Seung-hoon Jeong

Biopolitical Ethics in Global Cinema takes a new approach to world cinema through critical theory. Whereas world cinema often refers to non-American films deemed artistic or peripheral, Seung-hoon Jong examines its mapping frames: the territorial 'national frame,' the deterritorializing 'transnational frame,' and the 'global frame.' If world cinema studies have mostly displayed national cinemas and their transnational mutations, his global frame highlights two conflicting ethical facets of globalization: the 'soft-ethical' inclusion of differences in multicultural, neoliberal systems and their 'hard-ethical' symptoms of fundamentalist exclusion and terror. Reflecting both and suggesting their alternatives, global cinema draws attention to new changes in subjectivity and community that Jeong investigates in terms of biopolitical 'abjection' and ethical 'agency.'

In this frame, the book explores a vast net of post-1990 films circulating in both the mainstream market and the festival circuit. Jeong comparatively navigates these films, highlighting less essentialist particularities than compatible localities that perform universal aspects of biopolitical ethics and its alternatives by centering the narrative of 'double death': the abject as symbolically dead struggle for lost subjectivity or new agency until physically dying. This narrative pervades global cinema from Hollywood blockbusters and European art films to Middle Eastern dramas and Asian genre films. Ultimately, the book renews critical discourses on global issues—including multiculturalism, catastrophe, sovereignty, abjection, violence, network, nihilism, and atopia—through a core cluster of political, ethical, and psychoanalytic philosophies.

In this book, Seung-hoon Jeong introduces the cinematic interface as a contact surface that mediates between image and subject, proposing that this mediation be understood not simply as transparent and efficient but rather as asymmetrical, ambivalent, immanent, and multidirectional. Jeong enlists the new media term "interface" to bring to film theory a synthetic notion of interfaciality as underlying the multifaceted nature of both the image and subjectivity. Drawing on a range of films, Jeong examines cinematic interfaces seen on screen and the spectator’s experience of them, including: the direct appearance of a camera/filmstrip/screen, the character’s bodily contact with such a medium-interface, the object’s surface and the subject’s face as "quasi-interface," and the image itself. Each of these case studies serves as a platform for remapping and revamping major concepts in film studies such as suture, embodiment, illusion, signification, and indexicality. Looking to such theories as the ontology of the image and the phenomenology of the body, this original theorization of the cinematic interface not only offers a conceptual framework for rethinking and re-linking film and media studies, but also suggests a general theory of the interface.

'This original, brilliant, and graceful book uses the concept of the "interface" both theoretically and philosophically to develop an extremely useful framework through which to coherently explore and compare our experience not only of cinema but also of other moving image platforms. Also providing an analytic history of contemporary film theory, it will be an exciting addition to the graduate classroom.'-- Vivian Sobchack, UCLA School of Theater, Film & Television

'Operating in the gap between phenomenological and apparatus theory, Jeong brings Deleuze's and Levinas' understandings of the face together with the cultural theory of interface to make a powerful new way to consider the cinema in a period of rapid and radical change.'—Sean Cubitt, Goldsmiths, University of London

'Cinematic Interfaces combines speculative theoretical inquiry with rigorous analysis of films. It presents a radical rethinking of both film and film theory in the age of new media. Of particular significance is its reassessment of the cinematic apparatus – especially of image and subjectivity – as a series of interfaces.'--Warren Buckland, Oxford Brookes University

Introduction
1. The Medium-Interface
2. The Body-Interface
3. The Surface of the Object
4. The Face of the Subject
5. Image and Subjectivity

Once heralded and defined by the likes of François Truffaut and Andrew Sarris as a romantic figure of aesthetic individualism, the auteur is reinvestigated here through a novel approach. Bringing established as well as emergent figures of world art cinema to the fore, The Global Auteur shows how politics and philosophy are present in the works of these important filmmakers. They can be still seen leading a fight that their glorious predecessors seemed to have abandoned in the face of global capitalism and the market economy. Yet, as the contributors show, a new world calls for a new cinema, and thus for new auteurs. Covering a range of global auteurs such as Lars von Trier, Lav Diaz, Lee Chang-dong and Abderrahmane Sissako, The Global Auteur provides a much-needed reassessment of the film auteur for the global age.

“As we plunge into the second century of cinema, this terrific collection of essays reckons with not only the persistence of auteurism but its resurgence in the context of global cinema. Framed by the editors' superb introduction, The Global Auteur features a brilliant roster of scholars whose essays, ranging across an admirably broad range of filmmakers, finally helps us to understand the work of art cinema in our era of digital reproduction.” –  Gregory Flaxman, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Director of Global Cinema Studies, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA

“Once a dramatic new critical perspective and later declared a moribund leftover of romanticism, auteurs and auteurism today have become-as this outstanding and wide-ranging collection reminds us-more vibrant and complex than ever before.” –  Timothy Corrigan, Professor of Cinema Studies, English, and History of Art, University of Pennsylvania, USA

“This ambitious collection fills a glaring gap in studies of cinematic authorship in the twentieth-first century. It was about time for the creative contribution of the film director to be reassessed from a global perspective, away from hierarchical canons and in light of the radical changes entailed to film production by the widespread use of the digital technology. In the age of social media, where the individual merges into the general and anyone can 'author' a film, the role of the battered but resilient auteur may be, as the editors rightly say, more crucial and relevant than ever.” –  Lúcia Nagib, Professor in Film, University of Reading, UK

Introduction
(Seung-hoon Jeong, New York University Abu Dhabi, UAE, and Jeremi Szaniawski, Korea National University of the Arts, Republic of Korea)

Chapter 1 The Global Author: Control, Creative Constraints and Performative Self Contradiction
(Thomas Elsaesser, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)

Chapter 2 Abderrahmane Sissako: On the Politics of African Auteurs
(Rachel Gabara, University of Georgia, USA)

Chapter 3 Godard's Stereoscopic Essay: Thinking in and with Adieu au langage
(Rick Warner, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA)

Chapter 4 Michael Winterbottom: A Self-Effacing Auteur?
(William Brown, University of Roehampton, UK)

Chapter 5 Provocation and Perversity: Lars von Trier's Cinematic Anti-Philosophy
(Robert Sinnerbrink, Macquarie University, Australia)

Chapter 6 From Political Engagement to Politics of Abjection in Polish Auteur Cinema: The Case of Wojtek Smarzowski
(Izabela Kalinowska, SUNY Stony Brook, USA)

Chapter 7 Of Intruders (and Guests): The Films of Michael Haneke and Aleksey Balabanov
(Jeremi Szaniawski, Korea National University of the Arts, Republic of Korea)

Chapter 8 Suffocating Kinesis: The Late Films of Aleksey Gherman
(Fredric Jameson, Duke University, USA)

Chapter 9 Contemporary Romanian Auteurs: Politics, Irony and Reflevixity
(Dominique Nasta, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium)

Chapter 10 Fatih Akin's Moral Geometry
(Dudley Andrew, Yale University, USA)

Chapter 11 Richard Linklater's Post-Nostalgia and the Temporal Logic of Neoliberalism
(Dan Hassler-Forest, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)

Chapter 12 'Black in White': Language, World-making and the American Contract in the Cinema of Quentin Tarantino
(John Pitseys, Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium)

Chapter 13 Battle with History: Carlos Reygadas and the Cinema of Being
(Michael Cramer, Purchase College, USA)

Chapter 14 The Art of Encounter and (Self)Fabulation: Eduardo Coutinho's Cinema of Bodies and Words
(Consuelo Lins, Federal University at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Trans. Leslie Damasceno)

Chapter 15 Shareable Cinema: The Politics of Abbas Kiarostami
(Nico Baumbach, Columbia University, USA)

Chapter 16 Migration and Contemporary Indian Cinema: A Consideration of Anurag Kashyap and la politique des auteurs in the Times of Globalization
(Kaushik Bhaumik, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India)

Chapter 17 Space and Time in the Land of the End of History
(Marco Grosoli, University of Kent, UK)

Chapter 18 Revisiting Jia Zhangke: Individuality, Subjectivity, and Autonomy in Contemporary Chinese Independent Cinema
(Victor Fan, King's College London, UK)

Chapter 19 Kurosawa Kiyoshi, Dis/continuity, and the Ghostly Ethics of Meaning and Auteurship
(Aaron Gerow, Yale University, USA)

Chapter 20 A Generational Spectrum of Global Korean Auteurs: Political Matrix and Ethical Potential
(Seung-hoon Jeong, New York University Abu Dhabi, UAE)

Globalization has brought a blossoming of inclusive systems of transnational capitalism, multicultural traffic, and networking technology, while also generating symptoms of exclusion related to migration/refuge, precarious life, and various catastrophes that debunk the holistic universality of one rainbow global village. Political dialectics has turned into the absolute antagonism between the ‘soft’ ethical inclusion of differences in the whole and the ‘hard’ ethical backlash from its excluded remnants. Then how does cinema address today’s global life?

