South Korean Film: Critical and Primary Sources is an essential three-volume reference collection representing three distinct phases in the development of South Korean national cinema, foregrounding how epochal characteristics inform the way in which the national cinema represents the penetrating thematic concern of auteur-ship, genre, spectatorship, gender, and nation, as well as the way in which these themes find expression in distinct visual styles and forms.

Volume I covers the "Golden Age", referring to the cinematic era that covers the post-Korean War period from 1955 to 1972, and represents the first phase of creative, popular and commercially successful national filmmaking and consumption in South Korea. Contemporary South Korean filmmakers often cite the influence that films from this era have had on them. Volume II comprises the phase that produced what critics sum up as New Korean Cinema produced since the 1990s, and which has led to the commercial and critical success of recent South Korean cinema. Volume III, while continuing the thematic and stylistic development distinct in New Korean Cinema, calls for a new epochal conceptualization that emphasizes South Korean film's global location. Extrapolating from the widely-accepted term Hallyu ("Korean Wave"), referring to the expansion of Korean cultural artifacts across global markets, the third volume deals with the trajectory in which South Korean cinema has taken shape as part of the global enterprises of Hallyu which also refers to the South Korean culture industry's reformation of the local artifacts into global commodities. The volume's point of analysis for this phase will specifically be on auteurs, whose auteur-ship is itself a global Hallyu product, who have strong international presence. The essays in this volume will emphasize the formal and conceptual innovations of these auteurs that have a lasting global impact.

This collection reveals the emphasis in current research on the central themes of gender and nation and on the stylistic and representational strategies that articulate those paired themes in South Korean national cinema. This is an essential addition to libraries and a major scholarly resource for researchers involved in the study of South Korean film.