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Reconstructing Partition in Indian and Korean Cinema
Organizer and Chair: Suk-Young Kim, University of California, Santa Barbara
Discussant: Claire Conceison, Tufts University
In the aftermath of the World War II, both Korea (1945) and India (1947) were partitioned, a traumatic postcolonial experience for the people of both nations. This panel explores how partition is reconstructed in Indian and Korean films while considering specific socio-political, economic, and cultural conditions of each locale. Comparative in nature, this project attempts to unveil commonalities in artistic strategies of addressing partition which often challenge the Eurocentric perspective of reducing the Indian and Korean experience to “Asian” exceptions. The panel addresses the disjuncture between the intended representation and the discursive reception of the partition while demonstrating that partition is as much a facet of cultural imaginary as is it the practical political conditions. Sudipto Chatterjee examines how the Indian film director Ritwik Ghatak created idiosyncratic cinematic techniques of capturing the partition of Bengal through the “trauma of silence,” a non-violent way of depicting the experience of a displaced people. Kyung Hyun Kim discusses how recent South Korean films project North Korean diasporic women in a romantic light, the tendency which reflects both the shifting South Korean conception of the North and the crisis of the South Korean male subject. Suk-Young Kim analyzes the filmed documentation of “Arirang” performance, the North Korean state jubilee staged in Pyongyang, 2005. She explores how this film becomes a site of contention regarding varying perspectives of the North Korean producers and South Korean consumers. Bhaskar Sarkar compares recent Indian and Korean war films by focusing on the notions of collective loss and mourning. He explores various cultural strategies of mediating the two Asian partitions in comparison to the Jewish Holocaust.
Cracks in the Heart: Partition Trauma in Ritwik Ghatak's Cinema
Sudipto Chatterjee, University of California, Berkeley
Ritwik Ghatak transitioned from the stage very early in his career to the cinema, in the early fifties, just as he had moved from East Bengal (that had become East Pakistan), to settle for/in West Bengal, India. Consequently, his films are “stagy” in the often raw and somewhat over-stated (if not melodramatic) depiction of emotions. But at the same time, they depict the collective trauma of a displaced people that is, in contrast, muted and never shown physically. The Partition of Bengal becomes the obsessive theme of Ghatak's cinema through almost all his eight feature films. His career as film-maker depicts a journey through several stages of his eventual inability to deal with partition, even as his personal life spirals into the depth of alcoholism to slow self-annihilation. However, Ghatak is not the norm in post-independence Indian Bengali cinema. While most filmmakers of West Bengal through the fifties and sixties made films that were referentially self-sufficient within the bounds of the Indian nation, Ghatak seemed to refuse to accept it, his camera pointing to an unfilmable horizon on the `other' side of the border. But never does he allow his “partition trauma” to act itself out through direct depiction of real violence of the Hindu-Muslim riots. This is in sharp contrast to several `Partition' films that have appeared in the last ten years in India. These films have two features: (1) they are almost all luridly graphic in their depiction of the communal riots; and, (2) they all deal with the partition of Punjab. Ghatak's films continue to remain the only potent Bengali films dealing with India's partition on the East. This paper will explore how through the “trauma of silence” the partition of Bengal spoke Ritwik Ghatak.
Romancing the North: Representation of North Korean Women in Recent South Korean Films
Kyung Hyun Kim, University of California, Irvine
In Typhoon (Taep'ung, Kwak Kyông-t'aek, 2005) and Wedding Campaign (Na ûi kyôlhon wonjônggi, Hwang Pyông-guk, 2005), two commercial feature films that have been widely released in South Korea, North Korean diasporic women characters play significant roles. What is apparent in these recent films is that the landscape of North Korean female characters has become much more dense than the one-dimensional fatalistic ones that previously patented the South Korean depictions of North Koreans. Yet, what is less easy to speculate is whether this new “liberal” approach towards the North firmly reinscribes an ideological shift on the South Korean consciousness about the North Korean situation. Using the two recent film texts, I will attempt to explore how the South Korean production of North Korean subjects continue to self-serve the interests of South Korea in its attempt to come to terms with an internal crisis that is characterized by the cultural disenfranchisement of a anxious male Korean subject and a narcissistic loop around the protagonist's own ontological nausea. I argue subsequently that this nausea is itself a displaced symptom that engages, especially in Wedding Campaign, the North Korean girl without being either conscientious or self-reflective. This affirms a self-deluding other-ization in a fashion that could be described—to borrow a phrase from Edward Said—as a “metropolitan transfiguration of the male existential angst” - a state that could be said to be no different from the hegemonic nation's racialized construction of the colonized.
Contesting the Korean Partition: The Filmed Documentation of the North Korean Arirang Festival
Suk-Young Kim, University of California, Santa Barbara
In August 2005, the North Korean government commemorated the 60th anniversary of its liberation from Japanese colonial rule in a grandiose festival. It was in Pyongyang May Day Stadium that nearly a hundred thousand performers gathered to stage a breathtaking performative history of North Korea, from its prenatal struggle for independence to its utopian future. Based on an amalgamation of performance forms such as acrobatics, martial arts, singing, dancing, and a laser lights show, the spectacle was given the name Arirang, borrowed from the title of a Korean folksong and a metaphor for a quintessential “Koreanness,” which transcends the ideological divide between North and South. A limited number of South Korean civilians touring Pyongyang had a chance to see the live performance, but the majority of South Koreans could not attend the event. In response, the North Korean government released a filmed version of the event intended for a wide circulation in the South. However, the South Korean government barred its tourists from bringing the video back to the South. This paper explores how various parties involved in the production and consumption of the filmed version of Arirang conceptualize the partition in different ways: while the film presents partition as the transitional state from which Korea should emerge as one nation, some South Koreans only saw Arirang as but another attempt by the North to express their ambition on their southern neighbor, thus turning the film into a site of contention where intended representations and discursive receptions of the partition collide.
Between Partition and Reunification: The Political Horizons of Indian and Korean War Films
Bhaskar Sarkar, University of California, Santa Barbara
This paper examines the traces of an originary trauma‑the bifurcation of national territory‑in recent war films from India and Korea. Both national partitions, coming in the wake of WWII and decolonization, produced social upheavals that left millions homeless, and hundreds of thousands dead. In placing these historical experiences within the framework of trauma studies, my aim is not only to append further instances to an ever‑growing global archive of human catastrophes, but also to put pressure on the categories and insights of trauma studies that remain crucially tied to the Jewish Holocaust. How does this comparative approach help us produce a supple, more accommodating theoretical framework that can account for the Korean and Indian experiences alongside of the European trauma, without reducing them to Asian "exceptions"? On the other hand, how do notions of collective loss and mourning, central to trauma studies, allow us to apprehend cultural mediations of the two Asian Partitions?
Recent war and espionage films‑‑Indian [Border (1997), Gadar (2001), L.O.C.: Kargil (2003), Lakshya (2004)] and Korean [Shiri (1999), JSA (2000), Tae Guk Gi (2004)]‑in their intense focus on Indo‑Pakistani and DPRK‑ROK conflicts, constitute a form of cultural mourning work whose "object" is coming to terms with the loss of national unity. What representational strategies (e.g. brotherhood as allegory of schism; romance overcoming communal division to enact fantasy of unity) do these films adopt to work through the legacies of political truncation? What differential projections of the future of community and politics do these strategies intimate in the two cultures?