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Lecture on Post-War Korean Cinema

November 8, 2012
4:00PM - 6:00PM
Jennings Hall, Room 40

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Add to Calendar 2012-11-08 16:00:00 2012-11-08 18:00:00 Lecture on Post-War Korean Cinema What happens if we take the Korean dish budae jjigae --Army base stew-- as a metaphor for Korea's popular cinema of the 1950s? like the cooks of this modest dish, postwar filmmakers struggled to make something worth consuming during an era of extreme scarcity and they, too, "poached" resources from a number of different sources. This talk focuses on the film "Madame Freedom" ( 1956) and explores how it borrowed creatively from Korean, Japanese, and American sources. It pays particular attention to how the US military functioned as a reservoir of resources -- material, symbolic, experiential -- from which Korean cultural producers could draw to produce something distinctly Korean. Christina Klein is Associate Professor of English at Boston College and is the author of Cold War Orientalism: Asia in Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961. She has published articles on Asian cinema in journals such as Cinema Journal, American Quarterly, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and the Journal of Transnational Cinema. Klein is also a Research Associate at Harvard's Korea Institute. She is currently working on a project about Korean cinema and its relationship to the US military. Jennings Hall, Room 40 Popular Culture Studies gardner.236@osu.edu America/New_York public

What happens if we take the Korean dish budae jjigae --Army base stew-- as a metaphor for Korea's popular cinema of the 1950s? like the cooks of this modest dish, postwar filmmakers struggled to make something worth consuming during an era of extreme scarcity and they, too, "poached" resources from a number of different sources. This talk focuses on the film "Madame Freedom" ( 1956) and explores how it borrowed creatively from Korean, Japanese, and American sources. It pays particular attention to how the US military functioned as a reservoir of resources -- material, symbolic, experiential -- from which Korean cultural producers could draw to produce something distinctly Korean.

 
Christina Klein is Associate Professor of English at Boston College and is the author of Cold War Orientalism: Asia in Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961. She has published articles on Asian cinema in journals such as Cinema Journal, American Quarterly, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and the Journal of Transnational Cinema. Klein is also a Research Associate at Harvard's Korea Institute. She is currently working on a project about Korean cinema and its relationship to the US military.