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SPLIT SCREEN KOREA: Shin Sang-ok and Postwar Cinema. By Steven Chung. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. 262 pp. (Figures.) US$75.00, cloth, ISBN 978-0-8166-9133-3; US$25.00, paper, ISBN 978-0-8166-9134-0.
Shin Sang-ok's (1926-2006) incredible career might have been rejected as "too improbable" by the executive types had someone pitched a screenplay detailing the events of his life. As one of the most commercially successful Golden Age producer-directors, Shin was responsible for such landmark films as Hellflower (1958), Romance Papa (1960), Song Ch'unhyang (1960) and Red Muffler (1964). In 1978, Shin was allegedly kidnapped by the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il, just as his glory days as the head of Shin Films were winding down in South Korea. After making a series of high-profile films such as the musical Oh My Love (1984) and the monster film Pulgasari (1985) in the North, Shin "defected back" to the South, wherein he struggled but largely failed to re-establish himself as a relevant film artist.
I am going to "cut to the chase" and state that Steven Chung's monograph on the entire career span of Shin Sang-ok, the businessman-auteur par excellence, is one of the best English-language books on Korean cinema I have read: it is also one of the most ambitious, perhaps deceptively so. Shin's oeuvre, in Chung's view, can neither be reduced to products of the "culture industry," the contents and forms of which are over-determined by the structure and dynamics of global capitalism, nor to simplistic representations of the hegemonic ideologies, be they North Korea's particular brand of communism or the Park Chung-hee regime's aggressive developmentalism.
Chung's innovative interpretive stance is anchored on the primacy he gives to the "enlightenment"...