Rethinking Han in Contemporary Korean Cinema: Fiery Moods, Affects, and Atmospheres in Lee Chang-dong’s Burning
Campbell Mah
Simmering orange hues envelop Jong-su’s figure (Yoo Ah-in) in Burning.
Since the 1980s, South Korea’s cinema — much like the nation itself — has been the subject of rapid and drastic change. In the 21st century, contemporary Korean film and television have taken on an exceedingly transnational character, transcending geographic boundaries and reaching an unprecedented number of foreign audiences through popular streaming platforms such as Netflix and the global hype surrounding prize-winning cultural sensations like Parasite (Bong, 2019) and Squid Game (Hwang, 2021). According to Jeeyoung Shin, “contemporary Korean cinema is both an effect of and a response to media globalization,” no longer limited to dealing exclusively with Korean histories, narratives, and audiences in an era where “localization, regionalization, and globalization co-exist in the global media cultural economy” (Shin 52). Thus, Korean cinema today exists in its most decentralized state yet, spanning diverse viewing contexts that demand we expand our understanding of Korean films and their contents beyond the rudimentary metric of the nation-state.
How, then, should we think, write, and talk accordingly about Korean film during its current period of intensive globalization and transnational consumption? Instead of engaging with this question from a more traditional approach (such as by analyzing the narratives of contemporary Korean films and parsing their common thematic, generic, and stylistic trends), I will do so by focusing primarily on the emotional and sensorial dimensions of the filmic medium. Using Lee Chang-dong’s 2018 psychological thriller Burning — a consummate and lauded work of Korean cinema operating squarely within this contemporary transnational context — I will argue that this film formally mediates and evokes a spectrum of emotions associated with the Korean feeling of han primarily through aesthetic channels of mood, affect, and atmosphere. By rethinking contemporary Korean cinema in terms of a shared language of aesthetics and affective resonances as opposed to a collection of narrative and generic trends bound to a particular geographic region, we forgo the risk of reducing a nation’s cinema to a few essentializing epithets (extreme, dark, intense, etc.) and instead better understand films for what they ultimately are — enveloping, visceral, and singularly moving works of art.
Before we unravel the intricate emotional mechanics of mood, affect, and atmosphere in contemporary Korean film, let’s first define and attempt to theorize the Korean notion of han vis-à-vis the cinema. According to Sandra So Hee Chi Kim, han is “an essentialist Korean sociocultural concept that is popularly understood as a uniquely Korean collective feeling of unresolved resentment, pain, grief, and anger. Han is often described as running in the blood of all Koreans, the quality of Korean sorrow … being different from anything Westerners have experienced or can understand” (254). Björn Boman further defines han as a feeling of “rancor or grief, which is a consequence of a persistent injustice due to asymmetric power relations or an inability to take proper means to solve the suffering” (919). Thus, the idea of han is intimately wrapped up in the societal traumas that haunt Korea’s modern past, a deeply ingrained and culturally mediated reaction to the horrors of colonialism, division, war, and authoritarian regimes that is said to be an essential feature of Korean identity and persist generationally. We can, therefore, more clearly understand han as an underlying emotional disposition rooted in Korean national and cultural heritage rather than a fleeting, discrete emotion in and of itself.
Existing scholarship examining the role of han in Korean cinema rarely, if ever, strays from a hegemonic reading that privileges film narrative over all other aspects of the medium. In “The Spectrum of Han: Cultural Psychology in Korean National Cinema,” the authors posit that the articulation of han in Korean cinema “predominately hinges on three key elements: plot, theme, and ending” (Gao et al. 273); the paper attributes portrayals of societal darkness, morally ambiguous characters, and tragic conclusions as primarily constituting the ethos of han in the narratives of Korean films. Likewise, in “From Oldboy to Burning: Han in South Korean films,” the principal criteria of Boman’s analysis of han in four contemporary Korean films are “plot, genre, character constitution, mise-en-scène, and cultural-ideological tendencies” (923), once again entirely dismissing the sensory and affective dimensions of the film medium. Given the predominance of emotive language (underlying feelings of resentment, grief, pain, etc.) used by scholars to describe han as a psycho-cultural concept, it feels only necessary and appropriate to investigate the potential link between cinematic representations of han and a film’s unique capacity to provoke and solicit emotional responses from its viewers.
