Abstract

Although the Gwangju Democratization Movement in 1980 (also called the May 18 Movement) is often remembered as a symbolic event in the history of South Korean democratization movements, it had been prohibited from being enunciated in the space of public memory for a long while. Instead, the sense of liberation, fear, and violence as well as the following pain and indebtedness experienced by those who were involved in the events of May 1980 have been commonly represented in works of Korean literature and film. These works valued listening to testimonies of the survivors and remembering their agony and spirit of resistance. Contrary to such works in the past that tended to recall the voices of those who directly experienced the events, several outstanding works have recently emerged from younger generations who did not directly experience the events but shared their memory. These younger generations distinguish themselves from the survivors and witnesses generation in ways that overcome the survivor’s solemn attitude toward the democratization movement. A feminist Holocaust scholar, Marianne Hirsch refers to these generations as “post-generations” and calls their works “postmemorial works.” This article will discuss how these postmemorial works engage in the act of remembering, mainly focusing on the documentary film Kim-Gun (dir. Sangwoo Kang, 2019) and comparing it to other contemporaneous works. In Kim-Gun, the film crew makes an effort to track down a real person who was photographed by a photo-journalist during the events of May 1980. In doing so, the film crew meets and interviews the survivors out of desperate expectations to reveal the truth in the age of “post-truth” marked by a deluge of fake news. In the end, however, it is revealed that there is something more important than finding the truth. The documentary film thus demonstrates how the post-generations remember and represent the Gwangju Democratization Movement and acquire the affect of entanglement vis-à-vis a traumatic history in a new manner that extends beyond Hirsch’s formulation of postmemory as centered on familial relations.