- Digital Media, Global media, East Asian Cinema, Comparative Media Studies, Transnational Cinema, Visual Effects, and 12 moreCritical Cartography, Haunting and Spectrality, Film Studies, Globalization, Media Studies, Cinema, Documentary Film, Animation, Film and Media Studies, Visual Culture, Animation Theory, and Computer Animationedit
- Hye Jean Chung is Professor of Cultural Studies at Kyung Hee University. She received her PhD in Film and Media Studi... moreHye Jean Chung is Professor of Cultural Studies at Kyung Hee University. She received her PhD in Film and Media Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She was also a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities in the Comparative Media Studies Program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her primary research interests include digital filmmaking, production studies, visual effects, global Hollywood, Korean cinema, East Asian cinema, and documentary films.edit
This book challenges the widespread tendency among audiences and critics to disregard the material conditions of digital film production. Drawing on interviews with directors, producers, special effects supervisors, and other film... more
This book challenges the widespread tendency among audiences and critics to disregard the material conditions of digital film production. Drawing on interviews with directors, producers, special effects supervisors, and other film industry workers, I trace how the rhetorical and visual emphasis on seamlessness masks the social, political, and economic realities of global filmmaking and digital labor. In films such as Avatar (2009), Interstellar (2014), and The Host (2006)—which combine live action footage with CGI to create new hybrid environments—filmmaking techniques and "seamless" digital effects allow the globally dispersed labor involved to go unnoticed by audiences. I adapt Foucault's notion of heterotopic spaces to foreground this labor and to theorize cinematic space as a textured, multilayered assemblage in which filmmaking occurs in transnational collaborations that depend upon the global movement of bodies, resources, images, and commodities. Acknowledging cinema's increasingly digitized and globalized workflow, I reconnect digitally constructed and composited imagery with the reality of production spaces and laboring bodies to highlight the political, social, ethical, and aesthetic stakes in recognizing the materiality of collaborative filmmaking.
Research Interests:
This article mobilizes the motif of digital reincarnation to examine the regenerating bodies and the multiple lives of the mummy in The Mummy franchise. I read the body of the mummy as a cyborg hybrid because it features enhanced powers... more
This article mobilizes the motif of digital reincarnation to examine the
regenerating bodies and the multiple lives of the mummy in The Mummy
franchise.
I read the body of the mummy as a cyborg hybrid because it
features enhanced powers of rejuvenation that are indicative of malleable,
porous, and networked bodies of our digital era. This updated version of
a computer-generated mummy infuses digital aesthetics and logic into the
mummy complex of cinema. Assembled in the virtual production pipeline of
global Hollywood, this contemporary mummy is a heterogeneous amalgam
of media forms: organic flesh, synthetic prosthetics, and digital bytes.
regenerating bodies and the multiple lives of the mummy in The Mummy
franchise.
I read the body of the mummy as a cyborg hybrid because it
features enhanced powers of rejuvenation that are indicative of malleable,
porous, and networked bodies of our digital era. This updated version of
a computer-generated mummy infuses digital aesthetics and logic into the
mummy complex of cinema. Assembled in the virtual production pipeline of
global Hollywood, this contemporary mummy is a heterogeneous amalgam
of media forms: organic flesh, synthetic prosthetics, and digital bytes.
Research Interests:
This paper examines the Korean media industry’s recent endeavors to create content for global consumption by presenting the case study of Space Sweepers (Seungriho, Jo Sung-hee, 2021), a Korean science fiction film released worldwide on... more
This paper examines the Korean media industry’s recent endeavors
to create content for global consumption by presenting the case study
of Space Sweepers (Seungriho, Jo Sung-hee, 2021), a Korean science fiction
film released worldwide on Netflix. This film exemplifies how the local
and the global are converging in the Korean media ecology. I discuss
this film’s transnational aspirations by focusing on its references to
global science fiction and its computer-generated imagery that
envisions a transnational future. I analyze how digital spaces and
bodies in Space Sweepers emulate the visual vernacular produced and
circulated by global Hollywood and how this film repositions a
transnational imaginary within a local context by deploying Korean
talent onscreen and offscreen. This analysis considers how national and
transnational properties coexist in Space Sweepers by examining the
film’s text and production context to identify elements of marked and
unmarked transnationality in contemporary Korean media. This film
integrates both local and global resources by adopting and
appropriating the idioms of Hollywood science fiction cinema while
utilizing Korean talent and technological expertise. This Korean science
fiction film articulates how local media industries can draw upon
global media texts and practices to produce content that envisions a
transnational future in alternative forms of postnational communities
and posthuman characters that engage with, but differ from, the
hegemonic visions of global Hollywood.
