Comfortless

by Riccardo Triolo
  • friday, 1 september 2023

To witness, to document. These are concepts that are so strongly correlated with photography that one cannot really discuss one without the other. Photographs depict the phenomenon as it appears, and is the forerunner of cinema. Without photography, there would have been no cinema, either. Immersive art – film-like experiences shot in either 180 or 360 degrees – follow the ‘witness’ idea to take the user, not mere spectator, within an environment that we want to be witnessed, rendered in all-around photo-like imagery, whether still or moving.
Since 2017 at the latest, the year she won an award for Best Linear Content with Bloodless, Gina Kim has been giving life to places that lost it, and that were facing total, regretful abandonment. These are places where women have been abused—in particular, Korean women abused by American troops after the Korean War. Experience after experience, Kim found an original style, at once poetic and documentary: the places dedicated to the exploitation of so-called comfort women are explored in static shots that animate subtly, turning into something akin to tableaux vivants bearing the signs of a strong ethical tension. To see, to witness something that took place in the past and is now forgotten impacts audiences strongly, and bestows the techniques some moral depth. Bloodless was followed by the heart-rending Tearless, and now by Comfortless. Less signifies subtraction, existences once subtracted from History, though now made indelible by a very capable immersive filmmaker.

COMFORTLESS
COMPETITION –  360 Videos
by Gina Kim
(South Corea, USA, 15’)

Screenshot-2023-09-07-alle-16.07
Enzo Jannacci
BARBERA_2023-500
Becoming what we are
limelight-495x495
Survivors
83066-PHOTOCALL_-_THE_KILLER_-_Director_David_Fincher__Credits_Giorgio_Zucchiatti_La_Biennale_di_Venezia_-_Foto_ASAC___2_
David Fincher
bellissima_magnani-chiari
Bellissima is not Reality
Simone_Massi_Abbecedario
Chronicles from Nowhere
claudio-casale
The long way around
giorgio-diritti
Giorgio Diritti
ammutinamento-caine
Herman Wouk
alix-delaporte
In the Spotlight

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