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Discourses on New Cinema in Younghwa-yesul(Film Art)―The Professionalization of Film Criticism and the Institutionalization of Korean Film Studies in the 1960s

Sunjoo Lee 1

1한양대학교 현대영화연구소

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the 1960s’ discourses on new cinema in Younghwa-yesul (Film Art), a Korean film journal that sought to not merely publish film criticism but also to introduce innovation to the entire Korean film culture since its first publication in April 1965. Although its publication was repeatedly suspended and revived until the mid-1990s, as the only film-specific journal of the 1960s. Younghwa-yesul raised an array of significant critical agendas such as critic Lee Young-il’s Riŏllijŭm ch’ogŭngnon (‘transcendence of realism’ thesis) as a key topic of its first issue, cinepoem (a.k.a. yŏngsangjuŭi [imagism]), internationalism, avant-garde cinema, modern cinema, cine-club movement, and scenario movement. This paper contextualize these agendas within the industrial and cultural contexts of the Korean cinema in the 1960s, including the government’s drive for the corporatization of the local film industry, its enactment of a new film law, and its excellent film reward policy. In so doing, it focuses on how these agendas could construct the synchronous modernity of Korean cinema in terms of their correspondence with the world cinema of the 1960s characterized as the age of ‘new cinema’. Additionally, this paper illuminates how the journal’s search for the professionalization and institutionalization of film criticism coincided with the local formation of film studies as an independent discipline, as well as how its effort to promote intersections of the official and the non-official film cultures aimed at public film education and the audience’s enlightenment. For these aims, this paper investigates the journal’s editorials, features, articles, round-table discussions, studies on modern film theories and film directors, cine-club correspondences, and scenario studies. In this course, it elucidates the ways in which several concepts delineated, employed, or supported by these sections, including auteurism, realism, globalism, cinepoem, and avant-garde cinema, were reflective of the processes of translation and refraction that were derived from the journal’s reception of Western film theory and criticism. In doing so, it takes a perspective of considering both the journal’s key critics and contributors and its readers as the active subject of culture.

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