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Shin Sung-yill's Persona - Youth, Romance, Modernity, and Cinema

  • Journal of Popular Narrative
  • 2025, 31(3), pp.401~452
  • Publisher : The Association of Popular Narrative
  • Research Area : Interdisciplinary Studies > Interdisciplinary Research
  • Received : September 10, 2025
  • Accepted : October 20, 2025
  • Published : October 31, 2025

Hogeol Lee 1

1동의대학교 영화•트랜스미디어연구소

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This study reveals that the persona of Shin Sung-yill, one of Korea's representative male film stars, was constructed around four elements: 'youth', 'romance', 'modernity', and 'cinema', and this study historically describes the process by which it changed and persisted over time. During the youth film period of the early to mid-1960s, his persona was built around the desire for success in romance and material modernity, and typical characteristics of youth such as purity and passion. During the artistic film transition of the late 1960s, the youth persona simultaneously developed in two contradictory directions. On one hand, he was taking on the image of a successful bourgeois male, while on the other hand, the modernist self-reflection on the romance and material modernity it implied was being performed. This was a process in which the youth persona was reproduced in a modernist manner. During the 1970s, when the stagnant Korean film industry foregrounded women, he was the most preferred male counterpart. The more flexible romantic image enabled him to play the lover of young women, and combined with the image of a successful bourgeois male still attributed to him, allowed his persona to maintain its previous form. In the 1980s, as a star in decline, he became a figure representing the Korean cinema of the past. The sync sound filming of this period deconstructed his persona as a film-historical figure. One of the concepts defining his persona is 'freedom'. His persona was shaped by the tension between radical freedom and the Liberalist freedom, which confines the radical freedom to the private sphere of home and market. Therefore, Shin Sung-yill can be defined as a male representation of the liberal private sphere. He embodies a distinctive meaning and affect that distinguishes him from the cinematic imagination of the era regarding the public represented by nation and people, and has been established as the representative male figure of the private sphere in Korean cinema during the industrialization period.

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