Abstract

This paper probes the ways in which Baek Yun-shik’s film persona, produced during the early to mid-2000s, reflects an encounter with the legacy of the authoritarian Park Chung-hee regime in the wake of the IMF Crisis. One noteworthy cultural phenomenon following the IMF bailout in Korea was the rise of discourse concerning Park, marked by a desire to reflect on our unnoticed embeddedness in developmentalism, even during the postauthoritarian period. By centering the intergenerational pairing of Baek’s characters, all of which reference the authoritarian era, with young protagonists ignorant of the historical implications of their struggles, Baek’s films simultaneously envision the state of epistemological blindness in the postauthoritarian period and our confrontation with the legacy of Park’s developmentalism in the wake of the IMF crisis. It is only after cinematically reconstructing what was missed under the epochal marker of “postauthoritarian,” up until the IMF crisis, that the films delve into describing the unprecedented nature of the crisis itself. Hence, I redefine the modifier of “postIMF” to designate a modality grappling with a series of epistemological shifts provoked by the IMF crisis, and suggest that Baek’s film persona has “postIMF” traits which facilitate a collective reckoning with Park’s surviving legacy, problematized retroactively during the crisis.