Author Description

<p><b>Alters the landscape of Lacanian film theory by revealing an "emancipatory drive" in transnational cinema.</b></p><p>A significant intervention into Lacanian film studies, this book sets forth a new theory of the psychoanalytic Real in cinema. In psychoanalysis, the Real ruptures the Symbolic that organizes law, ideology, and other systems of belief, revealing fissures in this underlying order. <i>The Cinema of the Real</i> explores how transnational cinema and especially South Korean cinema facilitate an encounter with the Real, enabling the emergence of a new political subject. Paying close attention to form, Hyon Joo Yoo reveals the existence of an "emancipatory drive" in films by Jang Hun, Park Chan-wook, Lee Chang-dong, Jia Zhangke, Michael Haneke, Claire Denis, and Bong Joon-ho, among others. Their work in effect provides viewers with a picture of how it looks and feels to be on a trajectory in which the subject and her world can change. Far from being a passive consumer of images, Yoo's spectator enters the space of the Real. Theoretically rigorous and inventive, <i>The Cinema of the Real</i> offers new, transnationally attuned tools for conceptualizing the body, affect, femininity, and spectatorship, as well as fresh readings of both classic and contemporary films.</p>