Michelle Cho - "Genre Worlds"

University of Pennsylvania Cinema Studies Department, Cinema Studies Colloquium

Michelle Cho, Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies and World Cinemas, McGill University

This talk comes from the introduction to my book project, Genre Worlds: The Politics of Form in Millennial South Korean Cinema, in which I read genre form, since the late 1990s, as a field of articulation and a defense against the reification of national narratives in the era of segyehwa (the Korean term for cultural and economic globalization). The activity of “worlding” is fundamental to South Korea’s globalization drive (segyehwa literally translates as “becoming world”). I argue that genre cinemas share this worlding capacity, both in a quotidian sense of constructing cinematic narrative worlds, but also in the transnational legibility of genre conventions by which “global cinema” is understood and consumed. Moreover, by giving form to a mode of spectatorship in which a reflexive understanding of genre aesthetics grounds the sensation of immediacy through affective absorption, film genre posits a particular kind of subject as the analogical base for global community, made possible by genre cinemas’ repeated, imaginative convergence of the personal/social, individual/collective, interior/exterior, and private/public.