Intellect

Authors:  Nohchool Park 
DOI:

Keywords
Korean cinema 1970s, Korean cinema 1980s, Visual Age Group, Cultural Centre Generation, Small Film Festival

Abstract
The current western historiography on South Korean cinema has centred around two specific eras: the 1960s that celebrated the ‘Golden Age’ of the national cinema; and the 1990s onwards, which is reputed to launch New Korean Cinema. This essay will examine South Korean cinema in the relatively mute period from the mid 1970s through the early 1980s. Defying the conventional reference to this decade as the ‘Dark Age’ of South Korean cinema, this work will illuminate a stream of domestic film movements, which arose at the time to awaken the national cinema to artistic and realistic consciousness. For the illustration of the film movements, I will discuss the activities of the Visual Age Group (1975–78), the Cultural Centre Generation (1977–80) and the Small Film Festival (1984). The film movements marked the genesis of the new wave consciousness in South Korean film history. And they extensively subscribed to international film new waves in order to rearticulate them within the South Korean context. The study of these three movements will also illuminate the conditions for the later appearance of the Independent Cinema movement.