2010년대 한국 청소년영화의 장르 구조와 사회성 연구

Abstract

Korean films dealing with teenagers have shown different tendencies in each decade. In 1970s there were ‘Yal-gae series’ featuring jolly highschool students and ‘Never Never series’, a teenager melodrama. From the late 1980s to early 1990s realist films were produced to aggressively criticize school problems. In mid and late 1990s the so-called ‘School Horror Films’ portray dreadfulness of brutal school system, and in 2000s the teen films were combined with mainstream genres to produce the teenager action films, the teenager comedy and the teenager romance films. In 2010s we are witnessing a quite different phenomenon from the past. The school, a place overlooked by mainstream commercial films, has been rediscovered as a place intensively inhabiting various problems of our society and adopted as a major subject matter in many independent films. The films as The King of Pigs(2010), Bleak Night(2010), Pluto(2012), Han Gong-ju(2013), Mot(2013), 18-Eighteen Noir(2013), Night Flight(2014), and Set Me Free(2014), through teenager characters, sum up what is wrong with Korean society today. The films of 2010s featuring teenager-students can be grouped and called as ‘New Teen Film,’ since they share many similar features. They are produced independently, the stories of which are led by just a few characters and very dramatic, and utilize the spaces of teenagers as symbolic spaces of social evils and conflicts. In this paper is pursued the generic features of teenager films which have formed different types in each decade since 1970s. Such representatives of 2010s’ teenager films as The King of Pigs, Bleak Night, Pluto, Han Gong-ju, which gathered wide critical acclaims and public interests, are analyzed for generic similarities and peculiarities in their characters, plot and style. These analyses will reveal the genre structure of Korean teen films in 2010s, and show how those distinctive features are forming and evolving.