David Scott Diffrient

Movie Migrations: Transnational Genre Flows and South Korean Cinema

As the two billion YouTube views for oGangnam Styleo would indicate, South Korean popular culture has begun to enjoy new prominence on the global stage. Yet, as this timely new study reveals, the nations film industry has long been a hub for transnational exchange, producing movies that put a unique spin on familiar genres, while influencing world cinema from Hollywood to Bollywood. Movie Migrations is not only an introduction to one of the worlds most vibrant national cinemas, but also a provocative call to reimagine the very concepts of onational cinemaso and ofilm genreo. Challenging traditional critical assumptions that place Hollywood at the center of genre production, Hye Seung Chung and David Scott Diffrient bring South Korean cinema to the forefront of recent and ongoing debates about globalization and transnationalism. In each chapter they track a different way that South Korean filmmakers have adapted material from foreign sources, resulting in everything from the Manchurian Western to The Host s reinvention of the Godzilla mythos. Spanning a wide range of genres, the book introduces readers to classics from the 1950s and 1960s Golden Age of South Korean cinema, while offering fresh perspectives on recent favorites like Oldboy and Thirst . Perfect not only for fans of Korean film, but for anyone curious about media in an era of globalization, Movie Migrations will give readers a new appreciation for the creative act of cross-cultural adaptation.

Beyond Tokenism and Tricksterism: Bobby Lee, MADtv, and the De(con)structive Impulse of Korean American Comedy

n her recently published critical overview of the politics of representation attending minority images in classic and contemporary television series, media scholar L. S. Kim asserts that, apart from anomalous instances of counterprogramming and color-blind casting, little has changed in the fifty years that have elapsed since Asian Americans first appeared on the small screen (125–46). Having earlier filled submissive roles as household servants in such TV westerns and domestic comedies as Have Gun—Will Travel (CBS, 1957–63), Bonanza (NBC, 1959–73), Bachelor Father (CBS/NBC, 1957–62), and The Courtship of Eddie’s Father (ABC, 1969–72) and after having played bit parts as Communist soldiers, impoverished farmers, refugee children, and flirtatious barmaids in the longrunning antiwar comedy M*A*S*H (CBS, 1972–83), Asian American actors were finally given a chance to reveal their talents in the decades that followed, when relatively new, ostensibly “progressive” stereotypes like the model minority and the technologically savvy overachiever emerged in popular culture. However, as Kim and other critics (including Gary Okihiro, Robert Lee, and Hye Seung Chung) have argued, the model minority I Beyond Tokenism and Tricksterism: Bobby Lee, MADtv, and the

The unbearable lightness of Hong Sang-soo's HaHaHa: awkward humor, nervous laughter, and self-critique in contemporary Korean comedy

Drawing from existing literature in the field of comedy studies (including work related to three long-established theories of laughter: superiority theory, incongruity theory, and relief theory), this paper examines the humorous elements in Hong Sang-soos films. Focusing on the Korean directors tellingly titled film HaHaHa (2010), the author puts forth the idea that both internal and external bursts of hilarity (coming from the characters and from the audience, respectively) form a line of bivalent critique that links textual and extratextual aspects of screen comedy. That linkage is gestured toward by the artificial ‘movement’ (or, rather, magnification) of the image specific to the zoom shot, which can be seen in nearly every one of this films simultaneously painful and pleasurable, uncomfortable and entertaining, sequences. In addition to expanding Paul Willemens theory of cinematic zooming, the author seizes upon some of the most persuasive writings about the comic mode in order to critically frame Hong Sang-soos unique brand of humorous self-reflexivity.

