• Broadcasting and Media Magazine
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.99-112
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• 2005

Christian Metz, the precursor of cine-semiology, considered cinema as a language in the sense that it is a set of messages grounded in a given matter of expression, and a signifying practice characterized by specific codifications. According to Metz, film forms a structured network produced by the interweaving of cinematic codes, within which cinematic subcodes represent specific usages of the particular code. For Metz, cinematic language is a totality of cinematic codes and subcodes, and history of the cinema is the trace of the competition, incorporations and exclusions of the subcodes. He also suggested a filmic text is not just a list of codes in effect, but a process of constant displacement and deformation of codes. Following Metz' textual analysis methodology, I investigated the formal configuration of Hayao Miyazaki‘s animation, Spirited Away. It is interesting to trace the interweaving of cinematic codes in Spirited Away, i.e. codes of lighting, color, movement, and auteurism, across the animation. I focused on the first scene at the bridge to Yubaba's bathhouse, analyzing each cinematic code and its subcode applied. The first bridge scene is carefully constructed to stand out the confrontation of Chihiro (with Haku) and the bathhouse. The bathhouse is not just a building, it represents the powerful witch, Yubaba, yet to appear on the scene, and functions as an antipode to Chihiro. In each shot, every subcode within the codes of framing, direction, angle, color, lighting and movement is used to maximize the contrast between the dominant bathhouse and the feeble 10-year-old girl. In Spirited Away, the subcodes within each cinematic ode are constantly competing and displacing each other to augment the antithesis between the characters and develop the narrative. As Metz's argument that film constitutes a quasi-linguistic practice as a pluricodic medium, Spirited Away communicates with the spectators with the combination and displacement of these cinematic codes and subcodes.

• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.59-65
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• 2019

This study examines how cinematic texts are used in movies through Lee Jun-ik's 2015 film, and what narrative and visual effects are obtained through them. This film portrays poet Yun Dong-ju as a central figure and chooses to reconstruct his life. The movie, , used Yun's poetry as a device to maximize the lyricism of the film and to suggest a change in the fate of the character and the inside. In other words, uses Yun Dong-ju's poetry to aesthetically express the inner change of the characters in the film and the sensitivity of the film. Through this, I visualize Yun Dong-ju as poet Yun Dong-ju, a poet who was stuffed in literary books, as a normal literary youth. It is also a reminder of the weight of the reality that the present youth is experiencing and the problem of an individual living in history. In this respect, the movie is a major text that depicts the poetry and poetry of the time, and the age of poet through the media. 'Poetry' as the text of the text delivered with the image maximized the lyricism of the image and led to high aesthetic achievement. Through poetry and poetry, it can be regarded as the main text approaching the problems of history, individual, literature and reality.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.53-98
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• 2021

This paper examines the ways in which Hollywood feature films produced and widely circulated with the establishment of the studio system was consumed in the ethnically segregated Korean movie theaters in Kyǒngsǒng in the 1920s. Focusing on how those theaters appropriated what Hollywood represented, this paper has three objectives. First, from a historical and economic perspective, I will historicize the emergence of so-called prestige pictures and how movies became a branded product in that process. Second, I will also loot at how Chosǒn Theater, one of the earliest movie theaters in the Korean-resident area in Kyǒngsǒng who sought to be a prestigious movie palace actively exploited Hollywood brand, by foregrounding its Paramount connection, in particular. Lastly, through a close reading of weekly programmes and handbills, I will examine how these promotional print materials, as an intermediating medium, helped to supplement the audiences' viewing of Hollywood movies while creating loyal audiences.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.13-51
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• 2021

As a case study, this paper historicizes the film culture in Namchon district in Keijo(京城) based on a preliminary research on the film ephemera produced during the colonial period. Through cross-examining articles appeared in Japanese newspapers and magazines at the time, this paper empirically reconstructs the Japanese settlers' film culture in Keijo, a colonial city whose cultural environment was ethnically divided into 'Bukchon' and 'Namchon.' During the silent era, movie theaters in the Namchon district not only played a role of cinema chain through which films imported and distributed by Japanese film companies were circulated and exhibited but also served as a cultural community for Japanese settlers who migrated to a colony. The film ephemera issued by each theater not only provided information about the movie program, but also connected these Japaneses settlers in colonial city, Keijo to the homogeneous space and time in Japan proper. Both as a minority and colonizer in a colony, these Japanese settlers experienced a sense of 'unity' that could 'distinguish' their ethnic identity differentiated from Koreans through watching movies in this ethnically segregated cultural environment. In doing so, they were also able to connect themselves to their homeland in Japan Proper, despite on a cultural level. This is a cultural practice that strengthens a kind of long distance nationalism. Examining Japanese film culture through film ephemera would not only contribute to the previous scholarship on modern theater culture and spectatorship established since the 2000s, but also be a meaningful attempt to find ways and directions for film history research through non-film materials.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.41-76
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• 2020