It is worth noting that amongst many South Koreans living in the 21st century, han is generally considered a dated term and has been extensively critiqued for its problematic and reductive mischaracterization of Korean identity as being somehow imbued with an intrinsic quality of tragedy or sorrow. While I want to eschew perpetuating an equally essentialist argument with my discussion of han and its relation to the aesthetics of contemporary Korean cinema, there is something undeniably at work between the brooding, deep-seated emotions often associated with han and the way these films feel on an experiential level. Although han is far from an ideal metric for theorizing film aesthetics, it provides us with a culturally informed framework from which we can effectively gauge contemporary Korean cinema’s affective and emotional palette.
How, then, do we approach an aesthetic analysis of han in Korean film in which we rigorously consider and grant utmost critical import to the emotional, mental, and bodily responses of the film spectator to the images and sounds on display? Writing of the significance of han and its place in Korean art, Sandra So Hee Chi Kim explains:
Despite the deeply negative and destructive quality of han, it is not a one-dimensional “bad” affect. It historically has been characterized as also creating complex beauty. In fact, han not only refers to a consciousness of ongoing trauma and a lack of resolution, but also the means to its own resolution. Han has an important place in culture because it has become associated with what makes Korean cultural productions — such as visual art, folk music, traditional ceramics, literature, and film, among others — uniquely and beautifully Korean (256).
Here, Kim notably characterizes han in terms of its affect, which she posits as embodying a mercurial combination of feelings of despair, sorrow, and bitterness pitted against a silently hopeful yet tragically unrealizable possibility of reconciliation, reclamation, and deliverance as a striking emotional counterpoint — eternal suffering tinged with an underlying, bittersweet sense of beauty. Translated over to the domain of cinema and its sensuous methods of visual and aural expression, affect, too, plays a fundamental role in sculpting the very granularity of our emotional responses to a film. It is this affective dimension of Burning — the way this contemporary work of Korean cinema aesthetically and formally channels a visceral experience of han through affect, mood, and atmosphere — that I intend to give its rightful due here.
Noting the distinction between affect and emotion, Steven Shaviro writes, “If emotions are personal experiences, then affects are the forces (perhaps the flows of energy) that precede, produce, and inform such experiences. Affect is pre-personal and pre-subjective; it is social, or even ontological, before it is strictly individual” (2). As opposed to the conscious, subjective sensation of discrete emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise, etc.), affects operate as a stealthy undercurrent of feelings and intensities that unconsciously shape our emotional, mental, and bodily reactions to stimuli before we recognize them as named emotions. “Affect,” according to Shaviro, “isn’t what I feel, so much as it is what forces me to feel” (2), attuning our senses to a particular emotional disposition from which we can later experience structured, concrete feelings. There is thus something primal, instinctual, raw, immediate, and physiological about affect and its effect on our cognitive and emotional processes.
A salient link also exists between affect and the cinema. Shaviro further describes affect as being both “actual because it happens within me as an alteration of my physical and psychological state” and “vicarious because … it is independent of the things or forces that trigger it” (2). The cinema — a two-track medium consisting of ghostly, projected moving images and enveloping, suggestive sounds — is thus uniquely poised to vicariously alter our moods, feelings, and thoughts via orchestrations of affect. By palpably engaging our senses (and thereby affecting us from within) through their formal and aesthetic properties, we do not merely watch and listen to films as removed spectators, but rather “we are part of cinema in its emotional eventfulness … in which our affective (‘bodily’) and cognitive (‘cerebral’) states are inextricably intertwined” (Laine 1). One of the primary affective vessels through which the cinema establishes this interface between the audiovisual contents of a film and the interiority of the viewer is mood.
