Construction of the female self in South Korean feminist documentaries Family Project: House of a Father (2001) and The Two Lines (2011)

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay pays particular attention to the strong presence of women filmmakers in the history of South Korean documentary filmmaking, analyzing two feminist autoethnographic documentaries, Family Project: House of a Father (Paemilli peurojekteu: abeojiui jip, Jo Yun-gyeong, 2001) and The Two Lines (Du gaeui seon, Jimin, 2011), to highlight how these personal documentaries create new discursive spaces for feminist issues. These films exemplify the two most prominent features of Korean feminist documentaries produced in the 2000s: autobiographical or autoethnographic approach and the critical reexamination of the family institution in the context of the twenty-first Century. The analysis of these films focuses on the role of the female narrator/the filmmaker and performativity in documentary filmmaking in order to illustrate how personal documentaries can be a useful strategy for women filmmakers to interrogate the most pressing feminist/gender issues of the time as well as to construct a new female self/subjectivity in the process of production. The act of making personal documentaries itself could be considered a process of self-exploration, and the performativity unique to making personal documentaries establishes such an act as a performative utterance.