The Legacy of the Colonial Past in South Korean Cinema
Krzysztof Loska
krzysztof.loska@uj.edu.plJagiellonian University (Poland)
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4078-798X
Abstract
The article is a review of Joanna Beczkowska’s book Południowokoreański nacjonalizm – kategoria Innego w budowaniu filmowych narracji narodowych [South Korean Nationalism: The Category of the Other in Creating National Film Narratives] (2024), which focuses on the construction of collective identity in connection with the development of national narratives, based on South Korean feature films. Looking at the history of cinema from the perspective of political science, the author of the monograph pays special attention to the issue of settling accounts with the colonial period and the complicated relations with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. She understands cinema, on the one hand, as a rhetorical tool that allows for influencing viewers’ emotions and shaping their ideas about the past, and on the other – as a “cultural object” placed in social and political contexts.
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Keywords:
Korean cinema, national identity, nationalism, colonialism, JapanReferences
Beczkowska, J. (2024). Południowokoreański nacjonalizm – kategoria Innego w budowaniu filmowych narracji narodowych. Łódź: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.18778/8331-534-8
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Loska, K. (2022). W cieniu Imperium Wschodzącego Słońca. Japoński projekt kolonialny i kultura filmowa w Azji Wschodniej. Kraków: Universitas.
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Authors
Krzysztof Loskakrzysztof.loska@uj.edu.pl
Jagiellonian University Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4078-798X
Professor of Humanities in the Institute of Audiovisual Arts, Jagiellonian University in Kraków. He is the vice-president of the Polish Society for Film and Media Studies and member of Editorial Advisory Board of the bi-monthly Ekrany. He has authored 150 papers and dissertations on media, popular culture, film history and Japanese cinema, published in various journals (Kwartalnik Filmowy, Studia Filmoznawcze, Przegląd Kulturoznawczy, Ekrany, Kultura Współczesna, Ethos) and edited volumes. He has published twelve books (in Polish), e.g. Dziedzictwo McLuhana – między nowoczesnością a ponowoczesnością [McLuhan’s Legacy: Between Modernity and Postmodernity] (2001), Poetyka filmu japońskiego [Poetics of Japanese Cinema] (2009), Kenji Mizoguchi i wyobraźnia melodramatyczna [Kenji Mizoguchi and the Melodramatic Imagination] (2012), Nowy film japoński [New Japanese Cinema] (2013), Mistrzowie kina japońskiego [Masters of Japanese Film] (2015), Postkolonialna Europa. Etnoobrazy współczesnego kina [Postcolonial Europe: Ethnoscapes of Contemporary Cinema] (2016) and W cieniu Imperium Wschodzącego Słońca. Japoński projekt kolonialny i kultura filmowa w Azji Wschodniej [In the Shadow of the Empire of the Rising Sun: Japanese Colonial Project and Film Culture in East Asia] (2022).
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