Abstract

This paper examines the achievements and limitations of Chung Chonghwa’s A History of Plagiarism and Adaptation in Film: The 1960s South Korean Film Industry and Japanese Cinema (LP, 2024), with particular attention to “adapted youth films” of the 1960s, exploring adaptation as a creative strategy and its significance in the context of film history. In this book, Chung investigates the issue of plagiarism from Japanese cinema in 1960s South Korea in a systematic and in-depth manner, and attempts to historicize it within the interplay of film industry practices, state policy, censorship authorities, creative agents, and audiences. Through the notion of a “mode of cinematic plagiarism and adaptation,” the book offers a close examination of how these processes coexisted and overlapped. Focusing on adaptation as a generative and strategic act, this paper engages with Linda Hutcheon’s theory of adaptation and Walter Benjamin’s notion of translation to reconsider the binary between original and derivative. It argues that adaptation, in this context, was not merely a imitation, but a site of creative negotiation—shaped by both global flows and local constraints. It also raises the necessity of considering the connection between 1960s Korean youth films and the global mediascape of youth culture that emerged simultaneously and inter-referentially across the Free World during the Cold War, and proposes a multi-layered perspective on the youth film genre cycle that encompasses both global and local intertextualities. Ultimately, the book is expected to serve as an important stepping stone for expanding film historiography through the perspectives and methods of comparative film history that go beyond a nation-centered approach. In order for comparative film history to make a more meaningful scholarly contribution, further efforts are needed to broaden the conceptual horizon of Korean film historiography and to deepen its levels of analysis.