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Peripheral Subempires: The Cinematic Representation of Economic Crises in Argentina, Greece, and South Korea (1990-2020)
Lee, Seungjoo
Lee, Seungjoo
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Abstract
Peripheral Subempires: The Cinematic Representation of Economic Crises in Argentina, Greece, and South Korea (1990-2020) addresses Argentine, Greek, and South Korean films in relation to the recent economic crises that the three countries experienced between 1997 and 2010. The primary goal is to answer the following questions: 1) How do filmmakers, conscious of the positionality of their societies as subcolonies and subempires, challenge development narratives that underplay inequality at the national level, and 2) what are the implications for their works, which are considered peripheral films in the field of transnational cinema? As readers and residents of each society, the directors have visualized the increasing discrepancy between existing social contracts and changing realities. In the films, human bodies reenact or resist national development narratives, which tend to emphasize center-periphery relations affected by the current flow of global capital, favoring specific gender roles.
I use key concepts of translation studies to analyze films from Argentina, Greece, and South Korea based on the current scholarship on the cinematic waves from the three countries. In dialogue with discussions on world literature and decolonial readings, I interpret these films in connection to late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century novellas. To illustrate this connection, I draw on studies that call attention to the imperial rivalries and the construction of civil society before WWI.
Chapter 1 focuses on underrepresented women’s narratives set in peripheral cities. I argue that these markedly gendered and heterogeneous spaces have been instrumental in shaping their respective countries’ national identities but have been culturally neglected due to the cities’ subaltern positionality within national industries. In these films, byproducts of national industries and changes in those industries shape the residents’ everyday experience within urban spaces and future paths. Chapter 2 concerns social class precarity and national narratives and focuses on the cinematic representation of demographic changes in each country’s capital city. I compare male characters in three films produced between 2000 and 2009 with three national literary figures from Argentina, Greece, and Korea (under Japanese rule) produced around the Great Depression of 1930. This comparison invites a renewed allegorical reading that includes a history of financial crises, which I view as a crucial factor in shaping post-war and post-colonial national identities since the 1970s. Chapter 3 is a critique on the current mediascape in relation to colonial legacies. I assess the three focal points —colonialism, authoritarianism, and financial crisis— observed in critically acclaimed films such as Zama (Martel, 2017), Dogtooth (Lanthimos, 2009), and Parasite (Bong, 2019). Chapter 4 examines three Argentine directors in their early careers, whose projects show transatlantic and transpacific entanglements and collaborations in the current film industry.
Based on the analysis and assessment from the four chapters, I conclude that films from Argentina, Greece, and South Korea that artistically broach the subimperial and subcolonial nature of the respective societies can be compared to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’ novellas. Taken as a whole, my dissertation contributes to the humanities on two interrelated fronts: it historicizes the gendered and racialized aspects of human migration within and across states caused by globalization and illuminates the film industries’ role as capital-intensive and transnational media workplaces of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
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Date
2024-08-31
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University of Kansas
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Keywords
Literature, Film studies, Latin American literature, Economic crisis, Film industry, Greek wierd wave, National cinema and world literature, new Argentine cinema, new Korean cinema