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Kazoku Cinema, Chunhyang And Postmodern Korean Cinema, Hyangsoon Yi

Journal of Global Initiatives: Policy, Pedagogy, Perspective

This article examines the salient characteristics of two representative postmodern Korean films from the late 1990s: Park Chulsoo's Kazoku Cinema (1998) and Im Kwon-Taek's Chunhyang (2000). Im and Park are veteran filmmakers who developed their directorial careers in the mainstream commercial film and television industries. In the 1990s, however, they decided to turn from the conventional mode of cinema to a more experimental form of film. These shifts resulted in a series of self-reflexive films. Kazoku Cinema is structured in terms of a film-within-a-film. Park's metacinematic treatment of the movie-making process for a dysfunctional Korean-Japanese family showcases his effort to …