Hallyuwood: The Ultimate Guide to Korean Cinema
South Korea was once ranked with the world’s poorest countries. In recent decades it became an economic dynamo, and when no one was looking, Korean pop culture overtook the world. K-pop went global, Korean soap operas are big in the Middle East and Korean films have found avid audiences in the West. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2019) won four Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay.
Film scholar Bastian Meiresonne’s Hallyuwood: The Ultimate Guide to Korean Cinema is a book, rare in today’s hype-powered publishing industry, that lives up to the promise of its subtitle. He begins at the beginning. Korean moviegoing in the early 20th century was much like moviegoing in America. The theaters were stinking and unsafe, condemned as threats to morality and frowned on by the elite as haunts of the lower class. Soon enough, movie palaces were erected and moviegoing became everyone’s pastime.
The earliest movies made in Korea were kino dramas, hybrids of theater and film. Sound came slowly and color lagged behind. A few silent movies were still being shot at the dawn of the Korean War.
Meiresonne gives scant mention to North Korea, whose crazed cineaste dictator, Kim Jong-il, kidnapped South Korea’s leading director, Shin Sang-ok, and his actress ex-wife, Choi Eun-hee, forcing them to make movies. Only one, a 1985 remake of Godzilla, received international attention.
Korean filmmakers from the southern half of the peninsula contended with varying rules of censorship under the Japanese and their own military dictators. Despite those restrictions, a complete Korean filmography would number in many thousands, reflecting influences from Japan, Hollywood and the French new wave as well as the local culture. According to Meiresonne, Korean cinema has enjoyed more than one golden age. One of them is happening now.
Hallyuwood: The Ultimate Guide to Korean Cinema is published by Black Dog & Leventhal.
Get Hallyuwood at Amazon here.
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