This special double issue of Studies in the Humanities addresses this question in the frame of ‘global East Asia,’ with its Asian identity taking on a sort of compatible locality that is not absolutely confined in Asian particularity. ‘Global East Asian cinema’ could then be termed for critical engagement with global phenomena and their influences on the notions of community and subjectivity as reflected or allegorized in the East Asian context. What is especially interesting is the theme of abjection: once characters lose their sociopolitical subjectivity, cast out of their community, they struggle to regain their original identity or gain new subjectivity. They become agents in the sense of acting to fulfill a mission which can be not only homecoming but also revenge or a terroristic attack, sacrifice or a gift-giving of themselves.

This narrative structure is prevalent in films with the motifs of journey, migration, bare life, coming-of-age, midlife crisis, secret agency, networking, and disaster, more or less resonating with global conditions of connected yet vulnerable life. Catastrophe from earthquake to zombification is an easy window to start with, since the cinema of catastrophe often symptomatizes a political deadlock of the current global world, the impossible utopian change in various forms of catastrophic imagination. But this cinema can also draw attention to an alternative potential direction of ethics irreducible to collective politics, when biopolitical abject figures become contingent agents of new relations through commonality without community, solidarity without unity. Abject agency would then inspire us to challenge commonsensical global ethics on hospitality, tolerance, pity or hate and violence through concrete films, opening room for networking on the edge of the global regime beyond the problematic ‘soft/hard’ ethical frame.

Contents

“Introduction” by Seung-hoon Jeong (New York University Abu Dhabi)

“Embracing Abjection, Reclaiming Agency: New Possibilities for the Zombie and the Social Recluse in Neet of the Living Dead” by Lindsay Nelson (Meiji University)

“Park Chan-wook’s Critique of Judgment: The Handmaiden (2016)” by Steve Choe (San Francisco State University)

“The Abject Other and Terrorism in Tsui Hark’s Detective Dee Series” by Haihong Li (Xiamen University)

“Conscientious Abjection and Chaosmopolitanism in Khavn de la Cruz’s Ruined Heart” by William Brown (University of Roehampton)

“Just a Formality”: Yakuza Sovereignty and Abject Exclusion in Kitano Takeshi’s Outrage and Beyond Outrage” by Se Young Kim (Vanderbilt University)

“Spy, Abjection, and Post-Socialist Identity: Chinese Neo-Spy Films since 2009” by Min Yang (Bowling Green State University)

“The Cartography of the Abject Nation in Thirst and Still Life” by Hyon Joo Yoo (University of Vermont)

“Must an International Chinese (Auteur) Filmmaker Make a Martial Arts Film?: Genre Filmmaking and Industrialised Cultural Production in Global East Asian Cinema” by Felicia Chan (University of Manchester)

“Rebuilding Humanity: Gaze of the Exile and Chinese Independent Cinema” by Victor Fan (King’s College London)

“Seeking Agency and Forging Identity Through Documentary” by Tze-lan D. Sang (Michigan State University)

“Dog and Thief: Two Modes of Abject Agency Crossing over East Asian Networks of Capital in Global Korean Cinema” by Seung-hoon Jeong (New York University Abu Dhabi)

This book represents the culmination of Thomas Elsaesser’s intense and passionate thinking about the Hollywood mind-game film from the previous two decades. In order to answer what the mind-game film is, why they exist, and how they function, Elsaesser maps the industrial-institutional challenges and constraints facing Hollywood, and the broader philosophic horizon within which American cinema thrives today. He demonstrates how the ‘Persistence of Hollywood’ continues as it has adapted to include new twists and turns, as well as revisions of past concerns, as film moves through the 21st century. Through examples such as Minority Report, Mulholland Drive, Source Code, and Back to the Future, Elsaesser explores how mind-game films challenge us and play games with our perception of reality, creating skepticism and (self-) doubt. He also highlights the mind-game film's tendency to intervene in a complex fashion in the political moment by questioning the dominant power’s intent to program both body and mind alike. Prescient and compelling, The Mind-Game Film will appeal to students, scholars, and enthusiasts of media studies, film studies, philosophy, and politics.

“언제 어떻게 하나의 기록이 문학이 되는가?
그때 무슨 일이 일어나는가? 이는 무엇 때문이며 누구 때문인가?”

“프랑스가 지구상에 배출한 가장 위대한 철학자 중 한 사람”(자크 시라크)이자 ‘해체주의’를 창시하여 기존 서양 철학의 전통을 뒤엎으며 현대 철학의 새로운 지평을 열어젖힌 자크 데리다. 그의 문학론을 묶어 펴낸 흥미로운 책이 문학과지성사에서 ‘현대의 문학 이론’ 시리즈로 출간되었다. 한 편의 인터뷰와 열 편의 에세이로 구성된 『문학의 행위』(데릭 애트리지 엮음, 정승훈・진주영 옮김)가 바로 그것.

데리다의 문학론―한 편의 인터뷰와 열 편의 에세이
자크 데리다는 초기작에서부터 문학의 부름을 받아왔다. 희곡, 시, 소설을 포함하여 불어, 독어, 영어로 된 텍스트에 이르기까지 ‘문학’에 대한 데리다의 글은 넘쳐난다. 이 책은 이러한 광범위한 문학 텍스트들에 대한 데리다의 응답들 다수를 몇 가지 기준에 따라 선택하여 한자리에 모은 것이다.
데리다와의 인터뷰를 포함해 모두 11편의 글로 이루어진 이 책은 루소, 말라르메, 카프카, 블랑쇼, 조이스, 퐁주, 첼란, 그리고 셰익스피어에 이르기까지 문학과 철학 사이의 접면을 전례 없는 방식으로 횡단하며 데리다 특유의 해체적 독서를 시도한다. 이렇듯 책에 실린 데리다의 텍스트들이 응답하고 있는 구체적인 작품들은 문학의 모든 행위—행위와 기록—이다. 즉 관습적이고 제도적으로 ‘문학적’이라고 범주화된 작품들이자, 또한 어떤 식으로든 문학을 수행하고 상연하며 그것의 법을 수립하거나 의문시하는 작품들, 제도와 범주를 확인하는 동시에 그것들로부터 내적인 거리를 두고 작동하는 작품들. 이런 의미에서 데리다의 텍스트들 또한 ‘문학 행위’라 말할 수 있을 것이다.
책 서두에 실린 인터뷰는 ‘문학’과 ‘철학’의 문제를 비롯해 정치, 역사, 페미니즘 등 다양한 분야에 걸쳐 있는 데리다 사상의 면모를 그의 육성을 통해 답하고 있다는 점에서 더욱 흥미로운 독서를 제공한다. 엮은이인 데릭 애트리지의 세심한 편집 또한 이 책이 지닌 미덕이다. 상세한 머리말과 한 챕터 분량의 개론, 그리고 데리다와의 인터뷰는 이 선집이 갖는 의도와 의미를 충실히 전달한다. 뿐만 아니라 각 글들 첫머리에 핵심과 맥락을 짚어주는 소개글을 덧붙임으로써, 난해하기로 악명 높은 데리다 텍스트를 이해하는 실마리를 던져준다.

