위안부 피해자 영상의 “포스트-기억 세대” 양식으로의 변화와 사회문화적 함의 읽기

This essay examines the recent changes in Korean cinema representing former comfort women. Discourses on comfort women have grown since the early 1990s — the time in which the first testimony of a former comfort woman came out. Early Korean cinematic representations on comfort women were invested in recording the colonial victims’ testimonies in a documentary mode, in the hope of maintaining an ethical distance from the victims’ undescribable experiences. Recent Korean films, such as Snowy Road (Najeong Lee, 2015) and I Can Speak (Hyunseok Kim, 2017), however, mark a deviation from the early mode of cinematic depiction. While dramatizing the traumatic history of comfort women, these films highlight a certain solidarity between two protagonists, often portrayed as two female friends suffering together at a comfort station, or the convoluted relationship between the colonial victims and contemporary Korean people. This essay seeks to understand this newly-conspicuous relationship depicted in these films ― particularly through a theoretical lens of “post-memory generation“ discourse, and in so doing, hopes to disclose how this new cinematic representation of comfort women contributes to establishing a close and family-like relationship between the colonial victims and the young generation in our society, thereby helping to redraw the boundary of contemporary Korean society.