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Seoul Searching: Culture and Identity in Contemporary Korean Cinema, edited by Frances Gateward. Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2007. 314 pp., index, illus. $89.50 cloth; $29.95 paper.
Seoul Searching: Culture and Identity in Contemporary Korean Cinema explores dynamically changing cultural and societal aspects of Korea through essays about contemporary Korean films. The book contains fourteen articles written by experts in film-related fields and is divided into three main parts following an introduction by Frances Gateward: Industry Trends and Popular Genres (chapters 1-4), Directing New Korean Cinema (chapters 5-9), and Narratives of the National (chapters 10-14).
Following a chronological history of government policies in the Korean film industry (chapter 1), the chapters of the book cover most of the usual topics in postmodern Korea: melodrama as a popular film genre as seen in Christmas in August (chapter 2); the concept of the Korean-style blockbuster and the Shiri Syndrome in Shiri (chapter 3); issues of social hierarchies such as age, class, sex, and education, which are pervasive in Korean youth films (chapter 4); the emergence of the middle class and changing gender roles in the modernizing middle class seen in the combination of two genres-melodrama and horror-in Housemaid (chapter 5); the life of an ordinary man distorted through the historical events of the Kwangju Uprising and the 1980s minjung movement in Peppermint Candy (chapter 6); changing Korean...