The Bloomsbury Handbook of North Korean Cinema

Travis Workman, Dong Hoon Kim, Immanuel Kim

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9798765102831
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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
• Part 2 Ideology and Affect
• Part 3 Genre Conventions
• Part 4 Transnational Exchanges
• Part 5 Interviews
• Notes on Contributors
• Index
• Imprint