Professor Choi Jinhee, head of film studies at King’s College, University of London, is describing her course. The curriculum promises an “understanding of film and moving-image media, the societies that produce them […] and the attitudes and debates they give rise to”; and frankly, there are far crustier degree courses out there.
Screenings of popular films from South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan, combined with a programme that offers “a solid foundation for careers in the film industry”, might sound like an unimpeachable choice for one’s college days. But a more serious academic spine runs through the professor’s agenda, one that wouldn’t occur to the rest of us in our movie-watching.
Seoul native Choi, 13 years at King’s and a former visiting professor in East Asian studies and film studies at Yale University, in the US, is awaiting publication of her latest book, a monograph titled Forever Girls: Necro-Cinematics and South Korean Girlhood, which investigates “girlhood as a sensibility”, she explains by Zoom from her London home. “In South Korea, girlishness is still permissible, regardless of your age, so I was interested in that [in writing the book].”
Girlishness as portrayed on film or in society generally?
“In the former sense,” says Choi. “Certain aesthetic preferences, pensiveness, sentimentalism, gestures. In Lee Chang-dong’s film Poetry [2010], the female protagonist, who ‘likes flowers and says odd things’ describes herself as somewhat girlie.
“The latter sense is also partly true: my mother, who is in her 80s, behaves in a girlish manner, which is why I dedicated this book to her, because she is, to me, forever a girl. But I was also [concerned with] labour history relating to girls and young people from the country moving to Seoul and working in factories. I was making a historical connection in terms of girlhood, labour and those films where girls die – what is the cinematic logic there?”
A film “starting with the death of a girl, or ending with one – sometimes that’s a trigger for developing a plot, sometimes it’s an outcome to reveal deplorable working conditions”, she says.
“[The concept] is fluid, that’s why it’s not ‘girls’, but ‘girlhood’, which can be embodied by different demographics – and that’s why body-switch films are interesting,” she explains. “If grannies can go back to their 20s and the girlhood they never had is something they can enjoy when a switch happens – I find that kind of device interesting.”
Choi is referring to, among other films, the “hugely popular” Miss Granny, a 2014 Korean comedy-drama directed by Hwang Dong-hyuk, in which a mysterious photographic studio becomes a portal to reclaimed youth. Chinese-Taiwanese-Korean remake 20 Once Again, starring Yang Zishan, followed only a year later.
Hwang, meanwhile, went on to create Netflix series Squid Game (2021). “I had to watch it,” says Choi, “because students kept asking me if I’d seen it. I said, ‘Squid what?’ I found it interesting, but the gender representation I wasn’t particularly fond of: the girl from North Korea died perfunctorily to set the stage for two male rivals.
“I like films better than series because series take a lot longer to watch. Ten episodes are fine, but 16? And seasons?”
When Choi introduced a special showing of the 2015 Korean mystery thriller The Priests at London’s Curzon Soho cinema, “It was sold out!
“They loved the exorcism in the middle of Seoul,” she recalls. “When the protagonist runs down the steps to throw a possessed pig into the Han River he takes a cab – and he should – to reach one of the bridges.”
That attention to location detail is not random – and suggests a modicum of homesickness in a scholar who left her hometown about 30 years ago to move to the US, then Canada, then Britain. It is no surprise that the topic of urban space is addressed on her course.
“In [2016 action-horror film] Train to Busan, for example, I like to see the history of Seoul Station and how transport has changed – how that station, established in the colonial era, has become a museum,” she says. “And in [2013 spy film] The Suspect there’s a great car chase in some of the areas I’m familiar with; I like to see the urban spatial traces.”
The enthusiasm is reciprocated. “The students love the films, but it is not purely for entertainment. They also want to learn some of the sociopolitical histories of the [countries represented],” she says.
And prospective undergraduates please note: popcorn is not handed out at lectures.
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