A film’s mood, much like atmosphere, is an intangible and elusive entity notoriously tricky to theorize in concrete terms; however, its presence, affective operations, and emotional effect on the viewer are undeniably palpable. Robert Sinnerbrink defines cinematic mood as an expression of “how a (fictional) world is expressed or disclosed via a shared affective attunement orienting the spectator within that world” (148). According to Sinnerbrink, moods work to engender a homeostatic level of affect, dialing the viewer to a particular state of perception that thereby “enables certain items within that world to show up as interesting, attractive, significant, disturbing, repellent, perplexing, threatening, fascinating, and so on” (154). If affect eases us into a specific emotional disposition by subconsciously acting upon our senses, a film’s mood organizes and sustains affect through the various aesthetic and formal strategies unique to the cinematic medium (lighting, montage, sound, mise-en-scène, etc.). Mood is thus responsible for “eliciting and modulating our emotional responses … thereby contributing to the expression of meaning through cinematic style” (Sinnerbrink 163). Far from merely coloring a scene with a vague, diffuse emotional undertone, mood is intrinsic to the very generation of meaning in film — formally shaping the spectatorial vantage from which we perceive, cognize, and interpret the sights and sounds of the cinema.
If mood orchestrates our emotional and intellectual experience of watching a film through the measured disclosure of its affective contents, atmosphere constitutes the intermediate space through which we interface with the cinematic medium as embodied spectators. Gernot Böhme describes atmosphere generally as “the common reality of the perceiver and the perceived. It is the reality of the perceived as the sphere of its presence and the reality of the perceiver, insofar as in sensing the atmosphere s/he is bodily present in a certain way” (122). Böhme’s conceptualization of atmosphere as a kind of shared reality between the beholder and the beholden resonates with Robert Spadoni’s characterization of atmosphere in film as a “global entity” that “engulfs not a film’s characters but its audience” in the charged space between the spectator and the screen (56). Rather than merely serving as a background fixture or an accompaniment to a film’s narrative elements expressed through aspects of mise-en-scéne, Spadoni argues that film atmosphere crucially exhibits a quality of “betweenness” as it exists neither totally within a film nor in the audience but comes into being whenever each entity “breathes” the other (61). Atmospheres thus mediate our collective experience of the cinema, bridging the gap between human and medium and creating a space in which a film’s formal properties — its evocative displays of light, color, sound, and movement — coalesce with and tincture our perpetual, emotional, and cognitive processes in the darkened air of the theater. It is through the immersivity of atmosphere that our sensorium becomes enmeshed with the film medium, and our thoughts and feelings become interlinked with the silver screen.
My decision to critically examine han in Burning on the level of mood, affect, and atmosphere (as opposed to simply narrative and character) is multifold. By thinking about how this film feels, we become privy to underlying meanings, messages, and subtexts perhaps lost to a purely narrative analysis; han, after all, is a cultural concept foremostly described in terms of its emotional resonances. In the words of Sinnerbrink, “Emotion is elicited and communicated aesthetically, with feeling, sensibility, and reflection, as well as cognitively. We can be attuned or responsive to films in ways that are not principally oriented towards a goal, focused on grasping narrative content or on cognitive comprehension” (152). Thus, feeling this fiery film — paying careful attention to its calculated leveraging of mood and atmosphere, and how our emotions are thereby affected — is tantamount to comprehending its gripping chronicle of class conflict, simmering violence, and existential despair in contemporary South Korean society.
An Affective Analysis of Burning
Adapted from the 1983 short story “Barn Burning” by acclaimed Japanese author Haruki Murakami, Lee Chang-dong’s 2018 film Burning follows an unemployed novelist (Yoo Ah-in) as he obsessively investigates the mysterious disappearance of his childhood friend and current lover (Jeon Jong-seo) after she becomes involved with a handsome, wealthy young socialite (Steven Yeun) who claims to have an insouciant predilection for setting fire to abandoned greenhouses. The dramatic crux of the film revolves around the fraught, ambiguous tensions that riddle the relationships between these three central characters (named Jong-su, Hae-mi, and Ben, respectively), specifically, Jong-su’s conviction of Ben’s direct involvement in Hae-mi’s vanishing — potentially through murder. Ambiguity, uncertainty, and confusion permeate much of the narrative; the film playfully engages in diegetic games of presence and absence, forcing both its characters and viewers to habitually question their memory and perception as its manifold mysteries uncoil, only to resurge in an impenetrable knot of half-truths and hunches. To better understand how Burning evokes han through mood, affect, and atmosphere, let us first examine the various ways in which the film engages with realism and melodrama.
