Title: The Ethics of Redemption in Korean Genre Films with Filipino Characters
Abstract: The role of Filipinos in Korean films in the last couple of decades has been stereotypical; give or take, it has been either as a mail-order bride or a domestic worker whose affective potential is often mined for predictable filmic effects. As in many Korean films, those that have Filipino characters often deploy elements and techniques borrowed from multiple genres producing hybridized cinematic forms and narrative structures. As such, this paper aims to show how this cinematic hybridization makes for interesting, if also problematic, story-telling, that, at once hews closely to conventional generic features and defies them outright, apparently at will. This contradictory tendency results in a familiar yet strange narrative logic, overall, owing to a significant degree, to the invisible yet palpable role of affect in the cinematic narrativization. But the interest of this paper is to show how the apparently baffling narrative logic of the films is rendered legible in the light of the kind of ethics by which the film’s Korean hero finds redemption in the marginalized Filipino character.
Bio: Maria Luisa Torres Reyes is Full Professor, and Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Santo Tomas (UST), Manila, the oldest modern university in the Philippines, founded in 1611. She is the Editor-in-Chief of UST's multidisciplinary journal, UNITAS, the oldest extant academic journal of its kind in the Philippines, established in 1922. She is the founding editor and editor emerita of the widely indexed international journal, Kritika Kultura, published by the Ateneo de Manila University -- where she taught for many years. She is author of Banaag at Sikat (2010), the award-winning book of literary criticism on the first “socialist” novel in Asia published by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, and SipatSalin (2012), a collection of her poems and their translations in various foreign and local languages. In her national and international publications, her scholarly interests include the exploration of the ways in which “Western” ideas and literary and critical categories like the theories of Bertolt Brecht, a major German theatre theoretician and practitioner, have been transformed and refunctioned in the Philippines and other non-Western contexts.