[Cine 21] - Documenting Eating Disorder Recovery Through the Camera
Published April 25, 2002 - Source
Have you ever seen someone in a documentary who, while shoving their head into a toilet and vomiting up everything they ate, still takes time to adjust the camera angle to capture themselves properly? Is it even possible to set up a camera just right to frame your mouth as you chew raw animal liver in a dissociative state? What about the erratic behavior—frantically touching every crevice in the house, waving arms in the air while chanting spells? If she hadn’t intended to capture it on camera, would she have performed symbolic acts like wearing her mother’s wedding dress or hanging her grandmother’s cloths on a laundry line?
The self-documentary Gina Kim’s Video Diary is filled with staged scenes that would be taboo in conventional documentaries. Only a handful of moments suggest “there’s a camera somewhere filming Gina Kim as a subject.” More often, Kim is keenly aware of the camera and performs for it—engaging in a kind of performance. In this work, life and performance frequently blur. She uses the camera to turn her life into a performance, and at the same time, enacts separate performances in front of the lens to express that life. What makes Gina Kim’s Video Diary such a unique documentary is precisely this ambiguous boundary between everyday life and performance.
“There were days when I filmed only for a few minutes, but on especially lonely and difficult days, I left the camera running nearly all day.” The documentary captures a 23-year-old art school graduate from Seoul National University, who moves to the U.S. to study abroad. There, in an increasingly reclusive life, she suffers from anorexia and begins documenting herself with an 8mm video camera. Over time, this process becomes a means of gradual healing. This 157-minute self-camera documentary documents that journey.
This diary-like work, which offers little regard for viewer comfort, contains many moments a person would normally be ashamed to show: hitting herself, chewing raw animal liver, sobbing at the window overcome with anxiety, or showing her emaciated body—thin limbs and a bloated belly from bingeing after long periods of starvation—before a mirror. Yet the documentary is not only about these disturbing images. What it truly captures is the peculiar and intimate relationship between the camera and herself—a relationship that might be an even more central subject than the eating disorder itself.
The Camera: Both Confidant and Watcher
Gina Kim’s Video Diary features, almost eerily, only Gina herself. Though filmed while studying abroad in the U.S., no friends from school—or even store clerks—make an appearance. The only space shown is her room. The school entrance appears once, but only in a long, static shot of the empty concrete floor. “You write a diary when you’re alone, right? I couldn’t bring myself to take out the camera around other people. And honestly, I really was alone.”
Her eating disorder first surfaced around her senior year of college. As graduation loomed, she became increasingly aware of herself “as a woman,” and spiraled deeper into confusion. Just as her mother had once distanced herself from her grandmother, Gina decided to leave for the U.S. in order to escape her mother. The opening segment of Video Diary, titled “Leaving Home,” follows her on the day she packs to go abroad. Her grandmother, who had not visited for years, suddenly shows up unannounced and says something deeply foreboding: “Don’t go. Stay here with your mother. You’re weak.” Her mother chases the grandmother out. Gina leaves home—and soon after, plunges into severe anorexia.
At one point, “feeding the cat was my only social activity,” says Kim. “I thought I looked so hideous that I couldn’t bring myself to go outside.” Trapped in a mindset that demanded, “I must be special. If I can’t be special, I must at least appear special,” she meticulously tracked even a sip of water in her obsessive dieting. Paralyzed by imagined external judgment, the only “friend” she found was the camera.
The moment she connected the video camera to the monitor and pressed the red button, she was no longer alone. The camera became both a confidant who listened intimately, and a scolding, watchful “Other.” One day, as this paradoxical relationship with the camera deepened alongside her illness, Kim set up the camera right after binge eating, stood in front of the mirror, and stripped off her clothes. Exposing her emaciated limbs and bloated belly to herself, she took her first step toward escaping the illness.
“What if what’s inside my swollen belly isn’t food, but a baby? Mom… were you happy when you were pregnant with me?” At the moment her bloated belly appeared to her like that of a pregnant woman, she made a dramatic reconciliation with it. “It wasn’t food I was rejecting—it was my mother. A mother is the one who gives food to a baby. By not eating, I was unconsciously rejecting my mother.” After this, she sought treatment and brought her video tapes—ones she had recorded over years—to her advisor at school for consultation. The professor said, “Anorexia is a social illness. Why don’t you make work out of this?” Kim edited one day’s footage, titled it The Empty Room, and for the first time, shared her diary with the world—at the 1999 Seoul Women’s Film Festival, Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, and Pia Film Festival.
Reconciliation with Her Mother, and Accepting Nourishment
Gina Kim, who studied video art at CalArts in Los Angeles, is a feminist video artist. While she later discovered that other feminist artists also documented their lives through video diaries, when she first stood in front of the camera, she had no intention of turning it into an artwork or showing it to anyone. She filmed a video diary solely for herself over the course of six years. Later, she edited approximately 2 years and 8 months of footage—centered around a unifying theme—into the 157-minute film Gina Kim’s Video Diary. The work is divided into seven chronological chapters: “Leaving Home,” “Morning Becomes Eclectic,” “Mother’s Wedding Dress,” “Naked Appetite,” “Mirror,” “Mother’s Song,” and “White Laundry.” Alongside the theme of “anorexia,” the other major axis of the film is her relationship with her mother.
“I never realized how hard it is to feed, wash, clothe, and nurture a single person into the world. And yet—how did my mother ever manage to gut a mackerel?”
Amid a tangled family history and mixed feelings of love and resentment, Gina begins to sift through memories of her mother. While unpacking after arriving in the U.S., she finds an old English-learning cassette tape from her mother. It begins with textbook English phrases, but then transitions into a Rachmaninoff melody, over which the voice of her young mother speaks: “Gina, time for yum-yum. Yum-yum. Look at Gina’s belly button. She cried so hard her belly button popped out.” The ordinary, loving tone of a mother speaking to her baby—set against footage of the adult Gina’s bare stomach—brings an unexpected emotional weight. These forgotten words of her mother strike a deep chord with Gina’s situation at twenty-five.
After hanging her grandmother’s tattered old clothes out in the sun, Gina finally steps outside—for the first time in the entire 157-minute film. Until that point, sunlight had only danced in grid patterns across her floor; now it stretches boundlessly beyond the confines of her home. The film concludes at this hard-won threshold with the aphorism:
“As long as I live, there is hope. As long as there is flesh, there is hope. My flesh, my life.” (** In Korean, 살다 (to live) and 살 (flesh) share the same linguistic root, collapsing life and embodiment into a single condition of hope.)
Having completely overcome her anorexia through six years of filming her video diary, director Gina Kim continues to record video diaries to this day. But unlike before, the subject is no longer just herself—it now revolves around a matrilineal history that includes her grandmother, her mother, and herself. Now much more grounded in everyday life, she approaches her work with clear direction. Simultaneously, she is also preparing a feature-length fiction film titled Invisible Light.
What is the story she wants to tell as a feminist? It is, in fact, a story about the belly. While discussions of female desire often begin with sexuality, Gina focuses on appetite—the stomach that accepts nourishment and embodies motherhood, the womb as origin, and the belly button as the sole remaining trace of connection to another being. Through the belly, she explores female desire from a navel-centered discourse rather than a phallocentric one.
Through filming her video diaries, Gina performed a private ritual. As she describes it, the work is “a collection of all kinds of ceremonies,” and at the same time, a highly unusual form of daily documentation. In many ways, Gina Kim’s Video Diary doesn’t feel like a documentary at all. By capturing a profound dialogue between herself and the camera, the film boldly challenges and paradoxically reaffirms the conventional notion that a documentary must represent unadulterated daily life.
Gina Kim’s Video Diary was screened in the Video Diary section of the Jeonju International Film Festival.