Burning adopts a social realist aesthetic that foregrounds the stark disparities in the working and living conditions between members of modern South Korean society. Jong-su, a college graduate who majored in creative writing (but has yet to write anything for actual pay), lives on his father’s livestock farm in the rural city of Paju, located north of Seoul and just a few hundred kilometers below the 38th parallel. Much of the film’s action is set against the backdrop of the Paju countryside; dilapidated greenhouses, manual agricultural laborers, and the ghostly echoes of North Korean radio broadcasts pervade the scenery of Jong-su’s precarious existence as an unemployed young person from a working-class family, systematically excluded from the lavish comforts of upper-class life in the nation’s capital. The film juxtaposes these scenes of provincial quietude, often filmed using long takes that immerse the viewer in a realistic sense of time and space, with those taking place in Seoul’s Gangnam District — the glitzy, upscale neighborhood where Ben and his circle of affluent socialites (whom Jong-su bookishly refers to as Korean Gatsby’s) reside. These two spaces — only a short drive away for Ben’s Porsche and Jong-su’s battered, sputtering pickup truck — are further rendered disparate through differences in lighting and color; the penumbral Paju sky that lays everything awash in icy shades of blue contrasts with the warm, artificial light fixtures that illuminate Ben’s penthouse suite with a soft, golden glow.
In addition to representing contemporary social reality and its (dis)contents through a realist aesthetic, Burning operates in a distinctly melodramatic mode of filmmaking by which the film ostensibly solicits empathy for the plight of its unfairly disadvantaged hero victim (Jong-su and, to an extent, Hae-mi) faced against a morally bereft and classically evil victimizer (Ben). However, while the film combines melodrama and social realist aesthetics, it does so with a subversive edge. The film’s meditative, slow-burn approach (accentuated by extensive use of long takes, contemplative pacing, and its spacey, ambient musical score) to depicting highly melodramatic narrative conceits — including Jong-su’s jealousy over Ben’s power-ridden relationship with Hae-mi and the latter’s disappearance and possible murder by a Bluebeard-esque figure — lends itself to an attenuated affective palette atypical of conventional melodrama. Instead of clarifying the lines between good and evil and inviting pathos for its protagonist, the film’s formally subdued melodramatic language and the complete elision of scenes depicting the actuality of Hae-mi’s vanishing further obfuscates this binary. Jong-su’s supposed heroic search for the truth behind Ben’s incendiary hobby reads more closely akin to an obsessive, rage-fueled masculine fantasy — one tinctured by undercurrents of han in its self-destructiveness and futility. Similarly, our expectation for the “dramatic revelation of moral and emotional truths” (Williams 42) through melodrama is undercut by the film’s playful reveling in ambiguity. In this way, Burning complicates traditional melodramatic narrative and affect through its slow aesthetic and formal minimalism, inflecting clear-cut moral distinctions with a level of epistemic uncertainty reflective of the changing ethos of modern Korean society.
It is also worth noting that Burning exists within a web of intertexts informed by an amalgam of references, including Haruki Murakami’s broader literary oeuvre —specifically, plotlines involving missing felines and mysterious wells from his 1994-1995 novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle — and William Faulkner’s 1939 short story “Barn Burning,” from which Murakami’s 1983 story takes its title. These literary influences, along with political allusions to the close bearing of Trump-era American politics on South Korea’s growing economic disparity and youth unemployment rate (particularly in a scene featuring a televised newscast of the former U.S. President that plays in the background of Jong-su’s cluttered Paju dwelling) give the film a layered complexity. The film’s synthesis of these varied influences creates a composite that, despite the global scope of its constituent intertexts, still engages distinctly Korean thematic, cultural, and sociopolitical matters, both narratively and emotionally.
