Reviewed by: Unexpected Alliances: Independent Filmmakers, the State, and the Film Industry in Postauthoritarian South Korea by Young-a Park Kyungjin Cho Young-a Park, Unexpected Alliances: Independent Filmmakers, the State, and the Film Industry in Postauthoritarian South Korea. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. 224pp. Young-a Park’s Unexpected Alliances is an ethnographic variation of the narrative on the anticathartic aftermath of the Revolution: what happens when the tyrants are toppled and the oppressed become the new masters? In this ethnography, Park follows South Korea’s activist independent filmmakers throughout the country’s transition from a military authoritarian regime to a democratically-elected post-authoritarian regime. Having participated in the democratization movement as radical liberals, how did they re-invent themselves as key cultural actors in a neo-liberal state? More crucially, how do we make sense of anti-establishment activists as they become the main players in the state’s cultural apparatus? How is their symbolic capital as activists eroded as they bestow prestige and funds for select members of their circles? Indeed, having forged “unexpected alliances” with state and business sectors, as suggested in the title, how will history judge them? In the Introduction, Park begins her story with an irony: the success of the Korean film industry propelled by “unlikely social actors,” activist independent filmmakers. The book notes how the Korean film industry is considered both a commercial and artistic success. Whereas Hollywood films dominate in other markets, Korean films comprise more than half the national market share and have increasingly boasted commercial success in new markets such as China, whose large-scale audiences are the main consumers of hallyu (the Korean wave). Success, however, is not only limited to commercial films. Artistic recognition of Korean films such as Pieta (2012) by Kim Ki Deok, which was awarded the Golden Lion Award at the [End Page 1253] 69th Venice Film Festival, and more recently of Kim Heung Soon’s Factory Complex (2014), the winner of the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale, is a culmination of various social and state forces at work. Identifying these forces and the way they operate is at the core of Park’s book. For Park, this irony has two dimensions. The first lies in the fact that anti-state, anti-capital independent filmmakers have joined hands with both the state and chaebol (Korean business conglomerates) to propel a commercial, albeit staunch nationalistic, film sector. The second dimension refers to the manner in which the post-authoritarian regimes, starting with that of Kim Dae Jung, promoted the cultural industry. Former film-making activists who had contributed in bringing the liberal regime into power, established themselves as cultural brokers with almost exclusive access to government subsidies. Their personal connections with other activists, who were now key players in the government, provided the basis for their social capital; whereas their status as radical activists, bestowed upon them symbolic capital, imbuing them with a higher sense of morality. The formation of a favored cultural hegemonic bloc, was reminiscent of government patron–client transactions of the 1960s and 1970s under the military dictatorship, which was precisely the type of cronyism and favoritism that activists had sought to topple. It is within these contexts that Park asks the main question of her inquiry: “Can the alliances in contemporary South Korea described throughout this book be characterized as the ‘cooptation’ of social activism?” (24). In other words, did the activists sell out once they came into power? As such, Park’s inquiry is part of the larger discussion that problematizes the rapid pace of neoliberalization that has transformed the sociopolitical landscape of South Korea after democratization, and the role that previous activists have played in this process (Song 2009). Park’s ethnography is an attempt to make sense of these seemingly contradictory historical processes, by focusing on radical film activists in its center. In Chapter 1, Park traces the origins of activist independent filmmakers through an organization they formed, which she names KIFA (Korea Independent Filmmakers Association). Active in the 1970s and 1980s, KIFA would produce anti-government films and also use screening events as political rituals of resistance. At the height of political and labor repression...
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Oct 6, 2023
Zaza Tripolski 
Open Access
