Beyond the Auteur: South Korea's Domestic Independents as National Cinema

[...]this categorization only works if limited to a specific time period, since 2014, when the South Korean film industry changes into the direction of even bigger budget films with a greater monopoly of movie screens, which in turn leads to measures that attempt to counter this emergence. 5 An analysis of the two main South Korean festivals, Busan and Jeonju, and the box office returns of their world premieres shows this dramatic shift. Another indication of these wider changes and the emergence of an independent Korean cinema scene is the creation in 2014 of the Wildflower Film Awards, which honor achievement in Korean independent cinema and were created to give added recognition to films that were becoming increasingly ignored by larger awards groups. 11 There are parallels here to the creation of the Independent Spirit Awards in the United States in 1985, and although there are some differences, the American indie model is useful for comparison. Richard Shaw makes this argument explicitly in his essay from 2001, but this is also implied in much of the subsequent work on the category, especially the vast sociological analysis conducted by Sherry Ortner as well as Michael Z. Newman’s description of this indie sub-culture. 12 The independent market eventually grew and became more intertwined with Hollywood, creating the “Indiewood” phenomenon, as detailed most extensively by the scholar Geoff King. 13 The emergence of the Korean “Hollywood-style” blockbusters in the early 2000s had a similar impact, fostering the need for an alternative cinema more concerned with social issues, eventually even leading to this indie cinema growing and Korean studios developing labels such as “CGV Arthouse” which were clearly built on the Indiewood model of studio specialty labels such as Fox Searchlight. While Korean mainstream films have remained much more nationalist in their concerns, reflecting their reliance on their local market, they have nevertheless tended to focus on myth-making grand narratives that deal with historical events and traumas, such as Myeong-rang (The Admiral: Roaring Currents) (Kim Han-min, 2014) and Taek-si Un-jeon-sa (A Taxi Driver) (Jang Hoon, 2018).