부산대학교 도서관

This chapter illuminates the succession and innovation of the activist tradition by discussing the twenty-first-century social change documentaries that take as their subject three social problems that the early activists and their collectives engaged in dialogue with during the mass demonstrations in the 1980s and the new civil movements in the 1990s: state and ideological violence, labor issues, and disenfranchised subjects. The documentarians who addressed these three problems have advanced the activist tradition in two directions: first, while sometimes being directly aligned with the social movements and explicitly promoting social solidarity, many documentarians, including such veterans as Kim Dong-won and Hong Hyung-sook, have tended to focus on each of the subjects as individual (kaein) rather than audiovisually constructing them as minjung. Second, the documentarians’ growing self-consciousness of their identity as individual kamdok (directors), of their relationship to the social actors, and of the documentary modes available for them has resulted in different ways of telling stories (including ethnography, experimental diary film, and observational documentary) than practiced by the enlightenment discourse of the 1980s activism, and of investigating the aspects of reality that were not noticed by the activist precursors, such as the mechanisms of the union and workplace themselves, the culture of the urban poor, the senses of disabilities, and animality.