Abstract

This article examines the aesthetic transformation of Korean cinema in the mid-1970s through close analyses of The Heavenly Homecoming to Stars (1974), The March of Fools (1975), and Yeong-ja’s Heydays (1975). Previous studies have primarily understood these films in relation to youth culture, generational change, industrialization, and the emergence of mass culture. While such approaches effectively explain the historical conditions in which these films appeared, they do not sufficiently account for the transformation in the ways cinema perceived, depicted, and recorded the world. This study reconceptualizes pungsokhwa (literally, “genre painting”), a term repeatedly employed in contemporary Korean film criticism, as an analytical concept for understanding this transformation. From this perspective, it argues that Korean cinema in the mid-1970s developed a new visual practice centered on describing and recording everyday reality. The Heavenly Homecoming to Stars demonstrates how actual places and real people intervene in fictional space; The March of Fools explores how the cam- era’s indexical capacity records urban space and youthful bodies; and Yeong-ja’s Hey- days examines the commodified and fragmented body produced by industrialization. Rather than attributing the novelty of these films simply to the emergence of a new generation of filmmakers, this article argues that their significance lies in a fundamental transformation in the cinematic ways of depicting and recording the world. These films shifted away from organizing reality through historical narrative and instead turned toward the surfaces of the industrialized city, the people inhabiting its spaces, and the traces that this changing world inscribed upon the human body. In this sense, the article argues that the aesthetic transformation of mid-1970s Korean cinema can be understood through the emergence of pungsokhwa as a new visual regime for depicting and recording the world.