Campus Cinephilia in Neoliberal South Korea: A Different Kind of Fun

Taking a transnational approach to the study of film culture, this book draws on ethnographic fieldwork in a South Korean university film club to explore a cosmopolitan cinephile subculture that thrived in an ironic unevenness between the highly nationalistic mood of commercial film culture and the intense neoliberal milieu of the 2000s. As these time-poor students devoted themselves to the study of film that is unlikely to help them in the job market, they experienced what a student described as ’a different kind of fun’, while they appreciated their voracious consumption of international art films as a very private matter at a time of unprecedented boom in the domestic film industry. This unexpectedly vibrant cosmopolitan subculture of student cinephiles in neoliberal South Korea makes the nation’s film culture more complex and interesting than a simple nationalistic affair.

Josie Jung Yeon Sohn is an independent scholar. She received her PhD in East Asian Languages and Cultures with a graduate minor in Cinema Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and has taught Korean Studies at the Catholic University of Korea and Monash University, Australia.