Spectator sports and terrorist reports: filming the Munich Olympics, (re)imagining the Munich Massacre

Drawing upon the writings of Benedict Anderson, Hayden White and Robert Rosenstone, this essay compares and contrasts three feature-length films dealing with a historically significant event and its aftermath: the ‘Munich Massacre’, which took place during the 1972 Summer Olympics and led to violent reprisals in the months and years that followed. While stylistically different from one another, these political thrillers – 21 Hours at Munich (1976), Sword of Gideon (1986) and Munich (2005) – share thematic similarities and mobilize sport metaphors so as to emphasize the teamwork that was necessary to counteract this and other terrorist threats. The essay also considers the significance of witnessing TV sportscasters such as Jim McKay (who appears in the opening minutes of Munich and can be heard in 21 Hours at Munich) deliver breaking news in such a way that two seemingly unrelated things – spectator sports and terrorist reports – begin to slip into one another. Finally, it is argued that, in deconstructing the boundaries between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’, ‘history’ and ‘narrative’, these films collectively make the case for a modernist form of history writing while reminding audiences that singular events are at once ‘bound’ to other extreme moments in history and, perhaps paradoxically, beyond representation.

Dead, but still breathing: the problem of postmortem movement in horror films

Abstract This article builds upon Davina Quinlivan’s pioneering work on cinematic breathing by considering the conspicuous but often-overlooked place of breath in horror films. The author focuses specifically on the way still-breathing bodies – i.e. those of actors pretending to be deceased on screen – prick our senses and draw our attention to one of the genre’s unavoidable paradoxes. Stated simply, what all but the most metatextual or parodic horror films wish to hide – to keep concealed inside their own literal and figurative ‘basements’ – is the inherent artifice of fictional death, which has traditionally been represented by way of living actors who must mask their breathing in order to sustain the feeling of dread on which the genre is affectively reliant. Taking the title and premise of the recent U.S. theatrical release Don’t Breathe (2016) as a leaping-off point, but expanding the scope of this essay to include a representative cross section of international productions and trashy exploitation cinema, the author hopes to contribute to a better understanding of the genre’s unique respiratory tendencies as well as the risible yet significant textual ruptures that occur when bodies continue breathing after they have stopped living.

Elevator to the shallows: spatial verticality and the questionable depth of social relations in Mad Men

ABSTRACT Set in the world of Madison Avenue advertising during the 1960s, a century after the earliest construction of vertical lifts in New York City, Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men illustrates how central the elevator has become to the urban spatial imaginary, perpetuated in part through such cultural productions as Billy Wilder’s 1960 film The Apartment (a source of inspiration for Weiner). Like Wilder’s classic comedy, Mad Men stages several interpersonal encounters inside the cramped spaces of elevator cars, which are private zones of physical and verbal intimacy as well as public areas where individuals from different social classes come together, if only momentarily. Inspired by the work of Andreas Bernard (author of Lifted, which focuses on literary and cinematic representations of elevators), I explore the contradictory aspects of this prominent yet overlooked type of human conveyance, looking at the fleeting personal exchanges that take place inside vertical lifts on Mad Men as well as on other television programs. As Bernard states, because it combines ‘freedom of access while stopped and hermetically sealed impenetrability while in motion’, the elevator cab is ripe for interpretation as a means through which to tell the story of the modern metropolis and its demographically diverse inhabitants.

Contemporary comic books and Hollywood noir: remediating cinematic style and cultural memory in The Fade Out

ABSTRACT This article explores Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ recycling of film noir images and tropes in The Fade Out, a twelve-issue comic book series that borrows heavily from photographic and cinematic materials (including publicity stills and actors’ head shots) to craft a ‘remediated’ vision of old Hollywood that is simultaneously deceptive and truthful about the harsh realities of working in an industry popularly known as the ‘Dream Factory’. The nightmares that haunt the narrative’s protagonist, Charlie Parish, tied to his military past as well as to his relationship to a dead starlet named Valeria Sommers, are referred to by the narrator as ‘half-remembered images’, a fitting description of the way in which Phillips’ own drawings – his nearly ‘perfect’ reproductions of earlier photos and movie scenes – are actually incomplete without the kind of historical contextualization that this series demands. By juxtaposing panels from the comic book with those original images, the author reveals how, beneath the nostalgic surface of The Fade Out, a deeper message about cultural memory and historical archiving is being articulated. Mixing real-world figures (e.g. screen icons such as Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, Clark Gable) and fictional characters who nevertheless call to mind actual people from Hollywood’s past, this comic book series invites us to speculate on the demands of the star system as well as on the possibility that our own fading memory might make such distinctions (e.g. between ‘real’ and ‘fake’) less clear in the years to come.

