Cinematic collage as an ethical response to the abject: Sang-mi Choo’s The Children Gone to Poland

ABSTRACT

In The Children Gone to Poland (2018), Sang-mi Choo employs different narrative styles not to faithfully present public history on North Korean orphans who were moved to Poland during the Korean War but to rewrite different groups of subjects who underwent painful experiences during the Cold War, such as North Korean war orphans, the Polish teachers who cared for them, and a North Korean refugee who risked her life during the 1990s. To create their dialogic engagement, Choo uses her personal experience and weaves them into her cinematic narrative. Her filmic endeavour, however, is often conflicting as her audiences encounter a non-linear story world in terms of editing. In addition, she experiments with her filmmaking by having a porous nexus among images capturing disparate spaces and times. Audiences become defamiliarized from the film narrative as historical truth and are instead aware of it as a careful construction creating a dialogic space. To explicate Choo’s cinematic project, this article employs the philosophical concept of gesture elaborated by Giorgio Agamben. Choo’s construction of an unconventional film narrative is an ethical response to the miserable subjects who still have painful memories and urgently seek to be heard.

KEYWORDS:

• Cinematic experimentation
• war orphans
• refugees
• film narrative
• transnational narrative

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Sookmyung Women's University: [Grant Number 1-2103-2005].

Notes on contributors

In Shik Bang

In Shik Bang is Assistant Professor of the Department of English at Sookmyung Women's University, Korea, where he teaches courses on genre film, comics, and digital literature in English-speaking countries. He has publications on American autobiographies, North Korean refugee narratives and comics studies. He is currently working on the intersection between autobiography studies and Asian American comics.