“What is a Parasite in The Host?: Bong Joon-ho’s Cinema," a lecture by Seung-hoon Jeong

Date: 10-18-2021

Time: 07:30 PM

Location: Quicklive

This event is part of our HI-funded Film Series, "Asian Cinema as World Cinema"

Bong Joon-ho’s third feature, The Host (2006), is the first mainstream South Korean monster film that fancifully visualizes his unique genre imagination: what if a monster suddenly attacks the center of Seoul? This hypothesis, however, serves as a platform for social critiques that draw particular attention to the government’s irrational security measures against citizens. The main characters’ struggle with state power as well as the monster makes us question the relation between the biopolitical system and its apparent enemy, evoking the 1980s dissident movement in Korean geopolitics. Bong’s generational background matters here to highlight the local context of historical traumas and societal shifts allegorized in political, cultural, and ethical ways. This talk focuses on The Host in this regard while briefly mapping Bong’s later films, including Snowpiercer, Okja, and Parasite.

The lecture is given by Seung-hoon Jeong, Assistant Professor of Film and Electronic Arts at California State University Long Beach. He wrote Cinematic Interfaces: Film Theory after New Media (2013), co-translated Jacques Derrida’s Acts of Literature into Korean (2013), co-edited The Global Auteur: The Politics of Authorship in 21^st Century Cinema (2016), guest-edited an issue of Studies in the Humanities “Global East Asian Cinema: Abjection and Agency” (2019), co-edited Thomas Elsaesser’s The Mind-Game Film: Distributed Agency, Time Travel, and Productive Pathology (2021), and is writing Global Cinema: A Biopolitical and Ethical Reframing (forthcoming in 2022).

The event is sponsored by the Humanities Institute; Asian Studies Program; Dept. of Visual and Performing Arts; International Studies Program; Honors Program; Dept. of Communication & Dept. of Modern Languages and Literatures.

For more information, contact Jiwei Xiao / 203-254-4000x3475 / jxiao@fairfield.edu