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’)
