영화 <미지왕>의 작가주의적 관점과 영화사적 의미 고찰

A Research on <Ambiguous Man>’s Creative Motivation

<Ambiguous Man> was premiered in December 21st, 1996. It was produced by Taehung Production Co., ltd. and directed by Kim, Yong Tae. Taehung Production Co., ltd. was the top grossing film production company at that time. Kim Yong Tae who obtained Bachelor’s degree as well as Master’s degree from Sogang University majoring in journalism also attended New York University Master’s program at Tisch School of the Arts majoring in film productions. The collaboration of these two had enough elements to get people’s high attention. However, this movie turned out to be a big failure at the box office. The time was before financial or big corporate investment flooded into the film industry. Therefore Taehung Production Co., ltd. was the sole investor of this movie and they put up with 1 billion KRW when the average budget of movies was 3 to 4 hundred million KRW. 10,403 people watched <Ambiguous Man> and the top grossing film of the same year, <Two Cops 2>attracted 636, 047 audience. Because of the huge failure at the box office, <Ambiguous Man> was quickly ignored by critics and academics. It was only tagged as “the first Korean cult movie.” Regardless of box office score, there are movies that are actively studied and not. <Ambiguous Man> belongs to the latter category. However, I believe this movie needs to be studied and analyzed more due to following reasons. First of all, this movie was the first that did not quite belong to any specific genre category throughout Korean film history. That fact alone has enough value to be studied. Second of all, it was a time when number of directors who had studied film abroad came back to Korea and made directorial debut. Up to this point, filmmaking was strongly an apprentice and one had to climb up the whole systematic ladder in order to become a film director. However, these new comers were able to skip this system. They directed films without any field experiences and they tried put what they have learned abroad into their movies. Kim Yong Tae was one of them. It may be very interesting study of what influences they made on Korean films industry. Finally these new directors’ accessibility to various movie contents that were not available in Korea.