“문학이라 불리는 이상한 제도”―데리다와 문학의 문제
그렇다면 데리다에게 ‘문학’이란 무엇인가? 문학 연구에 몸담아온 모든 이들에게 핵심적일 수밖에 없는 이 질문은 플라톤과 아리스토텔레스 이래의 서양 철학 전통 내에서도 끊임없이 반복하여 제기되어왔다. 이는 결국 문학적 질문이 아니라 철학적인 질문이다. 이 질문은 문학의 본질에 대한 진술을, 문학을 문학이 아닌 모든 것과 구별하는 요소를 추궁하기 때문이다. 따라서 “문학이란 무엇인가?”라는 질문은 “철학이란 무엇인가?”라는 질문과 분리될 수 없으며 문화, 정치, 윤리 혹은 역사를 포함한 모든 고려 속에 내포되어 있다.
이 책에서 데리다가 강조하는 바는 “문학이 하나의 제도”라는 점이다. 그에 따르면 “자체적으로 문학적인 텍스트란 없”으며, “문학은 자연적으로 혹은 머릿속에서 주어진 것이 아니라 역사적, 지리적으로 지도를 그릴 수 있는 사회적, 법적, 정치적 과정에 의해 생겨났다.” 특히 17세기 혹은 18세기 이래 서구 민주주의 국가들에서 경험해온 문학이라는 제도는, 우리 주변의 여러 언어적 실천 가운데서도 문학을 독특한 어떤 것으로 만드는 특징을 지니고 있다. 데리다는 바로 그 특이성을 강조한다. “관습과 규칙 등을 가진 역사적 제도로서의 문학, 그러나 또한 원칙적으로 모든 것을 말할 힘을 가진, 이러한 규칙을 어기고 이를 몰아냄으로써 자연과 제도, 자연과 관습법, 자연과 역사 사이의 전통적 차이점을 도입하고 발명하고 더 나아가 의문시하는 그러한 제도로서의 문학.”
이러한 의미에서 거의 최초와 다름없는 이 문학 선집이 갖는 의미는 각별하다고 할 수 있다. 서구의 사고방식을 가능하게 한 숨겨진 조건으로서 ‘문자’를 탐구하는 것이 바로 ‘해체’라 불리는 데리다의 작업이었고, 따라서 그의 작업은 서구 사상을 대표하는 구체적인 작품들에 밀착한 연구일 수밖에 없기 때문이다. 우리에게 잘 알려진 데리다의 ‘철학 텍스트 읽기’가 아닌 ‘문학 텍스트 읽기’ 작업을 한데 모은 이 책은, 이런 의미에서 난해하기 짝이 없는 ‘해체’란 현상을 이해하는 또 다른 길잡이가 되어줄 것이다. 뿐만 아니라 데리다 작품에 나타난 문학, 즉 문학 텍스트와 문학이라는 제도의 의미를, 그리고 문학에 있어서의 데리다 저작의 의미를 새롭게 생각해보는 계기를 마련해줄 것이다.

루소, 말라르메, 조이스, 퐁주, 카프카, 셰익스피어……
‘문학’과 ‘철학’ 사이를 종횡무진 횡단하는 지적 사유의 모험
이렇듯 문학 텍스트에 대한 데리다의 글쓰기는 어떠한 관습적인 의미에서도 논평이나 비평, 해석이 아니다. 데리다의 글쓰기는 문학작품을 위치 짓거나 장악하거나 철저히 규명하거나 번역하거나 꿰뚫어보지 않는다. 문학에 대한 데리다의 텍스트는 문학적인 정도 이상으로 철학적인 것은 아니라 해도 여전히 철학적인 질문에 사로잡혀 있으며, 문학 텍스트에 의한 철학의 해체가 감지될 수 있는 방법을 찾는다. 그렇게 함으로써 문학에서 문학적인 것이 무엇인지를 전면에 내세운다. 문학이라는 단어를 글쓰기나 법과 같은 용어로 만드는 그 무엇, 문학이 속한 담론과 제도를 뒤흔들 수 있는 그 무엇 말이다.
1장 「“문학이라 불리는 이상한 제도”」는 엮은이인 데릭 애트리지와 자크 데리다와의 인터뷰로 책 전반을 아우르는 구체적인 질문과 답변을 통해 ‘문학’과 ‘철학’의 문제를 흥미진진하게 풀어냈다. 인터뷰는 데리다의 제안으로 성사되었으며 이전에 출판된 적은 없다. 2장 「“이 위험한 대리보충”」은 데리다의 주저 『그라마톨로지』  제2부 2장으로, 루소 텍스트들 가운데 ‘대리보충’이라는 단어의 변덕스러운 사용에 주목했다. 3장 「말라르메」는 제목 그대로 말라르메 작품에 관한 짧은 논의를 담고 있다. “문학적”이기도 하고 그렇지 않은 것으로 분류되기도 하는 말라르메의 글쓰기는 문학과 문학 비평의 전통적인 범주를 뒤흔든다. 데리다에게 말라르메가 야기하고 징후화하는 위기는 새로우면서도, 또 아주 오래된 것이기도 하다. 4장 「첫번째 세션」에서 데리다는 어떻게 해서 미메시스가 진리 개념과 밀접히 연관되어왔는지를 보여준다. 이를 위해 데리다는 미메시스 개념의 내적 모순들이 분명히 드러나 있는 플라톤의 『필레보스』 발췌본과, 그 모순들을 구체적으로 보여주는 말라르메의 짧은 산문시 「미미크」를 겹쳐놓는다. 5장 「법 앞에서」는 이 글에서 인용하는 카프카 우화의 제목과 동일하다. “문학이란 무엇인가?”라는 자기 심문적 질문은 카프카의 짤막한 우화 「법 앞에서」에 대한 폭넓은 독해에서 다시금 제기된다. 6장 「장르의 법칙」은 5장 「법 앞에서」와 묶여 풍성하게 읽힐 수 있다. 「장르의 법칙」은 다른 문학 텍스트에서 출발하여, 법과 법의 대리인들에 대한 의무의 문제와 씨름하며, 또한 그 문제에 다가가는 데 있어서의 문학의 중요성을 붙잡고 늘어지는 에세이다. 7장 「율리시스 축음기: 소문으로 들은 조이스의 예스」는 조이스에 관한 데리다의 에세이로, 제9회 국제 제임스 조이스 심포지엄의 초청으로 개회 연설을 했을 당시 발표한 글이다. 8장 「「프시케: 타자의 발명」 중에서」에서 데리다는 프랑시스 퐁주를 논하며 ‘발명’이라는 이슈를 통해 ‘타자’라는 문제를 다룬다. 9장 「『시네퐁주』 중에서」는 8장에 이어 퐁주를 다루며, 서명과 고유명사라는 서로 밀접하게 연결된 문제에 매진한다. 10장 「『쉬볼렛: 파울 첼란을 위하여』 중에서」는 첼란 시에서 따온 여러 가지 모티프를 통해 그 이중적 특성에 초점을 맞추는데, 이 글에서는 암호 쉬볼렛, 할례, 재 그리고 날짜가 포함된다. 데리다가 “날짜의 수수께끼”라 부르는 이 특성이 이 글에서 가장 두드러진 주제를 이루고 있다. 마지막으로 11장 「아포리즘 대응시간」은 1986년 『로미오와 줄리엣』 파리 공연에 앞서 다니엘 메스기슈의 초청으로 마련된 데리다의 강연을 계기로 씌어졌다. 이 희곡은 서구 문화 역사 전체에 걸쳐 지속되는 문제점들을 표출하고 있음과 동시에 가장 친숙하고도 재소비되는 아이콘들 중 하나다. 데리다는 이 같은 두 가지 특성에 반응하고 이 둘을 대응시간에 초점을 맞춰 연결시킨다.