to create content for global consumption by presenting the case study
of Space Sweepers (Seungriho, Jo Sung-hee, 2021), a Korean science fiction
film released worldwide on Netflix. This film exemplifies how the local
and the global are converging in the Korean media ecology. I discuss
this film’s transnational aspirations by focusing on its references to
global science fiction and its computer-generated imagery that
envisions a transnational future. I analyze how digital spaces and
bodies in Space Sweepers emulate the visual vernacular produced and
circulated by global Hollywood and how this film repositions a
transnational imaginary within a local context by deploying Korean
talent onscreen and offscreen. This analysis considers how national and
transnational properties coexist in Space Sweepers by examining the
film’s text and production context to identify elements of marked and
unmarked transnationality in contemporary Korean media. This film
integrates both local and global resources by adopting and
appropriating the idioms of Hollywood science fiction cinema while
utilizing Korean talent and technological expertise. This Korean science
fiction film articulates how local media industries can draw upon
global media texts and practices to produce content that envisions a
transnational future in alternative forms of postnational communities
and posthuman characters that engage with, but differ from, the
hegemonic visions of global Hollywood.
Research Interests:
This article examines how contemporary media art and popular culture, vernacular cultural practices, and digital technologies express and actualize aspirations for global mobility. This task is propelled by the need to question the... more
This article examines how contemporary media art and popular culture, vernacular cultural practices, and digital technologies express and actualize aspirations for global mobility. This task is propelled by the need to question the limited scope of how we envision globalization. Here I explore how people use forms of visual media to “perform the global” through mediated experiences of mobility. I propose the concept of “virtual cosmopolitans” to describe those who participate in the experience of global citizenship through their use of photography, film, and digital media. Although they do not have access to conventional forms of cosmopolitan mobility, these virtual cosmopolitans find ways to envision or simulate cosmopolitan experiences by inserting themselves into the global imaginary via mediated networks of images. This article discusses how these virtual cosmopolitans participate in the discourse and experience of globalization, and considers ways to manifest and actualize cosmopolitan desires through vernacular forms of media. I focus on two documentary films that engage with the photographic medium to consider diverse forms of mediated mobility: Born into Brothels (Ross Kauffman and Zana Briski, 2004) and City of Photos (Nishtha Jain, 2005). Although both films illustrate how disadvantaged subjects in contemporary Indian society negotiate their desires of mobility, they propose different ways to assert their identity as a cosmopolitan, deploying varying levels of imagination. This discussion illustrates how marginalized subjects engage with global forces in local spaces by cultivating media literacy and demonstrating creative uses of visual media.
Research Interests:
This essay analyzes Korean films, Traffickers (Gongmojadeul, Hong-seon Kim, 2012), Sea Fog (Haemoo, Sungbo Shim, 2014), and The Yellow Sea (Hwanghae, Na Hong-jin, 2010), to examine the motif of fragmented bodies and perilous cross-border... more
This essay analyzes Korean films, Traffickers (Gongmojadeul, Hong-seon Kim, 2012), Sea Fog (Haemoo, Sungbo Shim, 2014), and The Yellow Sea (Hwanghae, Na Hong-jin, 2010), to examine the motif of fragmented bodies and perilous cross-border migrations. These films depict vulnerable bodies that are at risk of being brutalized, mutilated, and dismembered according to the calculating logic of global capital.
Research Interests:
This essay analyzes two Korean films, Coin Locker Girl (Chinatown, Han Jun-hee, 2015) and Missing (Missing: Sarajin Yeoja, Lee Eon-hie, 2016), to consider how the films’ spaces exhibit traces of transnational mobility. Considering how... more
This essay analyzes two Korean films, Coin Locker Girl (Chinatown, Han Jun-hee, 2015) and Missing (Missing: Sarajin Yeoja, Lee Eon-hie, 2016), to consider how the films’ spaces exhibit traces of transnational mobility. Considering how various forms of border crossing and transnational exchanges affect changes in Korean society, this paper examines changing perceptions of kinship and alternative notions of family and home. These changes in networks of kinship and ideas of “homely” and “unhomely” spaces, I argue, is indicative of one’s shifting status or position in the “imagined community” of contemporary South Korea. I focus on “unhomely spaces,” or spaces that are “made strange,” in a broader attempt to analyze the spatial relations and representations of space in Korean films. These spaces, I contend, function as an emblem of complex networks of kinship that are created and maintained, or sometimes threatened and disintegrated by transnational exchanges that occur in contemporary Korean society.
