Forging the Personal with the Historical in Cheonggyecheon Medley －Experiments in Documentary Form in South Korea－

초록

Experimentation in documentary aesthetics has contributed to creating a more flexible documentary culture within South Korea’s national cinema. Emblematic of the recent generation’s widening embrace of formalist approaches is Kelvin Kyung Park’s film Cheonggyecheon Medley (2010), which helped focus international attention on the Korean experimental documentary. Using iron as a metaphor for Korean modernity, Park’s medley, or collage, of different documentary modes such as archival films, observational footage of iron workers from the neighborhood, musical montages and an essayistic voice-over, creates a kaleidoscope of different documentary sensibilities that reflects Park’s own subjective and fragmented stance as a former Korean ex-pat on the social subject of precarious labor in South Korea. This writing also examines in what ways his postmodern construction reveals to the viewer how each documentary mode determines the visual depiction of the social subject and is also a form of textual abstraction. Expressivity and forms of verifiable knowledge within the documentary enterprise are not mutually exclusive categories but intersect and are inter-connected through notions of evocation of the social subject, creating valid and innovative forms of critical subjectivity in visual ethnography.

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