[TK-21 - Poitevin]

Published November 28, 2017 - Source

By Jean-Louis Poitevin, Translated from French

The wings of an angel…

It’s too far away to remember—and also too far away for memory—and it doesn’t matter. In the late sixties, a song played on the radio titled If I Had the Wings of an Angel... It spoke of journeys taken while lying on the back of a cloud drifting off from the sweet, heady scent of a cigarette.

Let’s just say it’s about the image of the angel passing by and gently brushing everything with its wing. Let’s say that this wing is of incredible softness, and that everything it touches is in the same instant split and reassembled, struck by a flash of light, and reborn from its ashes—identical, yet transformed.

This angel is Gina Kim; her wings are made of the images from her film, Faces of Seoul. The radical and violent softness of the impact is carried by the film’s words, by the voice that says what it sees, sees what it senses, senses what it knows, knows that it does not know what it thought it knew, and discovers that therein lies the chance to achieve something that once seemed impossible: to make a film with almost nothing that would be, of this magical, delirious, mad city, a calm and gentle portrait—yet so true that the teeth of truth would grind in the mouths of all who see it.

Because everything here is seen through the doubled gaze of inaccessible memories, touched by hands torn between the present’s refusal to become image, and listened to with ears trying to catch the vibrations of a tomorrow clipped with invisible pins to the clothesline of hope—perhaps.

Some of the tectonic plates involved in the creation and mutation of the city are named, located in time and space, with precise dates tracing through the years like a permanent catastrophe with a viral appearance. Places of brutal or miraculous intensity awaken in the flesh the traces once buried beneath the skin marked by time. Buildings splash images as if they themselves were producing them.

And between daughter and father—but it could just as well be between a traveler newly arrived, attuned to the urban scents as one might be to the signs etched in a beloved’s face and the dream they carry within them, layered into the city they discover—the alchemy of a return transforms nostalgia into an irresistible force of articulation.

“Everything” has become a word that means nothing, because nothing fits anymore within the idea of a whole—least of all a city. And yet, the desire remains in each of us to hold in the palm of our hand, in our ear, in our heart, some fragment of truth that might absolve us and bring comfort.

It’s enough—easier said than done, nearly impossible to achieve—to forget the whole, to set aside the obsession with grasping, and to focus on what moves across the visible, here the shadow of an angel’s wings.

Both out of honesty and an intimate understanding of the city’s changing status at the turn of the 21st century—as a city, and as her city—Gina Kim passes the shadow of her wings across it and records the barely visible lines they trace and reveal.

Here, to make is to show, to show is to speak, to speak is to make, to make is to carry out a magical operation of revelation. If the word weren’t so immensely loaded and its meanings so depleted, one might say that what we are shown here is an apocalypse.

History does not turn back on itself; it sees itself by observing what separates it from itself, and in doing so, it discovers where it tends when it understands that neither the immediate nor mediated data of consciousness are any longer the foundation of knowledge—neither of the self nor of the other.

The city grates, and it is that grating we perceive here. The background noise is transformed into a light hum, and then the small sounds of life—sometimes even that of a building collapsing for no apparent reason, of course, or the silence of the smiling golden Buddhas at Jogye Temple—become audible.

These sounds are those of the threads connecting the edges of the crater, the wound, the chasm, the cut through which memory escaped—not without leaving some of its humors to coagulate on the rim. And we begin to grasp the miracle stirred by the angel’s wings across “everything”: the vibrations that shake the city are transformed but precisely traceable—like seismic lines on parallel recording devices—in the minds of its inhabitants, or at least in that of this woman returning to her city.

She understands immediately: time does not pass the way we say it does. That’s just a repeated untruth used to align ourselves with the supposed logic of clocks—which couldn’t care less—while forgetting, while ignoring, how time is perceived by the great thinking machine of the living body.

There is only one time: the time of today.

And this day opens its door only if, during each day, each of us grasps the threads passing through our minds—dripping at the edges, tangled or torn—and takes them up again, as one would to mend a garment: always already too old, yet still wearable, and which one neither wants to throw away nor give away, but keep close, like one holds on to the warmth of a memory, the ache of a sorrow, or the beauty of a smile.

When looking at the images that compose this film, one might say they are “humble images.” Not because they’re made with a camera anyone could own, but because they aim for nothing more than to bind themselves to the words—so that the words may in turn come back and gently stroke the images in a back-and-forth motion, occasionally interrupted by the sharp snap of a truth striking like a whip. And when one listens to the words, when one reads them, one understands that this is the act of reweaving, played out between the words and the images.

What Gina Kim makes us perceive is that the city is a canvas—and that to grasp it, it is necessary and sufficient (but who does this? Everyone?) not to try to see the pattern in the rug, but to slip into the motion of the shuttle that passes from one edge to the other—of time, of sky, of streets, of the mind—and weaves and unweaves, present, past, future, and present again, not only the image of the city, but the city as it lives inside each of us.

And this back-and-forth is as much a movement as it is a philosophical assertion. Once the distance between self and other, between city and dream, between confession and emotion is recognized and accepted, one must understand that the act of reweaving is not meant to close the gap, the wound, or the scar—but to allow us to pass from one edge of the dream to the other by walking through the streets of today, guided by evocations of the past or futures peeking out from beneath the sheet of desire.

And nothing matters more than holding together the precise distance that allows both passage and connection—without erasing what was, what is, and what will be—the fluctuations of feeling and emotion, and the rigor of rules and laws.

This is the gesture Gina Kim performs in this film—a gesture that, between words that laugh and weep, and humble images that caress and express, reveals itself to be profoundly philosophical. Every intermediate space—and the city is such a space, and it is this space she films and voices—can be inhabited by anyone.

Each of us, in our own way, is like a little shuttle traveling across the loom that is the city. Irresistibly drawn to what escapes us, each of us, through our acts, makes the city a site of experimentation. And so, swept up in the flow, we come to understand that what is at stake here is nothing less than showing how, within this irresistible chaos, it is still—always—possible to invent an ethics.