Bong Joon Ho: Philosopher and Filmmaker

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Anthony Curtis Adler (Yonsei University’s Underwood International College, South Korea) Costica Bradatan (Texas Tech University USA)

Bong Joon Ho

Philosopher and Filmmaker

Anthony Curtis Adler (Yonsei University’s Underwood International College, South Korea), Costica Bradatan (Texas Tech University USA)

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English

Bloomsbury Academic
11 December 2025

Film theory & criticism; Individual film directors, film-makers; Philosophy: aesthetics

Series: Philosophical Filmmakers

With the release of Parasite (2019), winner of the Palme d’Or and an Academy Award for Best Picture, the South Korean director Bong Joon Ho secured his place as one of his generation’s leading filmmakers. While scholars and critics have long appreciated his penetrating critique of Korean society and global capitalism, this book presents the first cohesive philosophical analysis of his first seven feature-length films. It argues that Bong’s cinema not only engages with philosophy, but is radically philosophical.

Writing as an intimate outsider to Korea, a “resident alien” married into a Korean family, and teaching at Bong’s own alma mater, Anthony Curtis Adler explores Bong’s visionary and re-visionary treatment of spatiality, temporality, myth, memory, genre, and the semiotics of monstrosity.

Adler argues that for Bong Joon Ho, cinema doubles the ambiguity of philosophy, presenting the aesthetic means to represent anarchic motions and movements. While it can capture and contain them, subordinating them to an overarching order, it can also free them to appear in their anarchy. From the humble apartment building of Barking Dogs Never Bite to the train in Snowpiercer and Parasite’s mansion, Bong’s films stage interior spaces as representations of a cinematic apparatus that is, ambiguously, site of both imprisonment and liberation.

Even while confronting globalism head-on, Bong’s films never cease to engage with the specific challenges faced by modern Korea, and, above all, the struggle of the Korean people for political representation and economic justice.

By: Anthony Curtis Adler (Yonsei University’s Underwood International College South Korea)
Edited by: Costica Bradatan (Texas Tech University USA)
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 218mm, Width: 144mm, Spine: 26mm
Weight: 540g
ISBN: 9781350414655
ISBN 10: 1350414654
Series: Philosophical Filmmakers
Pages: 344
Publication Date: 11 December 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Anthony Curtis Adler is a professor of German and Comparative Literature at Yonsei University’s Underwood International College, South Korea. His most recent books include Celebricities: Media Culture and the Phenomenology of Gadget Commodity Life (2016), and Politics and Truth in Hölderlin: ‘Hyperion’ and the Choreographic Project of Modernity (2021).

Reviews for Bong Joon Ho: Philosopher and Filmmaker

A brilliant analysis of the films of one of the most discussed and studied Korean filmmakers, written by a fine connoisseur of Korean culture and history. This book provides unique insights into the films of Bong Joon Ho. * Thorsen Botz-Bornstein, co-editor of Parasite: A Philosophical Exploration (2022) and Professor of Philosophy at the Gulf University of Science and Technology, Kuwait *