Testimonies, Landscapes, and Reenactments in Im Heung-Soon's Documentary Works

Abstract

Bridging between documentary cinema and media installations that focus on portraying the traumatized memories of the marginalized subjects who experienced national or postcolonial violence, Korean artist-filmmaker Im Heung-soon is acclaimed both locally and internationally. Investigating his feature-length films Jeju Prayer (2012) and Factory Complex (2014), as well as his latest multi-screen installation pieces Reincarnation (2015) and Things That Do Us Part (2017), I argue two aesthetic forms variously employed in his work – landscape imagery and reenactment – serve as rich supplements to audiovisual testimonies to overcome the impasse of documenting the traumatic memories and experiences of subjects affected by violence. While Im renders the seemingly indifferent present landscape as the ruin haunted by the remainders of pain, loss, and death, he also employs various forms of reenactment to reconstruct affectively and fantasmatically the painful experiences of the subjects. I argue his careful orchestration of testimonies, landscapes, and reenactments makes his documentary works significant to “decolonizing trauma theory” in that it leads to a larger narrative of trauma and violence that both respects the specificity of traumatized individuals and creates their commonalty across different times and geopolitical contexts, one that I call the translocal or trans-historical narrative.

Keywords:

• Documentary film
• Im Heung-soon
• installation
• landscape
• reenactment
• testimony
• translocal or trans-historical narrative
• trauma
• violence

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 For the national and local memorializations of the incident that had long been stigmatized as a communist riot in the official Korean history, see Kim Seong-nae’s (2000) seminal survey.

2 Things That Do Us Part was later made into a feature-length documentary of the same title (2018, 99 mins.), but I focus on its installation version here.