황홀경

I’ll Be Seeing Her [IBSH] selectively re-presents the images of women in South Korean cinema. Kim Soyoung, the director of this documentary, is herself a film critic who has published several books on Korean cinema focusing on melodrama, horror film, and the Korean blockbuster. Scenes from the work of mater directors of the Golden Age of Korean Cinema (1950s-1960s) such as KIM Kiyoung, SHIN Sangok, and LEE Manhee, as well as scenes from contemporary films, are juxtaposed with interviews with legendary actresses, longtime-movie-goers, and young women directors. Deliberately sidestepping an orthodox documentary style, IBSH blends the fantastic mode with the realistic mode. The documentary freely appropriates, montages, and hybridizes different genres and scenes to imagine and inaugurate a new cinema. While the contemporary Korean Wave across East and South East Asia and the West arouses curiosity about its past, IBSH eccentrically reconstructs the history of South Korean cinema from the perspectives of female spectators and actresses. The documentary weaves together rebellious, beautiful and ecstatic images of women captured in the classics of 1950s and 1960s and contemporary films to recover a legacy and to stimulate a new dynastic tradition. The original Korean title of this documentary Hwangholkyong evokes states of ecstasy, fantasy, and phantasmagoria. It is in ironic celebration of the excesses of feeling and the raptures of looking that women spectators have experience and won from the notoriously misogynistic films of South Korea over the past decades.