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Im Kwon-Taek: The Making of a Korean National Cinema. Edited by DAVID E. JAMES and KYUNG HYUN KIM. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002. 294 pp. $44.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).
Im Kwon-Taek finally succeeded in making his much-deserved global debut as a director of international significance with the recognition of Chunhyang (1999) and Chihwaseon (2002) at Cannes. The publication of Im Kwon-Taek: The Making of a Korean National Cinema coincides with this major landmark in Im's four decades of film-making career. Broadly speaking, Im's life-long achievements parallel the evolution of South Korean cinema since the 1960s and form the underlying theme of the book, as its subtitle implies.
The essays in the collection, however, concentrate largely on the period from the late 1970s to mid-1990s, leaving out many of Im's works from before and after this period. The omission of Chunhyang in particular-the first Korean film that received a commercial theater release in the United States-may be rather disappointing to readers. This drawback notwithstanding, the volume is a welcome contribution to the growing field of Korean cinema as the first scholarly book in English devoted to an individual director-rather than to South Korean cinema at large, as the editors claim somewhat misleadingly.
Im is one of the most influential and also prolific directors in Korean...