SENSUAL EXCESS AND THE ‘BODY’ OF FILM:
SUBVERSIVE IMAGES AND NARRATIVE STRATEGIES IN CONTEMPORARY KOREAN CINEMA
13th Laterna Film Academy
28-31. March 2012, Pécs, Hungary
Project Description
In the past, say, 10-15 years there were two noticeable tendencies in the study of film which both widened its scope and brought changes in its methodology. The first concerns its relation to other forms and genres of art like fine arts, theatrical performance, music, dancing and animation. Certainly it is not a new thing, film and the other arts have many times inspired each other since film came of age in the 1920s. Many times film makers came from the other camps like in the avantgarde and even later on when several authors started as painters, writers or performers. Other times film and the other arts evolved hand in hand like the French nouveau roman and the new wave. But it was only in the mid-nineties that the intermedial or in-between character of moving images became a hot issue in film studies. The reason being that it was not only that many films tended to include other forms of art but that moving images were incorporated in theatrical and musical performances and even infiltrated into the space of museums. Thus the specificity and the autonomy of the medium of film became questioned. The term intermediality became common currency almost everywhere in film studies.
However, intermediality received an even greater stress by the other major tendency that almost completely re-mapped the terrain in film studies: the digitalization of the film medium. The shift from analogue to digital opened up film studies to a series of new forms like computer games, YouTube, music videos (clips), 3D animation, digital television, web series, etc. The debate about the specificity of the filmic medium was rekindled without there being a consensus about the status of these forms whether they should be seen as new media or as new genres.
One common and crucial consequence of both intermediality and digitalization is the growing emphasis on the multimodal, multisensorial or synaesthetic aspect of perception. It is not only that moving images exist in-between the medium spaces but that they are perceived by the entire gamut of sense modalities, or which is the same, by the human body. This time it was the term ‘embodied perception’ that acquired full currency in film studies, or to be a bit more precise, in its corners where the cognition of moving images was taken heed of. Over and above the general trends of cognitive film studies, which comprise a large scale of approaches from the ecology of perception to narrative constructivism, a new theoretical approach, the phenomenology of the film jumped to forefront to claim that the directly sensual effect of the images is a key element in understanding how film and its related genres work. “We perceive with our entire body”, Merleau-Ponty writes, and in his wake many other theorists seem to have adopted terms form the other arts to describe – at least approximately and by analogy – the film’s visuality. People talk about “the skin of the image” (Laura Marks), “the resonance of the imagined sound” (Vivian Sobchack), the literally haptic character or the “de-virtualization” of cinematic space where the viewer interact with “material” objects of camera vision (Manovich). In one word, moving images have become more and more aggressive, violent, invasive, or what not, vis-ŕ-vis the senses. Their sensual challenge was foreseen by Deleuze as an – and the only possible – incentive to think creatively. The challenge of the sensual is the experiencing of the new, which is close to what Kant called as the sublime, which exceeds the bounds of our already acquired categories.
But even if extreme sensuality, or multi-sensorial, is not a prerequisite for creative thought, as Deleuze suggested, it is one of the most conspicuous elements of contemporary moving images, which poses a challenge to the theorist of film. There are a couple of national cinemas which have staged a concerted attack against the senses, like the French, the Belgian, the Irish, the Japanese and the Korean. It can be said that their films go beyond the normal, the perceptible, the thinkable, or in one word, they are ‘excessive’. Our focus falls on Korean cinema for three reasons. The first is that Korean cinema foregrounds excess at three different levels of film analysis: the audiovisual (i.e. the sensual), the narrative and the conceptual where social-psychological themes and identities are at play. The second reason is that the excess that Korean film manifest can be described as a kind of aesthetic tension between the three levels, that is the function of visual, narrative and thematic structure is very strong even in horror films. In most cases Korean films aesthetize the excessive. And the third reason is that Korean film is not specifically over-represented at conferences.
The basic aim of the conference is then to take up that challenge at various levels of viewers’ response. Starting with the sensorial level where the sometimes extreme sensuality and graphic violence of the image can be theorized in terms of a three-tier model comprising phenomenology, cognitive psychology and neurology, the challenge can be carried over to narratology, genre- and author-theory, and last but least, post-colonialism, that is, culture studies. Thus we welcome papers from very different camps on condition that they are trying to meet the challenge of sensual, narrative, and globalized excess.
General topics to be addressed:
- Authorship (notable filmmakers including Kim Ki-duk, Park Chan-wook, Hong Sang-soo, Lee Chang-dong, Bong Jun-ho, and Kim Ji-woon)
- Multi-sensorial approaches to viewers’ response to the audiovisual excesses of images
- New visual and narrative techniques in contemporary Korean cinema
- Postcolonialism, transnationalism, and globalization in contemporary Korean cinema
- Special treatments of genetic tendencies in contemporary Korean cinema (horror, melodrama, comedy, documentary, etc)
- The phenomenology of violence and "extreme" cinema
- The representation of class, gender, and sexuality in Korean cinema
Special questions to tackle:
- The aesthetics of stylized violence in Park Chan-wook’s films
- The phenomenology of the body in Kim-Ki-duk’s films
- Postmodern theories of the excess in contemporary Korean cinema
- Deleuzian approches to the problem of the sensual in film
Keynote speakers confirmed:
Hye Seung-Chung (Colorado State University)
Soyoung Kim (Cinema Studies, Korean National University of Arts):
Earl Jackson (University of California at Santa Cruz)
Daniel Martin (Queen’s University, Belfast)
David Scott Diffrient (Colorado State University)
The structure of the conference:
Part I.: Theoretical Approaches of the Senses in Cinematic Perception
Part II.: Excesses of the Visual and the Body in contemporary Korean Cinema
Part III. Narrative Excesses in contemporary Korean Films
Part IV. Special Panels: ’Close-Ups’ of Individual Authors
Participation fee:
which includes registration booklet, 3 lunch buffets, coffee and refreshments
Standard: 80 € (or equivalent currency)
Student/unwaged: 60 € (or equivalent currency)
Banquet with wine tasting and trip to country: 30 € (or equivalent currency)
Conference Venu:
Zsolnay Cultural Centre
Application:
In order to attend, please, fill in the Registration Form to be downloaded at:
and send it to the following address:
no later than January-07, 2012
Main organizer:
Dept. of Film and Visual Studies
Faculty of Humanities, University of Pécs
Joint organizer:
Laterna Magica Association
Contact persons
Administration and website: Rita Somogyi ([log in to unmask])
Academic program: László Tarnay ([log in to unmask])