박수남 감독 다큐멘터리 속 오키나와의 강제징용 군속과 위안부 재현 연구: 마이너 트랜스내셔널한 기억과 ‘비커밍 아웃’으로서의 증언

Abstract

Director Park Soo-nam’s films are highly valuable as an author in that they constantly record minority histories excluded from ”official and public archives”, such as the Japanese bombing victims, Korean survivors of the Battle of Okinawa, and the comfort women issue. The most interesting point in 〈Song of Arirang—Voices from Okinawa〉(1991) and 〈Nuchigafu—Life Is a Treasure, “Gyokusai” Stories in the Battle of Okinawa〉(2012) is that in both films, Okinawans actively testify about the victims of Koreans and show solidarity with Koreans. This phenomenon can be called a minor transnationalism conceptalized by Shu-mei Shih and Françoise Lionnet. This does not mean that the minority always opposes the mainstream in the vertical relationship of assimilation and resistance, but reveals a multi-layered area of (inter)action with the voices of majors and other minors, and multi-layered linguistic utterances (Korean, Japanese, Okinawan language). It is a perspective of (im)possibility in which the expressive domain of minors is formed through comparison across national boundaries. Therefore, firstly, this paper attempts to read Park Soo-nam’s film as the concept of “minor transnationalism,” because they depict the memories of minorities formed by crossing the boundaries between Okinawan men or women and Korean men or women in the framework of the memory of Okinawan residents, in which the violence of the Japanese Empire is embodied as a collective memory. Second, I examine how director Park Soo-nam responds to the task of breaking the silence while avoiding the explanation of objectifying “the unmemorable or the unspeakable,” through the ambivalent strategy of non-representation and representation. Lastly, I would like to analyze the mutually (in)communicable relationship between the witness and the listener, the director(or audience), that is formed through the form of the performative performance of the documentary seen in films, in relation to the concept of “becoming out” that Ichiro Tomiyama calls. Here, “becoming out refers to the process of asking questions about our response after the testimony, rather than “the individual’s coming-out with respect to past events that are the basis for judgment.”