Speaker: Immanuel Kim, The George Washington University
Friday, October 9, 2020
4:00 p.m. – 5:30 p.m. Easten Time
Virtual Event via Zoom
This event is on the record and open to the public.
Event Description
This study analyzes North Korean comedy films from the late 1960s to present day. It examines the most iconic comedy films and comedians to show how North Koreans have enjoyed themselves and have established a culture of humor that challenges, subverts, and, at times, reinforces the dominant political ideology. Immanuel Kim argues that comedy films, popular comedians, and the viewers have an intricate interdependent relationship that shaped the film culture—the pre/post production of filmmaking, film-watching experience, and the legacies of actors—in North Korea.
Speaker
Immanuel Kim is Korea Foundation and Kim-Renaud Associate Professor of Korean Literature and Culture Studies. Prior to working at the George Washington University, he was Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies at Binghamton University (SUNY). Dr. Kim
received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Riverside. He is an authority on North Korean literature and film and is the author of a recent book on North Korean literature, Rewriting Revolution: Women, Sexuality, and Memory in North Korean Fiction (University of Hawaii Press, 2018).
Purchase Laughing North Koreans: The Culture of Comedy Films.
Discussant
Dong Hoon Kim is an associate professor in the Department of Cinema Studies at the University of Oregon. His research interests include visual culture, early cinema, media spectatorship, and East Asian film, media, and popular culture. Kim is the author of Eclipsed Cinema: the Film Culture of Colonial Korea published in 2017 by Edinburgh University Press.
Purchase Eclipsed Cinema: The Film Culture of Colonial Korea.