Research Interests:
This paper considers memory as a productive supplement to so-called “historical facts.” But memories are often unwieldy and unstable, so the representation and inclusion of memory in historiography raise many questions. In what ways can... more
This paper considers memory as a productive supplement to so-called “historical facts.” But memories are often unwieldy and unstable, so the representation and inclusion of memory in historiography raise many questions. In what ways can personal memory be incorporated into collective memory or public history? In what modes and cultural forms can memory be stored in archives? How can memories be mobilized outside the realm of mental images and materialize in mediated forms? This paper explores possible ways of integrating media representations of memory and history by examining the Cambodian-French experimental documentary The Missing Picture (Rithy Panh, 2013) in the context of this discourse on history, memory, trauma, and documentary evidence. Based on the historical repercussions of the Pol Pot communist regime, Panh’s documentary ponders on the dilemma of depicting genocide—in terms of overcoming personal and collective trauma and also finding adequate methods of representation. In addition to photographs and archival footage, the filmmaker uses clay figurines as uncanny doubles for himself, family members, and many other victims to re-enact their collective sensory memories. Panh further experiments with the limitations of representation by juxtaposing clay figurines and archival footage in the same frame to create a multimedia memoryscape. The disorienting friction between these two modes of representation foregrounds the materiality and temporal complexity of mediated memories. This paper interrogates how these unconventional modes of documentary embody the collective trauma of Khmer Rouge victims, and how they accommodate the complex temporalities and embodied materiality of mediated memories.
Research Interests:
Media have complicated relationships with death. Often when a new medium emerges and develops, it is imagined as a channel of contacting, capturing, or otherwise mediating invisible presences. Thematic and visual tropes of ghosts,... more
Media have complicated relationships with death. Often when a new medium emerges and develops, it is imagined as a channel of contacting, capturing, or otherwise mediating invisible presences. Thematic and visual tropes of ghosts, phantoms, mummies, doppelgangers, and other spectral phenomena have been invoked to describe the uncanny doubling and disembodying effects of photography, cinema, electronic and digital media, as well as visions of the afterlife offered by such media technologies. Jacques Derrida writes that, ‘every period has its ghosts, its own experience, its own medium, and its proper hauntological media’ (1994, 193). The cinematic medium is particularly inviting to forms of the undead because of its uncanny capacity to record and reanimate ghostly residues of the past. Bodies continue to regenerate in contemporary digital cinema. In digital media, the undead are often reanimated, good as new, either reproduced in the same form, or reincarnated as an enhanced body composed of varying amalgams of organic, mechanic, and cybernetic parts. Mobilising Marxist concepts of dead and living labour and Derrida’s hauntological approach, this article examines the phenomenon of new perceptions and depictions of death (or after-death) in the hybrid environments of contemporary cinema: the reanimation of the digital (un)dead. I focus on incarnations of the digital undead in two films that deploy different modes and techniques of animation: ParaNorman (2012) and Avatar (2009). This article interrogates how we live (and die) as a human in a posthuman world and what it means to be human amid the emerging promise of posthumous existence through digital reanimation. I suggest that these films are emblematic of the current visual culture of digital enhancement or regeneration of the human body into hybrid cyborg bodies, which embody the paradox of a dead, yet animated existence, or a no-longer-human, yet all-too-human body.
