The chronotope of trauma in national cinema

Abstract

In recent South Korean cinema, the idea of northerness has become a tropological and aesthetic motif through which film seeks a visual language to express national trauma. What I call the films of the chronotopic North stage South Korea's traumatic encounter with a North that stands in as its unmodern Other. I look at films in which those encounters occur in Manchuria and which introduce a subject that cannot be confined within the ideologies and practices of the South Korean modern nation-state. This subject reveals what Jacques Lacan describes as the Real, which in terms of film analyses means a cinematic element that disrupts narrative cinema's ideological project to secure a normalized subject position. In film theory, current discussions regarding the disruption of narrative tend to focus on so-called Hitchcockian blots. These are images within a film that exceed the narrative's diegesis and make the symbolic meaning of objects falter (the crop duster in North by Northwest, for example, or a windmill that rotates against the direction of the wind in Foreign Correspondent). I argue that the films of the chronotopic north suggest a new way of introducing the Real in film. It is in this light that I look at how ethnic Korean subjects emerge as subjects of the Real in The Yellow Sea and Dooman River, both of which use Manchuria as the setting for subject formation. In doing so these films introduce new ways in which film can visualize the Real and ways of representing the subject of the drive that opens up this visual field of the Real. I pay special attention to how Dooman River works as a tropological and aesthetic alternative to the preexisting mode of neorealism.