A New Wave in the Korean Documentary Scene:
Evolving Personal Documentaries

KIM So-hee , Movie Critic

Source : ‘Korea Cinema Today’ vol.28 published by Korea Film Council

For many years, Korean documentaries have been subject to a master narrative. Hence, it was not until the 2000s that the trend of personal voices started bursting out of the screen. Along with the symbolic commercial success of films such as <Old Partner>(2009) and <My Love, Don’t Cross That River>(2014), personal documentaries have branched out in various ways and are still evolving.

Here we introduce the transformation of the Korean documentary including essay documentaries as well as new directors at the forefront of the Korean documentary scene whose works start out from the individual to finally embrace society, period and even history. A list of works that have been showcased at the Jeonju International Film Festival from April 27th ~ May 6th also mirrors the current state of Korean documentaries.

At one time, documentaries were considered as objective educational current affairs programs with a touch of political nuance as if the dark ages of the 1980s left a responsibility to uncover the truth up to documentaries. In the 90s, when activism documentaries were the mainstream, self-narrated documentaries started to emerge. These ‘personal documentaries’ mostly directed by female filmmakers weren’t taken as seriously as ‘conventional’ documentaries.

It is still hard to claim that these personal documentaries have joined the mainstream, and furthermore, the attitudes towards these types of films have not really changed.

Regardless, personal documentaries have slowly changed in terms of their definition, recognition and character as we see in the films that have actually been made. Since the 2000s, personal documentaries are no longer considered to be on the fringes, but a method that questions the boundary between the private and the public spaces.

HONG Jae-hee’s <My Father’s E-mails>(2014) and PARK Moon-chil’s <My Place>(2014) journey from intimate family stories to pick up the major narratives of Korea’s modern history and then return to the individual. Throughout this all, these films depict the inseparable relationship between history and the individual, and how it is passed down to the next generation.

JEONG Su-eun’s <One Warm Spring Day>(2016) is an extension of this trend, but instead of using the context of modern history as a twist, it presents it as constantly palpitating between contexts of modern history and the family.

Bringing Down the Wall between the Individual, Society and an Era

Personal documentaries just focusing on the daily routines of an individual are still being made. <Dear Grandma>(2016) tells the director’s story as she decides to document her grandma who attempted to commit suicide. What sets this film apart from other documentaries highlighting the lives of aging people is that the documentarian as an individual and her grandmother’s relationship is at the center of the film. While dealing with the issues of the life and death of a person in their golden years, this film succeeded in attracting empathy and support from the audience with its positive energy towards life that it worked hard to convey.

KIM Soo-vin’s <Welcome to Playhouse>(2015) is the filmmaker’s personal story of getting pregnant and experiencing marriage, childcare, housekeeping and serving her in-laws at a young age in her early 20s. The film is reminiscent of RYU Mi-rye’s <My Sweet Baby>(2010) that shows how the filmmaker juggles between raising her children and making her documentary or Jimin’s <Two Lines>(2012), which dealt with an unexpected pregnancy and moving in with a partner, yet differs in form and structure as the director actively stages herself in the film.

Staging oneself seems to be a recent trend. Unlike the ‘realistic’ or ‘sincere’ approach that used to be a priority in personal documentaries, this has been replaced by a ‘staged reality’. In other words, personal documentaries of recent times expand on or transform the idea of ‘realism’ or ‘sincerity’ we are familiar with.

<Areum>(2015) is perhaps a film that is most representative of this trend. It isn’t anything new for a filmmaker to explore the subject of his/her own body. But with the need for documenting pending social issues during the late 2000s including apartment redevelopment projects or the ‘Four Major Rivers Project’, it became difficult to find these self-narrating documentations.

During this time, <Areum> was the first self-diary-type documentary that came out in a long time. The fact that the body is considered a restriction is most similar to <Gina KIM’s Video Diary>(2001). However, unlike director Gina KIM who explored herself strictly from the viewpoint of a lonely individual, filmmaker PARKKANG A-reum doesn’t just limit this to when one is alone, but continues exploring oneself as a social being. PARKKANG devotes the film to the subject of one’s own physical features and how others evaluate it as she specifically exposes herself in front of the camera.

For the filmmaker to function as an actor before the camera contributes in dissolving borders between documentary, feature and experimental filmmaking. First of all, the origins of the experimental approach to shift between documentary and feature can be found in JANG Hee-sun’s <Making Sun-dried Red Peppers>(1999). <Making Sun-dried Red Peppers> is a docu-fiction that tells the story of 3 generations of mothers and daughters, for which the filmmaker turned her camera on her real family except for herself. KIM Sook-hyun’s <Searching for Dead Dogs>(2010) uses a dramatic narrative tone to distance herself from her own story.