개론: 데리다와 문학의 문제_ 데릭 애트리지
1장 “문학이라 불리는 이상한 제도”_ 자크 데리다와의 인터뷰
2장 “이 위험한 대리보충”
3장 말라르메
4장 첫번째 세션
5장 법 앞에서
6장 장르의 법칙
7장 율리시스 축음기: 소문으로 들은 조이스의 예스
8장 「프시케: 타자의 발명」 중에서
9장 『시네퐁주』 중에서
10장 『쉬볼렛: 파울 첼란을 위하여』 중에서
11장 아포리즘 대응시간

This essay sketches the evolution of cinematic experience from the century of authentic film spectatorship based on the dark theater and big screen to the new age of digital interfaces and streaming platforms. Special attention is paid to the paradoxical performance of Netflix driving this shift. It challenged the notion of ‘what/where is cinema’ with films like Okja and Roma, and its docu-essay Voir even leads a critical discussion on cinema’s past and future outside the traditional territory of cinema. The Covid pandemic has only contributed to Netflix’s self-contradictory engagement with cinema as its original shows, such as Squid Game, cinematically critique global capitalism while enriching the platform giant’s market dominance. This ‘new normal’ demands a multilayered approach to today’s ‘Netflix-ised’ cinema.

Bong Joon-ho's Parasite incisively depicts the contemporary class divide and its ethical impasse between contract/tolerance and hate/violence, devoid of any political resolution. However, this critique of neoliberal capitalism finds itself embraced in the global cultural and industrial spheres, compelling us to delve deeper into the film's intricacies on both the textual and contextual fronts.

Time is ever more spatialized on screen, as seen in postmodern pastiches of historical styles and post-medium relocations of cinema to art or life spaces. Subtle yet notable is a diegetic combination of these two trends in the “mind-game film” that plays games with characters and spectators through complex puzzle narratives. Time has indeed become a mappable fractal space to revisit or reshape, a database of modulative events accessed even obsessively in Hollywood cinema since the 1980s classics The Terminator and Back to the Future up until the last decade’s Arrival and Tenet. Tracing this evolution concisely, I will illuminate how time travel always creates a spatial loop with self-deconstructive hypotheses. Then, I will highlight Source Code and such action thrillers to explore the video game logic combined with embodied interfaces reassigning time spatially. This analysis will lead to critical thinking about narrative film’s cutting-edge desire to create transhuman agency and its innovative yet dubious ideology driven by today’s sociopolitical sci-fi imagination.

In this short pedagogical essay, I recall my unique experience of teaching Agnès Varda’s early masterpiece Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) in the United Arab Emirates and South Korea three times over half a century after its release. Though unfamiliar with the New Wave’s mother, young, non-European viewers in my classes were intrigued to accompany Cléo’s urban odyssey full of relatable existential anxieties and encounters. Their vivid, diverse, and critical discussion of the film’s content and form confirmed that its local modernity still resonates with global contemporaneity and appeals to students across nationalities and genders.

In the backdrop of global interconnection, such films as Crash, Syriana, and Babel drew attention to the six-degrees-of-separation “network narrative.” This type of distributed narrative with multiple access points or discrete threads has long evolved, perhaps since Griffith’s Intolerance and via modern masterpieces: Altman’s Nashville and Shortcuts weave many characters into a portrait of their social ground unmapped by themselves; Bunuel’s Phantom of Liberty shifts among characters only through the contingent movement of the camera. These two elements (multiple characters, a floating agent) intermingle now in the way that the protagonist takes the role of the very agent navigating among contingently networked characters in further decentralized directions: Birdman centers on the hero’s salvation but many other people around him form and cross small dramas; the protagonist in Waking Life shuffles through a dream meeting various people; Holly Motors stages a Parisian’s bizarre city odyssey, with the true agent turning out to be a car/cars; Mysterious Object at Noon experiments on the ‘exquisite corpse’ relay of a story through different people whom the director encounters while moving around... What does this non-linearity with different causal relations imply? How do mobile agents floating over decentralized events relate to global networks in general? This paper investigates today’s network narratives through an interdisciplinary approach to the notion of network as opposed to community even beyond film narratology. For instance, if the masculine formula of Lacan’s sexuation (all are submitted to the phallic function but one exception) underlies community, its feminine formula (not all are submitted to the phallic function but there is no exception) works for networking. Community forms the totality of all and an exception that fuels the universal desire to make it utopian, but network has the infinity of drives to (dis)connections dismantling community, yet thereby leaving no exceptional outside. Community is a closed set of subjects who may be ‘abjected’ from it; network is an open whole of endless links along which the subject-abject shift constantly occurs in the mode of being ‘on/off’ rather than ‘in/out.’ In Deleuze’s terms, community works as a “tree-like” vertical system of hierarchical units in the historical trajectory to its perfection, whereas the network creates a “rhizomatic” horizontal movement of molecular forces in non-dialectic, non-linear directions. Foucauldian “discipline” is a key to subjectivation in the community, but it turns into Deleuzian “control” in the network that promotes flexible agency and continuous modulation without exit. As actor-network theorists argue, nothing precedes and exists outside ever-changing networks of relationship. The network narrative will thus be explored as a cinematic symptom of the radical shift from community to network that both society and subjectivity undergo with all potentials and limitations in our global age.

The “world” in film studies has been the “other” of the world’s empire, with Hollywood taking American exceptionalism. It unfolds as the stage of identity politics representing all the rest of the world as postcolonial, peripheral, or merely different than Hollywood. However, this “political” model becomes challengeable as the world’s ongoing homogenization blurs old boundaries while causing “ethical” deadlocks such as the vicious interlocking between (neo)liberal multiculturalism and fundamentalist terrorism. The notions of subjectivity and society also undergo new crises and changes permeating the entire world beyond the established national or transnational frames of the world. Against this backdrop, world cinema can be reframed not for a world tour of territorialized national cinemas or transnational deterritorialization but a critical remapping of many contemporary films reflecting global phenomena even in localized narrative space. Locality functions here less as the basis of identity, referring to a unique reality that both resists and requires the center’s endorsement, than as a contingent springboard for addressing the concrete universality of the world system, including the center. This approach brings a global frame of world cinema.

<서울역><부산행><반도>로 이어진 연상호의 좀비 3부작은 한국적 로컬리티를 글로벌화하는 스케일의 확장 속에 ‘좀비 아포칼립스’의 장르 문법을 강화하며 답습해가는 한편, 이 장르 자체의 발달사와 함께 다른 장르들의 좀비적 출현을 시사하기도 한다. <부산행>이 할리우드식 ‘좀비 포맷’을 주류 감수성으로 국지화하면서 신자유주의 체제가 배태한 ‘유동적 공포’를 날렵하게 포착했다면, <서울역>은 이 공포를 통제하며 체화하는 한국 공권력과 계급적 착취 및 이에 대한 저항적 아나키즘으로서의 ‘좀비-되기’를 통해 이명박-박근혜 시대에 대한 직설적 사회 비판을 리얼리스트 애니매이션의 외피에 씌워 좀비 포맷을 뒤튼 바 있다. 반면 <반도>는 이미 퇴락한 문명의 잔여에서 재가동되는 원시 공동체가 자연화된 좀비를 사육하며 구축하는 초법적 주권의 원형을 디스토피아 SF 혹은 <매드 맥스>류의 포스트-아포칼립스 영화처럼 그려낸다. 이런 관점에서 3부작은 좀비 아포칼립스적 세계의 과거, 현재, 미래를 예시하는 가운데, 국가의 몰락과 유사 국가의 탄생을 매개하는 좀비를 통해 문명의 (악)순환을 환기한다. 사회적 바이러스로 등장하는 이 존재론적 타자에 대한 전염과 방역의 드라마는 그렇게 쳇바퀴 도는 문명의 부산물과 악전 고투를 벌이는 인간의 궁극적 가치가 무엇인지 되묻게 한다.

Skyfall (2012) signals a crisis in global espionage in a post-9/11 era of schizophrenic digital terror. James Bond and his enemy are both internally excluded from their agency-MI6-and this "abjection" leads to terrorist revenge and sovereign reaffirmation. The latter involves a survival test for 007's vulnerable body while simultaneously recovering a national identity for the United Kingdom. In this sense, James Bond mirrors Jason Bourne, the ex-CIA agent in the Jason Bourne film series. Bourne undergoes a similar abjection yet becomes neither terrorist nor sovereign but instead a symptom of perpetual mind-games. This chapter compares Bond to Bourne to enable a cognitive mapping of the twenty-first-century espionage genre and its global system of sovereignty and abjection.

