Japanese film in Korea

[Wujung Ju]

As far as I know, there were very little direct influences from the imported
Japanese films, which was actually what Korean industry already anticipated.
Except a few animations, there has not been any huge 'blockbuster' hit so
far. It seems recent Korean film boom has nothing in particular to do with
contemporary Japanese cinema. If there is any, I should say, it has deeper
historical root. As the original article pointed out, Japanese films were
not completely banned in Korea. There has always been black markets, to
which filmmakers must have been easily exposed. If you go further back to,
say, 1960s, there seems to have been much more direct influences from
Japanese films, even though they were not publicly released in Korea.

I would also like to point out that Japanese animations were actually NOT
banned in Korean TV. From 1960s on, many animes have been enormously popular
among Korean public viewers. The only trick here is, they had no idea the
anime programs were from Japan. Voices were dubbed and culturally
controversial scenes (violence, sex, Japanese traditions..) were
deliberately cut out. Viewers were completely deceived. (They really
believed Mazinga was a Korean robot!) This might be another version of
post-colonial twist of facts. ;P


On 3/22/07, Andreas Thein <andreas.thein at stadt.duesseldorf.de> wrote:
>
> Thanks for this highly informative essay! I wonder if the opening of the
> Japanese market had any influence on Korean filmmaking at that time,
> e.g. a new tendence to blockbusters, horror films... The huge popularity
> of Korean movies, K-pop etc. in Japan in recent years seems to have
> started here as well - does anyone have any information on that?
>
>
>
>
>
> Andreas Thein
> Filmmuseum Landeshauptstadt Duesseldorf
> Head of Collection
>
>
>
> >>> nuzumaki at gmx.net 21.03.2007 18:15 >>>
> I thought this could be an interesting essay for some Kinejapaners.
> Darcy Paquet gives a short introduction on the development of Japanese
> Cinema in Korea.
>
> Here the link:
> http://koreanfilm.org/japanfilm.html
>
> regards,
>
> Stefan Nutz
> --
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