Brochure Tells Its Movie

In Black Republic (1990), Park Kwang-su's camera follows Ki-yeong, a university student who is on the run, into a coal mining town. In A Single Spark (1995), his camera goes back to the past to meet Jeon Tae-il in Pyeonghwa Market, where sewing factories were concentrated in the 1970s. Activists and workers had hardly been seen in Korean films before Park’s films, and his films captured their faces.

The history of documentaries being released in theaters in Korea is surprisingly short. The Murmuring (1995) directed by Byun Young-joo was the first film to be released in theaters. This film captures the faces of the Japanese military comfort women. The wrinkled faces of old ladies calmly recalling their past in front of the camera resonate more than any other spectacle.

The first film was The Marriage Life (Kim Eui-suk, 1992). Marketing of this film had a freshness worthy of being recorded in Korean cinema. The film combines a screenplay based on data collected through research and a sense of a new generation. Marketing for this film utilized the boldness of showing the backs of two protagonists, the effervescent copies, and the light but audience-oriented approach. This strategy was inherited in countless romantic films.

The story of the man and the woman continued. ShinCine made The 101st Proposition (1993) after the success of The Marriage Life. Director Kang Woo-suk, who pulled off a huge box office hit with the buddy film Two Cops (1993), presented How to Top My Wife (1994), a 'Kang Woo-suk styled Marriage Life,' and prestigious film marketer Shim Jae-myung founded 'Myung Films' and released Corset (1996) as the founding work.

The brochure for The Rules of the Game (1994) boldly used a scene that can be seen as a critical spoiler. The brochure shows Yong-dae bleeding to death. When the film was released, this film was, in especial, spotlighted for its special makeup. Beat, which launched Jung Woo-sung to stardom, also featured the image of Min, a 20-year-old youngster without a dream, and the black-and-white photo revealing the rough feeling of his skin is impressive.

At this time, cartoon style and movie promotion were also combined. Ambiguous Man (1996) and Attack the Gas Station (1999) are comedies of different colors, but these two films break the formality of existing brochures and incorporate elements of comics.

There are many films and auteurs summoned by mania-oriented fan culture in the 1990s, but The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) is a bit special. This film, a cult legend, landed in Korea in 1998, 23 years after its release, and we worshiped and enjoyed this musical fantasy just as American audiences did in the 1970s.

Luc Besson was considered one of the leading directors of "nouvelle image." His film The Big Blue (1988) and Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colors: Blue (1993) captivated the audience with blue-toned images, as their titles suggest. It is quite a simple promotion strategy, but there was no better way to do it.

The release of Damage (Louis Malle, 1992) was controversial in Korea. The film conveys sensuality with various colors. The brochure combined with light green and dark blue tones reveals the sensual characteristic of the film. When it was re-released in 2021, an intense red tone was chosen for its main color. The power of ‘Damage,’ the title written in red-colored Gothic font on top of the green tone, is intense.

Total Eclipse (1995), directed by Agnieszka Holland and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, depicts the life of poet Arthur Rimbaud. The red color was used to represent the world of the poet's maddened poems. The caricature shown on the brochure is a portrait of Rimbaud by Pablo Picasso.