Drawing on Walter Benjamin's "Critique of Violence," this paper illuminates the complexity of law and violence in global biopolitical cinema. Benjamin's key notions ("lawmaking" and "law-preserving," "mythical" and "divine" violence) are revisited through diverse films such as The Dark Knight series, Dogville, The Act of Killing, and Waltz with Bashir. The paper explores how the sovereign agents of killing here embody 'pseudo-divine violence,' posing ethical dilemmas about justice and life's value. This analysis leads to the quest for 'true divine violence' without sovereign power and the sanctity of humanity believed only as potential to retain and relay.

Stanley Kubrick’s political films can be revitalized regarding psychoanalytic biopolitics on power, desire, and subjectivity. Paths of Glory exemplifies how the military system renews itself by scapegoating some of its members, making them ‘bare lives’ outside the law. Such a sovereign regime of biopolitical ‘abjection’ targets the communist half of the world in Dr. Strangelove and even the entire humanity except the few selected in a neo-Nazi eugenic dream mixed with polygamic machoism. Here, the Schmittian political theology overlaps with the Lacanian psychoanalytic sexuation: the sovereign’s divine power enacting the state of exception is analogous to the unrestrained desire of a ‘primal father’ figure exceptional to the symbolic order of castration. Alex in A Clockwork Orange appears as an exception to the law, which then puts him in a prison-hospital complex to make him a normal subject. The aversion therapy for this, however, reveals the institutionalization of sovereign power that treats him as an abject for bioengineering, only to leave him back in a society where he is degraded into a total abject. This abjection is redeemed with the final sexual fantasy, which the obscene superego of the regime itself enjoys. Sexuality is repressed in Kubrick, yet with the illusion of fulfillment. Recruits in Full Metal Jacket are trained to be soldiers (subject) equipped with supralegal power (sovereignty) to kill enemies as homo sacer (abject). However, this subjectivation also implies the absurd masculinization of derogated men into machos who, after undergoing the trainer (father)’s rules and his death, enjoy libidinal culture in fascistic male bondage to share commodified women in Vietnam. In short, the universal phallic function for all men, along with its exception (sovereign/superego), totalizes the world in the masculine logic of identity. The Vietnamese female sniper at the end, then, appears as a true embodiment of femininity whose ‘not-all’ is subject to the phallic function, an abject per se whose difference destroys the illusion of desire. Her death opens an abyss of unthinkable otherness. This paper explores the complexity of all these issues drawing on today’s critical theory, as Kubrick’s political unconscious intimates it in different historical settings of the 20th century for critiques of modern humanity.

The Dardenne brothers' The Promise (1996) and Fatih Akin's The Edge of Heaven (2007) depict non-western migrants in western Europe as the social 'abject' in the background of multicultural conflicts between global (Christian) Europe and its (Islamic) periphery. Also, both share a motif based on the Abraham‐Isaac story. Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac epitomizes one's singular relationship with God beyond community (Kierkegaard, Marion, Derrida), but the Abraham figures in the films give themselves to the abject Isaac figures through self-abjection. This becoming-abject as an existential gift breaks the father‐son identity in the global regime, forming solidarity among the abject as strangers. Such an abject is, I claim, a 'faceless' third. For Levinas, the 'face of the other' leads one to divine infinity beyond totality, but this self-other unit is destabilized with the other's place taken (repeatedly) by the faceless third. Neither friend nor enemy, this new other should be called 'neighbour' in the context of ethical philosophy. The sovereign-subject-abject hierarchy is dismantled into the equality of the neighbours who share abjectness beyond cultural mediation or identity and walk side by side rather than face to face. I reframe Levinansian infinity in this network of neighbouring on the edge of the global system.

Seung-hoon Jeong discusses in his paper global action thrillers about the war on terror. He highlights the biopolitical abjection of counterterrorist agents from their state agencies. This objection ends up either self-reaffirming in the manner of a sovereign agent (the Bond series) or terrorizing their sovereign system (the Bourne series), while both are trapped in the vicious cycle of terror and counterterror. More notable is the “mind-game” sci-fi genre. Source Code, among others, stages a loop of a traumatic counterterrorist mission with retroactive causality, a closed circuit of neoliberal productivity and pathological abjection in a video-game narrative. The time-travel motif here, however, ultimately “undoes” sacrifice, problematically sacrificing the ethics of sacrifice. Finding no exit from the sovereign system, the abject agent against it embraces the perpetual present of actions including undoing traumas. This reinforced reaffirmation of sovereign agency underlies Hollywood’s new ideology as seen in many other post-Source Code films.

Bong Joon-ho’s global blockbuster Snowpiercer (2013) is perhaps the first major Korean film that tackles outright the fate of humanity facing environmental and sociopolitical crises of the entire world. Set in a new ice age, it unfolds a sci-fi parable about a never-stopping train where post-apocalyptic survivors are put in a dystopian caste system. This iron Ark draws our attention to a series of issues and dilemmas allegorically related to today’s economy and ecology, revolution and sustainability. Discussing these points along with detailed film analysis, the chapter weaves through diverse discourses on critical topics such as biopolitics, capitalism, utopia, and cinema. It particularly illuminates how the train as a biolpoitical ecosystem implies post-historical symptoms and how its final catastrophe leaves room for some new potential of human agency.

In the context of global cinema reflecting today’s society and subjectivity, this paper maps contemporary South Korean films that expose two transnational networks of capital and its agents cast out of the very networks around the Korean peninsula: (1) the ‘North-West network’ ranging over North Korea, Russia, and the northeastern China; (2) the ‘South-East’ network spreading over Japan, Shanghai/Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia. The ‘North-West’ network is palpable in realist dramas and thrillers such as The Journals of Musan, Poongsan, and The Yellow Sea that present North Korean refugees or Korean-Chinese immigrant workers in South Korea. Deprived of social subjectivity, they appear as the ‘abject agents’ whose mission rather enslaves them like ‘dogs’ to the lawless network of capital while they struggle to escape it in vain. On the contrary, The Thieves (along with the Tazza series) stage powerful ‘thieves’ of capital traversing the ‘South-East network.’ They embody a new type of ‘abject agency,’ not as the rabble but as rebels who paradoxically epitomize what today’s global system requires and represents. Their intelligent, physical, and social skills and adaptability visualize the trendy lifestyle of capitalist professionals who circulate capital, not circulated by it. Thirst allegorizes and yet questions the relentless greed of this system driven by cognitive, financial, and emotional capitalism. Here may be room for expecting alternative abject agents to come out in global Korean cinema.

The sadomasochistic subculture of "female domination," namely femdom, has formed a conspicuous mode of digital carnality that prevails among new media interfaces while radicalizing interactivity. The submissive man's relationship with the dominant woman is never simple here, not just pornographic but symptomatic of complex phenomena regarding power and society, media and life that shape our techno-libidinal age. This paper sheds light on its sexual, psychological, psychoanalytic and socio-ethical implications, drawing on and reframing theories about masochism, abjection, biopolitics, nihilism and so on. Full of paradoxes, femdom embodies a formally structured governance of sensation and determination, an exceptional law beyond normal law by which submission to a sexual sovereign leads to both the slave's self-deprivation and regain of freedom. His failed desire for the unobtainable object then takes on the Lacanian drive, the instant satisfaction of circulating around the void as if to constantly "edge" without closure, as typified in the digital loop of GIF images. More precisely, desire and derive mingle indiscernibly in the disintegration of the Symbolic and the Real, of the private and the public that characterizes the self-destructive addictive culture of capitalist hedonism. In this context the femdom wonderland turns out to be a permeable network of numerous Dom/subs' life-building communities, a self-modulating interactive heaven of the undead desire-drive without outside, without nirvana.

