The Emerging New Elite in 1990s South Korean Cinema: Creation of a New Cultural Capital
Résumé
In the late 1980s, as the democratization movement started winding down with significant results in South Korea, a new elite group emerged. These young intellectuals tried to distinguish themselves from their elders to avoid being relegated to the background in the hierarchy of the intellectual field and to acquire their independent authority. In this context, the film criticism discourses, hitherto despised in the intellectual field, receive the most attention in the contemporaneous cultural reviews (Yang, 2000). Those conducting the film discourses endowed themselves with various symbolic capitals, such as academic capital and relational capital. However, cinema remained in the non-culturally legitimized field in South Korean society, its cultural legitimization only just beginning. This study focuses on the expression Munhwawon sedae, which has contributed to the recognition of film experiences in French and German cultural centers in Seoul as cultural capital. Appearing in the media in 1996 immediately after the success of the 1st Busan International Film Festival, the expression was used to represent a cultured individual's taste for film art. In other words, the cinematographic experience acquired in the cultural centers of European countries served as a criterion of distinction to differentiate the taste of the elites, inclined toward artistic films, and the non-elite for entertainment movies. The expression also contributed to the functioning of the habitus of the new elite of the 1990s. In this study, the transition of the Munhwawon sedae, from an incorporated to an institutionalized cultural capital, will be examined based on Bourdieu’s three states of cultural capital.