Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Lucidly and sensitively written, Steven Chung’s book is not only a historical study of a single director and national culture caught in an eventful time period. It is also an excellent thesis on cinema as a locus of multidiscursivity whose evolving fissures—temporal, spatial, technical, and experiential—defy any facile attempt to stabilize meanings by way of aesthetics or geopolitics."—Rey Chow, Duke University
"Split Screen Korea is a pathbreaking work that offers a theoretically sophisticated study of the complex and shifting relations between Korean cinema and mass culture. Through its careful, meticulous tracing of Sin Sang-ok’s work as a director, producer, and studio head, this book allows us to rethink the multilayered cultural and visual politics of divided Korea and, more broadly, the global Cold War itself."—Theodore Hughes, Columbia University
"Split Screen Korea exemplifies a kind of necessary scholarly monograph that will never go out of style. Instead of seeking to construct yet another fashionable revisionist history, Steven Chung writes fluidly and directly, establishing ‘film and nation’ as the basic binary from which his research emanates."—Slant Magazine
"Written in clear, jargon-free prose and gently persuasive and accommodating in its engagement with the existing scholarship, Steven Chung’s Split Screen Korea mounts a compelling case for re-examination and re-evaluation of the commercial Korean films produced between 1953 and 1979."—Pacific Affairs
"Chung presents his arguments beautifully in jargon-free, concise language and offers a pleasurable sense of discovery at every turn. . . Split Screen Korea: Shin Sang-Ok and Postwar Cinema is a formidable work and a crucial contribution to the field of Korean studies, film studies, and mass media studies."—Situations
Table of ContentsContents
Introduction: Visible Ruptures, Invisible Borders
1. The Century’s Illuminations: The Enlightenment Mode in Korean Cinema2. Regimes within Regimes: Film and Fashion in the Korean 1950s3. Authorship and the Location of Cinema: In the Region of Shin Films4. Melodrama and the Scene of Development5. “It’s All Fake”: Shin Sang-ok’s North Korean RevisionsConclusion: Post-Development Pictures
AcknowledgmentsNotesShin Sang-ok FilmographyBibliographyIndex
