What If Viewed Longer and Slower
Hangil Jang
Site and Memory
Director Claude Lanzmann, rejecting the use of archival footage and dramatization, focuses on interviews and location filming in Shoah (1985). Nearly three decades after the end of the war, Lanzmann and his crew visit the site of a former extermination camp in Poland, where no visible traces of the atrocities remain. Instead, a lush natural landscape of grass and trees stretches before them. Nevertheless, survivor Simon Srebnik is able to locate the site, which Lanzmann later refers to as a “non-site of memory.”
Over the past 40 years, Shoah has sparked extensive discussions in which the notion of "non-sites of memory," among others, emerged as a key issue. Lanzmann argues that indirect, abstract knowledge of the tragic event alone does not entail true understanding, while visiting the site without prior knowledge prevents one from truly seeing it. His belief in the inseparability of knowing through seeing and seeing through knowing extends beyond the Holocaust, encompassing atrocities across different times and places. "What, then, to do with these sites—these sites of destruction... What should one make of them cinematically?... What was the point of returning to the sites?" These questions posed by Georges Didi-Huberman remain unanswered to this day. At sites where the traces of past tragedies are absent, what should filmmakers capture, and how should they present it?
The Internalization of Measurement
In FOOTAGE (2015) and (100ft) (2016), both shot on 16mm film, Minjung Kim explores the conditions and materiality of analog film through various approaches. One of the most striking aspects is the term foot, which refers to not only the bottommost part of the body but also the imperial unit of length (ft.) and the origin of the word "footage" denoting recorded film. In today’s era of digital video, where the duration of footage is no longer tied to physical length, it is easy to overlook that this term originates from a measurement based on the human foot. A roll of 16mm film measures 100 feet, containing 4,000 frames, and at a projection speed of 24 frames per second, it runs for approximately 2 minutes and 46 seconds. This is something that an analog filmmaker must internalize, especially when filming must be uninterrupted.
In FOOTAGE, composed of numerous still images depicting feet—from photographs and classical paintings to medical diagrams—the conversion between physical length and duration of time is a key element, alongside the polysemy of the word foot. Every frame displays numbers engraved in the four corners, each indicating frame per second, frame per foot, length in feet, and time in seconds. The frame count per second ranges from 1 to 24, while the frame count per foot ranges from 1 to 40. Each time the frame counts reset, the foot and second increase by one, progressing until they reach 100 feet and 166 seconds, respectively.
In contrast, (100ft) presents physical length differently. On-screen, two figures take 100 slow steps, against the backdrop of Soda Lake, from the left edge of the frame to the right. The total runtime of the film is 3 minutes, which translates to about 108 feet of film; subtracting the time occupied by the credits gives approximately 100 feet. While the actual distance walked near Soda Lake will almost never align with the width of the screen, time—a fixed variable across all screening environments—becomes the crucial metric for approximating the original distance captured in the film. Through (100ft), the audience experiences how the filmmaker internalizes the formulas involving measurement of and conversion between time, distance, and length. The difference in foot size between the two individuals creates discrepancies in the distance they walk, reflecting the inherent ambiguity of measurement claimed to be objective. This ambiguity also corresponds to the subjective sense of time that individuals associate with internalized measurements of distance and length. It is through this internalization that Kim's film ultimately is made significant. In (100ft), the frames contain no elements that subvert visual illusion or direct markers pointing to the material conditions of the film. However, without contemplating beyond the on-screen appearance of Soda Lake and the two figures walking, one cannot fully grasp the film’s fundamental conditions—distance and time.
Unlike the direct approaches of Stan Brakhage’s Mothlight (1963) or Paul Sharits’ Frozen Film Frames Series (1966–77) that visually expose the materiality of film, Minjung Kim constructs an allegory that guides viewers to become gradually aware of the structure and materiality of film as they watch. The structure and materiality of the film are not simply observable facts or fragments of knowledge but rather sensory experiences, inherently resistant to being fully encapsulated within an individual frame. As a result, the audience must constantly reflect on and imagine what extends beyond what is visible on the screen. This process mirrors the observation of the "non-sites of memory."
Subtractive Film
In Minjung Kim's work, her exploration of the materiality of film intersects with the (im)possibility of capturing past events on camera. "The red filter is withdrawn." (2020) consists mainly of two types of location footage: that of former Japanese military fortifications in Jeju, built during the final stages of the Pacific War as part of Operation Ketsu-Go No. 7, and the sites associated with the 1948 Jeju Massacre. Most of the locations in the film bear only faint traces of the Jeju Massacre and—in the case of Operation Ketsu-Go—the events that would have occurred. The waters flow and clouds glide across the sky, along with swaying grass and tree branches in the wind, as if to sweep away the remnants of the past tragedies that the island has endured. The resulting vistas are beautiful—but is it acceptable to depict massacre sites in such aesthetically pleasing ways? Occasionally, signs or small iron fences appear as markers of the past events. However, like Kim's earlier works, “The red filter is withdrawn." invites viewers to engage with what lies beyond the visible surface of the images.
A crucial cue guiding such engagement is the subtitles, which consist of excerpts from Hollis Frampton’s performance A Lecture (1968). Among them, the following passage warrants a closer explanation:
It is only a rectangle of white light, but it is all films. We can never see more within our rectangle, only less… A red film would subtract green and blue from the white light of our rectangle. So we should not say: There is not enough here, I want to see more.
The experience of cinema is produced by the reduction of light. What we perceive as films in “full color” are, in fact, those that have undergone the greatest light reduction. Color film consists of three layers sensitized and respond to red, green, and blue light. Naturally, the amount of light diminishes as it passes through each successive layer. However, in the context of Frampton’s performance where a projector is used to demonstrate such a property, a more intuitive analogy is offered by the earlier Technicolor process based on subtractive colors. Technicolor is a process that involves shooting black-and-white film through red, green, and blue filters, dyeing each resulting strip in cyan, magenta, and yellow respectively, and layering the dyed strips in front of the projector’s light bulb to create “full color” movies on screen.
In other words, the red filter refers to not an additional layer for color overlay but a removal of the green and blue filters or films that filter out certain spectra of light. Kim exploits the very moment that Frampton’s A Lecture becomes ironically persuasive across different spatiotemporal contexts, so that “The red filter is withdrawn.” could sensitize the viewers to the subtractive color systems of cinema, where reducing light paradoxically allows "more" to be viewed. Additionally, the film reflects on the human desire "to see more", as exemplified by the Exhibition Room 4 at the Jeju 4・3 Peace Memorial Hall. The exhibition reconstructs the Darangshi Cave massacre site—where 11 civilians were slaughtered—including even the skeletal remains of the victims. The physical reality of light and film—especially in light of what it means to “see more” or "see less"—runs counter to the desire associated with the image formed on the human retina. The beautiful natural landscape of the massacre site does not “romanticize” the event but instead underscores that it is also an image resulting from subtraction. Meanwhile, the red images, produced by allowing more light to pass, paradoxically bring us closer to the event than the natural-color images.
Everything on the screen gains meaning beyond mere visibility only by being aware of the film’s conditions, and this process differs from the inseparability of knowing and seeing that Lanzmann argued. Watching Kim’s films does not require prior knowledge external to them. Instead, all the clues are already embedded in the light that illuminates the screen before the viewer, the projector running behind the audience, and the film strip in it. All the clues the audience needs to perceive the traces of the past hidden in nature can be found within the screening space itself.
