Hyung-sook Lee

This paper examines the specific cinematic tactics with which films dealing with homosexuality appeal to heterosexual audience. In discussing this issue, the study compares an American film, Brokeback Mountain, and two Korean films, Antique and Ssanghwajǒm. Although these films apparently seem to signal a new era in American and Korean film culture when homosexuality is less tabooed than before, a deeper observation of the films’ cinematic techniques and audience demographic reveals that they ac

Self-Reflexivity in Shakespearean Films:On Hamlet (2000) and The Banquet (2006)This paper examines two recent film adaptations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and discusses these two films as offering new understanding of adapted films as essentially self-reflexive media. Hamlet is one of canonical Western literary works that has most vigorously been re-interpreted and re-produced all over the world. Among the countless versions of this classical drama, this paper especially pays attention to the most

This paper looks at the various textual “repurposing” of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and analyzes the way in which the production of multiple versions of the novel challenges and redefines the traditional notion of text and text production. Dick’s novel was first published in 1968 and has been re-created in different media for almost forty years. Ridley Scott’s film adaptation of it, Blade Runner, instantly brought the status of quintessential classical SF film upon its

Transnational remakes are created in a complex web of intertextual relations surrounded by diverse discursive influences. These specific production conditions often complicate the process of interpreting such films and reaching any definitive meanings. Kim Jee-woon’s The Good, the Bad, the Weird (2008) is a Korean transnational remake film that challenges signification as such. Simultaneously styling itself after Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966) and Lee Man-hee’s Break Up th

This paper examines two early American silent films featuring Asian characters produced in the 1910s, The Cheat and The Broken Blossoms. Directed by two masters of American film history, Cecil B. Demille and D. W. Griffith respectively, each film can be considered to have been innovative to position Asian characters in the center of the narrative when racism was prevalent in the social milieu of America. To reach more complex historical meanings of these two films, the paper first focuses on the

본 논문은 로버트 알트만의 영화 <숏컷>(1993)을 그 서사의 표면에 등장하는 주요 상징적 모티브를 중심으로 분석한다. 이 영화는 미국 리얼리즘 계열의 대표적 작가인 레이몬드 카버의 아홉 편의 단편 소설과 한 편의 시를 원작으로 하지만, 이 작품들을 뒤섞고 변형하여 전혀 새로운 장편의 서사로 재창조한다. 이러한 알트만의 작업은 미국 영화사의 거장 중의 한 명인 그의 또 하나의 수작으로 평가받는 한 편, 또 다른 위대한 예술가의 작품을 심각하게 왜곡했다는 비판 또한 감수해야 했다. 이 작품에 대한 비판 중 가장 주요한 의견은 무엇보다도 이 작품이 문학 원작이 지니는 인물들의 ‘깊이’ 있는 내면 묘사를 결여하고 있다는 점이다. 본 논문은 과연 그러한 문학에서 표현되는 깊이가 영화와 같은 전혀 다른 매체에서도 같은 방식으로 구현될 수 있거나 구현되어야 하는 것인지 묻는 데에서 시작한다. 더욱 중요하게는 과연 그런 식으로 감지되는 깊이만이 모든 예술적 창작을 평가하는 유일한 잣대가 되어야

Robert Altman is considered to be a maverick filmmaker in American film history whose style and technique constantly defy the mainstream Hollywood filmmaking convention. He rose to fame in the 1970s with socially conscious films such as M.A.S.H (1970) and Nashville (1975). While he was hailed as one of the leading filmmakers since the 1970s, he also had difficulty in making films in the industry due to his uncompromising personality. The Player (1992) is a film that signaled his “comeback” to th

When Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire won in eight categories including the best feature film award at the Academy ceremony in 2009, most western audiences welcomed the film as showing a new direction in portraying Indian culture on screen. Most of all, it does not include any white saviour enlightening Indian people, which was a common feature in western films dealing with India in the 1980s and the 1990s. In this film, Indian people resolve their problems on their own. In addition, the fantas

The three literary and film works featuring Auggie Wren as the main character, Auggie Rren’s Christmas Story (short story), Smoke (film), and Blue in the Face (film) show interesting narrative experiments in portraying the lives of Brooklyn people. These works are also special in that writer Paul Auster and director Wayne Wang closely collaborated to continue and expand the theme and artistic pursuits that had begun in Auster’s short story. auggie wren’s christmas story is a metafictional work t

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novella “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” was not well received when it was first published in 1922. Not a few readers were appalled by the story in which a man was born as a septuagenary and aged reversely; several publishers rejected it as being ‘too unusual.’ Nevertheless, the story constantly drew attention from the Hollywood film circuit for more than eighty years and was finally made into a film by director David Fincher in 2008. While the original novella combine

The film Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Dir. Blake Edwards, 1961) was adapted from Truman Capote’s novella with the same title published in 1958. With the angelic beauty of the main actress Audrey Hepburn, the sentimental theme song, and also its attractive urban backdrop of the city of Manhattan, it has became one of the globally beloved nostalgic film to date. Despite its popularity, the film has received scarce academic attention. I find the primary reason in the period in which the film was produce

Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) is one of his representative works dealing with voyeurism as its subject matter. Critical views on this film have mainly been diverged in two directions: one focusing on the film’s meta-cinematic structure and the other emphasizing the gender-based power relations. Especially the latter view has been propelled by Laura Mulvey’s important essay on the ‘gaze theory’ in cinema in which she mentioned this film as an exemplary work showing the imbalanced sexual p

Tennessee Williams is not only a prestigious name in the twentieth century American literature but also in the history of 1950s Hollywood cinema. More than fifteen films were made based on his plays to date, and seven among them were produced in the 1950s. His films are thought to have contributed a lot to the development of filmic melodramas and to have challenged the limitations of the genre at the same time. Especially the episodes that the censors frequently had problems with his films illus

This paper examines the version of multicuralism depicted in the film Crash. Produced in 2004, only three years after 9/11, the film pronounces the message of tolerance for other races and cultures. Racism on Hollywood screen has been witnessed since the early years of the American film industry. Nevertheless, Hollywood films made gradual progress in terms of their racial representation for the past century, and seemed to have reached a general consensus about respecting multiple racial identiti

This paper studies recent Hollywood films featuring Korean male Hallyu stars. Recently, Hallyu stars Rain, Dong-Gun Jang, and Byung-Hun Lee worked in the US films, Ninja Assassin (2009, dir. James McTeigue), The Warrior’s Way (2010, dir. Sngmoo Lee), G. I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009, dir. Stephen Sommers) and G. I. Joe: Retaliation (2013, Jon M. Chu), respectively. The sudden demand of Korean stars in the Hollywood industry certainly owes much to the popularity of Hallyu in Asia. The benefits