Two Recent Experimental Films From South Korea (Patreon)

This Isn't What It Appears (Heehyun Choi, 2022)

BY REQUEST: David Dinnell

In these Patreon "pages" I have expressed my ambivalence regarding the new crop of essay films that, within some sectors, have come to define contemporary experimental film. Words and images, illustrated lectures, real-time image analysis... Sometimes it feels as if artists are too afraid to let a viewer think for themselves. Having said that, This Isn't What It Appears is one of the best examples of the genre I've seen in quite some time. This is partly because it is so spare and methodical in its approach. Choi begins with a succinct, somewhat familiar discussion of photography and its Bazinian dimension, the indexical character of analog pictures that attests that "this thing was there." 

From there, she expands to the close consideration of a very particular photographic archive. The film is focused on a series of snapshots taken by U.S. servicemen stationed in Korea. Archivists and researchers have been collecting these photos, partly for their historical value but also in an attempt to identify the Koreans in the images. The content of these photos is not so surprising. They tend toward exoticism and, in several cases, show women performing for G.I.s in clubs. So the archive memorializes the combination of sexism and colonialism characteristic of this moment in the history of the Western gaze.

Choi's point is completely evident. Just because the photographic image accurately depicts the existence of people and places at a particular moment, that is no guarantee of truth. Not only are we missing a broader context, but the women performing are, in a sense, dissimulating for the pleasure of the white viewer. Choi's still, uninflected documentation of her actions, introducing photo after photo before the lens, is very similar to Morgan Fisher's films of the late 60s and early 70s. But where Fisher attempted to expose the artifice of "realism" in a universal, axiomatic way, Choi's smaller sample size allows her to zero in on a very specific ideological formation.

Night Walk (Sohn Koo-yong, 2023)

A catch-up viewing from Prismatic Ground, Night Walk is a nearly feature length film that concentrates, as you'd expect, on nighttime photography. Sohn moves around the outskirts of town, capturing neighborhood streets, parks and streams, and the occasional glimpse of a highway or factory. The filmed images are almost entirely devoid of movement, and this stillness allows Sohn to use them as the support for superimposed ink drawings. In most cases, the drawings trace a possible path through the image for the eye, or highlight an underlying structure within the spaces we see. And, throughout the film, we see onscreen text, a series of poems relating to nature -- writing that I did not know until the end of the film was from the Joseon Dynasty.

I know it's a rather petulant complaint to say that a film seemed too long. But, as the sameness of the images and (especially) the poems impresses itself on the viewer, it's clear that there is no real progression, no particular reason why Night Walk couldn't be five minutes long, or two hours. Initially the material is visually novel, with the calligraphic overlays and the frequent difficulty to see exactly what we're looking at. I also admired Sohn's decision to make the film completely silent, its "verbal" communication conveyed by writing alone. But Night Walk just doesn't seem to take the specific parameters of cinema into account, at least not as much as it should. It feels like flipping through an art book, and I suspect I would have actually preferred that.