This chapter will explore geological strata of political locality in contemporary South Korean film and a wide spectrum of their globalized expressions by focusing on four major auteurs: Park Chan-wook, Kim Ki-duk, Lee Chang-dong, and Bong Joon-ho. Establishing their worldwide recognition throughout the millennial boom of Korean cinema, these directors have more or less exposed different positions and tendencies of what was called “386 generation” – Korea’s most politically engaged generation that led the leftist anti-dictatorship student movement in the 1980s. Their contemporaneity is that which, for example, such other auteurs as Hong Sang-soo and Im Kwon-taek do not share and, in particular, international audiences could not detect without deeply looking at its local contexts.
While tracing these auteurs’ historical 386 issues of democratization, human rights, American imperialism, and two Koreas’ division/reunification, this chapter will direct attention to their overlap or transition to more global phenomena. Especially notable are the ways in which the “abject” characters cast out of their community try to regain their suspended social subjectivity or reveal transformed subjectivities while opening alternative relationships through the motifs of bricolage, double occupancy, artistic creation, game or puzzle, and self-imposed or social mission. Here, the political in the Korean auteurs secretly resonates with that in global cinema which extends to biopolitical concerns contoured by neoliberal transnational capitalism and threats of terroristic catastrophe. For the abject implies “bare life” deprived of political identity, symptomatic of exclusion from any inclusive regime now globally locatable.
The chapter will map out various auteuristic themes in this regard: the loss and recovery of ordinary life social minorities undergo in Lee, ideological systems that class and legal conflicts debunk in Bong, vengeance and judgment driven by out-law desire in Park, and the sin and redemption of animalistic ghost figures in Kim. This mapping will help delve into the nature and boundaries of such notions as power, justice, community, and ethics in view of political philosophy and critical theory. At the same time the auteurs will be repositioned and reconnected from different angles including realism and idealism, genre and style, and their engagement in political parties and actual issues. But since the political in post-80s Korea does not directly manifest itself so much as it often resides displaced and replaced behind some universally appealing aesthetic appearance, the task is to read the artistic transformation of the political allegorically and symptomatically. For this, a broad corpus will be examined from the auteurs’ major narrative features to their shorts and documentaries, and even other directors’ films they wrote or produced.
Auteurism based on the myth of classical individuality may be deconstructed here, or say, reconstructed into a generational structure of contemporary auteurs’s multilayered political consciousness or unconscious. The Korean auteurs may then offer an interesting case of reflecting how the 21st century cinema has evolved the political on a localized plane of immanent globality.

This chapter proposes a new theorization of André Bazin’s realism in two directions in which the medium-specific notion of photographic indexicality can be deconstructed and reframed in view of Bazin’s own work and post-Bazinian film history. First, aesthetically, iconic index as full representation: it is more accurate that his ontology of the image is less about indexicality per se than about the indexical effect which can also be created in hyperreal or surreal iconicity. The Bazinian total cinema has evolved in this regard, enhancing the spatiotemporal unity in long-take/deep-focus and even eliminating the boundary between screen and theater spaces through the digital/3D technology. Second, philosophically, imperfect index as partial revelation: Bazin’s realism in a more documentary mode often leads us from actual reality to the virtual Real, the unrepresentable abyss of ontological otherness that is only indirectly, impossibly indicated. This underworld of his realism is a fertile theoretical ground of (French) revelationism that has evolved from Epstein to Daney, from Deleuze to Nancy, Derrida, and Žižek. The chapter delves into these two contradictory trends of Bazin’s persistent inspiration while analyzing relevant films including post-Bazinian world cinema and contemporary digital cinema.

문화 상품으로서의 한류를 넘어 동시대 글로벌 현상들의 국지적인 반영으로 한국적 글로벌 시네마를 규정할 때, 한반도를 둘러싼 두 방향의 초국적 자본 네트워크와 거기서 배태/배제되는 문제적 에이전트들은 최근 한국영화에 등장하는 주목할 현상이라 하겠다. 본 논문은 남한을 기준으로 북한, 러시아, 연변 등 중국 동북부로 이어지는 ‘서북 네트워크’와, 일본, 동남아, 홍콩 등 중국 동남부로 이어지는 ‘동남 네트워크’를 매핑하면서, DMZ의 함의를 직간접적으로 드러내는 첫번 째 네트워크를 집중 분석한다.
이 서북 네트워크를 배경으로 하는 영화들은 구소련과 중국 등 구공산권이 자본주의적 세계 체제로 편입하는 와중에 탈북자와 조선족 이민자들이 남한 사회로 유입되면서 겪는 갈등을 주로 다룬다. <무산일기>나 <댄스타운> 등 네오리얼리즘적 독립영화들에서 보듯, 그들은 포괄적 다문화 체제 내의 배제의 징후처럼 무산계급 이하의 서발턴으로, 정치적 주체성을 박탈당한 비체 즉 사회적 앱젝트(abject)로 등장하여, 정체성이 유보된 헐벗은 삶(bare life)을 살아간다. 이 동물적 생명은 종종 자본의 ‘개’가 되어 일종의 미션을 수행하는 에이전트로 형상화되고, 노예적 삶을 전도하기 위해 자본의 ‘도둑’이 되는 모험을 동반하기도 한다. 이때 내러티브는 공동체로부터의 탈각이라는 상징적 죽음과 종종 결말에 드리운 물리적 죽음이라는 이중 죽음 사이에서 벌어지는 주체성 회복 시도 혹은 그 실패로 구조화된다. 조선족 중국 감독 장률의 <망종>, <경계>, <두만강> 등에서는 운명의 이중 구속 같은 개와 도둑의 이 이중 모티브가 중국과 몽골로 확장되는데, 탈북자들의 정처 없는 횡단은 대안적 주체성에 대한 아스라한 가능성을 유목적으로 시사하기도 한다.
<공동경비구역 JSA> 이래 북한에 대한 이미지를 쇄신해온 간첩 소재 장르 영화들은 또 다른 분석의 축을 이루면서 국경과 월경의 다층적인 의미를 촉발한다. 가령 김기덕 제작의 <풍산개>에서 개처럼 남북을 오가며 미션을 수행하는 이중 첩자는 군사분계선을 넘을 땐 나체 상태로 DMZ의 진흙과 뒤섞이며 생태적 헐벗음을 체현하는 탈영토적 노마드가 된다. 남북 두 체제가 초법적 예외 상태에서 착취하고 제거하려는 이 앱젝트 에이전트는 체제의 내재적 외부에서 내부를 급습하는 유령적 테러리스트이기도 하다. 연장선에서, DMZ를 둘러싼 혈투를 유럽으로 옮겨놓은 <베를린>과 남한 내 조선족 에이전트의 테러리스트화를 극명하게 보여주는 <황해>는 퍼즐 같은 내러티브 속에 스릴러의 현실 반영성을 강화한다. 특히 후자에 드러난 폭력적 지하경제의 우발적 네트워크와 거기서 요구되는 인지자본주의적 생존 능력은 바로 그 자본 체제에 대항할 앱젝트의 매트릭스와 노하우로 전유되고, 이를 통해 새로운 주체성은 유토피아가 아닌 탈-장소의 아토피아적 운동 속에 수행적으로 생성된다.

Taking the animal and the machine as two ontological others of the human, this paper looks into how they “are added to” and “replace” the humanist others based on race, gender, class, etc. in contemporary cinema. This “supplement” urges us to reframe identity politics and cultural studies in a larger “polis” emerging between and encompassing both the human world, which becomes ever more globally homogenized, and its radical environment, natural or technological. The topic is a global cinematic phenomenon that even local films directly embody. The animal is captured on the boundaries between “the symbolic” and “the real,” between “the actual” and “the virtual” in the artistic works of Werner Herzog, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Peter Greenaway. The machine convolutes the issues of informatics, embodiment, and cyborgism, often through SF fantasy that pervades Hollywood blockbusters and Japanimation. The rare amalgam of animal–machine receives further attention in David Cronenberg's films, and becoming-animal/-machine in Avatar empowers the human in the posthuman sense of biopower that transforms the body and registers it on a larger network. From this perspective, discourses on the animal (zooesis) and technology (technesis) work together to bring a new political potential. Animality and technology no longer form a naïve dichotomy of nature vs. civilization but combine in ways of making more visible the new condition of life. It unfolds in a cinematic “zone,” an ephemeral “clearing” for “bare life” within the globalized world. This zone exists in the exceptional state of temporary potential to de-/repoliticize any humanistic politics.

