The prospects of occupancy rate for Korean movies were not optimistic in the first half of 2011 since there were some newly released Hollywood blockbusters such as 〈Kung Fu Panda 2〉 (2011), 〈X-Men: First Class〉 (2011), 〈Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides〉 (2011) and 〈Super 8〉 (2011). However, the biggest box office hit in the first half of 2011 in South Korea was 〈Sunny〉 directed by Kang Hyung-cheol. There were no actors or actresses with ticket selling power in this movie. Furthermore, this movie had a disadvantage of designating a large number of characters and its subsequent weakness of a lack of audience’s engagement. No one expected that it stood against Hollywood blockbusters.
Regarding the reasons for 〈Sunny〉’s box office hit, many people concerned with the movies mentioned that it led the audience to feel the creation style with a sense of noticeable entertainment and emotional identification and it aroused the code of nostalgia penetrating the sensibility of the audience.
Today the codes stirring up the past in popular cultures provided romantic nostalgia, which created a trend. As shown recently in a TV program such as 〈I’m a Singer〉 or in ‘C’est si bon’ Fever, the cultural codes belonging to the past could embrace previous generations and endow the audience with a sense of being touched. It could be explained in terms of collective arousal of the memories that had been shared by people in the past, but the reason for influencing the generations who did not experience the times was due to the sociological representation, such as nostalgia with a signifier of the past.
In the movie 〈Sunny〉 that aroused the past through ‘the memory search’ of women in their forties, the past enumerated popular cultures in the 1980s and these functioned as an exhibition space. Namely, the images of retrospection closely related to the popular cultures at the time gave the audience an opportunity to enjoy ‘cultural memories.’ In this way, the method of calling in arousal by projecting specific time period into materialistic images has been one of the esthetic strategies found in the movies of nostalgia. It could be assumed that such a strategy interacted with the desire of people and contributed to the success of 〈Sunny〉. Therefore, this study was aimed to interpret the keyword of nostalgia embraced by people through the images of retrospection and the medium method adopted by 〈Sunny〉. It would be closely related to the specific formalistic structures established by the movies of nostalgia. Besides, it would help us have a better understanding of the movies of nostalgia deeply established as a commercial genre along with the acceleration of modernization.