the single ‘window’ that completely dominates the cinematic screen (ibid.pp.28–9). Such a suggestion is complicated not only by the many and different historical examples of feature films that employ multiple windows – Napoleon (1927), Pillow Talk (1959), Woodstock (1970), Wicked, Wicked (1973), Dressed to Kill (1980), Buffalo 66 (1997), Requiem for a Dream, Kill Bill, Vol. 1 (2003) – but also a tradition of experimental film, most notably Andy Warhol's The Chelsea Girls (1966). Warhol's epic, dual-projection film was a spectacularly successful attempt to break down the ‘art of duality’ – the visual (experimental) and narrative (mainstream) modes of film-making – that polarised the New American Cinema of the early to mid-1960s (Warhol 1983: 139). More recently, the Warhol legacy – the ongoing exchange between the industrial and the artisan – can be found in the likes of the parallel plotting of films such as Short Cuts (1993) and Magnolia (1999), the surveillance television of Big Brother, and the real-time web phenomenon of JenniCAM.

Utopian and dystopian discourses have accompanied the rise of digital techniques of cinematic production and post-production. While some enthusiastic directors, film critics and spectators have found that digital technologies have already reshaped cinema, others, offering a more temperate, almost Luddite perspective, believe that digital technologies have not brought substantial changes and will not modify the cinematic experience as we know it. In other words, a century after the birth of cinema, digital technologies might show the limits of celluloid and traditional montage practices, but they will remain in a state of infancy that does not call for the revolution in cinematic practice foretold by many.

What I propose in this essay is to adopt a more balanced approach to the use of digital technologies in contemporary films, bearing in mind that Utopian and dystopian positions are complementary rather than mutually exclusive. Digital technologies have favoured a certain democratisation and transformation of cinema: new film-makers direct their first films at minimal cost, and more experienced directors perform technological ‘tricks’ that may not have been possible prior to the advent of digital media. Digital technologies, however, do not erase a century of film-making practices and cinematic heritage overnight. Issues of representation, mise-en-scéine, montage and performance do not disappear with the advent of digital media; they come back to life in forms that are mediated in a new way. Dogma 95 and new punk films exemplify the manner in which contemporary cinema has used digital media creatively but without breaking with the cinematic past.

The Adverts were one of the earliest British punk bands of the mid-1970s that emerged in the wake of the Sex Pistols. The band was formed in late 1976 by two art students, TV Smith and Gaye Advert; early in 1977, several months before the appearance of Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, the Adverts had released their first single, ‘One Chord Wonders’. In August 1977, Ian Birch wrote up the band for Melody Maker, wherein he described a recent concert:

‘[T]o put it mildly their set was a shambles. But, in a way, that is what has always appealed to me about the band. It never ceases to amaze me how they can stumble through one number, let alone a whole set. Every song constantly teeters on the verge of collapse as it careers along’ (Birch 1977: n.p.).

Film, as we have known it for over a century, began its death in the later 1970s. Though it still exists, it is no longer what it was prior to this, and never will be again. Its death continues to be awkward and, religious connotations aside, if this death is to result in a resurrection we must, firstly, remove the veil of nostalgia that attaches itself to the picture palace and celluloid era and we must, secondly, embrace a new way of understanding and reading the moving image and its attendant sounds, styles and strategies, as well as its technical meta-text.

Unlike the background to the emergence of the punk movement, which occurred in the same period, the death of cinema was not produced by disaffection with establishment practices or, indeed, by a promotion of a philosophy of amateurism; paradoxically, cinema's death was brought about by an over-affection for the mainstream (in cinema's case represented largely by the professional operations of Hollywood). By ‘cinema’ I should differentiate here between that building we know as ‘the Cinema’ and the art-form we know as ‘cinema’ or ‘film’. That building, the Cinema, has adapted to the prevailing post-1970s' conditions to incorporate a broader public entertainment ideal and a discourse of choice; the movie multiplex is the prime example of this. Likewise, because of the changes of the past thirty years, neither ‘film’ nor ‘cinema’ is now an entirely suitable term for the visual and aural medium we're discussing; for the moment, however, both, or either, words will have to do.

A consolidation of the predominant characteristics of recent Hollywood filmmaking occurred in the success of two late-1990s’ box-office hits: Titanic (1997), the zenith of the film-as-experience strain of ‘High Concept’ North American cinema, and American Beauty (1999), acclaimed for the originality of its approach to its material. The films came across as experiences for the taking, labelled as such for the multiplexes, ‘must-see’ ‘water cooler’ talking points. In this respect, the latter was ‘art as entertainment’, the former, ‘entertainment as entertainment’, a difference of degree between the two but the denominator is common and they both trailed Academy Awards in their wake.

