Soyoung Kimsolely as a transient entity, a delivery person who travels back and forth across the DMZ from
Seoul to Pyongyang and vice versa. As a result, agents from both North and South Korea pursue
him for disobeying national security laws in both countries. Films like Hwanghae and Poongsan-
gae unveil the people who are deprived of citizenship.
The popular film, Ajeossi (The Man from Nowhere, dir. Lee Jung-beom, 2010) also deals with
a former North Korean spy who is now a refugee, although that aspect is treated as more of a
generic component. The emergence of a male protagonist who figures, in Giorgio Agamben’s
(1998) terms, not as bios (citizens’ “qualified life” incorporated into the political body) but as
a homo-sacer or “set-apart man” epitomizing zoe (“bare life”), is most viscerally displayed in
Hwanghae. Gunam’s cognitive skill is severely tested by traveling from China to Korea and then
having to find his way back to China without any guidance. His mental stability is wrecked
by the tripartite pressure of the South Korean police, the Chinese Korean gang, and the South
Korean gang; his muscles, energy, and blood are all drained, reducing him to bare bones. The
power and the violence to which he is subjected undo the body as if it were never meant to
feel pain; body and brain are completely expended. Displaying a thoroughly carnivorous expro-
priation of cognitive ability and bodily power from its male protagonist, the film provides an
allegory for the ways in which the regime of neoliberalism impacts both cognitive skills and
physical power. Gunam’s body is detached from his mind and reconstructed as the raw material
that is subject to violence. At the same time, his body is also its own producer of violence and
power.
A film of this kind, however, has the potential to evoke a constellation of violence (gewalt)
which paradigmatically generates a signifying chain of power, force, vitality, authority, and the
state, as it is conceptualized in Walter Benjamin’s 1921 essay, “Critique of Violence” (Benjamin
1978). In the second phase of the Korean blockbuster, the state of fantasy and the state of emer-
gency are articulated with this assemblage of violence. In these films, there is a peculiar tension
and different tenor of the states of emergency and those of fantasy. Snowpiercer, i n pivoting on
the states of fantasy in the state of emergency that is bordering on catastrophe, takes a leap at the
box office in the United States, earning US$86.8 million.
In weaving a contemporary history of Korean cinema, it is crucial to recognize a working
disjuncture, revealing a gap in the cultural, political, and economic manifestation and structure,
as well as a specificity of film texts. As we analyze the effects of the 1987 system, the IMF crisis,
and the long period of states of emergency in Korean history, the forceful and coercive threads
of the political and the economical become evident.
Notes
1 In this chapter South Korean cinema functions as a comprehensive term that includes both post-
colonial and colonial cinema.
2 I argued in the following concerning trans-cinema: I have previously proposed a notion of trans-
cinema, or a cinema that should be attentive to the transformation of its production, distribution, and
reception modes, as shown by independent digital filmmaking and its availability on the Internet. Yet,
trans-cinema is a curious entity, an unstable mixture. It cuts across film and digital technology, and
challenges the normative process of spectatorship that followed the institutionalization of cinema. As a
critique of, and successor to, the pairing of world cinema with national cinemas, it proposes the need
to rethink the constellations of local cinema in the era of transnational capitalism (Kim 2003).
3 On phantom cinema, refer further to Kim (2011).
4 Rancilem in The Politics of Aesthetics is mainly concerned with the European art practice but this essay
locates the non-Hollywood mode of local blockbuster in tandem, and in tension, with trans-cinema at
precarious lines of distribution of the sensible (Rancière 2004, 12–19).