(Non)representation of a damaged body

Director Gina Kim’s Virtual Reality (VR) Film Tearless (2021), which recently won the Best Immersive Work Award at the 27th Geneva International Film Festival, is the second film of the so-called “U.S. military Comfort Women” trilogy. Director Kim, who made this work against the backdrop of camp towns around major US military bases where the Korean government detained women under the pretext of the treatment of venereal disease, explored the case of Yun Geum-i murdered in 1992 by Kenneth Markle, a member of the United States Forces Korea (USFK), through her previous work “Bloodless” (2017). The common denominator running through the two works are as follows: the shooting and format are based on virtual reality technology; the theme she dealt with is the issue of the U.S. military “Comfort Women”; the aforementioned two commonalities can be traced to the director’s concerns about the ethics of representation.

The murder case of Yun Geum-i perpetrated by a member of the USFK in Dongducheon in 1992 was the most notorious instance in terms of representing the memories of the victim. While the inequality of the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) came to the fore surrounding the physical transfer of suspect Kenneth Markle and triggered the growth of social movements aimed at revising the agreement and eradicating crimes committed by members of USFK, the problem underlying this issue was the fact that movement organizations seeking to draw the public attention on this matter released the photos of the victim’s corpse to the public as they were. Though the image containing the mutilated body and the brutal crime scene made it possible to arouse public outrage and contributed to the spread of the movement, the ethical issues related to such representation were not widely debated within the movement at the time.

Director Kim, who had access to the movement as a university student, got the notion that “the representation of violence offered tremendous violence not only to the spectators but also to the subject”^[1] and contemplated how to represent the incident without exploiting (the image of) the victim for nearly 25 years.^[2] “Bloodless,” which was created after such a long consideration, does not show directly the damage of violence, unlike the 1992 photos. The audience cannot make an easy decision on where to go or what to see on the street of Dongducheon filmed with a 360-degree VR camera. As you walk along the alley behind the club with its shutters lowered, you hear the sound of someone’s high heels. Following the sound of footsteps or the direction in which a woman who had brushed past you disappeared, you reach a cramped single room. On the small floor looking as if someone stayed right before are pools of blood among scattered clothes. Director Kim remarks that the strategy she adopts in this work is the “absence of the body.” In other words, it is the strategy of “not showing the corpse but leaving the trace of murder” in the scene of the incident at which the audience arrives.^[3] 

Death pit photograph

The question of the representation ethics posed by releasing the photos of Yun Geum-i’s body and the answer of “Bloodless” can be said to come down to a matter of how to look at “women living in the post-colonial society,”^[4] as director Kim observes. To put it another way, it is a matter of how the damage to women living in post-colonial Korean society is depicted, what kind of gaze works here, and where the gaze ultimately seeks to reach. The matter of what those who wanted to show the photos of the victim’s disfigured body in the name of resisting imperialist violence saw (or believed to have seen) from the photos and attempted to show to the public. Similar representations have been repeated since then. In 2002, when two middle school girls were killed by the armored vehicles the members of the USFK operated, the photos of the accident scene exposing two victims’ maimed bodies were printed and distributed on pickets or leaflets at the demonstration places together with the movement for the amendment of the U.S.-ROK Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA). In addition, the photos and visual recordings of the corpses of what is believed to be the Japanese military “Comfort Women” piled up in a pit were discovered by Korean researchers at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) of the United States and released to the public in 2018. They remain examples showing how such photographic representations of damaged bodies, by being combined with the platform of Internet 2.0, make the problematic gaze on the damage inflicted by imperialism entrenched as ubiquitous in our daily life. Digital images circulated by the researchers were instantly exposed to the public by the recommendation algorithm of video streaming platforms through media channels and further permeated individuals’ everyday lives through social media (see image above. Problematic photo image was blurred). 

This type of damage record, referred to as the “death pit photograph,” has been frequently used by museums and multiple media platforms of Western society in expressing the memories of the Holocaust and considered effective in emphasizing the brutality of the perpetrator group. However, the photographic records of mutilated bodies piled up like objects don’t provide any understanding of the violence that engendered the damage and the suffering the victim had undergone, irrelevant to a disturbing iconic representation of the image itself. Photographic historian Janina Struk remarks that since such images are fragments of the past, they cannot offer a comprehensive understanding of the historical events surrounding them and condemns that the naive belief that photographic images reflect the truth of the past conceals the fact that the narrative of the images can be fabricated at any time by those who release and display the images in the present.^[5] Though the massacre of 30 Korean “Comfort Women” in China’s Yunnan Province is confirmed in the document data of the U.S. military logbook released by the research team along with visual material, there is no evidence that the released visual material of the death pit is the film shooting the result of the incident in this document. Rather, the release of the video resulted in unnecessary controversy with Japanese far-right extremists turning a blind eye to historical truth due to the inaccuracy of the NARA metadata related to the video material. To be specific, the video material in this incident is no more than fragments of the past, failing to serve as evidence of a historical event or offer a comprehensive insight into the incident.

Post-colonial women and the gaze of the death pit

Media critic and academic Barbie Zelizer goes even further and notes that photographic representation of brutal damage will cause atrocity’s normalization by making cruel images familiar iconographically and for that reason, enable suffering that exists in the present or can occur at any time to be overlooked.^[6] Neither the photo of Yun Geum-i’s body nor the death pit video of “Comfort Women” presumed to be victimized by the Japanese military can tell even a word about the structural and cultural context of the lives they had led until they were exposed to such violence, simply making violence that occurred become iconic spectacles and leading viewers to consume them voyeuristically.

However, it is necessary to look at these displays from the perspective of the “women living in a post-colonial society” beyond such a general criticism, as director Gina Kim argues. Unlike the death pit of the Holocaust, that of the Second World War seen from post-colonial Korea is not only a pit of atrocity but a symbol of failure. The failure of a nation-state that could not exist under the colonial state and consequently, could not rescue the victims. The failure of patriarchy “repentant for not being able to protect them”^[7] even after the establishment of the nation-state. Photographic theorist John Tagg observes that the reason documentary photographic images seal the relationship between the viewer and the viewed (the subject) into the paternalistic relations of domination and subordination is that these images serve as “an emotionalized drama of experience,” rather than as the flat rhetoric of “scientific evidence.”^[8] The emotive drama of a devastating failure to rescue women as beings who are vulnerable to destruction and must be rescued is completed by gazing at the image of the slice room in Dongducheon and the death pit in Yunnan Province, China. 

In “Bloodless,” director Kim’s strategy of “not showing” by showing an empty, cramped room with no individuals present through VR is synonymous with the scheme to show a vacant hole, and more precisely, invite the audience to the void pit. Instead of showing otherized and objectified bodies as objects of the failed “rescue” and identifying herself with someone who can exert the power of rescue outside the pit, it is a representation that pushes the audience into the pit and making them look out from the pit. This may have implications for the representation of memories of Japanese military “Comfort Women” victims.