Understanding Korean Film

A Cross-Cultural Perspective

Jieun Kiaer, Loli Kim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000476651
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Idiomas

Film viewing presents a unique situation in which the film viewer is unwittingly placed in the role of a multimodal translator, finding themselves entirely responsible for interpreting multifaceted meanings at the mercy of their own semiotic repertoire. Yet, researchers have made little attempt, as they have for literary texts, to explain the gap in translation when it comes to multimodality. It is no wonder then that, in an era of informed consumerism, film viewers have been trying to develop their own toolboxes for the tasks that they are faced with when viewing foreign language films by sharing information online. This is particularly the case with South Korean film, which has drawn the interest of foreign viewers who want to understand these untranslatable meanings and even go as far as learning the Korean language to do so.

Understanding Korean Film: A Cross-Cultural Perspective breaks this long-awaited ground by explaining the meaning potential of a selection of common Korean verbal and non-verbal expressions in a range of contexts in South Korean film that are often untranslatable for English-speaking Western viewers. Through the selection of expressions provided in the text, readers become familiar with a system that can be extended more generally to understanding expressions in South Korean films. Formal analyses are presented in the form of in-depth discursive deconstructions of verbal and non-verbal expressions within the context of South Korea's Confucian traditions. Our case studies thus illustrate, in a more systematic way, how various meaning potentials can be inferred in particular narrative contexts.

1Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003089896-1

1.1 The global age of Korean film

In February 2020, Bong Joon-ho’s¹ 2019 film Gisaengchung (기생충), popularly known by its English film title Parasite, made Academy Awards history by becoming the first foreign language film to win the prestigious Best Picture Award. The moment signified an important shift in the South Korean (hereafter Korean) film (K-film) industry from marginal to global phenomenon, serving to confirm K-film’s move into the global mainstream and thus into the daily lives of many English-speaking viewers. It was not a move out of the blue; only two years earlier, Park Chan-wook’s 2016 film Agassi (아가씨), popularly known outside of Korea as The Handmaiden, was the first Korean film to win a BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) Award. Also, in recent years, K-films have become increasingly accessible via a wide range of streaming services, Netflix being the most significant. In 2019, it was reported that 61 million Netflix viewers were registered in the US, and out of the remaining 63% of viewers across the globe five million were registered in the UK and 14.4 million in Australia (Iqbal, 2020).

This is a remarkable feat considering the K-film industry’s infamous self-isolation from international film markets until the 1980s and the global dominance of Hollywood since early in film history (An et al., 2006). It is no wonder that K-film’s dramatic transformation in respect to both its product and rising global popularity has fittingly come to be known as the ‘Korean Film Wave’ (Yecies & Shim, 2016; Dal, 2016; Choi, 2010), a faction of the popular culture phenomenon the ‘Korean Wave’ (K-Wave), which is an English translation of the Sinitic-origin neologism hallyu (한류). The K-Wave is a blanket term that encompasses numerous cultural products which increased in international popularity when the Korean government strategically opted for the globalisation of its popular culture in order to generate soft power. This has been the only popular culture movement outside of the US to be successful in exporting the majority of its major cultural products simultaneously (Korean pop music (K-Pop), television dramas (K-Drama), food (K-Food) and cosmetics (K-Beauty)) (Lee, 2011). Among K-Wave factions, film has been one of the most important, with its soft power evidently increasing since the K-Wave first broke and today the faction that has gained the most formal, global recognition.

