South Korean Cinema: From Golden Age to Parasite

The Golden Age and the Long Silence

South Korean cinema's first flowering came in the decade after the Korean War, when a devastated country produced, against all economic logic, one of the most vital film cultures in Asia. The late 1950s and early 1960s saw an explosion of production — melodramas, war films, literary adaptations — and a handful of masterpieces that still anchor the national canon. Kim Ki-young's The Housemaid (1960) is the era's most extraordinary film: a delirious domestic thriller in which a middle-class family is destroyed by the young woman they hire, staged almost entirely on a two-storey house set that becomes a pressure cooker of class resentment and sexual panic. Its influence runs in a straight line to Parasite sixty years later.

Yu Hyun-mok's Aimless Bullet (1961) — a bleak portrait of a family broken by war and poverty, often voted the greatest Korean film ever made — and the prolific output of Shin Sang-ok demonstrated the range of the period. But the Golden Age was brief. Park Chung-hee's military government imposed the Motion Picture Law of 1962, and successive revisions brought the industry under heavy censorship and state control. For the next quarter-century Korean filmmakers worked inside a system that punished political content and rewarded quota-filling quickie production.

The 1980s brought slow loosening. Im Kwon-taek, who had begun as a director of commercial genre films, remade himself as the industry's conscience with films like Mandala (1981) and later Sopyonje (1993), a story of itinerant pansori singers that became a surprise domestic phenomenon and a statement that Korean cinema could draw power from Korean tradition. Democratization at the end of the decade opened the door to everything that followed.