Two Ways of Documenting Labor Migration : The Reconstitution of Fantasy Space and the Foregrounding of Fragments

Abstract

Garibong and Scenery deal with the issue of migrant workers. However, the way the two films depict them varies to a great extent. Rather than asking them about how they have grown up in South Korea and what suffering they have endured, Zhang Lu in Scenery asks about the dreams they have had while living in South Korea. This film moves forward by respecting the interviewees’ fantasy space. The function of fantasy here cannot be seen as mere illusion or imagination but, rather, as a frame to constitute our sense of reality. That is, the notion of fantasy can be defined as a way and/or frame to signify our world. The film makes a detour around the migrant workers’ wretched reality by interviewing them about their dreams. Zhang’s line of questioning might be seen as a strong point rather than a weak one, because if our world is structured around a fantasy screen, it is important to render the sphere of fantasy as open. Consider that, in our everyday lives, our fantasy screen is rendered invisible. The important point here is to reveal this space, thus enabling us to apprehend our world as structured around a fantasy screen. Garibong offers a different depiction of migrant workers’ reality from that of Scenery. First of all, this film attempts to record the space, especially Garibong, located in Seoul, Korea. However, what this film seeks to present is not a mere recording of our everyday lives but, rather, a sphere beyond our banal scope of perception and recognition. Although it is recording the reality, it nonetheless seeks to reveal the fragments and remnants of our everyday lives. Thus, it succeeds in foregrounding what Siegfried Kracauer (1997) calls the ‘endlessness’ of reality. Instead of reflecting the social reality, it attempts to divide multi-layered realities into infinite segments, thus enabling us to reconsider the relationship between cinema and historiography.