Gord Sellar

10.18399/acta.2011.14.1.007

SF cinema localization genre culture

The global production, distribution, and consumption of SF is difficult to explain on the basis of extant theories linking SF reception and production to industrialization. South Korea offers a striking example of a highly-industrialized society saturated with technosocial change, influenced by foreign SF but without more than marginally successful localization of the SF genre in literary or cinematic form. The Korean film industry’s forays into the “foreign landscape” of SF over the past decade allow for alternative interpretations. Analysis of Lee Si-Myung’s 2009: Lost Memories (2002), Jeong Yun-su’s Yesterday (2002), Jang Sun-woo’s The Resurrection of the Little Match Girl (2002), Jang Joo-Hwan’s Save the Green Planet (2003), Min Byung-Chun’s Natural City (2003), and Bong Joon-Ho’s The Host (2007), among others, reveal specific aspects of Korean culture that problematize the localization of the SF genre to a Korean setting, namely problems of generic fluency on the part of audiences and creators alike, post-colonial nationalist-historiographic concerns, anxieties of influence regarding foreign-originating genre and narrative forms, and more. A study of recent Korean SF films—primarily those which fail as specimens of the SF genre—is followed by a discussion of approaches which have resulted in the successful circumvention of cultural barriers to the localization of SF, suggesting tantalizing possibilities for the continued localization process and development of a native Korean SFnal imaginary.