With the release of Parasite (2019), recipient of the Palme d''Or and an Academy Award for Best Picture, South Korean director, Bong Joon Ho, secured his place as one of his generation''s leading filmmakers. Yet while scholars and critics have long appreciated his penetrating critique of Korean society and global capitalism, his oeuvre has not been considered from a philosophical perspective. This book argues that his cinema is philosophical and in a radical and original rather than derivative sense. Anthony Curtis Adler explores Bong''s assertion that Western philosophy is itself a "cinematic apparatus." He claims philosophy anticipates cinema''s technical and expressive means and cinema in turn possesses an extraordinary capacity to criticize philosophy from within. Focusing on the interaction of three closely linked philosophical-cinematic apparatuses used by Bong (the projection of visionary spaces, self-domestication and human life itself as a drama), this book features close readings of his seven feature-length films. Drawing out the philosophical depth of a visionary auteur, Adler brings us on a journey into a unique cinematic world.

Autorentext
Anthony Curtis Adler is a Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Yonsei University's Underwood International College, South Korea. His most recent books include Celebricities: Media Culture and the Phenomenology of Gadget Commodity Life (2016), and Politics and Truth in Hölderlin: 'Hyperion' and the Choreographic Project of Modernity (2021).

Klappentext

With the release of Parasite (2019), recipient of the Palme d'Or and an Academy Award for Best Picture, South Korean director, Bong Joon Ho, secured his place as one of his generation's leading filmmakers. Yet while scholars and critics have long appreciated his penetrating critique of Korean society and global capitalism, his oeuvre has not been considered from a philosophical perspective. This book argues that his cinema is philosophical and in a radical and original rather than derivative sense.

Anthony Curtis Adler explores Bong's assertion that Western philosophy is itself a "cinematic apparatus." He claims philosophy anticipates cinema's technical and expressive means and cinema in turn possesses an extraordinary capacity to criticize philosophy from within. Focusing on the interaction of three closely linked philosophical-cinematic apparatuses used by Bong (the projection of visionary spaces, self-domestication and human life itself as a drama), this book features close readings of his seven feature-length films.

Drawing out the philosophical depth of a visionary auteur, Adler brings us on a journey into a unique cinematic world.

Inhalt

1. Introduction
   a. Why Bong Joon Ho?
   b. Korean Cinema in an Age of Globalization
   c. Bong Joon Ho as Philosophical Filmmaker
   d. Overview of the Argument
   e. A Personal Note on Hybrid Subjectivity

2. The Cinematic Apparatus of Philosophy
   a. Cinema as Projection of Movement and Life
   b. Plato's Visionary Spaces
   c. Aristotle's Poetics and the Drama of Meaning
   d. Psyche as Cinema
   e. Scientific Objectivity as Cinematic Apparatus

3. Barking Dogs Never Bite
   a. The Korean Apartment Complex as Visionary Space
   b. Dog as Food, Friend, Foe: Civilization and Domestication
   c. Endemic Corruption
   d. Ambiguous Liberation
   e. Nature and Sprawl

4. Memories of Murder, Mother
   a. Cinematic Genre as Visionary Space
   b. The Korean Countryside and the Logic of Sprawl
   c. Memories of Murder, Cinematic Voyeurism and the Domestication of Violence
   d. Mother and Murder: On Breaking the Umbilical Cord
   e. The Tunnel and the Camera Lens

5. The Host, Okja
   a. Philosophy, Cinema, and the Global Imaginary
   b. The Host, Mutation as Genetic Sprawl
   c. Okja, Genetic Engineering as Absolute Domestication
   d. From Tunnels to Networks
   e. Visionary Capitalism

6. Snowpiercer
   a. Tunnel, Network, Train
   b. Absolute Global Order as the Apotheosis of Visionary Capitalism
   c. The Subversion of Plot
   d. Civilization as Autophagy
   e. Political-theology: The Hero, The Messiah, The Emperor

7. Parasite
   a. Globalism Inside Out and Outside In
   b. The House as Visionary Space
   c. Civilization and its Parasites
   d. Oedipus, Complexer
   e. Scholar's Dreams

8. Conclusion: Crashing the Cinematic Apparatus of Philosophy