Bong Joon Ho

by Joseph Jonghyun Jeon

Overview

Successful cult films like The Host and Snowpiercer proved to be harbingers for Bong Joon Ho’s enormous breakthrough success with Parasite. Joseph Jonghyun Jeon provides a consideration of the director’s entire career and the themes, ambitions, techniques, and preoccupations that infuse his works. As Jeon shows, Bong’s sense of spatial and temporal dislocations creates a hall of mirrors that challenges us to answer the parallel questions Where are we? and When are we?. Jeon also traces Bong’s oeuvre from its early focus on Korea’s US-fueled modernization to examining the entanglements of globalization in Mother and his subsequent films. A complete filmography and in-depth interview with the director round out the book.

Insightful and engaging, Bong Joon Ho offers an up-to-date analysis of the genre-bending international director.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780252088575
Publisher:	University of Illinois Press
Publication date:	11/19/2024
Series:	Contemporary Film Directors
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Joseph Jonghyun Jeon is a professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Vicious Circuits: Korea’s IMF Cinema and the End of the American Century.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

A Note on Romanization

Global Entanglements

Increments of Modernity: Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000) and Memories of Murder (2003)

Parenting Fails: The Host (2006) and Mother (2009)

Fantasies of Escape (Outside): Snowpiercer (2013) and Okja (2017)

Fantasies of Escape (Inside): Parasite (2019)

Coda: Mise en mondial

An Interview with Bong Joon Ho

Filmography

Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

Inventive and engaging, with elegant and grounded analyses of Bong’s oeuvre. While there are other English-language volumes now devoted to the director, Jeon’s multifaceted account of the relationship between Korea’s modern history and the trajectory of Bong’s traversal of genres, modes, and production practices yields remarkable insight.” —Michelle Cho, University of Toronto

From the Publisher