Hye Jean Chung
Hye Jean Chung is Professor of Cultural Studies at Kyung Hee University. She received her PhD in Film and Media Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She was also a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities in the Comparative Media Studies Program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her primary research interests include digital filmmaking, production studies, visual effects, global Hollywood, Korean cinema, East Asian cinema, and documentary films.
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expansions evident in the textual and contextual spaces of South
Korean cinema. I focus on the film, Escape from Mogadishu (Ryoo
Seung-wan, 2021), to examine how it expands the territorial scope and
topography of Korean cinema. This film demonstrates how local and
global agents are converging in Korean media production, and it
provides a glimpse into the opportunities provided by expansions into
foreign locations that diversify the topographies of Korean cinema.
Ryoo’s film, I contend, illustrates the Korean film industry’s overseas
expansion by demonstrating an advanced level of professional expertise
needed to systematize a transnational production. Through this case
study, I analyze how the global ambitions of the Korean film industry
manifest in non-Korean settings, and how this reflects territorial
tensions that trouble the increasingly porous borders of a globalizing
nation.
regenerating bodies and the multiple lives of the mummy in The Mummy
franchise.
I read the body of the mummy as a cyborg hybrid because it
features enhanced powers of rejuvenation that are indicative of malleable,
porous, and networked bodies of our digital era. This updated version of
a computer-generated mummy infuses digital aesthetics and logic into the
mummy complex of cinema. Assembled in the virtual production pipeline of
global Hollywood, this contemporary mummy is a heterogeneous amalgam
of media forms: organic flesh, synthetic prosthetics, and digital bytes.
to create content for global consumption by presenting the case study
of Space Sweepers (Seungriho, Jo Sung-hee, 2021), a Korean science fiction
film released worldwide on Netflix. This film exemplifies how the local
and the global are converging in the Korean media ecology. I discuss
this film’s transnational aspirations by focusing on its references to
global science fiction and its computer-generated imagery that
envisions a transnational future. I analyze how digital spaces and
bodies in Space Sweepers emulate the visual vernacular produced and
circulated by global Hollywood and how this film repositions a
transnational imaginary within a local context by deploying Korean
talent onscreen and offscreen. This analysis considers how national and
transnational properties coexist in Space Sweepers by examining the
film’s text and production context to identify elements of marked and
unmarked transnationality in contemporary Korean media. This film
integrates both local and global resources by adopting and
appropriating the idioms of Hollywood science fiction cinema while
utilizing Korean talent and technological expertise. This Korean science
fiction film articulates how local media industries can draw upon
global media texts and practices to produce content that envisions a
transnational future in alternative forms of postnational communities
and posthuman characters that engage with, but differ from, the
hegemonic visions of global Hollywood.
The filmmaker also takes on the task of historian by using the documentary film as a medium to construct an alternative history on the Vietnam War. She performs this task by incorporating oral traditions, written records, still or moving images, actions, and space. Regret to Inform invokes the powerful impact of place memories in particular through the journey of the filmmaker and her companion, a Vietnamese American war-survivor/translator, to Vietnam almost twenty years after the war. Despite the limitations stemming from its mediation through the lens and perspective of an American filmmaker, the film attempts to diversify the voices that construct a historical narrative. Here personal memories come together to form an assemblage of collective memory. By giving first-hand accounts on surviving hardships during the war, or reading letters sent by loved ones who fought in Vietnam, the female subjects of the film share a common goal to fill in the “lacunae” of the written history on the war.
expansions evident in the textual and contextual spaces of South
Korean cinema. I focus on the film, Escape from Mogadishu (Ryoo
Seung-wan, 2021), to examine how it expands the territorial scope and
topography of Korean cinema. This film demonstrates how local and
global agents are converging in Korean media production, and it
provides a glimpse into the opportunities provided by expansions into
foreign locations that diversify the topographies of Korean cinema.
Ryoo’s film, I contend, illustrates the Korean film industry’s overseas
expansion by demonstrating an advanced level of professional expertise
needed to systematize a transnational production. Through this case
study, I analyze how the global ambitions of the Korean film industry
manifest in non-Korean settings, and how this reflects territorial
tensions that trouble the increasingly porous borders of a globalizing
nation.
regenerating bodies and the multiple lives of the mummy in The Mummy
franchise.
I read the body of the mummy as a cyborg hybrid because it
features enhanced powers of rejuvenation that are indicative of malleable,
porous, and networked bodies of our digital era. This updated version of
a computer-generated mummy infuses digital aesthetics and logic into the
mummy complex of cinema. Assembled in the virtual production pipeline of
global Hollywood, this contemporary mummy is a heterogeneous amalgam
of media forms: organic flesh, synthetic prosthetics, and digital bytes.
to create content for global consumption by presenting the case study
of Space Sweepers (Seungriho, Jo Sung-hee, 2021), a Korean science fiction
film released worldwide on Netflix. This film exemplifies how the local
and the global are converging in the Korean media ecology. I discuss
this film’s transnational aspirations by focusing on its references to
global science fiction and its computer-generated imagery that
envisions a transnational future. I analyze how digital spaces and
bodies in Space Sweepers emulate the visual vernacular produced and
circulated by global Hollywood and how this film repositions a
transnational imaginary within a local context by deploying Korean
talent onscreen and offscreen. This analysis considers how national and
transnational properties coexist in Space Sweepers by examining the
film’s text and production context to identify elements of marked and
unmarked transnationality in contemporary Korean media. This film
integrates both local and global resources by adopting and
appropriating the idioms of Hollywood science fiction cinema while
utilizing Korean talent and technological expertise. This Korean science
fiction film articulates how local media industries can draw upon
global media texts and practices to produce content that envisions a
transnational future in alternative forms of postnational communities
and posthuman characters that engage with, but differ from, the
hegemonic visions of global Hollywood.
The filmmaker also takes on the task of historian by using the documentary film as a medium to construct an alternative history on the Vietnam War. She performs this task by incorporating oral traditions, written records, still or moving images, actions, and space. Regret to Inform invokes the powerful impact of place memories in particular through the journey of the filmmaker and her companion, a Vietnamese American war-survivor/translator, to Vietnam almost twenty years after the war. Despite the limitations stemming from its mediation through the lens and perspective of an American filmmaker, the film attempts to diversify the voices that construct a historical narrative. Here personal memories come together to form an assemblage of collective memory. By giving first-hand accounts on surviving hardships during the war, or reading letters sent by loved ones who fought in Vietnam, the female subjects of the film share a common goal to fill in the “lacunae” of the written history on the war.