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Book Reviews New Korean Cinema edited by Chi-Yun Shin and Julian Stringer. Edinburgh and New York: Edinburgh University Press, 2005. 234 pp. $22.00 (paper) South Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre, and National Cinema edited by Kathleen McHugh and Nancy Abelmann. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005. 262 pp. $27.95 (paper) South Korean cinema, which remained obscure until the late 1990s, has recently emerged as one ofthe most interesting cinemas on the international film scene. The increasing critical recognition and popularity ofKorean cinema has been accompanied by the publication ofnumerous English-language books dedicated to Korean films: Hyangjin Lee, Contemporary Korean Cinema : Culture, Identity, and Politics (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2001), David James et al., Im Kwon-Taek: The Making ofa Korean National Cinema (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 2001), Eungjun Min et al., Korean Film: History, Resistance andDemocraticImagination (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003), and Kyung Hyun Kim, The Remasculinization ofKorean Cinema (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004). The diverse approaches of these publications demonstrate that the critical frameworks for South Korean cinema are at an initial stage offormulation and are open to fresh intellectual challenges. Compared to the broad historical approaches of the volumes just mentioned , the two most recent publications in the field—Chi-Yun Shin and Julian Stringer's New Korean Cinema and Kathleen McHugh and Nancy Abelmann 's South Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre, andNational Cinema—draw attention to a particular period. New Korean Cinema deals with contemporary popular Korean films and includes background coverage of Korean history, the film industry, and related social and cultural issues in contemporary South Korean society. South Korean Golden Age Melodrama, meanwhile, sheds light on a relatively unknown but highly prolific period of Korean film history, between 1955 and 1972. The narrower focus of these books seems to be an attempt to complement existing approaches to narrating The Journal ofKorean Studies 11, no. 1 (Fall 2006): 191-98 191 192The Journal ofKorean Studies Korean cinema as it relates to Korean society. (Another recent book, Justine Bowyer and Jinhee Choi's The Cinema ofJapan andKorea [Wallflower Press, 2004], includes eleven articles, each of which analyzes one significant South Korean film, from Hurrah! ForFreedom [1946] to Joint SecurityArea [2000]. Despite the interesting subjects ofeach article, as an anthology the book lacks an integrating framework, especially since the articles that deal with Korean films are mixed together with those on Japanese films.) With a well-conceived layout ofcontents, New Korean Cinema is an informative guide for readers who have been waiting for a substantial work to fill the gap between their growing interests and the academic literature about contemporary South Korean cinema. Introducing a new label—"new" Korean cinema—Shin and Stringer's book seeks to articulate a framework for presenting and comprehending contemporary Korean films by emphasizing their liveliness and diversity. Conceiving "new" Korean cinema is not possible, however, without defining "old" cinema. In the introduction of New Korean Cinema, Julian Stringer underlines the significance of"the post-authoritarian, post-political period of the post-1990s" (p. 6) as a historical turning point for the Korean film industry. Given this turning point, Korean cinema's current vivacity and relentless expansion owe much to the dramatic social and cultural transformation driven by "democratic civil governance from 1992 onward after an extended period of military rule 1961-1987" (p. 3). Thus it is not surprising that Michael Robinson's clear and precise narration ofthe political background of modern Korean society appears immediately after the introduction . Robinson highlights the importance ofconsidering Korean films and cultural products "within, until recently, an extraordinarily unstable political context" (p. 15). At the same time, his chapter adds weight to the notion ofnew Korean cinema by celebrating the positive effects of the cultural liberation since the early 1990s, which has released Korean cinema from the old political burdens. Other articles in the first part ofthe book, "Forging a New Cinema," confirm that view. Darcy Paquet's chapter ("The Korean Film Industry: 1992 to the Present") details the main changes in governmental policy and the film industry after 1992. Soyoung Kim's chapter ("'Cine-Mania' or Cinephilia: Film Festivals and the Identity Question") interprets...

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