TY - BOOK ID - 78676981 TI - Vicious circuits PY - 2019 SN - 1503608468 9781503608467 9781503606692 1503606694 9781503608450 150360845X PB - Stanford, California DB - UniCat KW - Economics in motion pictures. KW - Motion pictures KW - Motion picture industry KW - Film industry (Motion pictures) KW - Moving-picture industry KW - Cultural industries KW - History. KW - Korea (South) KW - United States KW - Civilization KW - American influences. KW - American studies. KW - Asian Marxism. KW - Asian studies. KW - IMF Crisis. KW - K-pop. KW - Korea. KW - US hegemony. KW - cultures of economics. KW - film. KW - globalization. UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:78676981 AB - In December of 1997, the International Monetary Fund announced the largest bailout package in its history, aimed at stabilizing the South Korean economy in response to a credit and currency crisis of the same year. Vicious Circuits examines what it terms "Korea's IMF Cinema," the decade of cinema following that crisis, in order to think through the transformations of global political economy at the end of the American century. It argues that one of the most dominant traits of the cinema that emerged after the worst economic crisis in the history of South Korea was its preoccupation with economic phenomena. As the quintessentially corporate art form—made as much in the boardroom as in the studio—film in this context became an ideal site for thinking through the global political economy in the transitional moment of American decline and Chinese ascension. With an explicit focus of state economic policy, IMF cinema did not just depict the economy; it also was this economy's material embodiment. That is, it both represented economic developments and was itself an important sector in which the same pressures and changes affecting the economy at large were at work. Joseph Jonghyun Jeon's window on Korea provides a peripheral but crucial perspective on the operations of late US hegemony and the contradictions that ultimately corrode it. ER -