More hybridization of the poetic and essay film genres.
Under-ground
Wook Steven Heo, 2019, South Korea
genre: essay film, poetic
Essay films are often theorized as establishing a different relationship to history. At the very least, their narration (voiceover, text, montage, sound-image juxtaposition, etc) provides a commentary on the image and often asks the spectator to reflect on the pastness and constructedness of the image.
So it’s no surprise to me that Wook Steven Heo uses the essay film form to interrogate the collective historical memory of Korean forced labor during World War II. Rather than use voice-over, though, Under-Ground uses a mix of material: on-screen expository titles, archival footage, and historical songs. The mainstay of the film, though is a poetic documentary with medium-long takes of the places where Koreans worked. The two strands – essay film and poetic doc – work in counterpart, effectively in my view, making the film a reflection on popular history and national memory.
The “Under-Ground” is both literal and metaphorical in this film, since Koreans often worked in subterranean places (coal mines, etc.) and because their forced labor was used to construct underground tunnels and shelters. But their work has been obscured in its role in the Japanese industrial revolution or war economy. And of course, the legacy remains a contentious point between South Korea and Japan. I appreciated how the film had multiple layers and could speak to various audiences differently.