One culturally specific facet of Burning is its commentary on repressed feelings of han inherited between generations and their pernicious effects on disillusioned male subjects adrift in contemporary Korean society. This theme is most conspicuous on a narrative level through the character of Jong-su’s father, a seasoned livestock worker tried and arrested for assaulting a government employee following a violent altercation that we never see. The father’s underlying rage — and his proneness to outbursts of violence — serves as a foreboding reflection of the son’s increasingly fractured psyche and capacity for such behavior as he obsessively seeks answers regarding Hae-mi’s disappearance and comes to resent Ben’s vacuous, destructive existence. Wrapped up in these deep-seated feelings of anger is a sense of frustration and bitterness arising from the contradictions Jong-su must face due to societal power imbalances; Jong-su’s working-class, single father is imprisoned for a minor scuffle while Ben — a potential serial killer — can enjoy burning greenhouses (literally or figuratively) and “playing” for a living at high-end restaurants and clubs with complete impunity, half-bored.
But how are the feelings of han central to Burning’s narrative — deeply-rooted emotions of unresolved resentment, sorrow, and grievance towards persistent societal injustices — aesthetically conveyed through mood? If mood refers to how a film reveals its cinematic world to its viewers through a shared affective attunement that orients us as primed perceivers, Burning leverages an aesthetic of minimalism, paring down what we see and hear through deliberate pacing and long stretches of silence or ambient musical score, thereby allowing affect — unresolved, simmering, half-formed intensities rather than overt emotions — to saturate our senses. This sustained induction of affect through a subdued cinematic style generates a sense of tension within the viewer whilst denying proper cathartic release, leaving us suspended between feelings of frustration and uncertainty that mirror Jong-su’s own emotional state throughout the narrative. In this way, the film’s mood becomes an affective conduit for experiencing han itself.
The film exemplifies the complex emotional effect of its mood produced in conjunction with its restrained cinematic style during an early scene in which Jong-su investigates the tool shed behind his father’s Paju farmhouse. Droning, ambient bass tones accompanied by a sparse percussive beat blend with the diegetic sound of birds chirping in the distance as Jong-su enters the shadowy space in silence. Enveloped in darkness save for a sliver of light breaching through a small window, the camera inquisitively pans around the cramped quarters until fixing its gaze upon an ominous locker in the center of the room. We follow Jong-su from close behind in a tracking shot as he slowly approaches the locker; the spacey, reverberant bass notes of the score generate a lowkey sense of apprehension. Jong-su unlocks the door to reveal a set of shiny hunting knives; the film subsequently cuts from a close-up of Jong-su’s entranced expression to an eyeline match of the weapons — their menacing blades glinting in the escaped morning sunlight as he regards them intently.
Although nothing blatantly shocking or horrifying happens in this scene, its slow pacing and sonic sparseness induce an affect of uneasy anticipation as we wait for the locker’s contents to be revealed to us. Once divulged, the knives take on a charged presence; the film attunes us to contemplate their violent potentiality — the pain they can engender if lodged inside another person’s viscera — and Jong-su’s capacity to carry out such actions himself. Through mood, the film primes us to feel the dormant violence the knives represent, not merely as instruments of bodily harm but as extensions of Jong-su’s psyche — his internalized personal and societal frustrations and the seething han beneath his laconic, impassive exterior. In this way, Burning suggests cinematic meaning primarily through aesthetic channels of mood and affect rather than a character’s direct actions or concrete emotional cues.
Knives suggestive of latent rage in Burning.
Burning also features extended stretches in which mood and atmosphere take complete and utter precedence over the progression of the film’s central narrative. Robert Sinnerbrink refers to these moods as “autonomous” or “enveloping moods” that “[take] on a primary rather than a supporting role in the composition of the fictional world,” “overwhelm the dramatic articulation or dynamic of the story,” and act as a “quasi-independent element within the cinematic world” (161). In perhaps the most atmospheric scene of the film, Hae-mi performs an impromptu topless dance for Ben and Jong-su after smoking marijuana with the two men on the latter’s porch. Time seems to come to a staggering standstill as Hae-mi slowly sways her body in a trance-like state to the dreamy rhythm of Miles Davis’s “Générique” — the graceful silhouette of her raised limbs and undulating figure backlit by the fading glow of twilight as a South Korean flag gently sways in the evening breeze. It’s a surreal, oneiric moment filmed entirely in long take and rendered even more peculiar when, after the song ends and Hae-mi exits offscreen, the camera silently lingers in place — panning across the rural landscape of the Paju countryside before settling its gaze on the dusk sky.
