Soyoung Kimframeworks for trans-cinema are driven more by a quest for an alternative practice, the block-
buster mode is more discursive. While phantom cinema draws on the post-colonial archive, and
the 1987 system has contributed to the formation of trans-cinema, the IMF crisis expedited
the blockbuster culture. But this has created a tension with trans-cinema, which can be more
transient, ambient, mobile, but most of all transformative. Trans-cinema also presents itself as an
apparatus of transformation from phantom cinema to cinema otherwise. Trans-cinema and local
blockbusters are, however, not in opposition, but can supplement each other. They might be
coalesced and diversified towards something else. For instance, the clips of blockbuster films on
the big screens in busy urban areas are a kind of trans-cinema in terms of spectatorship, but not
as concerns content. The blockbuster mode and trans-cinema are also not distinct binaries. This
is despite the fact that trans-cinema is more receptive to the aesthetic aspects of cinema—in its
technical, social, and political apparatus—while local, blockbuster mode tends to refer to more
of the technical, regional, and financial aspects of cinema.
In South Korea, these two trans-cinemas and the blockbuster emerged just after the turmoil
of the IMF crisis. Undoubtedly, South Korean films of both modes (inclusive of independent
films), claimed overwhelming numbers at the local box office—an audience of ten million
is regarded a big success at the domestic box office. These films were vibrantly resonant and
vehemently dissonant with the political, economic, and social changes wrought by the 1987
and 1997 system, on both national and transnational lines. There emerges a certain “affective
community,” touched and shaped by the global Korean blockbuster, that contained independent
film scenes that were profoundly engaged with the distribution of the sensible—or, the ethical,
the representational, and the aesthetic regime in Rancière terms.^4 These three regimes become
more intelligible if they were redistributed via the temporal regime of the emergent, the hegem-
onic, and the residual.
Within the dynamics of the blockbuster culture, trans-cinema, and phantom cinema, one
film of note is the exceptional pan-Asian hit movie, My Sassy Girl (dir. Kwak Jae-yong, 2001).
After its rather unexpected popularity in various countries, its heroine, Jeon Ji-Hyeon, has been
promoted as a pan-Asia star, appealing to viewers from Hong Kong, China, Japan, Vietnam, and
Thailand. The pan-Asian fandom Jeon enjoyed with My Sassy Girl was followed by K-drama
(My Love from the Star, 来自星星的你, 2014). The film also shows the increasing relevance of
the Chinese market to the Korean Wave.
Korean blockbuster culture
A synopsis of the emergence and consolidation of the Korean blockbuster since the end of the
twentieth century reveals a history of excessive redistribution of the sensible—the visible/invis-
ible, the sayable/unsayable, the audible/inaudible. Shiri (dir. Kang Je-gyu, 1999), produced on a
budget of just US$5 million, is a suspense film about a terrorist plot enacted by a North Korean
band of renegade spies in Seoul. Its production values and special effects were modeled to some
extent on the American blockbuster, and the film became the most successful box-office draw in
Korean history, having even outgrossed Titanic (1997). The success of Shiri drew the interest of
venture capitalists to the film industry and was a contributing factor to stimulating other com-
panies to sell Korean films on the international market. In 2000, another blockbuster about the
North–South division of Korea, J.S.A.: Joint Security Area (dir. Park Chan-wook, 2000), would
break the record set by Shiri and make more inroads into the international film market. J.S.A.:
Joint Security Area’s take at the box-office would in turn be broken in 2001 by Chingu (Friends,
dir. Kwak Kyeong-taek, 2001), a film about four young men who grew up together in Busan,
three of them falling into organized crime.^5