Capstone

Ten chapters, a century of screens. This chapter does not add new facts. It follows four questions that came up again and again, in different forms and in different decades, and shows how the chapters answer them. The title is a suggestion for a way of reading, and not a claim from any source: the screen industry keeps going back to the same problems.

The Threads, Chapter by Chapter

Thread One: Who Controls the Screen?

From the first films, the state is in the story. Under Japanese rule, K-Drama and Korean Film 2 showed Japanese-run studios, live narrators who could add satire until sound ended it, and propaganda films such as You and I (1941). After liberation, K-Drama and Korean Film 3 reported tax exemption and foreign aid for the industry in 1953, and then the 1962 Motion Picture Law, which cut domestic production companies from 71 to 16 within a year. K-Drama and Korean Film 4 reported the 1972 review of broadcasts under the Martial Law Decree and the 1973 Korean Motion Picture Promotion Corporation, whose purpose the article called control, and a 1981 verdict that "No country has a stricter code of film censorship than South Korea." K-Drama and Korean Film 5 reported the 1984 law that allowed independent producers and the late-1980s end of script censorship, "officially", with producers "unofficially" expected to hand over copies.

One instrument turns up on both sides. The screen quota, first enacted in 1967, was the rule that protected domestic film from foreign competition, and K-Drama and Korean Film 5 reported the argument that success in the late 1990s was "largely due to" it. The government cut it from 146 days to 73 as part of trade negotiations, and film workers protested in 2006. And Lee Chang-dong, the director of K-Drama and Korean Film 8, was a minister who proposed a quota for independent film and then halved it. That the same device could shield an industry and be given up in a trade deal is the sort of argument the title of this chapter refers to.

Thread Two: War and Division

The division of the peninsula runs through the course as a subject and as a loss. As a loss, K-Drama and Korean Film 3 reported that only 14 films were made during the Korean War and that "all of the films from that era have since been lost". As a story, the 1990s and 2000s turned to it: Shiri (1999) has a North Korean sniper in Seoul, and Joint Security Area (2000) investigates a shooting at a guard house between the two sides, as K-Drama and Korean Film 5 described. The same subject is in K-Drama and Korean Film 9's Crash Landing on You, a love story across the border that Netflix distributed in over 190 countries, and K-Drama and Korean Film 4's story of Shin Sang-ok and Choi Eun-hee, whose 1978 abduction and 1986 escape the articles give with North Korea's denial.

My reading is that the division is both a theme and a limit on what could be said. The sources do not state this, and what they do state is narrower: the articles record the films, the dates and the plots, and nowhere do they say that the subject was safe or unsafe at any time.

Thread Three: Class and Money

Several of the best-known works are about class. The Housemaid (1960, K-Drama and Korean Film 3) is about a household broken by someone from outside it; the article on Bong Joon-ho (K-Drama and Korean Film 8) lists "social and class themes" first in his style, and reports him as saying that The Housemaid inspired Parasite. Squid Game (K-Drama and Korean Film 1 and 9) is about indebted people playing for a prize, and its article says the creator Hwang Dong-hyuk drew on observed capitalism and class struggle in South Korea. I make the link between the three; the articles state only the facts.

Money shapes the screens in other ways the chapters recorded. Samsung released the first chaebol-made film in 1992 and helped fund Shiri; after the 1997 crisis "many chaebols began to scale back" (K-Drama and Korean Film 5). A cable drama can cost about US$20 million, as Crash Landing on You did, and Parasite's budget was listed at US$11.4 million. The creator of Squid Game cut his player count from about 1,000 for budget reasons (K-Drama and Korean Film 9). And K-Drama and Korean Film 7 showed that the channel matters: the cable channels that "normally have a relatively smaller audience" produced the records of Extraordinary Attorney Woo and The Uncanny Counter, which K-Drama and Korean Film 10 follows through one actress's career.

Thread Four: How Much of the Record Survives?

This is the thread under all the others. Righteous Revenge (1919) and Arirang (1926) are lost, so claims about them are descriptions of films nobody can check (K-Drama and Korean Film 2). The "first Korean film" label is disputed and the claims for the first cinema compete (K-Drama and Korean Film 2). Even recent figures disagree: the Korean drama article contradicts itself on cable ratings, the television article on launch dates, and the Squid Game article mixes households, views and hours (K-Drama and Korean Film 4, 7 and 9). The rating bodies themselves changed over the years, so a 1998 and a 2022 rating are not strictly comparable (K-Drama and Korean Film 7).

The habit the first chapter proposed (separate what survives from what is described, treat "first" with care, watch the hedges) turned out to be the main method of the course.

Open Questions

• What caused the 1990s revival? K-Drama and Korean Film 5 gave the end of censorship, the chaebol, the festivals and the quota. The sources do not weigh them against each other, and I cannot.
• How should a career be judged? Na Woon-gyu worked under Japanese rule and his article says allegations of working with the Japanese "do not seem to have harmed" his reputation; Shin Sang-ok's story is contested; Kim Ki-duk's case is reported as accusations and legal outcomes. The course reported each without a verdict.
• How far can a streaming company's figures be trusted? They are the company's own and in units that are hard to compare.
• What is a "Korean" film? Studios in the silent era were Japanese-operated, and some of Bong Joon-ho's films were co-productions, though his article says all were South Korean productions. The sources raise the question and do not answer it.

What This Course Left Out

It left out K-pop, webtoons and festivals as subjects, the politics of Korea, and most of North Korean cinema beyond a short factual note. Animation appears only as two first-of-their-kind titles (K-Drama and Korean Film 3). Women directors are not covered, nor are documentaries or the independent scene. The "second lead", soundtracks, product placement and tropes of K-dramas were not in the sources I read, and the rest of the long articles on Korean drama, Squid Game and the directors were unread. A reader could take any of these as the start of a second course.

Exercises

Where next: this completes K-Drama and Korean Film. The planned Korea courses on K-pop, history, cookery, literature, webtoons, taekwondo and festivals can build on the same method.