While European cinema has often reflected on the unrepresentable sublime of historical catastrophe (the Holocaust among others) as its aesthetic anxiety and ethical kernel, Hollywood has never cringed at representing a sublime (fictional or future) disaster as a marvelous spectacle. And since 9/11, the most typical SF motif for post-apocalyptic redemption, i.e. time-travel (Terminator, 12 Monkeys) has evolved into what Richard Grusin calls “premediation,” the proactive remediation of future traumas (Minority Report, Déjà Vu). Besides, digital technology has ever more perfectly simulated such potential terror to the extent of leaving nothing unrepresentable and unpredictable, with the side effects of oversaturation and trivialization of sublime audiovisual stimuli.
Tracing and mapping this Hollywood trend, I draw special attention to Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko as both a unique symptom and exception of it, which is also a complex case study of the American society and philosophical issues. Released in 2001, this SF-tinted cult film inadvertently signals 9/11 against the backdrop of Father Bush’s 1988 presidential candidacy and a jet engine’s sudden attack. Anti-heroic Donnie’s post-apocalyptic adventure then ends up becoming a super-heroic self-sacrifice to save the world from the same catastrophe returning in a Mobius time-strip. Cinematically, the “dynamic sublime” of this premediated apocalypse is remediated through the cross cut between the Romantic extreme long shot and the post-cinematic extreme time reversal. But rather than “(fore)closing” the sublime through this visual effect, the ending opens multiple entry points for interpretation particularly in terms of the ontological sublime, the insurmountable fate of the whole globe to which the Kantian ethics of freedom should be taken as Nietzschean amor fati. Furthermore, what eternally returns can be viewed not as the same trauma, but as the empty event of “time-being-out-of-joint” through which immanent but unrepresented social symptoms of the Real erupt onto reality. In this liminal but liberational “tangential universe” or “plane of immanence,” Donnie, a sort of postmortem figure, becomes a social “abject” whose resistance to society, sympathy for the other, and horror for apocalypse all mingle and ultimately open another time-world by his second, real death. I would ask if it is the only radical ethical way of allowing “atopia,” if not utopia, to be cinematically imagined in the post-apocalyptic closed circuit and in the post-9/11 Hollywood and world.

This paper addresses the issue of embodiment by looking at (expanded) Rube films in which the maladjusted to new media, confusing reality and illusion, directly touch the screen to catch the object of desire. The shift from perception to action here signals that from transcendent to embodied spectatorship, revealing the screen as a material “interface” that both provokes and frustrates the real contact. Defining this “ambivalent tactility” as a key aspect of interfaciality, the paper explores it in the frame of various spectatorship theories broadly from Lacanian semiotic psychoanalysis to Merleau-Pontian phenomenology of embodiment, while revisiting and reinterpreting such concepts as the mirror stage, narcissism, and skin
ego in relation to the screen function. This investigation suggests not only that the screen is a touchable interface for tactile experience, but also that the subject is “in touch with” surroundings before it “touches” something — i.e., one’s body is an inherently embodied interface generated through the primary écart from the mother’s body. Then, one can map three forms of interface from external to internal — screen, mirror, skin — and see that the artificial technological interface turns out to be derived from the ambivalently tactile skin as the embodied interface.

This paper sheds new light on Peter Greenaway's early films made in the 1970s as a remarkable seedbed of his later features. Reframing his experimental position accompanies two correlated registers that can be reexamined together: the then other avant-garde tendencies and the larger cultural context of poststructuralist and postmodern imagination. To link the former to the latter, the paper examines how the notion of ‘suture’ particularly worked in the Screen-theory-based experimental filmmaking and how Greenaway inspires us to expand and redefine it especially in ways of embodying Deleuzian ideas on any-space-whatever, automata, the virtual matrix of actual images, the plane of immanence of beings, etc. Analyzing seven films in two groups, this theoretical approach ultimately emphasizes what underlies Greenaway's apparently systematic cosmos: the system's becoming its own virtual chaos of non-system, which unfolds a creative disorder of post-apocalyptic, posthumous and post-human heterotopias.

André Bazin, un grand ami des bêtes, attire notre attention sur des films où l’animal figure en tant qu’« autre » ontologique le plus remarquable de l’homme. Dans ces films de fiction, l’animal apparaît comme une métonymie pour la minorité sociale qu’une communité devrait accepter ou abandonner. Cette socio-ontologie de l’animal diégétique s’étend à l’esthétique bazinienne du ‘montage interdit,’ quand il aborde l’énonciation filmique semi-documentaire où la différence ou l’altérité de l’animal doit être préservée à travers la continuité transparente. Bazin y voit une série de chiasmes entre le réel et l’imaginaire, entre le savoir de l’artifice et la croyance en l’illusion, en transférant son intérêt ontologique de l’image photographique vers le découpage cinématographique. En outre, il envisage la question radicalisée dans des documentaires d’aventure pure : le metteur en scène se situant dans l’environnement peuplé d’animaux souvent invisibles, un témoinage objectif du danger peut devenir inséparable d’une participation subjective au même danger, qui rend ce reportage si difficile que des images finales ne montrent presque rien. Donc, le cinéma ne peut pas être un index de la présence d’un objet ; cet échec même prouve toutefois son essence en tant que ‘para-indexicalité,’ indiquant le réel inreprésentable, la jouissance, la mort. L’animal, alors, ne se distingue pas de l’environement, comme un ‘phasme’ dont l’apparence n’est qu’apparition fantôme, avec le potentiel d’attaquer l’homme et de l’incorporer à l’abîme ontologique. Pour Bazin, les films d’aventure poursuivent cet animal entre le néant et la subjectivité humaine.

This paper aims at a semio-epistemological revisit to Peircean/Bazinian indexicality. On the level of diegesis, an image takes on indexicality as physical causality, the succession of causes and effects. What matters in our cinematic experience is then less medium-specificity than reference-recognition, i.e. whether or not we know what a visual sign refers to within diegesis. The problematic case is that in which an image is not a clear index to something visually given, but it appears and functions like a "para-index" that only partially, impossibly indicates the unthinkable, a sort of "digit" that fingers what Lacan or Deleuze calls the absent but immanent Real or Virtual. In fact Bazin's interest in adventure films facing this unrepresentable realm especially inspires us to revamp indexicality as para-indexicality. The paper elaborates on this notion through George Didi-Huberman and Jacques Rancière, as well as films by Michael Haneke, Ingrid Berg-man, Jean-Luc Godard etc.

Among scientific impulses in Peter Greenaway’s film is his interest in biochemistry and evolution. Setting aside the TV biopic Darwin (1993), I draw special attention to his two early films displaying experimental imaginations of men becoming birds. A Walk through H (1978) depicts an ornithologist’s posthumous journey to a birds’ land mapped on the director’s own paintings, and The Falls (1980) lists 92 men’s symptoms of, or transformations into, ‘becoming-bird,’ after an apocalyptic disaster named the Violent Unknown Event. These fake documentaries unfold a unique obsession with the postmortem (de)evolution of the human, which is less eschatological than virtually liberating the organic structure of life into a non-systematic ‘body without organs’ as in Deleuze’s bio-philosophy. The Falls, especially, suggests how the ‘dynamic sublime’ of the VUE (foreshadowing fallout) brings about the ‘mathematical sublime’ of innumerable human birds, the animal ontology of being a multitude. This shift in the ‘sublime’ mode not only underlies the cinema of catastrophe (e.g. Hitchcock’s The Birds) and the society of proliferating simulacra, but also embodies itself visually through Greenaway’s later experiment on multiple screens and media interfaces.
From this point, I also relocate the postmortem evolution from the onscreen organic life to the film strip as such. Greenaway’s film biology A Zed and Two Noughts (1985), with its documentation of the animal decay, appears here as a key link to Bill Morrison’ film chemistry Light is Calling (2004), an optical reprinting of an early film as seen through the roiling emulsion of the celluloid itself. What matters is not just how the film represents a virtual evolution of the human, but how it presents its own actual death and postmortem rebirth. I delve into this reincarnation of the film which always works through art-and-science combinations, and becomes ever more problematic in the dematerializing digitization that raises the question on the end of film evolution.