Hae-mi’s (Jun Jong-seo) mysterious dance and autonomous mood in Burning.
Although the scene bears little overall narrative import, this mesmeric interlude of song and dance instantiates an autonomous mood that momentarily supplants and overwhelms all other aspects of Burning (its plot, characters, etc.) by foregrounding itself as an enveloping, atmospheric presence in the film’s world. The handheld camera that measuredly follows Hae-mi’s body in a long take — latching onto each subtle inflection in her movement like a watchful observer — restrains our perception of the event whilst dialing us into a state of attunement as our eyes wander about the mobile frame and sensuous jazz music permeates our auditory channels for multiple minutes on end. Even after Hae-mi steps out of the frame, the film itself seems to exhibit a degree of agency as the camera meditatively lingers on her surroundings; the eerie affect of her onscreen absence and the hushed, natural soundscape presages Hae-mi’s mysterious disappearance (and possible demise) shortly after in the narrative. Thus, the scene’s mood embodies han by soliciting a mercurial mixture of feelings associated with its contrapuntal character — a sense of awe in the sublime beauty of Hae-mi’s liberating display of expressivity tinged with melancholic undertones of pity for the tragic impermanence of her existence.
Finally, Burning aesthetically conveys various affects of han through its striking use of color in the mise-en-scène — specifically, blues and oranges. Throughout the film, Jong-su’s pent-up feelings of disillusionment, powerlessness, and resentment chromatically manifest themselves in his surrounding environments. For instance, during repeated sequences in which Jong-su obsessively jogs past the greenhouses that surround his home in the early hours of the morning, the film employs deep blue hues that suffuse, obfuscate, and oppress his search for answers into Hae-mi’s whereabouts with epistemic uncertainty, literally coloring the way in which we emotionally experience these extended scenes of fruitless investigation. Blue colors in the natural scenery take on an enveloping, inescapable quality as they flank Jong-su from all angles, seemingly countering his search for clarity by actively obscuring his perception. Thus, the atmospheric presence of blues in Burning suggests diffuse feelings of futility and eternal struggle often associated with han.
Hazy, oppressive blues obfuscate Jong-su’s search for the truth in Burning.
Burning’s suffused blues appear in contradistinction to its primal, incendiary oranges that suggest Jong-su’s repressed capacity for violence and destruction. In two disparate moments in the film’s narrative, we see Jong-su framed in the foreground as he stares into an abyss of intense orange hues — a burning greenhouse in a dream and an art installment depicting a building fire, respectively. By depicting Jong-su in Rückenfigur compositions in which we view his onlooking figure from behind, the film visually externalizes his han, thereby inviting us to at once contemplate Jong-su’s emotional state as secondary spectators and, by proxy, vicariously partake in his experience of han ourselves. The fiery oranges, juxtaposed against the cool blues of earlier scenes, create a stark visual contrast that mirrors the escalation of Jong-su’s latent feelings of anger throughout the film; the two complementary colors momentarily become superimposed onto a single image during its explosive finale when the burning remains of Ben’s Porsche appear in the rear windshield of Jong-su’s truck as he drives, naked, on an icy country road after having stabbed the philanderer with a hunting knife in a brutal eruption of vengeance. In this way, Burning uses color to chromatically convey the varied emotional and affective gamut of han — ranging from subdued feelings of frustration and powerlessness to unbridled, violent rage.
More than mere assemblages of sights and sounds we observe as detached spectators, films are aesthetic objects that palpably engage our emotions, using mood, affect, and atmopshere to attune our perception to our mental processes and thereby produce meaning. By focusing on how a film like Burning — a work steeped in a broad intertextual dialogue existing within a globalized media landscape — aesthetically conveys feelings associated with the Korean cultural concept of han through its mood and atmosphere, we recognize its emotional complexity and provocative power as a film, understanding contemporary Korean cinema more than just in terms of highly melodramatic plotlines or gritty, intense narratives of revenge or class disparity, as many do. Slowing down to contemplate how these films, on an elemental level and through an elaborate synchronicity of formal and stylistic choices, move us to feel, laugh, gasp, and cry is both necessary and one of the enduring delights of studying the cinema.
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