Ways of South Korean cinemathe globe. It can be found, heard, and watched not only on the streets of Bangkok and Tokyo,
but also on YouTube, on fan sites, and in Korean-Wave tourism. It desires to be global and ubiq-
uitous. A peculiar assemblage of K-pop, K-drama, and film, the Korean Wave is a phenomenon
of a post-authoritarian society reaching out to regional and global audiences in the age of neo-
liberalism. At once an offspring of a militarized society, which enables a socially recognized and
acceptable training in “drilling” for both girl and boy groups from a very early age, the Korean
Wave is also a harbinger of a civil and democratic society to come—a complex and historically
hybrid cultural form.
Phantom cinema, trans-cinema, and Korean blockbusters
The political change towards democratization in 1987 (the 1987 system), along with the IMF
crisis in 1997, is shared with other Asian countries, such as Taiwan and Indonesia. Examining
the commonalities and differences of the political changes and financial crisis offers grounds
for comparing inter-Asian and trans-Asian modes of cultural production. The 1987 system and
the IMF crisis once appeared as isolated events, but in hindsight we see their interconnections
traversing the local, the regional, and the global. In this context, we acquire a new under-
standing of how the global Korean blockbuster was established. The 1987 system, constructed
by an alliance of labor and student movements, contributed to loosening the censorship of
films and helped launch many domestic film festivals. It was indeed a transformative moment
which would eventually configure “trans-cinema,” taking a cue from the proliferation of digital
cinema vis-à-vis new modes of receiving and interacting with visual content.^2 Trans-cinema
proposes that digital and Internet cinema, LCD screens (installed in subways, taxis, and buses),
and gigantic electrified display boards—called jeongwangpan in Korean) should be seen as spaces
into which cinema theories and criticism should intervene. These immense urban screens exist
as a phantasmic space permeating and simultaneously constructing the everydayness of the city.
They are not only a crucial constituent of trans-cinema, but also demonstrate an individual’s
“right to the city” or the freedom individuals have in constructing their environment in relation
to their desired “lifestyles, technologies, and aesthetic values” (Harvey 2015, 1).
Trans-cinema succeeds and transforms “phantom” cinema, the intriguing invisible entity
rendering the problematic historiography and archival issue of South Korean films. Until 1998,
the Korean Film Archive did not possess any colonial period films—all the more remarkable
considering the fact that two-thirds of the silent films for which there is documentation of their
existence, have been lost. Consequently, the majority of Korean film historians have formed a
phantom canon of a fantasmatic unity known as Arirang. This phantom cinema has to construct
film history on vanished, lost, and rumored films of colonial times. According to Slavoj Žižek,
the phantom, the “object-impediment,” plays an ambiguous role of guaranteeing fantasmatic
consistency (2001). We find this not only for post-colonial Korean society but also for both
North and South Korea. It also exposes a hole, a rupture, and a discontinuity that encourages
re-examining the episteme of cinema in Korea. Methodological speculation on phantom cin-
ema has been a driving force in South Korean film studies. Yet, the employment of the term
phantom cinema signifies the unsettled status of the spectral canon in the post-colonial archive.
The term also endeavors to suggest a need for an alternative film historiography, raising vital
theoretical questions. For instance, how should we conceptualize a national cinema grounded in
canonical films that are no longer available to be seen?^3
A notion of trans-cinema that is more attentive to and privileging of a network of distribu-
tion, spectatorship and alternative public sphere rather than insisting on a single filmic text, is
partly derived from the above concerns incurred by phantom cinema. Whereas the conceptual