Hallyuwood: The Ultimate Guide to Korean Cinema

In this entrancing debut chronicle, film historian Meiresonne charts the evolution of Korean cinema against the country’s transformation into a democracy. In the early 1900s, Korean theaters mostly showed European and American films and employed byeonsa (narrators) who stood near the screen to translate intertitles and explain cultural nuances. Japan’s colonization of the Korean peninsula loomed large over the country’s early films, Meiresonne contends, discussing how the blockbuster success of 1926’s Arirang, which follows a Korean protestor driven mad by his Japanese torturers, sparked a nationalist strain in early Korean film. The Korean War spurred a wave of melodramas—whose popularity, Meiresonne suggests, stemmed from their ability to capture audiences’ “extreme sense of helplessness in a ravaged country”—as well as a series of dictatorships that banned any movie “likely to tarnish Korea’s image abroad,” effectively stamping out realist films. Elsewhere, Meiresonne discusses how independent movies tackled such formerly taboo topics as the Korean War after the country’s democratization in the late 1980s, and how such films as Parasite garnered worldwide interest in Hallyuwood (a portmanteau of hallyu, a term for the growing prominence of Korean pop culture, and Hollywood) in the 2010s. Meiresonne seamlessly weaves film and political history into a riveting account of how Korean cinema alternatively capitulated to and challenged autocracy before growing into an internationally celebrated cultural export. Enriched by generous movie stills, this is a must for cinephiles. Photos. (Jan.)