War Films In Japan And Korea: Fantasies Of History And Historical Fantasy

A lecture by Prof. Dr. Alexander ZAHLTEN

The fraught history between Korea and Japan has led to very different paths in dealing with the topic of war on screen. War films have been used for memorializing the past, framing the present, or pointing towards a specific vision of the future. Showing multiple examples, this lecture by Prof. Dr. Alexander ZAHLTEN (Harvard University) examines how they have combined history and fantasy in specific and very different ways – from sci-fi epics about telepathic teenagers and flying submarines to brutal melodrama.