Bong Joon Ho

Joseph Jonghyun Jeon (Author)

9780252088575

Paperback / softback, published 19 November 2024

176 pages, 21 black & white photographs
21 x 14 x 3.8 cm, 0.254 kg

“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

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.

Acknowledgments