Archive, digital technology, and the inheritance of the Gwangju Uprising: the affect of the post-Gwangju generation of directors in Kim-gun (2019) and Round and Around (2020)

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay explores two recent documentaries on the Gwangju Uprising: Kang Sang-woo’s Kim-gun (Gim-gun, 2019) and Jang Min-seung’s Round and Around (Dunggeulgo dunggeulge, 2020). The Gwangju Uprising was a pro-democracy uprising that occurred in Gwangju, South Korea in 1980. In response to the uprising, the South Korean government ordered police and soldiers to massacre Gwangju civilians. Kim-gun sets out in search of the identity of a young man stationed in front of a truck-mounted machine gun in a photograph taken during the uprising. Round and Around, commissioned by the Korean Film Archive, is an audio-visual experimental project that was produced in 2020 to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the uprising. In this essay, I demonstrate that documentary directors Kang and Jang – who belong to the post-Gwangju generation and did not participate in, witness, or live through the uprising either directly or indirectly – find a way to reconnect with and inherit the historical memory of the uprising and bring the past to the present by appealing to affect and the senses rather than simply recounting historical facts and explicating the significance of the uprising.