The omnibus film as message picture: cold war politics and the myth of national unity in It’s a Big Country (1951)

This essay uncovers the production and reception history of It’s a Big Country (1951), a multi-director M-G-M film that explores the interwoven issues of nationhood, citizenship and cultural diversity during the cold war era. Produced by the liberal studio chief Dore Schary, who referred to the film as a ‘propaganda picture’ and a ‘message picture,’ It’s a Big Country is a contradictory text that explicitly upholds the cold war mandate of inclusive representations (with episodes focusing on different racial/ethnic groups including African-Americans, Italians, the Irish, Greeks, Hungarians and Jews) and implicitly challenges the myth of national unity through subtle textual maneuvers. We argue that the imperfections and shortcomings of Schary’s ambitious project (which received negative reviews upon its original release) are indicative of the national failings of a segregated, Cold War America. To a certain extent, the film was ahead of its time and its potential as a meaningful social statement had to be significantly tempered due to industrial and ideological constraints. Its underlying message, however, still has the power to spark conversations about the dialectic of social fragmentation and national belonging as well as the omnibus-like assembly of identities that go into making a nation.

Collecting Views and Visions of the City: Episode Films, Paris vu par… , and “Postcard Cinema”

Although cartographical city-films—from Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s fragmented procession of 65 static photographs depicting the rectangular upthrust of modern architecture in Manhatta (1921) to Walther Ruttmann’s poetic day-in-the-life film Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grossstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a City, 1927)—had already emerged as a generic dominant for which international recognition reached a peak nearly a decade before Benjamin posed his rhetorical questions, the city-film genre of the 1920s did not prove to be especially susceptible to the charms of Paris. With the notable exception of Alberto Cavalcanti’s odd blending of documentary footage and staged scenes, Rien que les heures (Nothing but the Hours, 1926), and the early studies of the Seine and the Champs-Elys ees shot by celebrated cameraman Boris Kaufman in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the city that had captured the imagination of the German thinker and peripatetic dreamer had seen relatively little action as the subject of metrophilic documentarians. In the mid-1960s, French film producer Barbet Schroeder took up the challenge put forth by Benjamin more than 25 years earlier, and in the process unfolded, like a map, the spatial coordinates of “cinematic Paris” even as he diminished the city’s diverse

TV Hybridity: Genre Mixing and Narrative Complexity in M*A*S*H

Few television series have become such a well-established part of American popular culture as M∗A∗S∗H (CBS, 1972–1983), a Korean War medical comedy-drama whose genre hybridity and unconventional approaches to adult subject matter contributed to a shift not only in societal attitudes toward the United States’ political and military adventures abroad, but also in the public’s awareness of the medium’s narrative and thematic possibilities. Produced by Larry Gelbart, Gene Reynolds, and Burt Metcalfe for Twentieth Century-Fox Television, this CBS series was unprecedented in many ways and deserves scrutiny for its creators’ willingness to tackle serious topics, such as warfare, sexism, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, generational polarization, and alcoholism. That they consistently did so over a period of eleven seasons while also making groundbreaking experiments in televisual style and narrative structure (in such episodes as “Deluge” [4.22], “The Interview” [4.23], “Point of View” [7.10], “Life Time” [8.11], and “Dreams” [8.22]) makes M∗A∗S∗H all the more impressive as a cultural production that expanded the boundaries of the medium. Of course, the show’s relevance has not been ignored by contemporary media scholars, many of whom have focused on its links to both Richard Hornberger’s original novel