Forever Girls: Necro-Cinematics and South Korean Girlhood

Forever Girls explores girlhood manifest in contemporary South Korean cinema within the conflicting socio-political forces that shaped the nation: coloniality, postcolonial and postwar traumas, modernity, and democracy. Author Jinhee Choi reorients the direction of current scholarship on contemporary South Korean cinema from patriarchy, masculinity and violence, to instead consider girls as a social imaginary.

Drawing on the depiction of girlhood from the 1970s as a reference image, including that of low-wage working-class girls, Choi explores the extent to which the form of girlhood represented in the millennial South Korean cinema still resonates with such an image. From the popular teen pictures and male auteurs’ work of the 1970s; to a contemporary film cycle on military sexual slavery (＂wianbu＂); to Bong Joon-ho’s girl trilogy; and to South Korean independent cinema of 2010s directed by women, Choi focuses on girls’ sexuality, labor, and leisure, and demonstrates how girls in contemporary South Korean cinema are increasingly represented to have agency (albeit still limited); they are subjects who remember the past, experience the present, and envision the future, and whose interiority lies beyond their status as victims of sexual violence and national trauma. Choi further critically engages with the girlhood associated with unproductivity and dismissed as mere irreality. In contrast, she foregrounds how cinema could adequately mourn girls’ deaths and grant them shelter and idleness as part of what is desperately needed: the very girlhood that has long been denied.

Jinhee Choi is a Professor of Film Studies at King’s College London, UK. She’s the author of South Korean Film Renaissance: Local Hitmakers, Global Provocateur (2010) and has edited Reorienting Ozu: A Master and His Influence (2018) and co-edited Cine-Ethics: Ethical Dimensions of Film Theory, Practice and Spectatorship (2014). She has published widely on East Asian popular cinemas, film and urban space, food and film, and philosophy of film in numerous journals and edited volumes.