History of Korean Cinema
SP2025 KOREAN360C / CMS320D
Instructor: Ungsan Kim (Assistant Professor of Asian Cinema, he/him/his)
Course Time: Tue/Thur 12:30-02:20pm (ARC 160)
Course Description
In 2019, Korean cinema celebrated the centennial anniversary of its birth. From the premier of Fight for Justice (의리적 구토) in 1919 to Parasite (기생충)’s winning of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes International Film Festival in 2019, Korean cinema has continuously developed and innovated itself, while inheriting and revising the legacies and traditions of the past eras. This course surveys the history of Korean cinema with a strong emphasis on film aesthetics and styles. While the course will mostly follow the chronological order of films, its focus will be on textual and formal analysis of representative films of each period.
Students will also learn about the historical vicissitudes of the Korean nation-states, including the liberation from Japanese colonial rule, the division system, military dictatorship, the democratic movements in 1987, and the emergence of Hallyu, or the Korean Wave. Other topics this course will cover include melodrama, history of censorship in South Korea, film festivals, women’s and queer cinema, and many others. By understanding each film along with its historical and cultural backgrounds, students will understand how the country’s historical transformations and human affairs affected thematic, formal, and artistic representations on screen.
In addition to surveying the proposed topics, this course also offers opportunities to view and analyze films by understanding cinematic grammar, narrative structures, and directors’ signature styles. By studying Korean cinema’s thematic and formal heterogeneity, students will better understand the aesthetic styles each director deploys and the social and cultural commentary each film provides. Throughout the course, we will learn how to rigorously “dissect” cinema’s formal structures, including frame analysis, editing techniques, sound effects, and cinematography. In so doing, students can articulate each film’s critical dimensions and formal structures.
There will be at least one Q&A session with film director(s) or industry specialist(s).