[TK-21 - Joinau]

Published November 28, 2017 - Source

By Benjamin Joinau, Translated from French

With Benjamin Joinau’s Je me souviens and Jean-Louis Poitevin’s The Wings of an Angel, a new kind of journey begins—into one of the world’s great megacities: Seoul.

The setup appears simple for this deeply layered documentary: the filmmaker Gina Kim returns regularly to Seoul—a city she once left—to visit her family. With each return, she films videos of her walks and encounters, like entries in a personal diary.

A “Video Je me souviens”: Fifteen Years of Filmed Memories of Seoul

From this mass of mundane and accidental footage, she crafts a video montage through which she weaves an inspired reflection on the city, the nature of representation and art, memory, identity, and the relationship with the father. The film opens with a shot of her father’s back, filmed inside his car as the family heads to the grandfather’s grave. Later, in Seoul’s city hall square, the author searches for an English word meaning “memory” that doesn’t contain the prefix “re-.” Her quest begins, blending old and new footage around the theme of remembrance.

Kim takes us from Seongbuk-dong to Changgyeong Palace, from Dongdaemun Market to the collapse of the Sampoong Department Store, from Buddha’s Birthday at Jogyesa Temple to the National Cemetery and the April Revolution of 1960, from Seodaemun Prison to Itaewon, from Gwanghwamun to Seoul Tower—until she finally arrives at the sought-after word: “anamnesis.” The final scene shows her father visiting an old neighborhood barber: the filmmaker finally films her father’s face.

This “essay-film” is fascinating—more so for the narration, remarkably intelligent, than for the image quality, which varies as it was shot on different cameras over a long span of time. The viewer is quickly drawn in by the author’s soft, monotone delivery, and mesmerized by this visual and temporal stroll through Seoul, structured like a philosophical investigation. One of the film’s great achievements lies in how skillfully it interweaves the urban and the personal into a reflection that reaches beyond the city and seeks to grasp the essence of representation and space.

The City Connects Us to What We Are Not

The film is framed by the question of the father. Filmed from behind, seen only in the rearview mirror at the very beginning, his face is barely visible. At the end, the filmmaker takes him to an old barber who claims that no one has ever captured the art of a perfect haircut on camera. Her father becomes the subject while his daughter films. In truth, little changes in her father’s hairstyle—but the barber persists in his pursuit of perfection. One might see in this a metaphor for the patient, discreet work of the documentary filmmaker.

The director then recalls the earlier image of her father: the power of photo and video, symbolized by the rearview mirror setup, is the power of anamnesis—the ability to make the past present. Let’s recall that anamnesis is also the clinical term for a patient’s medical history—for the list of their past sufferings. This is precisely what the filmmaker does by evoking the great traumas of contemporary Korea through Seoul’s urban sites.

This final sequence closes the quest that began with a forgotten word—a word of memory ironically misplaced—perhaps a subtle allusion to the “forgetting of forgetting,” that loss of memory haunting contemporary Korean society. It also highlights one of the documentary’s underlying themes: the question of the father. Through reflections on tradition, identity, and the search for one’s name, the author links fatherhood to modernity, indirectly raising the question: how can we be children—that is, heirs—of our parents in a postmodern context?

Here, Seoul is more than just a backdrop or excuse for this reflection. It becomes the very symbol of anamnesis: the city articulates individual and collective memory, generations, timelines, histories, forms of identity, places and names, the present and the past.

City and Story

Through this metaphysical video wandering, the film also addresses the question of physical presence and space. The city, in its many transformations, is always present—resurrected to itself, even as we fade. In an early sequence, the filmmaker, lost in a childhood neighborhood that has changed so much it’s unrecognizable, asks herself what “here” means—what it means for a place to be. Her investigation offers an answer of sorts: an art-house film, like a city, like a photograph, like any representation with physical form, connects the presence of the present with the fantasy of the past—reality and desire, ourselves and others.

Because cities, like films and photographs, connect us to what is not us. They complete us. They allow us to meet in our solitude… The filmmaker’s answer to this problem of fragmentation—central to our hypermodernity (fragmented memory, fragmented history, grand narratives, identity, the image of the father…)—comes through this film, which takes the city, or more precisely a years-long walk through the city, as a metaphor for narrative.

What sutures this essential fragmentation, what restores our shaken identities, is the dialogical and diachronic nature of narrative—the fact that it weaves together different temporalities (evoking the past, projecting into the future, etc.) and unfolds in time. In this documentary, that corresponds to the diachronic relationship with the city’s spaces, refracted through the author’s memory and narration. For Gina Kim, Faces of Seoul becomes a game of anamnesis—both collective and deeply personal—a kind of therapy through art. Seoul, for once, is not just a passive backdrop; it becomes an actor in this process.