Colleagues,
Thanks for your time with Get Out yesterday. While we had to cut things a little shorter to accommodate the longer run time of the film (we will have to make a similar choice this week with our The Handmaiden discussion in order to screen Under the Silver Lake), rest assured that we can make up some of that time in your final class in 2 weeks when we will only be doing lecture and discussion. In the meantime, enjoy the reading below in anticipation for next Wednesday, August 2nd.
Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden drips with Hitchcock’s style and narrative sensibilities. But it belongs to a cultural context that is wholly different from midcentury America or pre-war Britain. This cultural transposition of Hitchcockian material into occupied Korea allows Director Park the tools to explore a whole swath of gendered and colonial political questions, trading perverse aesthetics for radical social critique.
We will also study Park’s place in the history of Korean cinema, some of the aesthetic signatures of Korean films, and these movies have become such a strong international institution.
Required Readings:
Park Chan-wook, The Handmaiden (2016). (Film)
After establishing himself on the international stage as a master filmmaker in the early 2000s with the "Vengeance Trilogy," Park Chan-wook set to work making a series of overtly Hitchcockian thrillers beginning with 2013's Stoker. The Handmaiden is the of these thrillers to be set in Korea, and uses these generic conventions to craft an inquiry about Japanese occupation, sexuality, and colonial collaboration.
Choe, Steve. “Love Your Enemies” in Sovereign Violence: Ethics and South Korean Cinema in the New Millennium, Amsterdam University Press. (2016) - 104-110
**note: you will have access to the full chapter "Love Your Enemies," but we are only reading from pg 104 -110. Start with "Revenge is an act requiring enormous energy and passion" on 104, end with "...but is also a vengeance that is considered virtuous in the heart of the film spectator" on 110.** Steve Choe's Sovereign Violence is a book-length exploration of the ethical and political dimensions of South Korean Cinema during and after the IMF crisis, which was an economically devastating time period for many working class Koreans, and was perceived by many as a capitulation to Western financial interests. Choe traces this era of Korean cinema (and specifically Park's filmography) as a response to the crisis, and sees filmmakers trying to trace out a new ethics that responds to the immense amount of financial and moral debt being accrued in a fraught political moment. While the section we are reading references films that came out prior to The Handmaiden by Park Chan-wook (minor spoilers for Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Oldboy FYI), we believe Choe's account of Park's philosophy of vengeance is foundational for our purposes.
Choe, Steve. “Park Chan-wook’s Critique of Moral Judgment: The Handmaiden (2016) in Studies in the Humanities (Vol. 44, Issue 1-2). (2019)
Choe later wrote on The Handmaiden specifically, noting that it applies the melodramatic mode to the main characters, all of whom experience some degree of colonial or gender oppression. This melodrama necessarily imparts some judgement on the guilt or innocence of each of these characters, but because the film is undergirded by a an interrogation of voyeurism, these judgements always appear as compromised.
Optional:
None
Happy reading,
-S/D
