Kitano's honor

[Mark Nornes]

On Aug 31, 2004, at 1:33 AM, Jason Gray wrote:

> But once upon a time, Korea was bankrupt of ideas and
> turned to Japan's seishun eiga boom in the 1960s for
> material

As nice to Koreans as they are to Iranians, eh?

I have also heard of Korean filmmakers stopping in Tokyo on a layover 
from somewhere else. They check out what's hitting in Japan, and then 
go reproduce it back home. The example I heard was an Ozu film!  (I'd 
love to see if they copied Ozu down to the shot!)

What exactly was going on here? Setting aside Takeshi's setsu about 
lack of creativity, we can certainly say it has something to do with 
the ban on Japanese films in Korea. Was it simply a stunningly 
elaborate version of the remake/rip-off---Batman reproduced in the 
Philippines or the Ring in the US? The former example shows how 
prestige is borrowed, while the latter is a matter of creativity.

I suppose the first step would be finding out how much people knew 
about Japanese cinema despite the ban. And to what degree were these 
films coded as foreign, generically or even as adaptations? What does 
this say about Japan-Korean relations in pop culture?  This hints at a 
fascinating relationship between Japanese and Korean cinema beyond the 
colonial era and into the days of the embargo.

Anyone looking for a dissertation topic?

Markus
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