Search

The article discusses the depiction of the male crisis in the early films of Korean motion picture director Park Kwang-su. The political contradiction in modern Korean history leaves its legacy in male characters whose inability to properly communicate ostracizes them from a larger social linguistic network. The masculinities depicted by Park are consequentially unstable, traumas suffered in a violent political past are as common as dysfunctional families. The young men in a trouble period are not only repressed, they are also besieged by their social relations and their rattled and dismantled lives.

The section profiles and engages the texts of the three best-known directors of the New Korean Cinema, Park Kwang-su, Jang Sun-woo and Hong Sang-su. The emergence of the New Korean Cinema through its identification with a few names of film directors must be contextualized within an inauspicious milieu. The Korean film industry had to revalorize itself to the media, to the audiences and to the society at large that it was producing films that were intellectually engaging in order to diffuse the criticism that it was only catering to an audience seeking gratuitous images of sex.