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Sentimentalism of Melancholia and Death―Kwak Ji-kyun’s Melodrama Films, New Sentimentalism, and The Home of Two Women

Yun-Jong Lee 1

1원광대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how the melancholia and death drive foregrounded in Kwak Ji-kyun’s films have changed the affect and production trend of South Korean melodrama films of the late 1980s and thereafter. It particularly analyzes Kwak’s The Home of Two Women (1987) as his exemplary melodrama film. Kwak is not only an auteur filmmaker of the 1980s and 1990s but was also a herald of South Korean New Sentimentalist films back then. The New Sentimentalist filmmakers have aspired to sophisticate the South Korean melodrama film not only by de-sentimentalizing it from the shimpa quality but also separating it from excessive emotion of shimpa that had long dominated the national cinema. This affective sophistication is directly linked to the sense of loss and melancholia/depression of the characters in the film caused by the death of one’s beloved. This New Sentimentalist affect is best represented in Kwak’s The Home of Two Women through its depiction of the internal conflicts of artists struggling to artistically sublimate the death drive and sense of loss. By textually analyzing The Home of Two Women, this paper not only reevaluates Kwak’s film style but also reposition the topology of the New Sentimentalists in Korean film history.

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* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.
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