New York City’s Film At Lincoln Center is just a little over a week away from its upcoming retrospective celebrating classic and newly restored Korean films in its new 17-day series, Korean Cinema’s Golden Decade: The 1960s. The series is being organized by Young Jin Eric Choi, Goran Topalovic, and Tyler Wilson, and is co-presented by Subway Cinema in collaboration with the Korean Cultural Center New York and the Korean Film Archive.
Long before Bong Joon Ho, Hong Sangsoo, and Park Chan-wook catapulted South Korean cinema onto the world stage, the foundation of their country’s film industry formed in the aftermath of the Korean War. The period kickstarted a wealth of eclectic and innovative filmmaking that culminated in the 1960s.
Closer inspection of this decade, now widely considered Korea’s premier film renaissance, reveals the arrival of seminal works from auteurs such as Kim Ki-young, Shin Sang-ok, Yu Hyun-mok, Kim Soo-yong, and Lee Man-hee, alongside a meteoric rise and reinvention of genres—from melodramas and period epics to action, horror, war, and giant monster movies. Although the military dictatorship still imposed tight constraints throughout this era, what these filmmakers managed to accomplish under such conditions, in arthouse fare and unabashed popular entertainment alike, continues to reverberate and inspire to this day.
This September, Film at Lincoln Center and Subway Cinema are thrilled to showcase this rich period and its remarkably varied films, encapsulating a generation’s collective endeavor to define a national cinema.
The series is billed as “one of the largest retrospectives ever of 1960s Korean Cinema outside of Korea, including many rarely screened films, several presented on 35mm archival prints.” That includes a listing of as many as twenty four titles to relish when screenings kick off at the Walter Reade Theater September 1 through 17.
Official ticketing and student pass info can be found at the Film At Lincoln Center website. Feel free to check out the gallery below for all the titles programmed and listed accordingly.