 

The Performance of ‘Distanciation’

Presenting a performance that creates a sense of unfamiliarity to the story in a documentary occasionally reaches out on the broader scale of social space instead of just remaining as a personal subject matter.

CHOI Jin-sung, accompanied by indie musicians, travels to the Namhan River and the Nakdong River where construction is taking place for the Four Major Rivers Project to give a performance in the <Reservoir Dogs> series (2010, 2011). PARK So-hyun’s <The Knitting Club>(2016) introduces a group of travel company employees who present their own performances by getting together to knit and install their knit work at bus stations.

It seems that the current trend for documentary filmmakers is to weave meaningless things together. IM Cheol-min’s <Prisma>(2012) attempts to put together the various personal videos of people the filmmaker knows despite the rough and amateurish look of the footage. It’s like he is presenting his own performance during the editing process instead of doing it front of the camera.

KOO Dae-hee’s <Ladies’ Lunchtime>(2016) introduces women of diverse occupations and age groups who get together for reasons that are not explained to spend their lunch break together. And through the ambiguity of the filmmaker’s intentions and the connections of the women, the film gives the audience room to get involved.
These trends extend to documentaries dealing with social issues. The young filmmakers who gathered for the <Act as a Media> series position themselves as activists and filmmakers to create a joint project that may lack satisfactory images but are charged with great ambition. Such attempt is obviously in line with the trend to discover the reason of existence through the act of connecting video images. Now documentaries seek direction within the practice of combining the polished and the coarse.

 

Rising New Korean Documentary Filmmakers

 

WON Tae-woong
<The Day Going to Market>(2011)
<Son’s Time>(2014)

WWON Tae-woong ’s first film <The Day Going to Market> documents the filmmaker’s journey as he accompanies his parents who periodically travel to Seoul to buy various goods. The driving force of his film is not conversation, but the continuation of silence. Unlike most personal family documentaries which reveal conflict or reconciliation through dialogue, the characters in his film rarely open their mouths. He often juxtaposes two rooms divided by a wall in the same frame which recalls a rather strange mood to this ordinary daily space. Nevertheless, there is unusual warmth to his work.

In <Son’s Time>, the filmmaker takes a step further to experimentation. The series of scenes that seem to have no special correlation such as private footage of his nephew growing up, documentations of his Vietnam War veteran father, the filmmaker’s own performance set near his parent’s village seem like some kind of puzzle. It makes you want to continue solving the filmmaker’s puzzle by looking forward to clues he will give in his next film.

 

PAIK Jong-kwan
<Cyclical Night>(2016)
<Frequency Resonance>(2012)

PAIK Jong-kwan mostly focuses on directing experimental documentaries. ‘Quotation’ is one of the most striking aspects of defining his body of work. <Frequency Resonance>, whose title itself is a quote, is a sound montage of music, voices and a variety of noise from radio shows. As the filmmaker reveals, his work is a ‘pound stock sound’ that expands the sound concept of ‘pound stock footage’. This seems like an act of capturing the temporal sound from the radio and changing its nature. As listening to the radio simultaneously occurs with other actions on the move, likewise the images shown from a film seem as though they are drifting.

There is an exchange between ‘pound stock footage’ and ‘pound stock text’ in <Cyclical Night>. Face excerpts from video images spanning 4 segmented periods in Korean history from 1960 to 2015 are mixed with 4 different text phrases or readings to question the boundaries between what can and cannot be seen, existence and non-existence. The filmmaker creates expectations for his next experiment as he combines quotation and self-quotation to raise the question of what is new about this generation, and what is original about oneself.

 

JANG Yun-mi
<The Old Lotus >(2016)
<Mom Goes into Her Room>(2014)

JANG Yun-mi has been making shorts about her family members such as her mother who began studying late in her life in <Mom Goes into Her Room>, and her grandmother diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in <The Old Lotus>. Her works at a glance may not seem so different from the personal documentaries you may have seen before. However, once you look hard, you will notice the true value of her work: the filmmaker’s desires are not as big as the subjects that are captured on camera. This explains the affection that can be felt in her work.

This affection towards her subjects isn’t revealed simply through interviews, but in fact stands out especially when the filmmaker gazes at the traces left by subjects outside their interviews. In her latest work, <The Old Lotus>, the filmmaker minimizes interviews to follow the behaviors and movements of the subjects. This comes from the respect she has towards life. Inside the world that is captured on her camera, not only people, but also space and objects seem to be respected.

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