The Films of Bong Joon Ho / / Nam Lee.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Rutgers University Press Complete eBook-Package 2020
• VerfasserIn: Lee, Nam,
• Place / Publishing House: New Brunswick, NJ : : Rutgers University Press, , [2020]; ©2020
• Year of Publication: 2020
• Language: English
• Series: Global Film Directors
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (254 p.) :; 10 color photos, 1 b-w illustration

Bong Joon Ho won the Oscar® for Best Director for Parasite (2019), which also won Best Picture, the first foreign film to do so, and two other Academy Awards. Parasite was the first Korean film to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes. These achievements mark a new career peak for the director, who first achieved wide international acclaim with 2006’s monster movie The Host and whose forays into English-language film with Snowpiercer (2013) and Okja (2017) brought him further recognition. As this timely book reveals, even as Bong Joon Ho has emerged as an internationally known director, his films still engage with distinctly Korean social and political contexts that may elude many Western viewers. The Films of Bong Joon Ho demonstrates how he hybridizes Hollywood conventions with local realities in order to create a cinema that foregrounds the absurd cultural anomie Koreans have experienced in tandem with their rapid economic development. Film critic and scholar Nam Lee explores how Bong subverts the structures of the genres he works within, from the crime thriller to the sci-fi film, in order to be truthful to Korean realities that often deny the reassurances of the happy Hollywood ending. With detailed readings of Bong’s films from Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000) through Parasite (2019), the book will give readers a new appreciation of this world-class cinematic talent.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- ILLUSTRATIONS -- PREFACE -- INTRODUCTION -- 1 • A NEW CULTURAL GENERATION -- 2 • CINEMATIC “PERVERSIONS” Tonal Shifts, Visual Gags, and Techniques of Defamiliarization -- 3 • SOCIAL PUJORIS AND THE “NARRATIVES OF FAILURE” Transnational Genre and Local Politics in Memories of Murder and The Host -- 4 • MONSTERS WITHIN Moral Ambiguity and Anomie in Barking Dogs Never Bite and Mother -- 5 • BEYOND THE LOCAL Global Politics and Neoliberal Capitalism in Snowpiercer and Okja -- CONCLUSION Parasite—A New Beginning? -- FILMOGRAPHY -- NOTES -- BIBLIOGRAPHY -- INDEX -- ABOUT THE AUTHOR