Soon Mi Yoo Analysis

HARVARD AT THE GULBENKIAN — SESSION 3 (3.2)

Memory believes before knowing remembers

PRESENTATION

HADEN GUEST
This program is particularly exciting because we’re premiering the work of an extraordinary filmmaker here in Portugal. This is the first time the films of Soon-Mi Yoo have been shown in this country, so this is a very important occasion. It’s also important because it’s taking place within the context of this program that ambitions to explore the work that pushes documentary as a mode of historical enquiry to its furthest extreme —this is particularly true in the films of Soon-Mi Yoo. Yoo comes to documentary through experimental and avant-garde cinema and her work is shaped by a poetic lyricism and a density that gives it a
Korea never had a peace treaty, so it’s literally still in war between North and South. Anyway, I was doing quite some research in the National Archive in Silver Spring, because Americans (like other colonial powers) are very good at documenting their activities, wars and such. I was looking at endless footage, and generally when I do research I cast a wide net in the sense that I don’t look for something specific to use for a purpose, but I look at things that get caught in the camera by mistake or by chance; several times I came across the footage of the destruction, the amazing air footage of destruction in Ssitkim that I found by chance. I was almost knocked out of the chair because I was just amazed by the images. I did that for the Korean War, and you see a lot of the bombing and strikes. It hurt to see that landscape. A lot of times I think what happens when they want to document this kinds of thing is they just ask somebody to go and shoot the bombings, so there’s these mountains and hills getting bombed, napalmed and fire bombed. It’s sort of a game for these people (I assume), because you see the actual killing in these kind of images. Still, even though it hurt, I got bored by that sort of game and started to take notice of the landscape. What’s more, is that there were no cameramen, the cameras were actually attached to the guns, and they were
For this piece it was this news… Around 2000 North and South Korean governments agreed to resume family reunions. There were about over one hundred thousand families that were displaced during the war because the 38ºth parallel division was only supposed to be temporary and never meant to become a border. Before that, many people went back and forth between the North and South and when the war broke out and it became somewhat permanent many left their families, husbands or wives to go by themselves over to South Korea —that was it, they never saw each other again for 56 years, ever since 1953. Afterwards, out of these hundred thousand families, three hundred could hold family reunions at the parallel. The way the government found to select the families that were to be reunited was by holding a lottery, because they obviously couldn’t accommodate all the people. Older people had priority, because they didn’t have as many years to be reunited with their families. I was in Korea in 2001 but I had actually heard about this before: a few elderly people, mostly men, who didn’t get selected by lottery, committed suicide. I assume it was just too much. They just couldn’t go on anymore. This particular story really moved me… I didn’t necessarily always wondered what I could do about this but it was one of those things in the back of my mind. After I finished Ssitkim, which was a difficult project, because it took four years and there were all these war