Research Interests:
Using concepts such as “transmedia storytelling,” “world-building,” and “total merchandising,” media scholars have noted how the reach of the entertainment industry expands across a wide variety of media platforms including films,... more
Using concepts such as “transmedia storytelling,” “world-building,” and “total merchandising,” media scholars have noted how the reach of the entertainment industry expands across a wide variety of media platforms including films, television shows, comic books, video games, websites, and action figures. This paper examines how the material spaces of theme parks in particular expand the imaginative realm of experiencing and consuming entertainment media. Here I discuss the performative dimension of the extra-cinematic experience by focusing on the case study of a popular ride available in Universal Studios based on a film franchise: “Revenge of the Mummy.” I examine the sensations of mobility and velocity associated with the cinematic medium and the theme park ride, and then interrogate the relationship between the cinematic medium and the cultural significance of the mummy through the rhetoric of authenticity and the recurring motifs of death and rebirth. This paper performs a spatial and semiotic analysis to consider how the Mummy ride regenerates the fascination with the phantasmatic quality of the cinematic medium even as it enhances the physical experience of the film narrative. By doing so, this paper conducts a critical reading of a transmedia assemblage that deploys rhetorical, visual and narrative devices of both “old” and “new” media to visualize, produce, and maintain imaginary spaces that materialize in both real and virtual forms.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Media representations of race have attempted to contain blackness by packaging and commodifying it to reflect and affect preconceptions and prejudices of dominant culture. From the early beginnings of blackface minstrelsy as entertainment... more
Media representations of race have attempted to contain blackness by packaging and commodifying it to reflect and affect preconceptions and prejudices of dominant culture. From the early beginnings of blackface minstrelsy as entertainment form in the 19th century, representations of African Americans in popular culture and mainstream media have been closely associated with the notion of performance. The performative nature of racial representations is situated within the discursive struggle over what it meant to be Black, or what it meant to be labeled and portrayed as Black in American culture. This essay discusses four films that contain performances of “blackness” that assemble race and gender in complex configurations: Bamboozled (Spike Lee, 2000), Girl 6 (Spike Lee, 1996), Big Momma’s House (Raja Gosnell, 2000), and White Chicks (Keenen Ivory Wayans, 2004). I explore how the performative nature of “blackness” is emphasized, thematized, and problematized in these films through the physicality of corporeal figures that embody the close link between race and gender identities. Once cognizant of the fact that race and gender are fabricated cultural constructs and performative acts, one can recognize that notions of “blackness” and “femininity” are not naturalized or essentialist, but open to recontextualization and revision.
Research Interests:
In his film, Bontoc Eulogy (1995), Filipino-American filmmaker Marlon Fuentes tells the story of Markod, a young Bontoc chief and warrior from the Igorot tribe, by using such historical material as archival footage, photographs, and... more
In his film, Bontoc Eulogy (1995), Filipino-American filmmaker Marlon Fuentes tells the story of Markod, a young Bontoc chief and warrior from the Igorot tribe, by using such historical material as archival footage, photographs, and reenactments. Fuentes offers in this experimental documentary an alternative mode of telling history that deviates from the traditional ethnographic documentary, even as he re-appropriates the archival footage that is filtered through ethnocentric perspectives and steeped in colonial desires. Fuentes deploys the productive power of fabulation to wrest open an imaginative space in his film where ghosts materialize and articulate their stories. This essay analyzes Bontoc Eulogy as a ghost story. As a liminal figure that hovers somewhere in-between different realms of presence and absence, the specter transcends the supposed impossibility of bringing together a multiplicity of temporal and spatial layers. In his film, Fuentes presents a new kind of language to converse with specters and to make them discernible. His film uses fictional and imaginative methods that re-appropriate archival footage, sound recordings, letters narrated by the filmmaker, and fragments of the human anatomy, such as skulls, skeletons, and a pickled brain in a glass jar, which are stored and displayed as anthropological artifacts in a national museum. Here I discuss how an experimental documentary film can deploy spectral methods and disjunctive devices to give form and legibility to forgotten figures in history.
Research Interests:
This essay discusses the documentary film, Regret to Inform (Barbara Sonneborn, 1998), to examine how the filmmaker incorporates personal memories and testimonies to construct an alternative historical narrative of the Vietnam War.... more
This essay discusses the documentary film, Regret to Inform (Barbara Sonneborn, 1998), to examine how the filmmaker incorporates personal memories and testimonies to construct an alternative historical narrative of the Vietnam War. Through such performative acts as reading private letters and journeying to Vietnam, the filmmaker (who is also a war widow) endeavors to fill in the gaps of public history by expanding the archive to include personal memories, both first- and second-hand testimonies, and images from the past and the present. The film explores various ways to articulate history and to effectively form a chorus of plural voices that contribute to the construction of collective memory. In the film Sonneborn performs multiple roles as filmmaker, narrator, interviewer, war widow, and witness of testimonies given by other women whose lives were affected by the war.
The filmmaker also takes on the task of historian by using the documentary film as a medium to construct an alternative history on the Vietnam War. She performs this task by incorporating oral traditions, written records, still or moving images, actions, and space. Regret to Inform invokes the powerful impact of place memories in particular through the journey of the filmmaker and her companion, a Vietnamese American war-survivor/translator, to Vietnam almost twenty years after the war. Despite the limitations stemming from its mediation through the lens and perspective of an American filmmaker, the film attempts to diversify the voices that construct a historical narrative. Here personal memories come together to form an assemblage of collective memory. By giving first-hand accounts on surviving hardships during the war, or reading letters sent by loved ones who fought in Vietnam, the female subjects of the film share a common goal to fill in the “lacunae” of the written history on the war.
