OUAN502 - South Korean Cinema

Something I've noticed from watching a variety of different genres of films produced in South Korea is that there doesn't seem to be any indigenous genres. Instead of this it feels like the different genres, whether it is a thriller or a story about the relationship between two people are imitations of or variations on Western and other Asian film genres. For example, Hollywood created the western genre, and Japan developed the samurai film, whereas Hong Kong invented the martial arts film. These genres are part of the culture and were developed in these regions as representations of the different histories of cultures. In contrast, it seem that South Korea doesn't have any genres of its own but took different film genres from other countries and changed them in a way which appealed to their audiences. South Korean films started by simply by taking hit films in the west and imitating them, essentially in an attempt to ensure a good return on the films that were being released. In the beginning, Korean films took the stories that already existed in other areas of the world and copied them directly. However, by means of trial and error, the film industry instead decided to adopt genres rather than imitating specific films in order to enable a steady way to catch up with Western culture when it came to cinema. This led to some unwanted consequences, and became another avenue to which western ideology and cultures were imported. Film genres as a whole developed in a strange way in Korea, and there was a struggle between people attempting to embrace the cultural aspects that came with it versus others trying to reject them.

Towards the end of the 1990s in Korea, the market share of films produced in Korea was about 25%. In 1999 the film Shiri was released, and this changed everything. Shiri was essentially the first big budget style film to be produced in the Korean film industry. It was made as a deliberate celebration of the action films that were made popular in Hollywood during the 1980s. Furthermore, it contained a story that took national Korean sentiment in order to popularise itself in the story - a winning combination with the style of Hollywood's action features. The story in Shiri essentially follows the pursuit of a North-Korean assassin by two South Korean government agents, so quite simplistic at its heart. Shiri attracted around 6.2 million viewers which broke a record previously held by (at the time the highest grossing film of all time) Titanic which had around 4.3 million viewers. Due to this combination of things and the economic boom that was happening in South Korea at the time, the market share of Korean films went up a 58 % increase from the previous year. Following this, there remained a high level of competition from foreign films in the Korean film market and film makers and studios became focused on producing the best quality films of all genres with strong characters and great stories. In to the early 2000s the film industry was ever growing and between 2001 and 2007 the ticket sales and box office revenues doubled. Shiri was extremely popular throughout the rest of Asia, and is an important film in the Korean film industry as it paved the way for some of the most iconic films not just in Korean cinema but in global cinema such as Old Boy (2003), Memories of Murder (2003), Brotherhood (2004), I Saw the Devil (2010), The Man from Nowhere (2010) and many more. Shiri was also a film that helped to catapult the career of Min-sik Choi, one of South Korea's most recognised and influential actors.



Shiri (1999)