Free Essays,College Free Essays,Free College Essays at Anti Essays

KOREAN FILM CULTURE
Seeing Taeguk-gi in the Korean Film Festival held by the University’s Film Institute is not a first in my Korean Cinema radar. I have actually seen quite a few of the popular Korean films—Sassy Girl and, Windstruck. They were light stories of young love and hate then love again. I didn’t give them much a thought. Nothing different, why would I go far? Might as well support and bash our own. We have our own chinky-eyed and, crocodile tear-ed young actresses and actors. We are proud makers of the same light-hearted comedies but shamefully lesser quality. But when I chanced upon Park Chan-wook’’s Old Boy on a trip to the amusingly infamous Quiapo and the rest of his Vengeance Trilogy, I felt the urgency to know more.
Based on a few researches on Korean Cinema history, in the 1930s, Korea had a fairly thriving film industry. It was, however, almost completely wiped out by the Japanese occupation in 1937 and the Korean War in 1950. Only eight films made before 1953 have survived.

The film industry began to slowly recover after the Korean War with a spat of weepy melodramas, which were enormously popular. The climate shortly changed when Korea came under military dictatorship in the 1960s, which forced an intense industrialization of the country and maintained tight control of its film industry. The screening of foreign films was strictly limited, and production houses were ordered to churn out 15 entertaining films a year, in line with the dictatorship's sensibilities.

Nevertheless, the industry began to flounder in the 1970s because of censorship and did not bounce back until the early 1980s when a handful of new directors infused life into it. This was short-lived, however. In the late 1980s the government eased censorship laws and lifted import restrictions on foreign films. The competition of Hollywood and Hong Kong films nearly crushed the native industry, which inspired the government to do a...