Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

"[T]his fine book . . . . enlarges our vision of one of the great national cinematic flowerings of the last decade."--Martin Scorsese, from the foreword

In the late 1990s, South Korean film and other cultural products, broadly known as hallyu (Korean wave), gained unprecedented international popularity. Korean films earned an all-time high of $60.3 million in Japan in 2005, and they outperformed their Hollywood competitors at Korean box offices. In Virtual Hallyu , Kyung Hyun Kim reflects on the precariousness of Korean cinema's success over the past decade. Arguing that state film policies and socioeconomic factors cannot fully explain cinema's true potentiality, Kim draws on Deleuze's concept of the virtual--according to which past and present and truth and falsehood coexist--to analyze the temporal anxieties and cinematic ironies embedded in screen figures such as a made-in-the-USA aquatic monster ( The Host ), a postmodern Chosun-era wizard ( Jeon Woo-chi ), a schizo man-child ( Oasis ), a weepy North Korean terrorist ( Typhoon ), a salary man turned vengeful fighting machine ( Oldboy ), and a sick nationalist (the repatriated colonial-era film Spring of Korean Peninsula ). Kim maintains that the full significance of hallyu can only be understood by exposing the implicit and explicit ideologies of protonationalism and capitalism that, along with Korea's ambiguous post-democratization and neoliberalism, are etched against the celluloid surfaces.

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CHOICE Review

Also author of The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema (CH, Oct'04, 42-0840) and coproducer (with Martin Scorsese) of a 2010 remake of The Housemaid (to name just two of his accomplishments), Kim (Univ. of California, Irvine) discusses 18 important films of the "Korean wave" or hallyu period, roughly mid-1990s to 2007. Using Gilles Deleuze's work as a critical focus, he situates hallyu film in both its local Korean market and the global commercial market. He suggests that hallyu film earned international attention in Western film festivals and in popular entertainment markets of Pacific rim countries because Korean filmmakers blended the artistic aesthetics of modernism with the commercially successful Hollywood blockbuster films associated with a postmodern sensibility, thereby creating a hybrid form wherein even Korean "pop" films portrayed "cracks in the dominant ideologies." Hallyu films are marked by tensions between various issues: Korean identity or global aesthetic; values of art or of profits; conformity to or subversion of ideas; and coherent storytelling or "stylistic flair." The first seven chapters, which deal with metaphors and tropes and connect earlier auteur films with commercial blockbusters, offer useful discussions of Korean film (and filmmakers) ranging from Kwon-taek Im's Sopyonje (1993) to Chang-dong Lee's Secret Sunshine (2007). Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals. B. M. McNeal emerita, Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania