If You Were Me: Human Rights discourses and transnational crossings in South Korean omnibus films

“If cinematic narrativity can be construed as a signifying process that reductively aestheticizes or essentializes the pain of others, turning the cultural and/or historical particularities of people’s experiences into a series of universalizing tropes or moments of temporary contemplation for the comparatively privileged viewer, then the omnibus film – as a gap-filled text comprised of two or more episodes (each supplied by a different director) – can serve to remind audiences of the challenges involved in linking discrete sites of embodied suffering while acknowledging the twin commitments bound up in the idea of human rights: universality and equality (Orend 2002: 16) (109)

 

It should be noted, though, that while If You Were Me perhaps obfuscates or obscures the specificities or contingencies related to particular subjects (including pedophilia, the subject of the film’s second episode), its adumbrated, gap-filled structure makes it possible for audiences to fill in missing information and forge connections between seemingly

disparate people, a manoeuvre that has ethical implications. Because of the combined length and brevity of the form, as a feature-length motion picture composed of several shorts, the omnibus film paradoxically facilitates the spectatorial act of ‘crossing over’ by withholding information, by sketching in only a few details, by allotting open spaces in which viewers might dwell (if only momentarily) as active participants. (121-122)

 

Daivd Sott Diffrient says that a form of omnibus film can fulfil the text gap and remind the audience of the idea of human rights films: universaility and equality. ->  여섯 개의 시선 한글 제목 설명 뒤에 추가.

 

The politically charged omnibus feature has proven to be a perennial means of both challenging official policieis or prejudicial attitudes and solidifying public consensus while mining the many economic and material resources made available through Europe’s common market. (111)

 

Omnibus films increasingly lent themselves to collaborative, cooperative efforts to shore up a sense of solidarity in the face of historical, political and social change.  (111)

 

Such examples attest to the importance of episodic works in capturing a wide assortment of perspectives on contemporaneous moments of political contestation, social unrest and/or industrial transformation, as evidenced in subsequent productions like Guang yin de gu shi/In Our Time (1982) and Er zi de da wan ou/The Sandwich Man (1983), two films that jumpstarted Taiwan’s New Wave of the early 1980s, and Echoes of Conflict (1989), a collection of three short films (directed by Gur Heller, Jorge Johanan Weller and Amit Goren) about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. (111-112)

 

However, like the omnibus films comprising the ‘If You Were Me’ series, it paradoxically waters down the language of human rights (and perhaps even undermines its legal foundations) by suggesting that chauvinism, narrow-mindedness and a general disrespect of other people’s feelings are sufficient in satisfying the requirements for humanitarian intervention. (112)

 

As a ‘harbinger of the future of generalized film distribution’, one that accords with Wong’s

suggestion that an emergent type of ‘transnational public sphere’ can be conceptualized ‘through a more concrete transnational public power’, such diversified film events – occurring within and between different countries and regions of the world, and engaging a variety of ‘subaltern counterpublics’ within ‘parallel discursive arenas’ (Fraser 1992: 123) – are what mark human rights festivals as uniquely porous spaces conducive to the formation of ‘alternative public spheres’. (113)

 

Speaking specifically about the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, she (Cindy Hing-Yuk Wong) explains that its programmers are ‘invested in using cinema to “uncover the truth and make justice possible”’. That goal – an attempt to transform the medium of motion pictures into ‘an agent of dialogue and change’, one that ‘has the power to do good in society’ – is shared by the producer and distributor of If You Were Me and was likewise promoted when they and the contributing film-makers were interviewed after its theatrical release. (115)

 

Citing Cindy Hing-Yuk Wong, Diffrient points out that the intention of filmmakers’ engagement with If You Were Me seems to stem from ‘an agent of dialogue and change’, one that ‘has the power to do good in society’.  -> 감독들이 참여하게 된 배경.

 

Nam’s comment effectively synthesizes two particular subcategories of cinematic transnationalism described by Mette Hjort, who argues that both an ‘auteurist transnationalism’ and a ‘modernizing transnationalism’ are evident in the institutional frameworks or discourses surrounding omnibus films. Whereas the former type emerges when established film-makers embrace ‘a particular kind of collaboration beyond national borders’ (as the celebrated auteurs Pak Ch’an-uk and Pong Jun-ho have done through their

contributions to the multi-country omnibus films Three … Extremes [2004] and Tokyo! [2008], respectively), the latter arises when a ‘significantly transnationalized film culture becomes a means of fueling, but also signifying, the mechanisms of modernization within a given society’ (Hjort 2010: 22–24). (118) -> 남규선 인터뷰 뒤에 넣을 것 (감독 찾는 게 쉽지 않았으나 성장한 한국영화의 힘이다.)

 

its contributors – much like former President Kim Dae Jung, and despite their good intentions – could be accused of failing to ‘distinguish “human rights” from and in relation to other rights’ (Close and Askew 2004: 22). Just as Kim Dae Jung, in a pre-Presidential paper written for a 1994 issue of Foreign Affairs, and then in a 1999 speech that he delivered at an International Conference on Democracy, Market Economy and Development hosted by his government and the World Bank, ‘did not explicitly define or otherwise indicate a generic, categorical notion of “human rights”’ (Close and Askew 2004: 22), so too does the film occasionally muddy the waters with its emphasis on marginalized outsiders simply trying to fit in. (121)

è  시선1에서 합의가 충분히 이루어지지 않음.

 

Depth, traditionally conceived of as a kind of vertical plunging into profundity or ‘geological’ search for meaning below the surface, is thus made horizontal or ‘geographical’ in the context of omnibus features. […] What this (If You Were Me) and other omnibus films do is move beyond the temporal-historical markers of vertical depth to point towards the spatial-textual coordinates specific to what I call horizontal depth, which extends signification across an array of different environments or milieus, segmentally emplotted and transtextually linked. […] In transiting from one setting to another, the

viewer not only engages in a kind of intersubjective cosmopolitanism, increasing his or her capacity to see similarities among the text’s visible differences, but also metaphorically enacts, at the ‘local’ level, the kind of border-crossing

movement inscribed in transnational flows. Indeed, the omnibus film is the most ‘trans’ of all transpositional cinematic-cultural forms, collapsing transmedial,translinguistic, transgeneric, translocal and transnational modes in the space of a single feature that unites multiple voices and visions.

è  옴니버스 영화가 가지는 특징은 horizontal depth를 만들어내는 것. 즉 ‘trans’ 한 성격을 그 자체로 가지고 있다. 그리고 그 갭을 메우는 것이 관객의 engagement. ‘horizontal depth’로 인해 universality와 equality를 관객이 보충함. (인권)