87년 체제에서 IMF까지 한국영화 주류 장르와 관람문화: 1987-1997년을 중심으로

Abstract

In the early 1980s and the middle of 1980s when the Chun Doo Hwan regime emerged, it was a time when the state initiative to control the masses and the people movement to resist it were fiercely contested to have hegemony. As a result of the fierce hegemony struggle, the success of the democratic uprising in 1987 caused a great change in the Korean society. The after-formed system in the 1987 has affected the public sector and the public life in general. The Korean cinema renaissance began in earnest from 1997, and this phenomenon lasted for ten years. 1987-1997 can be defined as a preliminary period for preparing the Korean cinema renaissance period. This paper starts with exploring the transformation of the urban culture to find out what kind of structural change has occurred in the time of culture in this period, and examines the characteristics of the audience/spectator in connection with the current genre. Before 1987 a lot of films with a part of 3S policy and a stigma of low culture, and erotic genre films have been mistaken for the whole Korean cinema. In the 1990s, the liberalization of cinematic culture of Korean people who had been delayed for decades due to changes in the film viewing environment, such as the liberalization of importing foreign films and the mass supply of video tape recorders. The transformation of popular ethos due to democratization, the fall of socialism, and the interest in the mass culture that entered into the void of the grand discourse that has collapsed have made people to think newly about the cinema. This atmosphere became the foundation for the qualitative development of Korean cinema in the 1990's. In this paper, I analyze romantic comedy, past reflection film, modern action film, women’s film, and new eroticism film as the mainstream genres of Korean cinema in 1987-1997, analyzing the environmental and cinematic factors of these film genres, and explore the urban culture’s characteristics of each genres.