『South Korean Golden Age Melodrama』読了。
『South Korean Golden Age Melodrama:Gender, Genre, and National Cinema』Book informationImmediately following the Korean War, South Korea’s film industry flourished with vibrant local production of high-quality films. Characterized by its stunning melodramas, this “Golden Age” of South Korean cinema produced a body of work as historically, aesthetically, and politically significant as that of other well-known national film movements such as Italian Neorealism, French New Wave, and New German Cinema. Conditions that fostered South Korea’s cinematic Golden Age were short lived; a brief period of intense poverty and struggle -but also creative freedom- was ended by the dictatorship of Park Chung Hee in the late 1960s. Strong international interest in South Korea’s current film renaissance make an analysis of this enormously underappreciated cinematic tradition long overdue.South Korean Golden Age Melodrama is the first English-language book to examine this era of remarkable activity, covering the specifics of the Golden Age as well as the influences it has had on contemporary South Korean film and television. Given the compressed, ambiguous, and fundamentally transnational social and political dramas of South Korea’s history, South Korean Golden Age Melodrama addresses the widespread appeal of particular film modes and aesthetics, especially that of the melodrama. These essays also examine genre in relation to articulations of nation and constructions of gender in Golden Age films and how the nation manifests itself in persistent gender and genre trouble.Combining textual analysis, reception, and historical/cultural detail, South Korean Golden Age Melodrama skillfully renders the complexity of the Golden Age. Contributors cite both domestic and foreign films to demonstrate the generic and transnational impact of Golden Age cinema, sometimes calling into question the very integrity of “national cinema” in light of the workings of a transcultural cinema sphere during that era. With nine chapters, sustained treatments of nine canonical Golden Age films, together with extended consideration of contemporary film and television, this volume offers a rich contribution to the theorization of film genre and national cinema and their relationship to gender.Author information:Kathleen McHugh is associate professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is author of several books, including American Domesticity: From How-To Manual to Hollywood Melodrama (Oxford, 1999).Nancy Abelmann is associate professor of anthropology and East Asian studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is author of several books, most recently The Melodrama of Mobility: Women, Class, and Talk in Contemporary South Korea (University of Hawai’i Press, 2003).Contributors:Kathleen McHugh, Nancy Abelmann, Jinsoo An, Eunsun Cho, Hye Seung Chung, David Scott Diffrient, Soyoung Kim, Kyung Hyun Kim, Keehyeung Lee..(from Wayne State University Press)デトロイトにあるウェイン州立大学出版の「Contemporary Approaches to Film and Television Series」の一冊。この大学はアジア・アフリカ研究に力を入れているので、その出版物にも興味を引くものがけっこうある。上に引いた解説にもあるけれど、英語で出た韓国映画の研究書としてはとても画期的なもので、内容も自分の現在の関心に沿っているので一気に読めた。次のものにも期待したい。実際、映画については韓国語よりも英語で議論しなければいけない場が多いので、こうした本を読んで、いろいろな表現に慣れておけば、いざという時に非常に役に立つ。香港などでもそうだけど、やはり事務的なことの遂行には英語を使ったほうがスムーズな場合が多いし、議論に応じるのにもそれに耐えうるだけの英語が必要だ。でも、相手のネイティブ言語とそれに支えられている文化を一顧だにせず、英語にだけ頼っている人は必ずどこかでコケている。そのバランスがむずかしい。