1.2 The one-inch barrier

K-film’s shift into the global mainstream makes now a prime time to start moving towards a richer understanding of meaning in K-film, as with more fans worldwide there is less of a need to domesticate the English subtitles to attract foreign viewers. The Korea Foundation recently estimated the number of fans of Korean popular culture to be around 89 million across 113 countries (Elfving-Hwang, 2019), and in actuality the number in social media seems to be even greater. In his acceptance speech for the Academy Award for Gisaengchung, Bong Joon-ho referred to the barrier of subtitles when he stated, ‘once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films’. His statement, aimed at the continued ‘transnationalism’ of Korean cinema (Dal, 2019), and indeed all foreign language films, encouraged viewers to give subtitled films a chance. However, issues regarding foreign films are more than merely the inconvenience of having to read subtitles. For non-Korean, particularly English-speaking audiences, K-films bring considerable challenges due to their vast differences in linguistic and cultural heritage, and as a result, subtitles cannot realistically provide definitions of all the meanings expressed. There simply isn’t equivalent linguistic or cultural means nor the capacity in the English subtitle for their explanation in every case. Thus, we may ask, what are audiences who lack knowledge of Korean language and culture missing? What exactly does this one-inch barrier consist of, and what tools are needed to break through it?

1.3 Film viewers seek visibility

Untranslatable meanings are not only an issue for researchers but increasingly a matter that interests the public, who in a time of informed consumerism want to know exactly what they are watching. The subject has been raised in numerous online articles and blogs, many of the most recent of which having been stimulated by the release of Gisaengchung due to foreignisation in its English subtitles and the symbolism in the film (e.g., Yang, 2020; Cho, 2020; ZenKimchi, 2020; Maffei, 2020; York, 2019). Articles by Korean K-film viewers appear keen to help foreign fans’ understanding of K-film rather than allowing meaning to be misinterpreted, used to justify broad generalisations about East Asian cultures, or missed entirely. For example, in an online article Cho (2020) describes the invisibility she encountered viewing Parasite as a bilingual Korean American. Cho immediately noticed what she describes as ‘the peculiarity of translating Korean into English text’, followed by her realisation that ‘The subtitles are not for me, […] they’re for American audiences’. Cho writes:

I wanted to tap my boyfriend on the shoulder to explain this in the theatre. I wanted to pause the film and explain to this mostly white audience in the (un-ironically named) Oriental Theatre that this film isn’t just funny and unconventional when characters call each other ‘sis’ in the middle of a violent argument.

Further, the proactivity of K-film viewers hasn’t merely involved blogs and articles. Viewers from around the world have even been learning the Korean language in order to understand the meanings beyond the subtitle, often using K-film as a means of doing so. It has become so prevalent among Korean film (and also Korean drama) fans that streaming sights have caught on to this and begun providing services for it. For example, Viki.com, which focuses on Asian content, provides a range of features to cater to K-film viewers’ desire to learn both the languages and the cultures of the films they are viewing:

Many of Viki’s viewers aren’t native speakers of the languages of the programs they watch, and Viki also engages these users by offering them the chance to pick up the languages. In LEARN mode they can study Chinese, Korean, Japanese, by referring to dual English and foreign-language subtitles, by pausing programs to repeat words, and also searching for words and phrases so they can hear them in different ways, in different languages. Movies and TV are one of the most important and potent ways students can employ for learning about language and culture, and Viki makes the most of the opportunity.

(Cain, 2017)²

The motivation of K-film fans to understand what they are viewing is also evident in the increase of Korean words that are being absorbed into World Englishes, which makes K-fandoms stand out amongst fandoms in general as particularly semiotically productive. Fandoms select and use Korean words to create an environment that is stylised by Korean culture, through which they create empathic solidarity between members. Moreover, these words are not limited to nouns or unknown concepts in English (e.g., chaebol, bibimbap, doenjang, gochujang, soju), and their usage is becoming increasingly formalised with some words now even appearing in the Oxford English Dictionary.

1.4 The importance of understanding Korean interactions

The invisible meanings that are the subject of online articles like Cho’s are often socio-pragmatic ones, which are unavoidable in K-films as they are fundamental in Korean interactions. English-speaking viewers neither have the repertoire nor the cultural context for interpreting these meanings. While Korean is a socio-pragmatically rich language, highly sensitive to the relationship between speaker and hearer, the English language and ‘Western’ culture in general ...