Walter Benjamin once observed a phenomenon that seems, from this close distance at least, especially applicable to the ‘art as entertainment’ sensibility. The application is necessary because American Beauty seems to exemplify, and perhaps anticipates, a contemporary trend in North American filmmaking:

The great Spanish director Luis Buñuel loved his Martinis.’ Today I'm as old as the century and rarely go out at all’, he wrote in his charming autobiography, My Last Sigh, ‘but all alone, during the sacrosanct cocktail hour, in the small room where my bottles are kept, I still amuse myself by remembering the bars I've loved.’ (Buñuel 1983: 16)

Ah, yes. The bar. The cocktail. Buñuel liked to sip away in sustained quiet but there are times when juke-box music is in order. Alas, the juke-box, like the Martini, is under siege. Rare is the bar that keeps a good juke-box loaded with an idiosyncratic selection of music that reflects the owner's tastes and not some trash hit parade from the rental company.

One bar I know, perhaps too intimately, has a great machine, lodged at the back of the room. The other day I noticed a couple of new selections. One of them was Couleur Café by Serge Gainsbourg, the legendary French singer. The record is pure kitsch now but, in the early 1960s, nobody was more happening than Gainsbourg. The cover has the baggy-eyed swinger staring down the camera while a cheroot smoulders between his raised fingers. In the brothel-red background a pair of Latin gentlemen work over some bongos.

Alex Cox is very simply a punk-film phenomenon. He represents that rare breed of film-maker whose love of underground, off-centre and unseen cinema has resulted in him creating a series of defiantly independent works which continually fly in the face of the cinematic orthodoxy.

As a director, Cox first bedazzled and bemused mainstream Hollywood with his offbeat comedy/conspiracy-theory/road movie-inspired début Repo Man. The film featured an up-and-coming young Emilio Estevez as a disenfranchised punk rocker who is thrown into a number of surreal encounters after joining a vehicle-repossession agency hot on the trail of a nuclear-powered vehicle from outer space.

With its penchant for genre mixing, as well as its pounding Los Angeles underground music score, Repo Man was inextricably linked to the punk philosophy informing its creator. For cultural studies critics such as John Fiske, the subcultural activity of such marginal movements can be defined by the concept of ‘bricolage’, whereby ‘the subordinated make their own culture out of the resources of the “other”’ (Fiske 1990: 150). As Fiske notes, this function was seen in the punk movement's unorthodox conflation of pre-existing styles and modes of performance which ‘signifies their power to make their own style and to offend their “social betters” in the process’ (ibid.p.150).

When Thomas Vinterberg's The Celebration, the first film to be made under the aegis of the Danish film movement Dogma 95, premièred at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival, audiences were astounded that what looked like a home movie had ‘somehow wandered onto the screen’ (Kelly 2000a). This was due not only to its story of incest and a dysfunctional family but also to its assaultive style, characterised by unsteady camera-work and shock-cuts – a result of following the ten film-making rules in the Dogma 95 Manifesto, designed to counter ‘“certain tendencies” in the cinema today’ (Kelly 2000b: 226).

Known as the ‘Vow of Chastity’, the Dogma rules stipulate location-shooting (no imported sets or props are allowed), direct sound (produced at the time of filming and not dubbed over the images afterwards), hand-held camera (always following the actors, rather than forcing actors to move to where the camera is standing), colour film stock and available lighting (rather than special film lighting) and Academy 35 mm format. They also forbid optical work and filters, superficial action (that is, murders and weapons ‘must not occur’), genre movies, ‘temporal and geographical alienation’ (films must be set ‘here and now’), and state that ‘the director must not be credited’ (Kelly 2000b: 227–8).

There is nothing sexy about materialist critique which is why it is often ignored in favour of ideological analysis or aesthetic evaluation. That said, it is precisely to materialist critique that I want to turn, as I propose a definition for ‘punk cinema’ in this essay. Two pieces of punk culture should prove instructive toward this end. The first is the famous set of diagrams, from a 1976 issue of the punk-zine, Sideburns, that demonstrates the proper tablature for three guitar chords – A, E, and G. Four short sentences accompany them: ‘This is a chord. This is another. This is a third. Now form a band.’ This set of directions and blunt demand contain within themselves, in compressed form, the logic of punk and, by association and extension, that of punk cinema. Punk clearly has little to do with technical proficiency: the punk guitarist need only know three chords. Furthermore, as the diagrams suggest, punk is profoundly democratic: anyone should be able to play it. It is a socialised mode of music-making and performance in the sense that Walter Benjamin describes when he comments (on authorship) that ‘what matters … is the exemplary character of production, which is able first to induce other producers to produce’ (Benjamin 1978: 233). By by foregrounding its simplicity, punk produces producers. It propels potential producers over the gap between production and consumption, and it is this shift that socialises the music, which is not produced by an elite technocracy but by anyone who cares to create it.