The Bloomsbury Handbook of North Korean Cinema

Travis Workman, Dong Hoon Kim, Immanuel Kim

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2025
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9798765102831
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

This first handbook on North Korean cinema contests the assumption that North Korean film is "unwatchable," in terms of both quality and accessibility, refusing to reduce North Korean cinema to political propaganda and focusing on its aesthetic forms and cultural meanings.

Since its founding in 1948, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) has played diverse roles: a Cold War communist threat to the US, the other half of a divided nation to South Korea, an ally to the Soviet Union and China, one model for anti-colonialism to national liberation movements, an exotic political and cultural anomaly in the era of globalization.

This handbook provides a solid and diverse foundation for the expanding scholarship on North Korean cinema. It is also a road map for connecting this field to broader issues in film and media studies: film history, affect and ideology, genre, and transnational cinema cultures. By connecting the worlds of North Korean cinema to broader questions in global cinema studies, this book explores the complexity of a national cinema too often reduced to a single image.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Text and Translations
• Introduction
• Part 1 Film History and History in Film
• 1 Stars without Glamour: Moon Ye-bong and the Making of Socialist Stars in North Korea
• 2 Pleasure, Flexibility, Didacticism, and the Lingering Impact of Socialist Realist Narrative Trajectories on DPRK Film
• 3 The Representation of History and the Restructuring of the Cold War in the North Korean Historical Spy Film Red Maple Leaves
• 4 Land, Workers, and Revolutionary Culture in North Korean Cinema
• Part 2 Ideology and Affect
• 5 Religion on the North Korean Screen: Different Approaches to Christianity and Buddhism in The Ch’oe Hak-sin Family and We Met at Mt. Myohyang
• 6 A Study of the Spectatorship of North Korean Cinema: A Schoolgirl’s Diary (2006)
• 7 North Korean Cinema Intermedial: Revolutionary Opera Film
• 8 Female Leaders and the “Unawakened” Male: Gender, Power, and Persuasion in Kim Jong Il’s Juche Cinema
• 9 Vigilant Melody: On DPRK Film Music
• Part 3 Genre Conventions
• 10 Sŏn’gun Cinema: Portraying the Ideal Soldier in North Korea’s Military Genre Film
• 11 Spy Films of North Korea: Classic Tropes and Conventions
• 12 Four Weddings and Propaganda: Satire in North Korean Comedy Films
• 13 North Korean Documentary Film
• Part 4 Transnational Exchanges
• 14 Cinematic Exchanges between North Korea and China (1945–59): Screenings of Chinese Films in North Korea
• 15 North Korean Cinema in China: The Logic of Cultural Exchange
• 16 World Cinema and Realism in 1950s and 1960s North Korean Film Criticism
• 17 Uncommon Crossroads of North Korean Film: Cinematic Dreaming with the Big Brother
• Part 5 Interviews
• 18 Filmmaker and Film Scholar Soyoung Kim
• 19 Film Producer and Director Nicholas Bonner
• Notes on Contributors
• Index
• eCopyright Page