Post-verité Turns: Mapping Twenty-First-Century Korean Documentary Cinema

초록

This article presents a critical overview on how the formal and aesthetic variations of the Korean documentary cinema in the twenty-first century have differed from and simultaneously renewed the activist, cinéma-vérité tradition of Korean independent documentaries of the 1980s and 1990s. These variations encompass personal documentaries and essay films, experimental documentaries on landscapes, documentaries extensively using archival materials, digitally enabled documentaries, and intersections of documentary and contemporary art. Mapping these variations onto five categories, I use the term “post-verité” to theorize these new constellations of aesthetics and politics. By departing from the epistemological and aesthetic assumptions of its predecessor, the Korean documentary in the twenty-first century has formed the most vibrant screenscape for cinematic experimentations. At the same time, I argue that these experimentations have also updated the activist tradition’s political and ethical commitment to history and politics by reinventing the ways of engaging with the traumas of modernization and the new problems of neoliberalized contemporary Korea.

키워드