Dr. Kwang Woo Noh has conducted research on film history, film criticism, and popular culture theory (Korean Wave) through various articles and books including 《Everything of Drama: From soap opera to high-quality drama, from public TV to cable TV》 and 《Managing Transnational Flows in East Asia》. He received his PhD in Communications from the University of South Illinois in the United States, and is currently a film columnist.
In this lecture, he explained the formation, evolution and extinction of the road movie genre of Korean films. Dr. Noh defined road movies as “a series of events that characters experience during travelling” and the prototypes of Korean road movies can be found in “When buckwheat blooms” (1967). According to him, the speed of movement in the Korean road movies, coupled with the development of mobility technology, is related to the speed of transportation such as premodern walking, modern speed of transportation, and postmodern speed of transportation such as airplanes and high-speed trains. This talk made us to broaden the perspective on the representation and phenomena of mobility in Korean films through a multifaceted historical review of the creation, evolution, and extinction of Korean road movies.