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ASIAN CINEMA RESEARCH LAB BOOK TALK SERIES

Title: "Global Entanglements: Bong Joon Ho’s Cinematic Geographies"

Speaker: Joseph Jonghyun JEON (UC Irvine)

Date: 02 MAY 2025 (Friday)

Time: 1100HRS (+8 GMT)

Abstract

"This talk is a retrospective examination of the entire body of work of the renowned South Korean film director, Bong Joon Ho, looking specifically at the way in which his films thematize social entanglements at various scales. The scalar focus in these treatments ranges from the micro to macro, from the local idiosyncrasies of a Korean apartment complex in which neighbors get on each other’s nerves to global systems of commerce and exchange in which multinational corporations compete in increasingly cut-throat markets. We may think of Bong Joon Ho’s body of work as offering a capacious geography that spatializes in film the complex web of social entanglements that shape life in the 21st century, and all this from the perspective of late capitalist South Korea, which turns out to offer special insight into our contemporary historical moment."

Jason Bechervais (Hanyang University) will join this book talk as a discussant.