Mediterranean Institute Seminars
A Franco-Korean love affair? Icons, encounter and transnational cinephilia
Speaker: Dr Eun-Jee Park (Busan University of foreign Studies)
Wednesday 24 May at 17:30
venue: Mediterranean Institute (Ir-Razzett tal-Ħursun)
Abstract
French modernism invokes a particularly ritualised national-cultural memory in a generation of Korean cineastes. The self-confessed ‘Institut Français kids’ refers to a group born out of the theatre salon at the Institut in Seoul. At the time the Institut, known for its French universalist mission, had been a domestic hub for the screening of intellectual arthouse films that could not be shown elsewhere due to censorship. This presentation looks at how the lingering fixation on French cinematic context is represented in Hong Sang Soo’s In Another Country (2012), starring the French icon Isabelle Huppert, has become fluently transcultural in traverse. The once ardent West-to-East influence takes on a form of mutual cross-cultural encounter.