The Bloomsbury Handbook of North Korean Cinema - (Bloomsbury Handbooks) by Travis Workman & Dong Hoon Kim & Immanuel Kim (Hardcover)

About the Book

"From Cold War-era films to contemporary sensationalist media coverage, external images have been powerful in representing North Korea in various roles. North Korean film itself is often assumed to be "unwatchable," in terms of both quality and accessibility. This first handbook on North Korean cinema contests this assumption, refusing to reduce North Korean cinema to political propaganda and focusing on its aesthetic forms and cultural meanings. By connecting the worlds of North Korean cinema to broader questions in world cinema studies, this book explores the complexity of a national cinema too often reduced to a single image"--

Book Synopsis

This first handbook on North Korean cinema contests the assumption that North Korean film is "unwatchable," in terms of both quality and accessibility, refusing to reduce North Korean cinema to political propaganda and focusing on its aesthetic forms and cultural meanings.

Since its founding in 1948, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) has played diverse roles: a Cold War communist threat to the US, the other half of a divided nation to South Korea, an ally to the Soviet Union and China, one model for anti-colonialism to national liberation movements, an exotic political and cultural anomaly in the era of globalization.

This handbook provides a solid and diverse foundation for the expanding scholarship on North Korean cinema. It is also a road map for connecting this field to broader issues in film and media studies: film history, affect and ideology, genre, and transnational cinema cultures. By connecting the worlds of North Korean cinema to broader questions in global cinema studies, this book explores the complexity of a national cinema too often reduced to a single image.

Review Quotes

This is a must-read for any student of North Korean culture, or socialist cinema globally. It persuasively demonstrates that North Korean films are not simply reducible to state propaganda. Even if they carry a propagandist message, they rely on affective impact and on sophisticated techniques intended to maximize it. Far from being isolated, North Korean cinema is a part of a long history of transborder exchanges and cross-fertilisation. It remains to be hoped that books like this will nuance our understanding of what North Korean culture is and how it works.
Vladimir Tikhonov, Professor of Korean and East Asian Studies, Oslo University, Norway

About the Author

Travis Workman is Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, USA. He is the author of Political Moods: Film Melodrama and the Cold War in the Two Korea (2023) and Imperial Genus: The Formation and Limits of the Human in Modern Korea and Japan (2016). He is currently working on debt, neo-feudal economies, and contemporary media.

Dong Hoon Kim is Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema Studies at the University of Oregon, USA. His research and teaching interests include visual culture, early cinema, animation, film and media spectatorship, and East Asian film, media, and popular culture. Kim is the author of Eclipsed Cinema: The Film Culture of Colonial Korea (2017).

Immanuel Kim is the Korea Foundation and Kim Renaud Professor of Korean literature and culture studies in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the George Washington University, USA. He is a specialist in North Korean literature, cinema, and culture. His first book Rewriting Revolution (2018) explores the complex and dynamic literary culture, and his second book Laughing North Koreans (2020) is on the ways in which humor has been an integral component of everyday life.