Recently, the cinema industry faced a crisis on the rise of various media platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, IPTV, and Kakao Page. The rate of film release in the theater has become ever shorter, and the secondary consumption of film through IPTV, tablet, PC, or mobile has seen a drastic increase. In the midst of this new media-geography, the most significant change in recent years would be the rise of the 'fantasy film' genre. This paper explores the conditions and characteristics of fantasy films in the way in which the genre has been constituted, and delves into particular aspects that its contents contain. This is an attempt to understand the sociology of the birth of a new genre. In this process, this paper will ask two frequently raised questions in regard to this genre. The first is to ask whether we can discern fantasy from reality, and the second is to examine whether the fantasy genre implicates certain social subversion. These two questions aim to discover how fantasy forms a relationship with reality and what this means. To do so, this paper will trace the genealogy of the fantasy film genre in Korea and analyze recent big hits such as the series as the model case of digital fantasy film. Through this exploration, this paper will be able to provide a new sociology of the fantasy film production and consumption in the 21^st century Korea.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.87-122
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• 2019

This paper examines how the melancholia and death drive foregrounded in Kwak Ji-kyun's films have changed the affect and production trend of South Korean melodrama films of the late 1980s and thereafter. It particularly analyzes Kwak's The Home of Two Women (1987) as his exemplary melodrama film. Kwak is not only an auteur filmmaker of the 1980s and 1990s but was also a herald of South Korean New Sentimentalist films back then. The New Sentimentalist filmmakers have aspired to sophisticate the South Korean melodrama film not only by de-sentimentalizing it from the shimpa quality but also separating it from excessive emotion of shimpa that had long dominated the national cinema. This affective sophistication is directly linked to the sense of loss and melancholia/depression of the characters in the film caused by the death of one's beloved. This New Sentimentalist affect is best represented in Kwak's The Home of Two Women through its depiction of the internal conflicts of artists struggling to artistically sublimate the death drive and sense of loss. By textually analyzing The Home of Two Women, this paper not only reevaluates Kwak's film style but also reposition the topology of the New Sentimentalists in Korean film history.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.16 no.8
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• pp.484-492
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• 2016

Role of music in an image can be divided into a supplementary function to express narrative of image and an independent function to become the subject of music and to lead the image. To perceive sound through hearing and then, to make it visualized is called visual music. Since the 19th century, image synchronization of music through colored hearing has been continuously attempted by artists in their works. Also in the 20th century, many artists could attempt time-wise concept of movement passing the bounds of three-dimensional expression due to development of cinema. In such a process, artists with strong experimental spirits inferred correlation between sound and image and then, pioneered new genre of visual music. As a result, the times are being changed from those of listening to those of watching, and various works are being produced by experimental attempt of various music and images. This thesis aims to investigate aesthetic characteristics of modern visual music and then, to conduct comparative analysis on how visual music using colors are utilized in diversified fields such as movie, animation, music video and media art.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.121-128
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• 2016

Under the Bazinian influences, Eric Rohmer tried all his life to show the world as it was by taking full advantage of objective and revelatory nature of a camera. Believing the cinema was an instrument of discovery, that was able to reflect pre-existing beauty of nature, he wrote dialogues using actual words of actors and captured human actions as close to real life as possible. As a result, audience could meet lively, barely fictional characters and their ordinary, yet exciting adventures of daily lives. Focusing on , the third of his 'Six moral tales', this study attempts to discuss the matters of choice, chance and morality, and briefly his status as a writer in the history of narrative literature.

• Design Convergence Study
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.83-98
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• 2015

This study will examine the visual composition by which Secretly Greatly, in a circumstance that even the good original Manhwas or Webtoon have not made a hit on the market until now, could attract the spectator, in other word, illustrate the analogousness of the images through analysing visual texts. The study draw, first of all, a meaning of the box office performance caused by analogousness of image, that is similarity between the webtoon and film. In addition, the study will come up with an answer to the question that the webtoon, not in a temporary trend but in a sustainable form, can make itself develop. For this, the study suggests a meaning, worth and importance of the transformation, analysing visual components of a webtoon to film adaptation, Secretly Greatly. It primarily ranges over visual components, mise-en-scène identified with its expression formula, frame to frame changes and colour and tone. The examination sets the cinema's visual expression manner against the webtoon's on their concrete components: the size of scene, movement, color and tone, narrative condition and its background, spatial composition and depth, contrast, expression manner and disposition manner.

• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.9 no.5
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• pp.909-917
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• 2023

Semiotic theory plays a vital role in the cognition of realistic films. Realistic films aim to reflect events and situations in real life, and arouse the audience's thinking about real problems through realistic depiction. In this process, the theory of semiotics helps to reveal the symbolic elements in the film and the profound meaning behind them. This study focused on the realism movie 도 가 니 "(Silenced), on the basis of the theory of saussure's semiotics, combined with its proposed the concept of "signifier" and "mean", through the study of arbitrariness and secondary film symbol sign system, designed to dig deeper into the symbolic meanings in the movie, and their cultural significance and social evaluation. By analyzing the implied narrative structure, meaning structure and ideology in the film, this paper probes into the influence and effect of mass culture on society and reveals the potential information conveyed by symbols in the film. This study aims to provide creative insights and explanations to provide useful references for research in related fields.