How The Cold War Struggle In South Korean Film

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The South Korean film industry since Korean War (1950-1953) often portrays the Korean experience in the Cold War struggle and its lingering impact in inter-Korean relations as a backdrop for many of its popular films. While the Cold War is nominally a thing of the past, the consequences of the Cold War rhetoric are ubiquitous in the Korean peninsula, leading to an assessment and reassessment of the lingering feelings that South Koreans have of their Northern counterparts. The film industry’s captivation with inter-Korean relations is played out in film throughout South Korea’s film history. The dynamic between the two Koreas and its film portrayal is not only a subject of fascination for the average moviegoer, but to scholars looking at the …show more content…
In the 2000s, interest in Korean film studies boomed and the increasing interest in South Korean films after the industry’s resurgence in global film due to blockbusters like Shiri (1999), scholarly interest in analyzing the archetypal “North-South struggle” caused the South Korean film history field to expand. Within the field, two areas of study predominate: political film history and sociological analyses of the films themselves. Although neither field argues the domineering role of politics in South Korean film history, the two camps distinguish themselves in their debate regarding what aspect actually drives the South Korean film industry to keep producing films on the inter-Korean conflict. The field is categorized by a chronological division in sources, with sources covering the conjunction of South Korean political history and film history emerging first, offering three perspectives , and sources looking at a sociological angle, more specifically, the formation of a South Korean identity emerging in more recent

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