This paper chronicles and examines the activities of munhwahaggyoseoul [Cultural Institute Seoul (CIS)], a private cinematheque that was founded in 1992 and built a stronghold of an alternative film culture in the 1990s’ Korean film, sphere. After its national political liberation, South Korean film culture in the 1990s witnessed the burgeoning of dedicated film viewing ignited by the foundation of new film magazines (Cine21 for weekly, and KINO for monthly), private cinematheques, university cine-clubs, and non-university institutions dedicated to the education of humanities. In this paper I demonstrate that amongst all these cultural players, the CIS deserves particular attention in terms of the development of cinephilia due to its key activities (screening and discussion, education and study teams, and publication) and their underlying ideas. In so doing, I argue that the CIS’ actitvities in the 1990s were not simply a remarkable attempt to regionalize Henri Langlois’ archetypical cinematheque in the form of videotheque despite the lack of celluloid, but they signalled a dialectics of love and oblivion, of enchantment and disenchantment, as the underlying sensibility of Western cinephilia.
While the CIS’ regular and special screenings and their accompanied discussions were grounded in the auteurist model of cinephilia, other actitivies such as promoting study teams and publishing the outputs of their studies exemplified the collective’s extensive interests in introducing major tenets of contemporary film theories (psychoanalysis, genre studies) and critical philisophy (postmodernism) and using them to critically reread the canons of Western cinema as well as the history of Korean cinema. The latter activities as notable uses of disenchanement, promoted a renewed recognition of cinema in the Korean society of the time in the sense that the theories and critical frameworks offered the devoted spectators the repertoire of the broader questions on cinema?film’s essence, cinema and society, and cinema as a cultural practice?than film as entertainment. Considering all the activities, I argue that the most crucial role of the CIS was to formulate and cultivate critical cinephilia in the cultural sphere of Korean cinema in the 1990s, a cinephiliac sensiblity marked by the productive tension between the devoted viewer’s fascination with cinema and her/his critical engagement with it.