Screaming silently: haan, contemporary South Korean cinema, and emotional realism

Abstract

Through this thesis I examine how popular contemporary South Korean cinema
addresses, appeals to, and is shaped by Korea’s social, historical, and cultural context, specifically by drawing on the cultural concept of haan – a national sentiment that draws on notions of accumulated suffering and resentment in the Korean context. Rather than viewing haan as an essential component of South Korean cinema – as has often been the critical tendency – I seek to understand the function of haan within that cinema. My first chapter establishes a framework for examining haan, by understanding cinematic evocation of haan in relation to emotional realism – a mode of address that communicates the emotion of reality, if not its factual or aesthetic reality. Seen in respect to emotional realism, I argue, haan communicates Korean social and historical realism through emotional address. My second chapter charts Korean cinema’s portrayal of the 1980 Gwangju Democratic Uprising and argues how, despite the film-to-film differences in representation, haan is a constant in how Korean cinema emotionally frames the events of Gwangju, and thus mediates them within South Korean cultural memory. My third chapter focuses on a recent wave of films set during Korea’s 1910 to 1945 colonisation by Japan, drawing on consistencies in how haan is evoked during these films’ thematic elaboration of various issues relating to national identity. My fourth chapter, focusses on how haan manifests in South Korea’s blockbuster cinema, arguing that haan is frequently structured into cinematic spectacle, often through the creation of emotional spectacle.
Through this structure, and predominantly through textual analysis, my thesis
discusses how haan’s cinematic evocation appeals to the national by drawing on
sentiments of deep cultural resonance within the Korean context. Such appeal, when afforded precedence in the textual assemblage of a film, I argue, is of great significance to some of South Korean cinema’s most culturally important and domestically successful films.

More information

Identifiers

ORCID for Tim Bergfelder: orcid.org/0000-0001-6585-6123

ORCID for Corey Schultz: orcid.org/0000-0001-7866-2264

Catalogue record

Export record