There have been dramatic changes in the Korean film industry starting from the 1990s to the early 2000s, especially in terms of the changes in the distribution/investment structure. While many authors have celebrated the way in which a small national ...
There have been dramatic changes in the Korean film industry starting from the 1990s to the early 2000s, especially in terms of the changes in the distribution/investment structure. While many authors have celebrated the way in which a small national cinema has entered global cinema, this paper aims to interrogate the terms by which the contemporary Korean film industry has been changed. By examining the shifts via Marxian concepts such as ‘formal’ and ‘real subsumption’, it seeks to situate the contemporary Korean film industry in a wide force field of the global visual economy. Moreover, this study aims to critically review how the South Korean state played a role in the shift of the domestic film industry. Rather than merely affirming the state`s role in the course of the film industry`s change, the paper critically examines the state`s role. This paper also clarifies its critical perspective by contrasting it with a world-system approach. While fully recognising the significance of a world-system approach and its relevance to the Korean film industry, this study follows the line developed by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire (2000). As the new forms of cultural traffic in the current global film industry are exercised in every part of the network, and subsequently all the parts of the global visual network are tendentially interwoven with one another, the Korean film industry can best be understood as having been subsumed into the global visual system, rather than located in the phase of the semi-periphery in terms of a world-system perspective.