ARTicle Films [distributor], 2023.
Ever since the 1961 epistolary exchanges with Ri Jinu—a young Korean man on death row in Japan for killing two Japanese girls in 1958—that motivated her to pursue journalism and filmmaking about the legacy of Japanese imperialism on Koreans in Japan, Soo-nam Park has been writing, filming, and recording people and their voices long forgotten by history. Her documentary films contain important archival materials including testimonies, letters, wounded bodies, gestures, tears, and the sounds of people whose voices came to life through Park’s camera. Her early films, such as The Other Hiroshima (1986) and The Song of Arirang (1991), feature surviving Korean atomic bomb victims, Korean military labourers, and “comfort women” in Okinawa, respectively, whose stories were revealed to the world. One of the most recent and equally powerful films, Silence (2016), filmed by Park over a period of 20 years, garnered global interest for its poignant portryal of 15 Korean former comfort women and their collaborative political actions to demand an apology from the Japanese government.
Still, there are more, many more, voices that Soo-nam Park has recorded that remain in storage boxes and in her memory. Voices of the Silenced concerns the digital restoration of the “one hundred thousand feet” of physical reels that Park filmed throughout her long career as an activist and filmmaker. Slowly losing her vision due to an eye disease, Park co-directed the film with her daughter Maeui Park, who has been assisting her mother’s filmmaking for many years. The film is as much about tracing the voices Park has been recording as it is about chronicling her life’s trajectory. Park has been “capturing” the traumatic experiences of the silenced beginning with her first encounter with the racial discrimination faced by Korean residents of Japan (Zainichi Koreans) in the aforementioned cawe of Ri Jinu. Voices arise from the reels, voices long relegated to dusty boxes and Park’s keen memory, resonating with the literal translation of the film’s Japanese, Yomigaeru koe (“voices arising”). The film opens with Park’s recollections of Ri Jinu, then moves on to the making of The Other Hiroshima and other films, and then returns to where it began, with Park reminiscing about her meeting with the mother of Ri Jinu’s victim after Ri was hanged in 1962. Combining footage, archival images, singing, and conversation, Voices of the Silenced is a compelling record of the “historical truths” Park has been excavating throughout her life. In Park’s unapologetic position of criticizing Japan’s failure to apologize for its violent imperial past, the film is also an archive of resistance.
One of the strikingly creative aspects of the film is Park’s conversation with her daughter Maeui throughout the film, which builds the structural foundation of the narrative. Park answers questions asked by her daughter and converses with Maeui about her career as a film director and a Zainichi woman. Park says she was inspired to film the “trembling words and bodies” of the silenced because “language couldn’t convey such profound silence.” And her recollections of people she has met and recorded are juxtaposed as if she and the people onscreen are continuing their conversations. This narrative device generates a powerful effect for the audience, since Park, who faces the camera directly even though her vision is seriously impaired, participates in the restoration process with the audience, projecting herself as a living archive embodying the pains and sufferings of the silenced. She tells us clearly, “I am the camera.” The narrative jumps back and forth from past to present across multiple temporalities and boundaries to make the past and present meet with a singular purpose: to “…forever preserve memories. As victim’s memories endure so does the accountability of perpetuators.”
There is a recurring image throughout the film—multiple shots of Battleship Island (Gunkanjima). Shot from the perspective of a boat approaching the island, the island emerges from afar and grows closer, until finally Park and one of the surviving Korean labourers, Jeong-u Seo, land on the island where abandoned concrete buildings evoke memories of the horrifying working conditions that Seo still vividly recalls. The island was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2015 for its symbolism of Japanese industrialization. The history of forced labour by imperial Japan during WWII and the numerous deaths of Korean labourers mobilized for undersea coal mining is nowhere to be seen but in Seo’s memory. Such ingenious aesthetics make the film unique and impactful in terms of its power to evoke empathy in the audience.
Last, but not least, Voices of the Silenced tells the story of the collaborative spirit of resistance that has been manifest in the making and showing of Park’s films. The story of Japanese citizens who have been supporting Park in various ways for a long time tells us that the silenced voices rise and grow louder the more people hear their stories. Compelling, edifying, and inspiring, this affective and aesthetically rich film is an important contribution to the archiving of the voices of the marginalized, carried out tirelessly and passionately by Soo-nam and Maeui Park.
Jooyeon Rhee
Pennsylvania State University, University Park