ANTICOMMUNIST WAR FILMS OF THE 1960s AND THE KOREAN CINEMA’S EARLY GENRE-BENDING TRADITIONS

Abstract

During the 2000s, the Korean cinema rose to prominence as one of the hot spots in the global film industry. Along with the U.S., India and Japan, the Korean cinema has now taken its place as one of the strongest local film industries. The contemporary Korean cinema embraces arthouse as well as commercial cinema, producing a variety of genre films based on Hollywood and other film conventions. Nonetheless, the Korean cinema has developed a hybrid entity of its own that mixes the local and the global (mainly Hollywood) through dynamic cultural and artistic processes of assimilating, modifying and re-creating. What we have come to call the ‘New Korean Cinema,’ with its real origins in the late 1980s, has reached maturity, and its exponents take pleasure in manipulating what they have learned from Hollywood. As such, this article analyzes the historical development of a confidence and willingness to take on creative challenges. The genre-bending practice found in the Korean Cinema, however, has its historical connection to the 1960s, which is best represented by a hybrid genre-bending quality unique to Korea’s film history, indeed, one that is characterized by the 1960s anticommunist film.