Martin Scorsese on Bong Joon-ho, Park Chan-wook, Lee Chang-dong and Korean "Hallyu" cinema.

This is taken from the Forward to the book Virtual Hallyu: Korean Cinema of the Global Era by Kyung Hyun Kim.

To find a filmmaker or group of filmmakers with a new approach to film language, new answers to the question of what a movie is and what it can be ... it's one of the most rewarding aspects of movie culture. The pictures coming out of Iran and Taiwan in the 1990s, for example, required an adjustment. I remember watching them for the first time, seeing that they were urgent, passionately made, and I quickly understood that I would have to let the pictures themselves guide me, teach me their grammar, show me the way to their secrets, and to the cultural experiences and givens shared by the different filmmakers.

The great Korean cinema of the late 90s and the 2000S crept up on me, slowly and without warning. Hong Sang-soo's The Day a Pig Fell into the Well was a deceptively unassuming picture, made with great assurance. The narrative was intricate, but not in a manner that drew attention to itself-it was only as the movie unfolded that you came to understand how complex it was. The settings seemed banal, the concerns of the characters life-size, the focus uncomfortably intimate. The film left me unsettled-what had I just seen?

I was intrigued. I saw some pictures by another Korean filmmaker named Bong Joon-ho-a completely different approach, more overtly comic in his first feature, Barking Dogs Never Bite, but the comedy was savage and merciless. In Memories of Murder and The Host, I saw a clear link to American genre filmmaking, but it was interpreted and felt in a completely new way. The Host was fun, complex, rich, and panoramic, but in its own way it was just as troubling as the Hong film.

Park Chan-wook's Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, like his subsequent pictures Lady Vengeance and Old Boy, seemed to come out of a different strain in genre filmmaking-American drive-in movies, J-horror, Shaw Brothers martial arts epics. But the violence and action and chaos became expressive instruments, and the films were as ferocious as a great Eric Clapton guitar solo. But lingering in the background was that same unease and melancholy that I recognized in the other pictures.

The unease and melancholy took front and center in Lee Chang-dong's Green Fish and Peppermint Candy. These pictures were designed as ambitious portrayals of an entire society filtered through the experience of a few characters, devoted to giving you the texture of life, the dreams and the cold hard realities, the habits and prejudices, the different ways of living.

As the years went by, I realized that I was slowly becoming absorbed in Korean cinema and its development, and I became more absorbed with each new picture from these directors and others, like The President's Last Bang by Im Sang-soo, Camel(s) by Park Ki-young, Breathless by Yang Ikjoon, Never Forever by Gina Kim, and Jealousy Is My Middle Name by Park Chan-ok, an extremely subtle and emotionally complex film; and then in older pictures by filmmakers like Im Kwon-Taek, Park Kwang-su, and the late, great Kim Ki-young. I was actually introduced to The Housemaid, one of Kim's most disturbing pictures, by the author of this book, and it became came one of the first restorations undertaken by The World Cinema Foundation when it was formed in 2007.

Following these films and filmmakers over the years has shown me just how vital a role cinema can play in the life of a culture, no matter how "challenging" the movies are considered, how much or how little money they make, how large or small a public they find either inside or outside the country. The categories that many resort to when they judge movies nowadays-"entertaining" vs. "difficult," "fast-paced" vs. "slow moving," "short" vs. "long," "fun" vs. "art"-have very little to do with the movies themselves or how they affect viewers who come to them with an open mind. The films of Hong, Lee, Bong, Park, and their fellow filmmakers speak of, to, and from their culture, sometimes critically but never indifferently or disinterestedly- for that reason, they are genuine cultural ambassadors.

Kyung Hyun knows this. He knows that vital works of art never sit easily within the society they come out of. And he helps to explain, in this fine book, how the give and take between those filmmakers and their country actually functions. He enlarges our vision of one of the great national cinematic flowerings of the last decade.