Korean cinema has mainly been constructed on the realist paradigm of classical mimesis and probability of diegesis, which refers to the socio-political reality of Korea. Even fantasy has been represented as clearly marked but still subordinated to conventional film language that easily works in favor of reality. Though exploring the fantastic, Korean ghost film has repeated this paradigm, which has also determined academic approaches to the genre. Psychoanalysis has particularly interpreted the female ghost as the return of repressed sexuality/identity, as well as repressed pre-modernity. However, some auteurist films with ghost motifs such as Memento Mori, Blood Rain, Sorum, and Spider Forest little by little have questioned the established model, until 3-Iron can be seen as stepping into a different ontological dimension via an unconventional ghost-shadow. These films leave room for a more radical approach to subjectivity than psychoanalysis, for the ontological look at the ghost and the image at once, and finally for escape from classical norms of the realist paradigm. The task of this paper is therefore to draw a “line of flight” from psychoanalysis to ontology, a line which parallels that of the realist paradigm to the beyond. Such deterritorialization of the ghost genre allows us to expect not a ghost film, but a film as a ghost in the context of Asian horror and post-classical paradigm.

George Miller’s Mad Max series has established the unique subgenre of post-apocalyptic road movie. Interestingly, its episodic structure of Max navigating across disparate dystopian desert towns reflects human history in general with politico-economic shifts and techno-environmental concerns. Evoking the 1970s-80s oil and nuclear crises, the series stages an endangered future when the survivors’ struggle for scarce resources intensifies on an ever-larger scale. The vicious cycle of violence grows accordingly, in the lawless state of exception and the prehistorical state of nature followed by brutal regimes of commerce and dominion. Mad Max: Fury Road proposes that the only alternative to such a hostile community is to fight and change it within it. The imperial “Citadel” that eclectically embodies mythic fundamentalism, colonial autocracy, neoliberal inequality, and biopower technology is overthrown by its abject lives who become the united agents of revolution. Nonetheless, Max leaves the utopia he enables, which suggests deep skepticism about communal civilization as if its future New Normal would repeat the apocalyptic past he underwent. Yet his “atopian” drift also resonates with today’s post-historical (pre-apocalyptic) “liquid modern” subjectivity: modulable individualistic agency for survival, competition, pleasure, and connection without political collectivity. Max’s flight from a new world’s potential apocalypse is thus a symptom of ‘our’ post-political lifestyle stuck in the perpetual present when more and more global disasters are predicted to threaten the entire humankind. This paradox underlies the film saga’s loop of historical déjà vu, which I will critically explore in light of the current pandemic situation.

STUDIES IN THE HUMANITIES CALL FOR PAPERS
THEME: GLOBAL EAST ASIAN CINEMA: ABJECTION AND AGENCY

DEADLINE (extended): MARCH 31, 2018

This thematic double issue of Studies in the Humanities addresses globalization as a blossoming of inclusive systems of transnational capitalism, multicultural traffic, and networking technology, which has also generated symptoms of exclusion related to migration/refuge, precarious life, and various catastrophes that debunk the holistic universality of one rainbow global village. Political dialectics has turned into the absolute antagonism between the ‘soft’ ethical inclusion of differences in the whole and the ‘hard’ ethical backlash from its excluded remnants. Multiculturalism and terrorism, neoliberalism and fundamentalism, compassion and hate, human rights and bare life interlock like two sides of the same coin. The more connection, the more contamination. And now, as Brexit and Trumpism show, within the integrated global whole itself emerges the weird fusion of far-right and far-left mindsets against the status quo of problematic global capitalism and malfunctioning liberal democracy.

Then how does cinema address today’s global life? This special double issue proposes this question in the frame of ‘global East Asia,’ with its Asian identity taking on a sort of compatible locality that is not absolutely confined in Asian particularity. Locality is less the essentialist mark of a specific time-space than a contingent springboard for global perfomativity. Here, a traditional community gives way to a permeable, malleable network, and subjectivity as fixed identity changes into agency for contingently adaptable modulation. ‘Global East Asian cinema’ could then be termed for critical engagement with global phenomena and their influences on the notions of community and subjectivity as reflected or allegorized in the East Asian context. What is especially interesting is the theme of abjection: once characters lose their sociopolitical subjectivity, cast out of their community, they struggle to regain their original identity or gain new subjectivity. They become agents in the sense of acting to fulfill a mission which can be not only homecoming but also revenge or a terroristic attack, sacrifice or a gift-giving of themselves. This narrative structure is prevalent in films with the motifs of journey, migration, bare life, coming-of-age, midlife crisis, secret agency, networking, cyborg, and disaster, more or less resonating with global conditions of connected yet vulnerable life.

This issue thus hopes to be an intriguing selection of articles centering on abjection in the broadest sense of the term. Catastrophic events, natural or industrial, from earthquake and tsunami to zombification and nuclear crisis, could be an easy window to start with, since the cinema of catastrophe often symptomatizes a political deadlock of the current global world, the impossible utopian change in various forms of catastrophic imagination. But this cinema can also draw attention to an alternative potential direction of ethics irreducible to collective politics, when biopolitical abject figures become contingent agents of new relations through commonality without community, solidarity without unity. Abject agency would then inspire us to challenge commonsensical global ethics on hospitality, tolerance, pity or hate and violence through concrete films, opening room for networking on the edge of the global regime beyond the problematic ‘soft/hard’ ethical frame.

For the consistency of the cinematic corpus and the limited space, this special double issue focuses on narrative features made after 2000 that are to some extent globally circulated or available in the mainstream market or film festivals. The scope is, however, not limited to the following items:

Films on actual disasters such as the Great Sichuan Earthquake, Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, and the Fukushima nuclear accident
Films with apocalyptic settings; horror movies with networked contagion
Road movies on coming-of-age, midlife crises, life-changing experience; films on journey or with the motif of migration/deracination
Films on (cognitive) capitalism, casual labor, precarious life
Films on (war on) terror, control/militancy, secret agency, vengeance mission
Recommendable directors include Jia Zhangke, Xu Zheng, Vicky Zhao, Peter Chan, Tsui Hark, Xue Xialou, LI Luo, Pema Tseden, Zhou Hao, Wu Wenguang, Zou Xueping; Zhang Lu, Bong Joon-ho, Park Chan-wook, Yeon Sang-ho; Kurosawa Kiyoshi, Sono Sion, even in animators like Kon Satoshi, Otomo Katsuhiro.
The double issue of Studies in The Humanities on the subject of global East Asian Cinema, is guest edited by Seung-hoon Jeong, Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies at New York University Abu Dhabi. He wrote Cinematic Interfaces: Film Theory After New Media (Routledge, 2013), co-translated Jacques Derrida’s Acts of Literature in Korean (Moonji, 2013), and co-edited The Global Auteur: The Politics of Authorship in 21st Century Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2016). He is currently working on global cinema related to multiculturalism, terrorism, networks, and catastrophes.

The special double issue is scheduled to be out in June, 2018. Articles and essays are invited by March 31st, 2018. The manuscript (7,500 words in length), double-spaced, in 12-pt. Times New Roman font using Chicago style of documentation. Essays as well as enquiries regarding possible essay topics should be electronically submitted to seunghoon.jeong@nyu.edu. Please do not include your name anywhere on your manuscript. Place it in a separate attachment. Also please do not use embedded endnotes or footnotes. Footnotes should be at the end of the essay with no page division between them and the text or the Works Cited list that should follow it. You can find more information at the MLA Directory of Periodicals, where our acceptance rate is listed as 16%-25%. This peer-viewed journal is indexed in the annual MLA Bibliography, the Film Literature Index, the American Humanities Index, An Index to Book Reviews in the Humanities, and the Journal of Abstracts of English Studies. Full text of the journal is available online in multiple GALE and EBSCO databases.

http://www.iup.edu/english/publications/studies-in-the-humanities/studies-in-the-humanities-call-for-papers/ (original CFP)