Silent sorrow, blind revenge: the cultural complex han in new Korean cinema

Submission note: A thesis submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the Department of Arts and Critical Enquiry, School of Humanities, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, La Trobe University, Bundoora.

Han is an expression of grief, rage and vengeance specific to Korean culture. Han is not merely a feeling but a concept with a distinct history and political inclination in twentieth century South Korea. The minjung movement, an anti-establishment faction, championed han in the 1970s and 1980s as an emblem of the people’s history of suffering to incite the ire and revenge of the oppressed to rise up against the totalitarian state. The cry of the minjung movement lost its voice post democratisation in the 1990s but the emotional after-image of han lingered on in the films of that era, classed New Korean Cinema. This thesis considers the manifestation of han on screen as a projection of cultural trauma of social change in the guise of a cultural complex: a socio-historical motif tinged with emotion and symbolism for a particular culture. Through the lens of analytical psychology an archetypal drama unfolds revealing a history of intergenerational conflict and symbolic ‘incestuous’ healing. The film selection looks back to the turbulent twentieth-century history of South Korea, with collective nostalgia in Sŏp’yŏnje (1993), in the hope to reconcile with traumatic memories as in A petal (1996). Looking forward, the texts also relate a quest for new sense of Korean-ness in the dehumanising postcolonial atmosphere of Address unknown (2001) and the malaise of postmodern South Korean society depicted in Oldboy (2003).