The filmmaker also takes on the task of historian by using the documentary film as a medium to construct an alternative history on the Vietnam War. She performs this task by incorporating oral traditions, written records, still or moving images, actions, and space. Regret to Inform invokes the powerful impact of place memories in particular through the journey of the filmmaker and her companion, a Vietnamese American war-survivor/translator, to Vietnam almost twenty years after the war. Despite the limitations stemming from its mediation through the lens and perspective of an American filmmaker, the film attempts to diversify the voices that construct a historical narrative. Here personal memories come together to form an assemblage of collective memory. By giving first-hand accounts on surviving hardships during the war, or reading letters sent by loved ones who fought in Vietnam, the female subjects of the film share a common goal to fill in the “lacunae” of the written history on the war.
Research Interests:
In film noir, the masculine narrative attempts to contain subversive female characters, or “femmes fatales,” by turning her into spectacle, or by deploying the male voice-over narration. Although voice-over narration in film noir often... more
In film noir, the masculine narrative attempts to contain subversive female characters, or “femmes fatales,” by turning her into spectacle, or by deploying the male voice-over narration. Although voice-over narration in film noir often grants the male narrator control over the representation of the female character, this male dominance over narration is not always all powerful. A closer reading of film noir reveals gaps in the male narrative that allow for the female narrative to push through and exert its presence. This essay examines how the woman’s story vocally and visually exerts its power in two film noirs, Detour (Edgar Ulmer, 1946) and Raw Deal (Anthony Mann, 1948). A close reading of these two films reveal that various forces operate simultaneously within each film; thereby the film becomes a negotiating ground for multiple narratives that contradict, destabilize, contest, and compete with one another. The two films present different versions of a “vocal woman” that aspires to acquire an authorial voice: a verbally potent “femme fatale” in Detour, and a woman narrator in Raw Deal. Through a textual analysis of the film’s narrative, I demonstrate how disjunctions and contradictions among multiple objective and subjective viewpoints, visualized through such devices as lighting, camera movement, and shot composition, reveal narrative gaps in the film. These gaps ultimately open up interstices in the narrative for women characters to tell their stories with or without the mediation of the voice-over narration, thereby enabling more complex and empowering readings of the noir woman. I focus on how the complex narrative structure of a film allows more space for the female character to exert her presence and voice, ultimately destabilizing the hegemony of masculine power in classical Hollywood cinema.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
In this essay I examine the tension among the varying levels of global mobility associated with multiple spectral bodies that haunt the textual, intertextual and production spaces of the film, Shutter (2008), a Hollywood/Japanese remake... more
In this essay I examine the tension among the varying levels of global mobility associated with multiple spectral bodies that haunt the textual, intertextual and production spaces of the film, Shutter (2008), a Hollywood/Japanese remake of a popular Thai movie with the same title. I identify three types of spectral incarnations that are invoked or generated by the film: the Asian ghost figure in the narrative, the textual body of the Thai film that served as its source material, and Thai laborers that produced this earlier version. I argue that these spectralized forms of labor are materially present in the textual body of the film, and are perceptible to those who cultivate a “spectral vision” via uncanny effects created
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests: Film Studies and Sound
Research Interests:
Amid the fast-paced development and wide-scale deployment of digital technologies in contemporary film production, computer-generated visual effects are increasingly used to create fictional environments that are distant from present... more
Amid the fast-paced development and wide-scale deployment of digital technologies in contemporary film production, computer-generated visual effects are increasingly used to create fictional environments that are distant from present reality, whether temporally (past or future) or spatially (outer space or realm of fantasy). Notwithstanding the emphasis placed on emerging digital technologies that enhance the “otherworldly” effect of these alien environments, however, much of the filming process in science fiction cinema entail practical sets and effects shot in real locations, as did the pre-digital films of the Star Wars series. This chapter examines the hybrid environments of contemporary science fiction films that incorporate real locations on Earth and computer-generated ecosystems to create “alien” (i.e., otherworldly or futuristic) spaces by considering two films made by global Hollywood: Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012) and Oblivion (Joseph Kosinski, 2013). My concern here is to consider how these popular depictions of imagined spaces embody and construct a shared visual imaginary or vernacular of “other” spaces--whether on this Earth or beyond--for global consumption.
Research Interests:
English Translation of a novel by Korean writer
Gyeongrin Jeon
Gyeongrin Jeon