'변환기' 혹은 '모색기'에 대한 반성적 고찰 - 1980년대 리얼리즘 영화를 중심으로 -

Abstract

According to the critics, the 1980s is regarded as the Cinematic Transition or the Cinematic Seek Period after the 1960s, called the golden days, and the 1970s called the dark age in terms of movie. The terms, the Cinematic Seek Period and the like, indicate that movie makers tried to look for newly varied ways to bolster creation activity under the new government and cinematic conditions which were formed anew. The film makers were restricted by undue censorship and clampdown imposed by the military dictatorship in the 1970s. After that, the 5th republic was newly created in 1980 and it allowed people to expect a new era, described the Spring of Seoul, which would have abounded with freedom. However, it actually did not make any big differences; in other words, the freedom of creation was still precluded even though the policy of excess and arbitrary censorship was a little more softened than under the last military regime. At any rate, the 1980s was the era of both expectation and frustration for directors keeping up artistic conscience, for producers with commercial visions, and for many independent film makers who wanted to try their ideals with political ideologies. This means that it is not easy to form a clear definition on the identity of the Korean films then. In this sort of situation mixed with ideologies, market principles, entertainment-or art-oriented trend, self-reflection as well as historicity had played agreat role as a unitary framework to analyze all kinds of films at the same time, which included realistic and independent pictures which got acclaim from critics, and commercial pictures existing to be mainstream then. A work of art, an individual creation, also speaks for the public to live in contemporarily. Like we understand human being by history, it is possible to examine human being or history through films, as the so-called representative of history, because a film contains human vestige and can be descended. This study shows that the Korean films in the 1980s and the early 1990s, when varied experiments were tried, had faced some changes in terms of cinematic paradigm from the political ideology to industrial one and from individual-oriented trend to group-oriented one. Besides, it has been found out that due largely to the external reasons like UIP direct distribution or capital inflow led by large firms, the internal consequences such as generation shift of directors, diversification of genre, or post-categorization in genre had occurred at that time.