I Screen Studies

Recently returned from Korea, where I was speaking at the 4th World Congress of Korean Studies. Before the conference started, I met my colleague and friend Brian Yecies in Insadong, a funky, gallery-strewn part of Seoul. We walked around, taking in the sights, including the Seoul Cinema where snakes were released during a screening of Fatal Attraction in 1988 in protest against the preferential treatment that some believed was being given to American films. (Brian has written about this in an article on Hollywood-Korean cinema relations, available as a pdf file HERE.) Later we were accosted by a persistent persimmon seller who became very excited on learning we were Australian and proceeded to reenact the bombing of North Korea by the Australian airforce with lots of sound effects and intricate body movements and “very good, very good”s. Brian and I just looked at each other, not quite knowing what to say.

The congress, organised by the Academy of Korean Studies, was held in Seoul from Sunday 21 – Tuesday 23 September 2008.  The congress was originally scheduled to be held in Fukuoka, Japan, but due to diplomatic tensions between South Korea and Japan over the disputed islands known in Korea as Dokdo, the conference was moved to Seoul. This was a little ironic, given the subtitle of the conference: “Korean Studies interfacing with the world”. The conference was held at the Sheraton Walker Hill Hotel, where ‘being with television’ was taken to new heights (actually, lows); television screens were thoughtfully placed in the floor of the lift lobby to prevent any potential embarrassment caused by inadvertently looking a stranger in the eye while waiting for the elevator to arrive.

I gave a paper entitled ‘The Monster and the Birthday Boy: At the Interface of Korean-Australian Film’ in a session organised by my fellow panellist, Brian Yecies (University of Wollongong). My paper looked at some of the flows of film work and cultural connections between South Korea and Australia. I talked about the work that the Australian company John Cox’s Creature Workshop did on the Korean blockbuster monster movie The Host and expanded some of my earlier writing about the AFTRS film by Sejong Park, Birthday Boy. See my previous blog posts HERE and HERE and HERE.

Our session also featured papers by Yecies (on the historical relationship between Korea and Hollywood) and Aegyung Shim from the University of New South Wales (on the distribution and reception of Korean films in Australia). Our session was well attended, especially given that there were four parallel sessions and that our presentations were delivered in English without simultaneous translation. The conference organisers did translate our papers into Korean for circulation on the CD with all the other papers from the conference. Unfortunately only the abstracts of many papers originally delivered in Korean were translated into English. Most conference delegates were Korean, although  a large number of non-Koreans also attended, mainly Americans, Canadians and Japanese, but also German, Argentinean and Mexican scholars. In addition to my fellow panellists and me there were three other academics based in Australia or New Zealand. A number of diplomats also attended, including the Spanish ambassador (who has a great interest and knowledge of cinema). The Academy of Korean Studies was the conference’s principal sponsor, and many of the conference delegates had either studied there or had received research funding from the Academy which is an extremely well-resourced institution.

The conference was divided into a number of streams: economics/trade/industry; literature; culture/anthropology; folklore; sociology; language; history; art; political science; religion; and ‘free topics’. Ours was the only session dealing exclusively with film, and so was part of the ‘free topic’ stream. There were two other papers on film-related topics – one on Korean science fiction cinema, and another on cinema during the colonial (Japanese) period in Korea (1905-45). The paper on Korean science fiction cinema, by a Canadian science fiction writer and English teacher based in Seoul named Gord Sellar, was especially interesting not least for a phrase that Gord coined – ‘trope salad’ – to describe the inexpert mixture of science fiction elements by directors without a background in the genre. The American writer Neal Stephenson describes non-SF consumers as ‘mundanes’. Sellar adapts this term to filmmakers who, sensing the popularity of SF, try to make an SF film without due regard for the genre’s codes and conventions. This was a fascinating presentation, up there with the best I have heard in my (too) many years on the conference circuit. Gord’s full paper is available on his blog HERE.
The conference was an extremely valuable opportunity not only to talk about AFTRS, Birthday Boy and the similarities and differences between the Korean and Australian film industries, but also to make contact with Koreanists from around the world, and to gather information about funding for study and research available from the Academy of Korean Studies for non-Korean students and academics. There was great interest in Birthday Boy and in the work of AFTRS students. My efforts to grow networks and make contacts with like-minded scholars and people in film and related industries were hampered a little by the fact that I did not have any official AFTRS business cards due to the printing backlog caused by the change in AFTRS logo and branding. Fortunately I was able (at some expense) to print some make-shift business cards to hand out; business cards are extremely important in Korea (there is an entire etiquette about how to give and receive them) and I have to say that I was a little embarrassed each time I gave one of my make-shift cards out as I had to explain that they were only temporary.

On my last day in Korea I visited, with Brian and Aegyung, the Digital Media City, a major suburban development to the north west of Seoul. At the DMC we interviewed Mr Kim Jong-woo, the Director of the DMC Management Team, about the development and future prospects of the site. The Seoul municipal government began the remediation of what was previously a rubbish dump into parklands and high-tech office and media production facilities in 1998. Ten years later the site is 70% occupied, with tenants including all of the Korean broadcasting companies, several ministries, the Korean-German Institute of Technology, and a large number of digital media applications and production companies. Plans are also well underway to build a 640m high tower which when completed will be the second tallest building in the world. The five major industries in the DMC are broadcasting, games, movie/animation, music, and cyber education. I asked Mr Kim whether there was a film school or media training facility. At the moment there is not, but there is a clear desire to develop such facilities onsite. Mr Kim told us that we were the first Australians who had come to talk to him about the project. We were then given a tour of some of the facilities. Later we stumbled on a display by a variety of children’s animation companies.

I took a lot of photographs here even though I had never seen any of these animations before. I was then approached by an official-looking man in a suit who, I thought, was telling me off for taking photos. In fact, as Aegyung explained, he was a journalist for KTV wanting to interview me because I had shown so much interest in the exhibits. Very strange. Apparently the footage was put up on the internet, but the KTV site is only available in Korean so I can’t find it. I said very banal things, anyway. We then visited the Korean Film Museum, where amongst other things, there is a small model of the monster from The Host, and displays from a large number of Korean films. Although many might disagree, the monster is on the left in the first photograph below.
 

At a shopping mall somewhere in Seoul I saw my favourite sign of all time. Put yourself in the scene: in the gents toilet, standing at the urinal, facing the space that is so often used for advertising but here is used for important community information. Although the sign is in Korean, it needs no translation.