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Unexpected Alliances: Independent Filmmakers, the State, and the Film Industry in Postauthoritarian South Korea. By Young-a Park. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2014. xx, 224 pp. $39.95 (cloth, ISBN 9780804783613); $39.95 (e-book, ISBN 9780804793476).

2015; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 74; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1017/s0021911815001448

1752-0401

John M Cho,

Cultural Industries and Urban Development

Since the 1990s, South Korean films have “drawn roughly 40 to 60 percent of the Korean domestic box office, matching or often even surpassing Hollywood films in popularity” (p. 1). How did this Korean film explosion come about? It is tempting to credit acclaimed directors such as Park Chan-wook of Oldboy (2003) fame or Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun administrations' championing of Korean film as a “strategic national industry” in the new millennium. Young-a Park finds a less likely but equally compelling explanation in the opening up of new film institutions and spaces by activist independent filmmakers.Park points out how theorization around cinema and globalization has been structured in terms of conventional binaries of the “West” versus “non-West” (or “indigenous”) and “commercial” versus “non-commercial.” Elided within these binaries is the commercial success of non-Western film industries such as Bollywood and “New Korean Cinema” that are “innovative in style, socially engaged, yet widely appealing to the public” (p. 1). Drawing on field research conducted mostly between 2000 and 2005, Park traces the “unanticipated alliances” between the state, the mainstream film industry, and the social activism of the so-called “3-8-6 generation” filmmakers responsible for the Korean film explosion. (The “3-8-6 generation” refers to South Koreans born in the 1960s who were active as youth in the democracy movement in the 1980s.) At the heart of her project is the Korean Independent Filmmakers Association (KIFA), a network of filmmakers.Park's ethnography of KIFA is composed of five chapters and an epilogue. What makes it unique and valuable is its careful attention to the institutional conditions of representation. Going beyond the semiotic model of cinema where images on the screen are simply read as “signs,” she charts the unexpected ways in which films, filmmakers, and consumers converge and diverge within new film institutions and spaces such as the celebrated Pusan International Film Festival. Chapter 1, “Film Activism: Cinema as Politics,” invites the reader to consider the alternative paradigm of political ritual within which activist films in the 1980s and early 1990s were situated as part of the pro-democracy movement. Chapter 2, “Independent Film: Cultural Production under Postauthoritarian Conditions,” traces the specific genealogy of the term “independent,” arising within the post-authoritarian context of South Korea where KIFA brokers the “gold rush” of Korean conglomerates (chaebol) into the film industry. Chapter 3, “Beating Titanic: Independent Filmmakers at the Helm of Cultural Nationalism,” charts the participation of KIFA in the “screen quota movement” (legislation enforcing a minimum number of screening days for domestic films) that transformed a local issue primarily representing industry interests into a national, anti-Hollywood struggle. Chapter 4, “Transforming Activist Culture: Women Filmmakers and New Filmic Spaces,” focuses on marginal feminist filmmakers within KIFA who find unexpected allies in upwardly mobile, middle-class film festival audiences seeking “rare” cinematic finds. Chapter 5, “Film Festival Fever: The Circulation of Independent Films,” probes the “cultural developmentalism” of film festival fans who exhibit an excessive thirst for films that were formerly suppressed within dictatorial South Korea. What results from this careful examination of the situated interplay of the state, the film industry, and film audiences and producers is a highly readable and compelling account of the Korean film explosion that should appeal to scholars of film and media and Korean and East Asian studies alike.Among the book's many merits is Park's nuanced political sensibility. A member of the 3-8-6 generation herself, Park notes that many Korean scholars have characterized the current moment of Korean history as “democratic” and “neoliberal.” KIFA's own role in brokering the influx of chaebol capital into the Korean film industry would seem to provide further proof of the Korean left's complicity with and ultimate cooptation into the state-sponsored project of promoting knowledge- and creativity-based industries for global postindustrial competition. To do so, however, would be to ignore the ongoing legacy of KIFA's “leftist cultural power”—“a reference to a perceived concentration of power in the hands of progressives in the arts and cultural production” (p. 164). Such leftist cultural power has not only given Korean filmmakers the “confidence” to “catch up with Hollywood” but also expanded the perimeters of South Korean expressive culture, even following the election of President Lee Myung-bak in 2008. That is, by allowing the Korean film audiences to consider watching “social issue” films by minority film directors at independent film theaters and festivals a taken-for-granted aspect of their cultural repertoire, KIFA has managed to transform the idea of “political” from within the world of commercial film itself.