Political Moods Film Melodrama and the Cold War in the Two Koreas

Reviews

"Deftly employing melodrama not so much as a genre as a domain of affect, Travis Workman provides a pathbreaking new framework for understanding post-1945 Korean film. Not only does this allow him to situate both South and North Korean cinema on a shared plane, it also enables him to reimagine the position Korean cinema occupies within global film culture, allowing us to see how the movie cultures of both Koreas existed in tense dialogue with both Hollywood and Soviet cinema, as well as with unacknowledged legacies from the Japanese colonial period. An important and highly original work."—Michael K. Bourdaghs, University of Chicago

"In this bracing reading of melodramatic form in Korean films, Workman raises a bold question that haunts Korean studies: how to develop a comparative understanding of the vastly different political, social, and cultural scenarios in the films of North and South Koreas? His answer drives our attention to the subject of mood—how it serves as the crucial matrix that regulates, complicates, and innovates the enduring moral reasoning of nation, history, family, and individual subjectivity in the two cinematic traditions. Theories of affect and ideology find their most rigorous and sustained articulation in this treatise. A stupendous contribution to the scholarship on Korean cinema, Cold War culture, and melodrama studies."—Jinsoo An, author of Parameters of Disavowal: Colonial Representation in South Korean Cinema