"Candlelight Documentary" as the Cultural Politics of Recording and Memorizing, and the Emergence of the Candlelight Plaza

초록

The amateurism, spatial, and temporal expansions of the documentary films Gwangjang (Candle in the Wave) and Modeunnal-ui chotbul (All Day Candles), screened at Gwanghwamun Plaza in June 2016, dismantled the imaginary boundaries that existed between us and the Other. This paper examines how such dismantlement has moved to a new era and aesthetic strategy to bring the candlelight protests to the public's eyes. The Sewol Ferry Disaster led to the rediscovery of reportage in Korean literature and the local art scene, and to the strengthening of amateurism in documentary films as a result of dismantling the authority of representation through omnibus and episodic formats in these two works. Beyond fostering our integration, they have played a political aesthetic role in increasing solidarity by revealing the boundaries of imagination created by our inner unconsciousness, where the dominant languages of integration and exclusion have been internalized. These two documentaries rewrite the origins of the Candlelight Plaza as cultural politics of recording and memorizing. In the two films, the movement and expansion of the plaza provide ways to make it accessible and visible to the indivisible beings standing on these boundaries to relieve the absurdities of Korean society.

키워드